During the Miami GP Albon was heard to question the team’s requests to push harder, and on a different occasion, to manage his tyres.
Although such responses appear uncharacteristic given Albon’s calm personality out of the car, Vowles says he’s happy to have such feedback from his driver.
“I actually encourage it, I think it's a positive thing,” Vowles told Autosport. “There’s going to be no one better who knows what's going on in the car but him. I've heard it a few times with him. But it's constructive, it’s not negative.
“Alex's frustration was normal. He was in a phase where we knew we had an opportunity against Valtteri [Bottas], but only if we could create a tyre offset relative to the two of them. And more importantly, the threat from behind was going to be enormous.
“And it was a fine balance. He'll look back on it in hindsight and realise that whatever we did, that's where we were going to end up.
"It was an awful position for the engineer, because there's no good answer to it. Push then, and we would have looked even worse, manage more, and we would have been where we were.
“That's why I mean Alex can look at it afterwards and say, ‘OK I understand why you didn't know which way to go with it.’”
Source: Autosport