Hello everybody and welcome back to another WTF1 podcast. Now today I am joined by somebody

brand new to the podcast and very excited to introduce her to you all Hannah. Would you like to

introduce yourself to the people listening? Yes, hello everybody. I'm Hannah Atkinson. I'm

so excited to be part of the WTF1 team. Yeah, I've started watching WTF1 when I became a fan of

the sport and so I would never have guessed that I would be in this position I'm in now, but yeah,

I'm so happy to be here. That's awesome. And for your first podcast, your official debut on this

kind of thing, we've got quite a big piece of breaking news to discuss. So let's dive into it

because James Valz, who many of you might recognise the name, but we'll know him as the guy who's

famous for the Valtteri, it's James Mercedes Radio call. He has been hired as the new Williams

team principal for 2023. Now obviously we heard that Yoskipito was leaving the role towards the

end of last year and we were wondering who was going to be hired in that position and when,

but we now finally have an answer. So James is going to be joining the team from the 20th of February.

So obviously he's got some time that he needs between leaving Mercedes and joining Williams,

but he'll be there for the first Grand Prix in Bahrain. When you got that notification through

Hannah, what was your first reaction to the news? My reaction was the amount of things and people

saying that we're going to see Williams, it's James. I knew that that would be all over the internet,

it was. That was my first reaction. Second, I thought it was really interesting. I correct me if I

wrong but I feel like we don't typically see engineers or strategists become team principals,

especially for other teams. So I was quite surprised how did you, what did you think about it?

Yeah, I mean we've had lots of people's names be sort of thrown into the ring. I know a lot of

people were hoping that maybe a Susie Wolf could go there or a Jensen button, but yeah, I guess it

makes a lot of sense to sort of poach somebody from another team with a lot of experience. But as you

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