Lowe on last spell with Williams: 'The less said the better'

Former Williams technical director Paddy Lowe says he didn't enjoy the two years he spent at the British outfit from 2017 to early 2019, when it was "really hard work for no reward whatsoever".

Lowe unexpectedly joined Williams at the start of 2017 after a successful tenure with Mercedes during which he guided the Brackley squad's design department during its string of titles between 2014 and 2016.

It was a homecoming of sorts for Lowe who had started his career in F1 with the Grove-based outfit in 1987 before moving to McLaren in 1987 and then to Mercedes in 2013.

However, while the reunion held much promise, it proved unsuccessful and disappointing for both parties, with Williams falling to the bottom of the grid in 2018 and troubled winter thereafter leading to a belated roll-out of the outfit's 2019 contender at Barcelona during pre-season testing.

But the off-the-pace Lowe-designed FW42, plagued like its predecessor by aerodynamic issues, and operational issues suffered by the team convinced Williams to put its chief designer on leave indefinitely.

Lowe formally left Williams during the summer of 2019 and has since kept away from F1. Speaking on the latest episode of F1's Beyond the Grid podcast, Lowe tentatively opened up about the unhappy period.

"It’s a period I don’t really like to dwell on to be honest because in all of that time in F1 I loved every single year and all for different reasons and in some ways it just got better and better," he said.

"Those two years at Williams I didn’t enjoy, to be honest. It was really hard work for no reward whatsoever. And yeah, I think, probably the less said the better to be honest."

Lowe steered clear of revealing the details of the dissensions or fractures that marked his final collaboration with F1's third most successful team.

But the 59-year-old former Mercedes tech boss hinted that the fall-out was rooted in his inability to deliver a competitive design to Williams sooner rather than later or, as he put it, "to work miracles in respect of time".

"All I’d say is Formula 1 is an impatient space, nothing is patient in Formula 1," he added. "And yet, it’s an incredibly difficult competition.

"It’s arguably the most difficult competition on Earth, and that means if you miss a trick, and certainly if you’re not doing the right things for a long period of time, you can’t expect overnight recoveries.

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"It’s not a human point. I’m good at a lot of things, and I think I’ve proven that in a number of areas, but I can’t work miracles, and certainly not miracles in respect of time.

"I’ll give you a good example – the foundation of a winning team is literally a winning team, it’s the people.

"Now, the best people in Formula 1 don’t generally want to go and work for a team that doesn’t look in great shape.

"So, it’s already difficult to hire the best people. And if you can they are normally on very long notice periods.

"Even then, when they arrive it will take them a year, two, three years to create any sort of impact on the infrastructure because the car you produce, and its performance, is a function of your organisation – people, equipment, technology, software, all of your knowledge deployed into this product.

"So, if you’ve got a slow car, it’s not that you’ve got a slow car, it’s that you’ve got an organisation that makes slow cars.

"You have to fix the organisation and it’s a long, long process."

Addressing the sale of Williams last year and the departure of the founding family from F1, Lowe admitted the new of the takeover pleased him.

"That's what they've needed to do for a long time, and to be honest, should have done it earlier, for all sorts of reasons which are not to do with any individuals," Lowe said.

"The team has been in a very negative spiral from a funding point of view. While I was there, I was watching that spiral progress further down the drain, and it's actually quite distressing.

"You understand that there's no good end point apart from a sale. So you may as well cut that now and move on before it's all gone.

"I'm very happy that the team was sold for a reasonable price so that Claire and her brothers leave with something to work with from the great things the family has achieved over the years, and the name is kept.

"They've got new investors who will have the cash to take it forward and turn that spiral in the other direction, which will be a long process. People who are patient will take them there."

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