Innovation
How a Formula 1 titan is developing its next generation of drivers
by Josh Suttill
8min read
The bar for what constitutes a successful Formula 1 driver academy has risen and risen in recent years, to the point where every team is fighting hard to make its young driver programme the market-leader.
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Teams not only have the challenge of supporting their drivers to success on the junior ladder in championships like FIA Formula 2 and Formula 3, but also have an important role in sharpening their technical knowledge, their ability to give accurate feedback from behind the wheel and how they prepare for each race weekend.
Williams is among the teams pushing hardest for a fruitful driver academy, having essentially reshaped its entire young driver programme since Dorilton Capital took over the team in the summer of 2020.
Over the last two years alone, it’s given both Logan Sargeant and his replacement Franco Colapinto F1 race seats, and has a pipeline of drivers it’s readying for when it hopes to return to the front of the F1 field by 2028.
Central to that transformation has been Sven Smeets, who joined Williams in 2021 after a lengthy career in rallying as a co-driver and later team manager. As well as serving as the team’s sporting director, Smeets has been tasked with reshaping the Williams Driver Academy.
Williams junior driver Luke Browning (L) With sporting director Sven Smeets (R)
“When I joined [November 2021], I think there were two people in the academy, it was quite differently oriented,” Smeets says to Raceteq.
“It was normally people who were asking to join the academy, there was not a [proper] young driver programme anymore.
“Logan was the first one we signed, already signed when I joined, but the first one in the new era of having a young driver academy.
“We’re adding things that the academy gives every year. This year, very important was the sports science department that Patrick Harding is setting up.
“It means that every driver now has a full-time trainer, even at karting. Of course, on a very different level because they’re still very young, but we start from a very young age to give the driver the understanding of [being] a Formula 1 driver, because that’s the aim… actually living like an athlete.
“That means you need to look after your sleep, your drinking during the weekend, [your] food. For example, I have an American driver [karter Lucas Palacio, signed to Williams in 2024, aged 10] who comes from America to race in Europe, so jetlag is part of his world, we’ve been focusing on having that in very different layers.
“The karting driver will not have the same [training] as an F1 driver. But it’s just to build up: that’s the way you should live, and that’s been one of our focus points this year, and we’re doing very well.
“The drivers are taking it on board and we see big improvements from last year into this year.”
Williams junior driver Victor Martins races for ART Grand Prix in Formula 2
Williams’s two Formula 2 drivers - Luke Browning and Victor Martins - are at the top of the Williams Driver Academy. For Browning, working with Williams’s F1 team has been invaluable to his F2 programme.
“I get to speak to the [Williams] engineers who are all very qualified,” Browning tells Raceteq.
“And although I haven’t gone and studied that myself, after spending 15 years in the sport, you catch up pretty quickly, it now feels a bit second nature to me.
“The technical understanding is in a good place now; I’m not an engineer but I know enough to be able to say in a way that 100 people, or maybe even 1000 if it’s back at the factory, can understand what I’m saying and apply it in a constructive way and move forward.
“That’s probably the biggest learning an F2 driver has to do to F1. At an F2 team, you turn up and there’s a table of four guys, and then you explain it to them, and you can take a bit longer.
“Whereas in F1 it’s got to be structured, that’s what we do really well.”
Having already driven for Williams in two F1 practice sessions at Abu Dhabi in 2024 and Bahrain in 2025, Browning has started taking on an important race support role back at Williams’s Grove base in the United Kingdom during some F1 weekends.
Browning spent the 2025 F1 Miami Grand Prix back at base helping test what full-time F1 race drivers Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz couldn't during the sole 60-minute practice session that weekend.
Carlos Sainz (R) and Alex Albon (L) in action at the Miami Grand Prix. Williams’s academy drivers were hard at work in the factory that weekend helping Albon and Sainz set their cars up
Much of the work that drivers and technical staff do in the factory happens after qualifying sessions on Saturdays.
“When we’re sleeping, they’re normally working,” says Smeets.
He explains that Browning has spent a lot of time in the simulator since joining the team in 2023, helping confirm and test the set-up changes that engineers and drivers might want to make to the car.
“Today he’s very professional in the way he approaches sim sessions, he goes beyond his own racing. He’s now working to help the team grow.
“That’s what we would like and expect from a driver once you get to that F2 level, that you can do these kinds of tasks, and do Friday evening support, and help us to score points.
“It’s the continuation of growing into that kind of role.”
Williams also uses the simulator to test and teach its drivers, as well as leaning on the more experienced young drivers for development feedback.
“We can compare [his feedback] to another F1 driver: was he clear enough on what he’d like changed going into the next session?” adds Smeets.
He explains that development drivers are given a target laptime to hit around a circuit and they are taught to process information and give feedback during that.
For Martins, working with Williams has helped his technical understanding, confidence and motivation.
Formula 2 drivers in action at the 2025 Spanish F2 round at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya
“You have the support of an F1 team, you are in F2, the last step, so for sure it gives you hope you’ll have access to the top level of motorsport,” Martins explains.
“I’m definitely super happy, and I feel like I’m in the right place.”
It helps that Williams’s F1 team is spearheaded by James Vowles, who was instrumental in Mercedes’s young driver programme.
Smeets says Vowles keeps a keen eye on Williams’s young driver programme and pointed to Mercedes as a solid template as a team that has two academy graduates as its current race drivers.
“James is still very heavily involved in the young driver programme,” Smeets explained.
“He enjoys working with young people, also having young engineers in our company, just after they’ve finished school or university - that’s our future.”
The team even has a private Whatsapp group in which they share results from their young drivers in various other series.
It shows the financial and educational commitment that F1 teams such as Williams take in nurturing young talent and ensuring they’re capable of taking on the challenges of professional motorsport.
