Pat Fry says at Williams he hasn’t seen restrictions that he saw at Alpine thus far, as he adds on taking risks and not being afraid.
Having spent considering time at Alpine, Fry eventually moved out and was on gardening leave until joining Williams as its technical head. He has had time to settle down at the fag end of the 2023 F1 season and start work on its 2024 project.
With it, he is also looking ahead to the new regulation in 2026. Fry spend his early time in understanding the needs of Williams and rallying his group to work towards that goal. “I’m trying to understand how we work, what’s needed and what we are good at,” said Fry to F1 website.
“Some things are better than where I’ve been and there are some things, well quite a few things, that we need to fix and understand. But it is all about trying to build up those first impressions and then trying to set an overall target for the team. I always try and write as much as I can down in the first two weeks of my first impressions.
“Often when you dig in, the first impression is right but I have to understand the reasons of why it happened. I can easily list five, 10, 20, 30 things that are… not worrying, but think we have to get into. But you then have to dig down to the root cause, and a lot of the root causes are things we have to address in the long-term plan.
“It’s impressive to see how well Williams have done. Certainly last year, there has been better collaboration between various groups – engineering and aero. It’s looking promising. All these things are down to how well everyone else has done, but they have unlocked a chunk of performance which is a good step,” summed up Fry, who notes on needing patience and the will to take risks for rewards.
He goes in-depth on what didn’t work out at Alpine as he started to feel restricted there which he hasn’t seen at Williams thus far. For a team to be successful, the technical heads need free will to do things and any amount of pauses hurt in a long cycle.
“You need patience,” said Fry. “People have six month notice periods, some are a year. I think the project we have here is really exciting. It’s a case of trying to inspire other people to join that project. Things that were restricting us at Alpine are not a problem here. The board are behind us. They want to invest. They want to do all the right things. So the opportunity is there.
“We will make another step in 2024, but my eye is on the longer term things. We need a three- or five-year vision. So for the right people, we are going wait a year or year and half or whatever, but it’s all about getting key people in the right places and changing the mindset we have as a company.
“I want to do more, I want to end up building another winning team. Winning is everything. We weren’t really committed enough to take it beyond fourth place [at Alpine]. We might have said we could do it, but we never had the buy-in from the management to push it the extra bit, so in March I decided I had taken it as far as I can and I’ll look for something else. James had been pestering me for a while and this is a fantastic opportunity.
“I went back to Alpine with the idea of going back to the team where I started many years ago and to try and rebuild that and try and bring them forward again. The first three years were great, everyone at Enstone should be proud of what we managed to achieve. We were a distant fifth; year on year we designed and developed a better car and we were a solid fourth at the end.
“I believe we shouldn’t be afraid of decisions, we shouldn’t be afraid of risks. We have to be courageous. The difference between first and second is often how brave you are at the time in the decisions you make, be it in the wind tunnel or in the engineering office or how quickly you make things.
“You have to have that environment where you’re willing to take a risk – and failure is not a problem. It’s what you learn from your failures. You learn more by pushing and failing, as you don’t know how conservative you’ve been. It’s that environment that will take time, but that’s where we need to get to – where the team are not afraid to take risks,” summed up Fry.
Here’s F1 2024 launch dates and more: https://formularapida.net/f1-2024-launch-dates-set-fire-ups-more/
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