Shock fires and an unlikely win: part six of our Williams F1 series
Despite flashes of potential, even of brilliance, in the seasons immediately after the BMW divorce, at the turn of the decade Williams fell into a trough of underachievement from which it has struggled to extract itself…
Independence is a wonderful thing. To control your own destiny and enjoy the freedom that comes with self-sufficiency – it’s a blessing to be your own master. But in F1, independence can also mean weakness: ‘indie’ teams lack the cushion of manufacturer support and tend to pay for everything themselves (or at least through sponsors, if they can find them), including the biggest outlay: engines. Such teams tend to lack power – both metaphorically and literally – to compete at the sharp end, on the track and in boardrooms. It’s an unequal struggle, a tough, on-the-edge existence. In F1, sometimes independent freedom isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Frank Williams understands the indie life because it’s all he’s really known. Even when blessed with manufacturer engine power, from Honda in the 1980s, Renault in the 1990s and BMW in the 2000s, Williams still went its own way, calling the shots on its own terms – which perhaps explains why its last manufacturer relationship, with BMW 15 long years ago, withered away. Old habits die hard when you’ve battled like hell just to exist, never mind make the grid, which was the Williams way through the 1970s when Frank was starting out.
In 2006, in the wake of a damaging BMW divorce as the German car maker took a leaf, chose its own way and bought Sauber, Frank Williams and his partner Patrick Head found themselves going back to basics. But Formula 1 had come on a few yards since 1977 when they’d run a customer March for Patrick Nève, and so had their business which had moved from Didcot to a bigger facility in Grove, Oxfordshire back in 1996. As F1 downsized from 3-litre V10s to 2.4-litre V8s in a bid to cut speeds and costs, Williams looked to a faithful supplier from the past to provide its thrust. Cosworth’s V10 had won just two grands prix in the V10 era – Johnny Herbert in a Stewart at the Nürburgring in 1999 and Giancarlo Fisichella in a Jordan in Brazil in 2003 – after its last V8 had powered Michael Schumacher’s Benetton to the title in 1994. The new regulations invigorated its hopes of a meaningful return to the front line, in harness with one of the ‘grandee’ teams that had first made its way with the venerable DFV in the back of an FW06 all those years before.
But a tide of goodwill from paddock insiders and fans alike wouldn’t be enough to carry the new Williams-cosworth accord to race-winning heights. Still, these two special organisations had their moments, as GP2 champion Nico Rosberg made his F1 graduation beside Williams sophomore Mark Webber. A chip off the old block? Not really. From the start, Nico was a smooth, precise operator far removed from the jazzy, free-wheeling troubadour that had made old man Keke an all-time Williams favourite. Hell, he didn’t even have a ‘moose-tache’.
The lad was quick though. Fastest lap on his debut in Bahrain set an early marker, as Webber and Rosberg racked up points in sixth and seventh. Promising – but ultimately
misleading. They lined up an impressive third and fourth at Sepang, Nico ahead of Mark, but both were out by lap 15, Rosberg with an engine failure, Webber with faulty hydraulics. This was the real story of a season dogged by unreliability. Indie cottage-industry charm was only ever going to stretch so far and financial reality began to bite with Cosworth engines to pay for and the loss of a big blue-chip sponsor in Hewlett-packard.
Webber was soon on his way to Red Bull for 2007, frustrated by the failures. At home in Australia he’d briefly led during the pitstops before the gearbox broke, and was even a genuine contender in Monaco until flames from the exhausts ended his hopes. Closer in character to Alan Jones than Nico ever was to Keke, Webber could have been another Williams great – had he been given a competitive car.
The Cosworth year proved little more than a stop-gap, as Williams embarked on three seasons of stability with Toyota V8 power. There was new promise in 2007 as technical director Sam Michael, chief designer Ed Wood and aerodynamics chief Loïc Bigois produced the purposeful FW29 for Rosberg and new team-mate Alex Wurz. The combination was good enough for a much-improved fourth in the constructors’ standings (after Mclaren’s disqualification following the ‘spygate’ affair), with Rosberg making by far the more significant contribution with seven points finishes, including a fourth in Brazil. Wurz did at least land an unlikely podium in Canada, one-stopping from 19th on the grid, but before the season was finished the lanky Austrian admitted the game was up as he struggled to get to grips with Bridgestone’s control tyre, in the wake of Michelin’s F1 withdrawal. By the Japanese GP, this year held at Fuji, he’d stepped down, destined for sportscars and a more successful Indian summer during which he’d win Le Mans for a second time, with Peugeot.
The man who replaced him was a Toyota protégé – and the son of the Honda protégé Williams had rejected 20 years earlier, thus triggering the end of its first Japanese engine partnership. Compared with father Satoru, Kazuki Nakajima showed genuine long-term promise and would fit easily into Williams for two full seasons. The first, in 2008, netted five points finishes, but he raced in the shadow of Rosberg who was showing the kind of potential that would eventually prick Mercedes’ interest. Nico would score a pair of podium finishes, one in Australia and a best-yet second place at the first F1 night race in Singapore – scene of a suspicious crash by Nelson Piquet Jr which just happened to gift team-mate Fernando
Alonso a surprise victory. In 2009, when the truth of ‘crashgate’ emerged, it was deemed too late to strip Alonso of his ill-gotten win – even if medals are ripped from Olympians’ necks if drug offences are discovered years later… Singapore 2008 should have been Rosberg’s first victory.
F1 was in turmoil back then, caught between a crashing economy, a malevolent FIA president ‘tied up’ in a tabloid sex-scandal sting which embarrassed F1 (if not a Teflon-coated Max Mosley himself), and the manufacturer-led teams determined to grab power and money from the faceless owners of a sport effectively sold down the river by Bernie Ecclestone. Frank Williams, ever alert to the best possible deal for his team, weighed up his options. Back in 2006, he’d already pulled in a smooth-talking CEO to help guide the company through F1’s increasingly shark-infested waters. Ex-eton and Cambridge with a history in law, investment banking and the Rio Tinto Group, one of the world’s largest mining corporations, Adam Parr wasn’t very ‘F1’ – at all. But Frank was impressed. And now a quietly imposing Austrian called Toto Wolff took a minority company share, dipping his
“WILLIAMS PROVED IT COULD STILL BE CANNY, DESIGNING A DOUBLE DIFFUSER INTO ITS NEW-LOOK FW31. SO DID BRAWN GP, ONLY BRAWN DID IT BETTER”
toe into those potentially deadly F1 waters for the first time. We’d soon see more of him.
On track in 2009, a wholesale technical rules overhaul, the biggest in a generation, stripped away downforce (at least until the teams quickly clawed it back) and reintroduced slick tyres in the hope improved mechanical grip would revive a stale sporting spectacle. Here, Williams proved it could still be canny, designing a double diffuser into its new-look FW31. So did Williams’ engine supplier Toyota, so did Brawn GP, newly risen from Honda’s ashes – only Brawn did it better. Much better. The team that would become Mercedes swept to a famous drivers’ and constructors’ double, courtesy of Williams old boy Jenson Button (buying himself out of his contract to return to the team in 2006 had patently been money well spent). As for Williams, it laboured as the seventh-best team of the year, Rosberg proving consistent while Nakajima failed to trouble the scoreboard. Like Wurz, he’d reinvent himself as a brilliant sportscar racer, with Toyota, while Rosberg would sign up for the emerging Mercedes super-team, his four-year Williams stint at an end. A stretch identical in length to his dad’s back in the 1980s might not have garnered the same wins and title success – but it certainly achieved what Nico needed to make the crucial next step.
So Williams featured an all-new line-up for 2010 – and once again, it called on Cosworth for power. The Toyota supply had worked well – until the manufacturer pulled the plug on F1 completely in the wake of the credit crunch. It would leave grand prix racing winless and as something of a forgotten entity; strange given is status as one of the world’s largest and most influential car makers.
Buoyed by his return to race-winning form at Brawn, loveable veteran Rubens Barrichello now joined a team he had always admired and respected, beside a promising rookie tipped by some to be the next Michael Schumacher (who was also back on the grid in 2010, in a Mercedes). Nico Hülkenberg seemed to have all the right ingredients – even down to Schumi’s manager,
Willi Weber. What could he do in the new Williams FW32?
The answer was seven points finishes and what is still (at least at the time of writing) his greatest F1 achievement: a rain-affected pole position at the season-ending Brazilian GP. Nico had no way of knowing that it would never get any better as he headed for Force India and a decade of midfield toil. As for Barrichello, he scored 10 times that season, including a pleasing fourth place at Valencia’s European GP – and survived a nasty but all too familiar chop in Hungary from his old Ferrari mucker Schumacher. The team took a respectable sixth in the constructors’ table, lagging behind Renault but a point ahead of Force India. Then the wheels fell off.
The 2011 season was nothing short of disastrous on track, even if Parr would report a positive financial year thanks to newly minted sponsorship dollars from Venezuelan oil giant PDVSA, who pushed the new GP2 champion into a Williams seat. It had taken Pastor Maldonado four seasons to conquer the F1 breeding ground, but now he was ready for the premier league – wasn’t he? Parr bristled at the pay-driver jibes, but given the state of the team out on track it was no wonder Maldonado was made most welcome.
Williams finished ninth in the table, with just five points – four from Barrichello, one from the new boy. Desperately, it was the worst performance in the team’s hallowed history. Tech boss Sam Michael duly fell on his sword, while a new broom swept in Mike Coughlan – rehabilitating from his four-year ban for the Mclaren/ferrari ‘spygate’ scandal. Jason Somerville was promoted to head of aero and Mark Gillan named chief operations engineer. And in a season when Parr publicly floated Williams on the stock exchange, Patrick Head finally stepped down from the board.
By now it had been some time since Patrick had been on the F1 front line, but in partnership with Frank he’d personified what Williams stood for over three decades. He’d given and achieved so much, no one could begrudge him a life away from the claustrophobic paddock. But he sure would be missed.
Barrichello too would be gone at season’s end, but his sign-off was abrupt and lacked the respect he deserved after 19 seasons on the road in F1. Always a sensitive soul, he was unsettled by his friend Sam Michael’s departure and Rubens knew only too well how bad an F1 car he’d been
“MALDONADO WOULD NEVER COME CLOSE TO MATCHING HIS DAY OF DAYS. STILL, HE’LL ALWAYS HAVE SPAIN 2012”
saddled with in the FW33. He’d later admit Adam Parr wasn’t much to his tastes either, and he knew what was coming. The call came from Frank himself, Rubens recalling that the tone was business-like, more than a little chilly. What a shame it came to this – although Barrichello, being the man he is, holds no grudges.
What next? The new technical team set to work on regeneration in harness with Renault customer power. A revival of 1990s dominance was clearly a stretch… but still, a happy – and let’s face it, utterly shocking – surprise was around the corner. And there was more upheaval in the boardroom. Now nearing his 70th birthday, Sir Frank – a proud knight of the realm since 1999 – followed his friend Patrick by stepping back from the front line, his daughter Claire answering the call to maintain the family interest. Also, Parr was gone. In the midst of convoluted Concorde Agreement negotiations with Ecclestone, the CEO didn’t exactly win favour with F1’s tsar, and internal friction with the board led to Parr’s resignation. Some people pass through F1, never quite looking at home in this closed-off, strange little world that even now has its own specific way of doing things. Parr was always one of those.
Then, six weeks after Parr’s departure, Williams won a race. Maldonado had been showing signs of improvement in a refreshingly unpredictable 2012 season in which four different drivers won the first four races.
The Venezuelan stretched that run to five on an unforgettable weekend in Spain. First he inherited pole from Lewis Hamilton after the Mclaren was relegated to the back for running out of fuel after its Q3 run. Surely Maldonado would fade in the race though, wouldn’t he? He would not. Instead, he drew inspiration from lord knows where to regain a lead he’d lost to Fernando Alonso at Turn 1 and parry every attack from Ferrari’s warrior to shock not only the partisan crowd, but also the whole F1 world. No ifs, no buts, he drove beautifully that day to deliver a first Williams win since Brazil 2004 – and to date it remains the team’s 114th and most recent victory.
Ninety minutes after the race, as the team deservedly soaked in that sweet winning feeling, a fire swept through the team garage, fortunately without causing serious injury. Somehow, it summed up Williams in this period: even when on the up, something unexpected and difficult would floor it. Over the course of the season, Bruno Senna – nephew to Ayrton – added consistent points, but Maldonado would never come close to matching his day of days. Still, he’ll always have Spain 2012.
Once again, reality bit hard in 2013 as the team slumped back to equal its nadir of two years earlier, as a promising young Finn called Valtteri Bottas stepped in for Senna. Wolff quit his position for a chance to head Mercedes’ F1 team and finally the Venezuelan oil dollars began to run dry. But yet another new dawn promised hope. Jean Todt’s more measured approach to the FIA presidency since winning his mandate to rule back in 2009 now ushered in a new, hightech hybrid era that promised to make F1 more ‘relevant’ to a fast-changing world. Williams had taken a battering during the V8 era, but now, armed with a Mercedes powertrain that simply embarrassed Ferrari and Renault, indie freedom would no longer equate to weakness. It was time for ‘happy hour’. Martini cocktail, anyone?