Williams team principal James Vowles has explained how his attempts to sign Carlos Sainz Jnr last year differed from its portrayal in Drive to Survive.
Vowles’ efforts to court Sainz are highlighted in the fourth episode of the latest season, which premiered earlier this month.
The episode shows Vowles vying for Sainz’s signature alongside competing bids from Sauber and Alpine. The process lasted several months: Vowles first approached Sainz at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in December 2023, it became public knowledge the driver would leave Ferrari in February last year and Williams announced he had signed for them the following July.
One scene in the middle of the episode shows an anxious Vowles waiting as Sainz fails to appear on time to sign his contract. However the Williams team principal said he was always in close communication with his future driver.
“All the way through – unlike what’s been portrayed, actually – Carlos and I were speaking daily or certainly every few days,” he told the official F1 channel. “There was never a break in communication.”
Although the likes of Alpine’s Flavio Briatore did make approaches to Sainz, Vowles said the driver never failed to keep him informed about the situation. “He was honest and transparent, as I was, all the way through on what his feelings and thoughts were,” said Vowles.
“That’s what’s made it, effectively, I think, a strong relationship, because that transparency from me showed him: ‘here’s our weaknesses, our strengths, here’s what’s happening’. When you do that across three weeks, four weeks, you can hide certain things. [But if] you do that across six months, which is what we were talking for, you can’t hide anything.
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“[It was] the same from him. I saw the real Carlos underneath all of it, and that was important to me. I can see what his weakness is and his strengths were, and it’s why I could determine it really would work for all parties.”
Vowles said it had been a risky decision to allow the Drive to Survive producers to film their discussions and he was pleased with the depiction of them in the series.
“I think Netflix did a really good job,” he said. “It was even more twists and turns than you saw there.
“They captured a little bit of it, because we let them into our life. A big risk on our behalf, because at certain points, we could have looked like fools. But actually, capturing the emotion you go through when you’re going in this roller coaster, I think it’s a good thing for the sport to understand what really happens underneath. But there were more twists and turns than that.”
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