Drivers: Kazuki Nakajima | Nico Rosberg
Website: www.attwilliams.com
At times in recent years this once-mighty team has seemed to be in irreversible decline.
But Sir Frank Williams, Patrick Head and their colleagues have no intention of allowing their team to fade away like fellow former legends Lotus, Brabham and Tyrrell.
Its 2008 car veered between outstanding, podium-grabbing, form and midfield anonymity, so the team decided to turn its attention to 2009 very early – a policy that could well pay off given the major rule changes.
The team hopes that recently adopted cost-cutting measures will also work in its favour, and they will certainly help sustain a squad which admits it borrowed beyond its means in a bid to stay competitive during recent struggles.
Highly-rated lead driver Nico Rosberg has remained loyal despite Williams’s troubles, but has warned he’ll have to look elsewhere if the team isn’t back on the pace in 2009.
Williams wants nothing less, though, and it would be a hugely popular result if this respected team could mount an overdue resurgence.
F1 track record
Frank Williams knows all about life at the back of the grid, having endured years of cash-strapped uncompetitiveness in the 1970s.
It was only when he joined forces with rising design ace Patrick Head in 1977 that Williams started to make waves.
The team mastered the ground effect aerodynamics of the period and won its first race at Silverstone in 1979, before grabbing the 1980 and 1982 titles with Alan Jones and Keke Rosberg.
Williams then linked with Honda as turbocharged engines took precedence, and the partnership yielded constructors’ titles in 1986 and 1987 and a drivers’ championship for Nelson Piquet in the second of those years.
The Williams story took a grim twist during this period, as Frank Williams was paralysed from the neck down in a car crash early in 1986.
Despite his disability, he returned to the helm as soon as possible and has remained in charge – and indefatigable – ever since.
Honda jumped ship for McLaren in 1988, but the following year Williams began a new relationship with Renault that would lead to a string of titles in the 1990s.
Nigel Mansell won the drivers’ crown in 1992 with the revolutionary Adrian Newey-designed FW14B, before Alain Prost delivered a repeat title the following year.
Then came the tragedy of Ayrton Senna’s fatal accident at Imola in 1994, just three races into his Williams career.
The way that Williams bounced back from this nightmare spoke volumes for the team’s resilience.
Damon Hill took the fight to Michael Schumacher and only a controversial collision at Adelaide denied him the 1994 title.
Williams would secure another two championships (with Hill in 1996 and Jacques Villeneuve in ’97) before its run of success came to an abrupt end, as Renault quit F1 and Newey defected to McLaren.
Two quiet years with customer engines preceded an uneasy partnership with BMW that delivered race victories, but never a season-long title challenge.
The partnership dissolved amid mutual finger-pointing, and since then Williams has struggled to re-establish itself.
It has now gone four seasons without a win, and 11 without a title – statistics that leave Williams and Head deeply dissatisfied.