Why former McLaren boss is taking on new F1 challenge at Williams

Last week, Williams announced a major coup – signing leaders from the Mercedes and Alpine Formula 1 squads, as well as McLaren’s Piers Thynne, who’ll join the Grove-based outfit in August.

Having started his career with a lengthy stint as an engineering project manager at transmission specialist Xtrac, Piers joined McLaren in the late 2000s in a similar gearbox-related capacity before ascending the team’s hierarchy.

The Briton was successively named head of programme management in 2012, head of programme and operational logistics in 2017, productions director in 2019 and operations director in 2021, before becoming chief operating officer throughout the 2023, 2024 and 2025 campaigns.

As such, Thynne played a key role in McLaren’s revival, as the team recovered from a low of ninth in the 2017 constructors’ championship to world titles in 2024 and 2025, with Lando Norris clinching the drivers’ crown last year.

“Piers has been certainly an important contributor to the success that we have achieved at McLaren,” said team principal Andrea Stella, who moved to Woking himself in 2015 and worked closely with Thynne thereafter. “He’s a long-course server of the McLaren team. He started in 2008, so he’s been part of various phases. He’s been a close person to me personally, and also in his role as chief operating officer, quite instrumental for the development of the team.

“So, it’s for me the chance to wish Piers all the best in his new experience, in his new adventure at Williams. I’m sure he will be a very important contributor. When it comes to the organisation at McLaren, in reality, the organisation had already moved forward because Piers was in a different role other than chief operating officer for some months now. So, it’s not impactful to the way we have moved forward and evolved as an organisation.”

Piers Thynne - Atlassian Williams F1 Team

As Stella pointed out, Thynne moved to the team’s heritage department earlier this year – coinciding with the period when he started having talks with Williams, though which of the two happened first is unclear.

“The first conversations I had with him were probably more towards February time,” Williams team principal James Vowles said, amid a tricky time for the Grove-based outfit. Williams has dropped from fifth to eighth in the constructors’ standings, missed the Barcelona shakedown and subsequently turned up with an overweight F1 car, as the world championship switched to new technical regulations.

“I don't like reacting to what happens, but what was clear to myself is that the way we are operating is still well and truly off championship [level]; I'm not talking about just the late car to Barcelona and the weight in the car, just the time it takes us to get an idea to track is far too long, and it needs someone that has championship-level understanding of it.”

“The first conversations with him were outstanding. He's just very strategic in his thinking but he understands how to do the fundamentals of Formula 1 operations, and Formula 1 operations are a very different beast to anything else in the world, it's nothing like aerospace; it's very few things like it in the world where you're trying to get product to the track in three, four weeks. And what I liked with him is the strategic arm, he'll help us in so many different areas but he also understands what great delivery of product looks like.”

Interestingly, Thynne is walking in his father’s footsteps. Sheridan Thynne acted as Williams’ commercial director from 1979 to 1992, until Nigel Mansell’s relationship with the team turned sour and Sheridan followed him out the door.

Sheridan Thynne, Williams Commercial Director, Nigel Mansell, Williams and Ann Bradshaw

Photo by: Andre Vor / Sutton Images

But asked if that played a role in Piers’ decision to move to Grove, Vowles replied: “Not really. What he really enjoyed, he did a great job with McLaren bringing them to a really great place and he loves that part of the journey the same way I do, he wants to be part of bringing this team back to the front.

“What Piers did very well is he created a structure below him that was empowered and was working well so it gave him the freedom to execute and move elsewhere. But McLaren are in a very different place to us.”

The scale of the challenge is highlighted by Williams’ victory drought, with Pastor Maldonado’s triumph in the 2012 Spanish Grand Prix the team’s only success in the past two decades – or, in other words, in the latest 400 grands prix.

Additional reporting by Filip Cleeren