Williams F1 Team Poaches Key Senior Leader From McLaren F1 Team in Fight Up The Grid

If you wanted to put a name to the person who kept McLaren‘s engine room running during its championship revival, Piers Thynne would be a strong answer.

He joined the team in 2008 and worked his way through a series of leadership positions, including Executive Director of Operations from July 2019, a role that put him over the factory’s project management, manufacturing, build, test, and logistics functions.

He was elevated to Chief Operating Officer in March 2023 , and the timing lines up neatly with McLaren’s ascent back to the top of the constructors’ standings.

A degree-qualified engineer with a background in manufacturing and operations, Thynne’s pre-McLaren career included time at Ascari, a management position at Xtrac, and service as an Army Officer with operational tours in Iraq.

Now he’s leaving. McLaren confirmed Thynne will depart during July, currently overseeing the team’s heritage programme after stepping down from the COO role in January 2026. Williams announced simultaneously that he will arrive in Grove in August as their new Chief Optimisation and Planning Officer – a position created specifically for him.

What Thynne Brings to Williams

Thynne played a fundamental part in the transformation that fuelled McLaren’s 2025 success , which amounted to back-to-back constructors’ championships in 2024 and 2025. That’s the experience Williams is buying. The newly-created role will task him with modernising Williams’ manufacturing and operations, with the brief explicitly covering robotics, AI, and advanced manufacturing technology.

James Vowles, the Williams team principal who has spent years rebuilding the Grove outfit from the ground up, said: “I am thrilled to be welcoming Piers to Atlassian Williams F1 Team as we continue investing in the people, processes and technology to compete at the front in Formula 1. We are clear in our ambition to build a team that can win World Championships, and Piers has unrivalled recent experience in doing exactly that.”

Thynne arrives as part of a broader wave of senior appointments at Williams.

Claire Simpson has left Mercedes to join Williams as head of aerodynamic development , bringing 12 years of experience at Brackley. Fred Judd joins from Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains as Head of Performance Optimisation, having led the 2026 power unit development programme there. Steve Booth comes in as Head of Vehicle Engineering from Alpine, where he served as Chief Engineer across two separate regulation changes and was part of the Renault squad that won consecutive constructors’ titles in 2005 and 2006.

Thynne confirmed: “I am delighted to be joining Atlassian Williams F1 Team at what is a really exciting moment. Williams has clear ambition to be championship level in all areas and set new standards in the sport, and I can’t wait to play my part in that as a member of the senior leadership group. I have enjoyed a fantastic time at McLaren, helping bring the team back to the top, and hope we will be able to do the same at Williams.”

Whether Williams can replicate McLaren’s trajectory is the harder question.

The team had a slow start to 2026, with the FW48 reportedly overweight following the reinforcement work needed to pass crash test homologation.

The infrastructure being put in place is serious, but turning operational excellence into championship hardware takes time – as McLaren itself demonstrated over several years before the titles arrived. Thynne knows that process better than almost anyone, which is exactly why Williams came looking.