How Formula 1 Stays Human-Behind the Scenes With Atlassian Williams F1 Team

Formula 1 is the world's most technical sport. While hockey sticks now might be made of carbon fiber instead of wood, soccer balls are getting lighter and easier to control, and new ski shapes and materials can help downhillers bombing down a piste, little compares to the research, science and engineering effort put into making open-wheel racing cars go really, really fast around a track.

The 11 teams that compete in F1 can each spend up to $215 million a year to produce what they hope will be two winning cars for their driver pairing, although the drivers' multimillion-dollar salaries do not fall into the equation. Across a season that spans five continents-from Melbourne to Monaco, São Paulo to Singapore, and Las Vegas to the deserts of the Middle East-it is one of the most global competitions in sport.

The confines of the spending cap, introduced in 2021, forces teams to consider every dollar spent to maximize value. It also gives smaller competitors, like Atlassian Williams F1 Team, a fighting chance of winning races following an era dominated by big names like Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari, who spent many hundreds of millions more to guarantee success.

This pursuit of technical greatness has borne innovations which everyday drivers can see in their vehicles, including paddle shifters, hybrid engines and active suspension. The teams' research has also yielded other discoveries. Williams, for example, helped create an aluminum device similar to an F1 car's rear wing that helps make supermarket refrigerators more energy efficient.

It is the search for small, marginal gains that motivates F1 teams. James Vowles, team principal at Williams, calls it "the relentless pursuit of a millisecond."

"Doesn't sound like a lot. We blink in about 20 milliseconds. But if you relentlessly, all 1,300 people [on the team], pursue each one millisecond, you're up at 1.3 seconds. That makes a difference between the back and the front of the grid today," Vowles tells Newsweek's Editor-in-Chief Jennifer H. Cunningham.

While technical advances in F1 have made the cars faster, more efficient and safer for the drivers who pilot them, it is still a human behind the wheel, reacting and making decisions in real time in a bid to win the race. Molding the vehicle around the driver who can extract the best performance from the machine is the tricky task teams face.

"We are basically driving supercomputers," says Williams driver Alex Albon, who describes the experience as "kind of like a dance with the car."

Which begs the question: As technology takes on an ever-greater role in Formula 1, how does the sport stay human?

The Driver

Hard Rock Stadium may be home to NFL stalwarts the Miami Dolphins. But for one weekend a year in spring, it is taken over by the greatest traveling motorsport show on Earth: F1. The sound of tire guns and revved engines echo around the stadium and the surrounding Miami International Autodrome that extends outside its campus. In the center of it all is Thai-British driver Albon, who, with Spaniard Carlos Sainz, forms Williams' driver pairing.

Williams and the other teams arrive to set up on Thursday ahead of the Sunday, May 3 race to prep the cars for the Miami track, a 3.36-mile circuit that includes three straights and 19 corners. Its hot surface is known to be tough on tires, which means cars can lose grip quickly. So setting up the car for the demands of each track is important. Teams and drivers test for the races in their driving simulators before heading to the circuit, where there are three practice sessions ahead of qualifying-to see where the cars line up on the grid for the race, with the fastest on pole position-and, finally, the race itself.

The Florida heat also makes it a challenge for drivers, who can lose between 4 and 8 pounds of body weight in a race through sweating as they drive at speeds up to

200 mph and achieve up to 6Gs in the corners, forces comparable to what a fighter jet pilot would experience flying an F-35.

In an interview in Miami away from the practice, testing and general hubbub of the race weekend, which saw more than 275,000 fans in attendance, Albon speaks of the demands drivers face.

"Physically, these cars are tailor-made towards us. Our seats are wrapped around us. We are pretty much stuck in the car," he says. "It can feel claustrophobic. The tighter it feels, normally the better. Because you want to feel like your body's not moving. If you move unnecessarily, for example, if your head's moving too much or your knees are moving too much inside the cockpit, it's tiring."

Driver input is as crucial to the car's set-up on a race weekend as the data gained from the sensors dotted about the vehicle. In the early 2000s, cars had a few dozen sensors to monitor functions. Today, these machines have 500 sensors in one tire and 55,000 channels of data per car in total.

"The data's there almost more as kind of a support mechanism that we use as drivers; there's things that we can't tell that the data can pick up," Albon says. "We can't tell you the rear wing's working properly. We need data analysis to tell us that. We can tell you what the car feels like. Does the car feel stable? Does it feel predictable? Does it feel well balanced and does it make sense? Sometimes it can feel odd. Maybe something's not quite right with the car. There's so many moving parts in the racing car. So it is man and machine. We're kind of working together in many ways. Sometimes the data leads us the wrong way as well, so you have to be careful."

Albon says there have been times when he just doesn't gel with the car, when it doesn't do what he wants it to do. That is when he relies most on his communication with engineers.

"When you feel at one with the car, everything is in control," he says. "You can have moments, especially in qualifying, where you're really at the limit, where you're pushing the barriers of feeling. It's never out of control, but right on the limit."

The physical extremes of the sport, as well as the risks involved-more than 30 F1 drivers have died on race weekends, most famously Brazilian legend Ayrton Senna in a fatal crash while driving for Williams in 1994-mean Albon is on a strict diet, exercise and sleep regime to maintain peak fitness. Vowles says Williams' drivers work out four or five times a week, as well as the hours spent driving in the simulator and on the track.

Fans of the Netflix documentary series Drive to Survive, which featured Williams, got behind-the-scenes looks at drivers throughout a season, highlighting personal relationships, rivalries and the intimate teamwork that is required to make it to the podium.

Williams' senior content producer, Nicola Jefferies, tells Newsweek the show opened up the sport to new audiences who may never have watched a race, forging a deeper connection through personal storytelling that brings fans closer to the people behind the helmets.

"It hit an audience that wasn't already watching F1 [and] it helped give a nice storytelling for people who didn't have to understand how the racing worked," she says. "People got to know the people behind the racing before the race even started and then they cared about how well those people were doing."

Because it is not just the demands the racing entails, but the nature of life on the road for the drivers and other members of the team, too.

"I don't really feel like I have a home too much. I've had years where I've spent, you know, 20, 30 days at my home," says Albon, who is engaged to LPGA golfer Lily Muni He. "I think I see, for example, my engineers, my fellow rivals, colleagues, more than I do my own family."

The Heritage

After a sluggish start to the season, Miami provided a boost for Williams, with both drivers finishing in the points, Sainz in ninth place and Albon tenth. With a two-and-a-half week break before Montreal for the Canadian Grand Prix, the team headed back to their base in Grove, England, for further testing and refinement of their FW48 racing car.

Williams' HQ, home to the team's 1,300 members, is like a small university campus in the middle of the English countryside, 90 minutes' drive northwest of London. At their Experience Centre, Marketing Director Marcus Prosser guided Newsweek on a tour of its race cars dating from the 1970s until today, a visual representation of how the sport's cars have evolved over the decades.

"Every time we walk in here, it doesn't get old," Prosser says with a smile. "We've just had a quick walk through the 49 years of our history and it is somewhere where you can feel the energy. It is mightily impressive and we're going to need some more space soon because there's a lot more coming this way."

The British team, founded in 1977 by Frank Williams, who died aged 79 in 2021, became known as Atlassian Williams F1 Team after a multiyear sponsorship with the software company in 2025. The team has entered more than 860 races, marking 114 victories and over 300 podium finishes. Throughout the '80s and '90s, they won nine Constructors' Championships and seven Drivers' Championships with legends of the sport Alan Jones, Keke Rosberg, Nelson Piquet, Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost, Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve, the last in 1997.

Unlike other F1 teams like Ferrari, Mercedes or Cadillac, Williams is a true independent without ownership by a single automaker. Its legacy has been synonymous with engineer-led success in collaboration with top drivers. Vowles, who cut his teeth in F1 as part of Mercedes' winning teams in the 2010s, has the ambition to take Williams back to the top again. "It has such an incredible legacy and is still one of the most successful teams in Formula 1 history," he says. "We're not here selling cars, we aren't selling products. We are here because we are a racing team. Pure and simple."

"We know we fell behind in the past, but we're using that almost as a strength of ours," Vowles adds. "Instead of rebuilding it the same way that all 10 other teams have it, we're rebuilding it in a slightly different way using technology at our core. And that does create a differentiation for us."

In 2020, Williams ended its family ownership after being sold to U.S.-based private investment firm Dorilton Capital. The 2020s have marked a new era for Williams as the team gears up for its 50th anniversary in 2027. Prosser says the team already has a lot planned that honors the team's origins.

"The Williams F1 legacy has such a storied past and, for us, it's important to look back at the original FW that Sir Frank developed back in 1977-leaning into our heritage but focusing on the future," he says. "It's something we're incredibly proud of and I think it's coming back to that resilience of being able to cope with change."

The Team and Tech

When Vowles joined Williams as team lead in 2023, he admits he was "a little caught off guard by just how much work we had to do."

Three years later, he says the team is updating the car once every two races, meaning they aren't just focused on the big bursts anymore, but continuous performance improvements.

"Everyone, when you provide direction where we're going, turned and they're already marching that way," he says. "There is no resistance to us wanting to be world champions and the path that we need to take [to get there], as hard as it will be.

"Every individual can have a contributing part in what success looks like. And they do within Williams. That's one of the things I think we're very good at doing."

Technology, of course, is playing a big part of it. As well as global software company Atlassian, Williams has partnered with top AI companies VAST Data and Anthropic, known for its AI Claude, which is billed as Williams' "official thinking partner."

"We don't bring partners in because they have a sticker on the car; we bring them in because they make a tangible difference to what we're doing," Vowles says.

With Atlassian's help, the team is able to embed tools in the system to track every fault-from the factory to the track.

Technological advances in F1 have brought some backlash. Both drivers and fans have complained that the near 50-50 split between internal combustion and electrical power in this year's hybrid engines has harmed the quality of the racing and taken some of the human element out of the sport. The FIA, F1's governing body, has agreed to amend the rules, that will see the split changed to 58-42 in 2027 before moving to 60-40 in 2028, in a bid to make the cars a little less about technology and more about drivers' input.

For Vowles, people-and, by extension, culture-are the most important assets for Williams.

"The technology is the easier investment," he says. "But the investment in technology is no good if it doesn't have human beings using it in the right output.

"People, and therefore culture, are your most important asset, by a long way. Because technology is created by people. The use of technology is driven by people, and there will still be a people aspect to the sport in five and 10 years."

The Future

The rest of the season runs through December and will take the team to Europe, Asia, South America and back to the U.S., with races in Austin and Las Vegas. Races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia were canceled in April due to the war in Iran, but the season is still set to conclude in Abu Dhabi this winter.

Right now, Williams remains longshot underdog in the fight for both the Drivers' and Constructors' Championships. But Vowles has seen progress.

"When I joined, this team was pretty much the last team; now we're not anymore," he says. "We are coming from behind with the ambition to be at the front."

In his mind, that positioning provides a major advantage for Williams. Whereas the top teams are locked into their strategies and mechanisms to maintain their spots, Vowles says Williams has more flexibility and room to try new things.

"As long as what we are doing is investing in a future direction, that gives us the ability to fight at the front," he says.

"We are still a human sport," Vowles adds. "We have a human-being driver who is this incredible gladiator putting their life on the line and melding with the machine."

2026 NEWSWEEK DIGITAL LLC.

This story was originally published June 24, 2026 at 2:37 AM.