“Should Have Pulled You by the Shirt”: James Vowles ‘Regrets’ Celebrating With Albon and Colapinto

Alex Albon and Franco Colapinto sat together with their team principal James Vowles for the last episode of the year of their Team Torque podcast. The trio reviewed Williams’ roller coaster of a season and discussed some tense and fun moments they had in 2024.

Albon brought up a question about the one moment of the season that they could change to have it differently. On this, both he and Colapinto gave responses about one of the major crashes they had, as that cost the Grove team a lot of money.

However, Vowles went a bit off-beat for that moment and recalled the Azerbaijan GP celebrations that they had. That was the race where both Albon and Colapinto scored points and it was a huge haul of points per Williams’ humble standards. The Thai driver finished P7 while his rookie teammate followed him in eighth.

It certainly called for celebrations at the Williams garage and their mechanics were up to the task. One of them was having a champagne bottle in his hands as they clicked a team photo.

As is the custom in the paddock, the drivers and the team bosses get a spray of the bubbly. Vowles regrets that he let Albon and Colapinto run away and he had to take the majority of the spray.

“I knew someone had a bottle of champagne and I was polite and you two went ahead. My mistake was, should have pulled you by the shirt and just got ahead of you,” the Williams boss jokingly said.

Albon mentioned that he had noticed that one of the mechanics was trying to be sly about hiding the champagne bottle and spraying it on them, so he was ready to run as soon as possible. Colapinto also gave the same explanation. Sadly, Vowles could not match the reflexes and agility of his drivers.

Colapinto and Albon express regret about Las Vegas and Brazil

The Las Vegas and Sao Paulo GP weekends were the worst race weekends Williams could have imagined. Particularly, the amount of crash damage they had in Brazil was a major blow to a small, tight-budget team like them.

Colapinto and Albon both had a lot of crashes in the second half of the season, just like ex-Williams driver Logan Sargeant, who bore the brunt of these crashes in the initial half. The Argentine driver had replaced Sargeant as a reliable driver who won’t crash as often, but even he could not avoid some big shunts.

Colapinto deemed how the Vegas qualifying crash was something he would have liked to change, as that was a major incident in his head and perhaps avoidable. In fact, he mentioned that despite his two crashes in Brazil — one of which reportedly cost over a million dollars — the Vegas qualifying shunt felt “much bigger” to him.

Albon also seconded Colapinto’s opinion and analyzed his Brazil qualifying crash. The #23 driver felt he had enough grip to extract more performance on a treacherous Interlagos track. But it all went horribly south as his car ended up in a crumpled state at the exit of turn 1.

Naturally, Albon would want to change that moment, as he could have qualified in the top five in a chaotic qualifying, and brought home a huge chunk of points in the race like the Alpine duo did. But it only added to his damage bill and the list of massive crashes he had in 2024, which has also ranked him higher up in the Destructors’ championship.