Sven Smeets, Sporting Director and head of the Williams Racing Driver Academy, joined us on the Feeder Series Podcast to discuss the importance of driver academies.

By George Sanderson

Sven Smeets is the Sporting Director at Williams Racing, having joined the team of November 2021. He is also the head of the Williams Racing Driver Academy, where he supports the likes of Franco Colapinto, Lia Block and Luke Browning, to name a few. 

We spoke to Smeets on the 5 June episode of the Feeder Series Podcast, in which he gave us exclusive confirmation of the team’s plans for 15-year-old karter, Oleksandr Bondarev. The Ukrainian is set to take part in the final two Italian F4 rounds later this year ahead of a full year in F4 in 2025.

He also discussed the differences in methods used by the Williams academy to that of their Red Bull Junior Team counterparts.

“I think we are probably a little bit different than the Red Bull academy,” he told us. “We decided to go a little bit of a different way [to them] and try to focus on one or two drivers maximum per category.” 

By comparison, Red Bull have adopted a more widespread method, with their team livery visible on a number of cars in each category. This ‘fingers in many pies approach’ has proved successful in getting drivers into F1, often first at their junior team Visa Cash App RB. However, it has often been criticised for being too ruthless at replacing or dropping drivers, or not giving them the support they need. 

“We have less drivers than the Red Bull academy and we try to give the complete package for the driver to develop into an F1 driver at some point.” Smeets explains that when signing drivers “we try to create sort of age gaps between them and hopefully have picked the right one” that can then make it into the Williams lineup in F1. 

According to Smeets, when Dorilton Capital took over at Williams, establishing a good academy was “one of the things that was high on their priority.” He explains that this provides the team with good sustainability as a business if they are able to have “the driver in your own house” and be able to simply promote them to the main team. 

“It’s very important to have the drivers of the future in your own academy. Because we know there are 20 seats and it’s very difficult to get drivers from another team coming to you.” 

It is also a part of the project that James Vowles, Team Principal of Williams Racing, is particularly focused on.

“We believe in young talent,” says Smeets. “Williams is on a long-term project and James [Vowles] has been saying it for a while that the young driver academy is part of that project.”

How do Williams identify and manage their talents?

Identifying and signing young talents to the academies before other teams get the opportunity is a key part of what Williams hope will make their project successful in the long term. To do that, Smeets explains that the scouting process begins earlier into a driver’s career. 

“Of course, we look to what they have established before in karting, because we are also talking to 11, 12-year-olds now. Of course, there is not a huge racing prowess to look at, but you can already see how they are developing, how they are sitting in their age, how they are actually maybe already driving a year higher in karting and are very young.” 

Smeets explains how Williams have scouts who attend karting events during weekends in order to talk to teams.

“Most of the teams have had champions as Max [Verstappen], or as George [Russell], or as Alex [Albon] already through their ranks, so for them it is easy to compare youngsters to people they have had and have made it into F1.”

Even before a driver is officially signed to the Williams academy, the team is planning how they would develop the driver moving forward. Smeets discusses how “in karting you need to make a two-year plan” for the drivers, due to the transition between karts and cars being such a pivotal step in a driver’s career.

“From OK Karting into car is quite a big change because they are leaving their karting sessions behind and going to cars, so you cannot just ask them to stop karting today and start racing tomorrow in a car. There is a sort of transfer period where you need to have them testing a lot for the car.”

Such programmes include testing on a high-quality esports simulator, along with the physical training. Young drivers are given an F4 model car on the simulator and the team observes to see how they get along with the change, having a performance race engineer to help them with the programmes they need to run.

As shown with Bondarev, he successfully made it through this stage, and now has the ‘two-year plan’ ahead of him, finishing 2024 by joining the final two rounds of Italian F4, before racing an entire year of F4 championships in 2025.

Working with feeder series teams

Naturally, Williams want to put their academy drivers in the best seats possible for their development. However, the amount of influence an F1 team has on the driver varies from team to team once the season gets underway.

Oliver Oakes, team principal and director at Hitech GP spoke to Feeder Series about his observations when it comes to the varying ways in which F1 teams get involved with their academy drivers.

“They all work very differently,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a right or wrong sort of structure, I think each F1 team approaches their juniors in a different way. Some a quite ‘hands-on’, in terms of someone being in the paddock and keeping an eye on them, some prefer to let drivers get on with it, and they want to see if that driver can build a team around them and sort of take responsibility on their own.”

Jeremy Cotterill, MP Motorsport team manager, has noticed this trend shifting more towards the ‘hands-on’ approach over recent years. His team currently have a strong relationship with Red Bull, with Tim Tramnitz in F3 and the Al Qubaisi sisters racing in F1 Academy.

“The F1 teams, from what I’m seeing, are taking more interest – and taking it more seriously if you like – in terms of their development and their involvement. So, things are evolving, certainly our drivers are quite heavily involved with Red Bull.”

There are occasions though when the seats haven’t been able to produce the competitive car the academies would be hoping for in order to see how well their drivers can perform at the front of the field. Smeets tells us how there are still plenty of ways they can analyse the performances of their drivers.

“What we always try to do is – that even Zak [O’Sullivan] in Carlin at the time – is to try to base it on the teammate. Which, of course, first of all means then that he needs to have a good teammate.” After all, the main aim for any driver in any championships is to beat your teammate! They also look to races where the car is less important, and the importance of driver ability is more prevalent.

“Everybody remembers the slick tyres in the rain in Hungary,” Smeets reminds us, speaking about when O’Sullivan claimed a fantastic fourth-placed finish after starting 22nd in Hungary, due to pitting for slick tyres in changeable conditions towards the end of the race. This, in fact, was a race Zak wrote a column about for Feeder Series, back in August 2022.

The current crop at Williams

The approach of having a couple of drivers in categories a couple of years apart appears to be working for Williams so far and could well produce them talents ready for F1 seats in the years to come.

In F2, and theoretically closest to reaching F1, they have Franco Colapinto and Zak O’Sullivan, racing for MP Motorsport and ART Grand Prix respectively. Both have performed admirably in their debut seasons, with both picking up a win by the time the series reached the sixth race weekend of the season in Spain.

Colapinto took a sprint race victory at Imola, along with a podium at Spain, and has previously spoken to Feeder Series on how he has had to adapt over the course of the first half of the season. Meanwhile, O’Sullivan took an impressive feature race victory on the streets of Monaco after staying out in anticipation of a safety car – with a virtual safety car two laps from the end allowing him to pit and emerge in the lead.

“Zak and Franco are rookies in F2 and this year also with a new car. So, as you will have seen, some things have taken a little bit more time to sort out and, let’s say, the understanding of the car.”

“When we look to Luke [Browning], he is in his second year in F3 and we know what Luke can do. He has proved that in the past.” Browning took the 2022 GB3 title and has won many admirers from some of his performances in F3 last year too, none less than Smeets himself.

“You could already see it [Browning’s talent] last year in some of the races. I mean, when he went to Monaco last year, he was top four material, and he was the only rookie in the top ten. I think everybody saw what he did in Macau at the end of last year which was very impressive.”

Browning won the F3 World Cup race at Macau in dominant fashion, starting from pole position, leading by over two seconds by the end of the opening lap and then held off pressure on a safety car restart to maintain the lead and take the flag first.

Smeets says that next for Alessandro Giusti, currently racing in Formula Regional Europe, “is FIA F3 because it is his second season in FRECA.” Oleksandr Bondarev’s has already been confirmed, whilst 13-year-old Japanese karter Sara Matsui is competing in the OKJ class and the 2024 Champions of the Future series, supported by F1 Academy, where fellow academy member Lia Block currently races.

The American picked up a double points-scoring finish in Barcelona and is showing promise in her first season in single seaters. The Williams academy also made history through its longest serving member, Jamie Chadwick, this season. With a lights-to-flag victory at Road America, she became the first woman in Indy NXT history to claim a road course pole and road course win, along with being the first woman since Pippa Mann in 2010 to finish on the Indy NXT podium.

You can hear more from Sven Smeets on the 5 June episode of the Feeder Series Podcast, hosted by Jim Kimberley.

Header photo credit: Williams Racing