WORKING WITH THE GREAT DRIVERS

Mark Williams has worked alongside some of the sport’s very best during his long career. Here’s what he made of a few of them

JENSON BUTTON

“Jenson and Lewis Hamilton had very different driving styles. Jenson was the perfect guy to have in your team because he’s quick and he’s such a team player.

“When we first met him to sound him out, we said what’s really important is that we use both cars in FP1, FP2 and FP3 to improve the Mclaren and then in qualifying it’s down to you. Hopefully both cars have helped each other and you just shoot it out with Lewis. He said, ‘That’s perfect’. If I’d heard anything else I’d have been disappointed.

“It was open-book engineering, it’s the only way you do it, otherwise you might as well be running two teams, but you need the drivers to be on board. They were very supportive of each other.

“Jenson had his good days and bad days. There was always a reason, you just had to understand it. The rear of the car had to be really planted for JB to really deliver his best. That’s the same for every driver and some can handle something that’s a bit more lively, but why should you if your engineers can nail it?”

FERNANDO ALONSO

“I have massive respect for Fernando. He really drives the team on. When he first came to us in 2007, he was very focused; he knew what he wanted and helped the team get there. On car development and car set-up, he was very, very good. You can see why he’s a double world champion, he has what it takes.

“He’s a points accountant. He’ll take the points when he can and he won’t take big risks at the chance of losing points. He’s super-talented and really smart. He does great card tricks too, as we discovered at one wet Monza test!”

KIMI RAIKKONEN

“A man of very few words, too few. We tested a new power-steering concept once and he came in and said, ‘No, I don’t like it, it’s the same as I had at so-and-so and I didn’t like it then.’ Why didn’t you give us all that information before we embarked on this project?! Super-quick, unbelievably fast, but a man of too few words.

Not enough information.”

MIKA HAKKINEN

“It was all about your relationship with Mika. The first time I ran him was at a Monza test. We spoke on the phone and I said I’d got a set-up I thought he’d like. He stopped me and said, ‘Put David’s set-up on the car.’ I said, ‘You won’t like that, it’s not your style’, but he insisted. So we did that, Mika goes out, bangs a time in – very slightly quicker than David – comes in and says, ‘You’re right, I don’t like it, change it.’ Then he worked solidly all day until the circuit closed. I’m not sure if he was testing me or trying to outpsyche David. Probably both.

“I found the best way to get lap time from Mika was to send him home early. Don’t keep him at the track of an evening, he gets bored – he doesn’t do data. Engineers do data.”

DAVID COULTHARD

“I enjoyed working with David, a lovely guy, but he’s the encyclopaedia of car handling! Too much information, more than I could ever handle. He was always quick on the high-braking circuits with big stops, but always seemed to have poor luck. If something was going to go wrong on the car, it’d be with DC.

“At Monaco in 2001 [when Coulthard was on pole], he got onto the launch sequence too soon. He realised, came off the throttle to reinitialise and as he got off the throttle the engine revs dropped, they just plummeted and it stalled.

“We’d never seen that in testing so we took a car to Silverstone and we said to Alex [Wurz], ‘See if you can do that.’ He could do it at will, but we’d never ever seen it before. He said, ‘Well, you never normally do that’, so then we had to put systems in place so the engine would not die when you lifted off under no load.

“David deserved to have had better success. He was quick and had enough about him to be world champion.”

OLIVIER PANIS

“The other guy I really enjoyed working with was Olivier. He’d been written off and he was having doubts about his ability. Before he arrived, the team decked his car out in onions and all the French stuff. He saw it and burst out laughing and said, ‘You guys are really nice,

I’d looked from the outside and seen this frosty team, but really you’re just normal guys.’

“We had a good first test at Magny-cours and then we went to Silverstone, when Bridge corner was still on the lap. He did his first new-tyre run, came in and said, ‘I am so happy. Bridge is easy flat in this car, I have no problem’, as in, ‘When I drove here before I kept saying the car had a problem and no-one would believe me.’

“We had a fantastic season of testing. His commitment to the programme was just outstanding.”