Where did it go wrong for Williams?
Posted by Sport.co.uk on: 04 April 2011 - 10:44
Author: Sean Keywood
After the first race of this Formula One season, there are some obvious talking points that spring to mind. Will Red Bull dominate the season like their qualifying pace suggested, or will their unreliable KERS hold them back? Will McLaren be able to build on their surprising pace? Will Ferrari and Mercedes recover from disappointing starts? Does Vitali Petrov’s performance for Lotus Renault prove that the team can still compete at the front of the field without Robert Kubica? And will Sauber overcome their disqualification to prove that their strong start was no fluke?
Past Masters
The thing is though, the team I want to write about this week is none of the above. Indeed, it’s one you might not even have noticed was missing from the above list. And yet if you’d told an F1 fan 15 years ago that the least talked about team after the first race of a season would be Williams, they would have been less surprised if John Major had turned up in Parliament playing a Sega Saturn in a Union Jack dress. In 1996 Williams drivers Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve dominated the season, winning 12 out of 16 races between them as Hill took the title. The year after that saw Villeneuve take the crown, a title which cemented Williams’ place as the most successful team of the previous 20 years, and saw them replace McLaren as the team most likely to challenge Ferrari at the top of the all time table.
All of this seemed like a very distant memory in Australia, where Rubens Barrichello’s off-track excursions provided the best argument yet against charging older drivers less for their car insurance, while still comfortably outpacing his teammate Pastor Maldonado in a car that seems to have little hope of ending the team’s seven year wait for a win. For fans who remember the all conquering team of the 80s and 90s with the like of Jones, Rosberg, Piquet, Mansell, Prost, Hill and Villeneuve sweeping all before them, this fall from grace is staggering. But who or what was to blame for the team’s decline?
Engine Trouble
The problem Williams has always faced is the same as that faced by all other privateer teams- that of finding a reliable engine supplier. In the 80s and 90s this was not too difficult as, Ferrari aside, car makers who wanted to be involved with F1 were worried about the cost and complexity of running a whole team on their own, and much preferred to put their engine in the back of one of the traditional team’s cars instead. This meant that when first Honda and then Renault wanted to be involved with the sport they were happy to let Williams use their engines to take both brands to glory.
However, around the millennium this started to change. Manufacturers began to realise that they could have more control over their racing operations if they ran teams of their own, with the result that Honda, Toyota, Ford (as Jaguar) and Renault all set up shop for themselves. This left the two most successful privateer teams, Williams and McLaren, perched on the edge of a precipice, needing to maintain their works engine relationships with BMW and Mercedes respectively at all costs. However, where Ron Dennis sold shares in his McLaren team to Mercedes to ensure he kept them onside, Frank Williams was unable to hang on to BMW, despite hiring a string of German drivers for this express purpose.
Tightening Cambelts
From here on in the team was always facing a financial shortfall, and their attempts to meet it became ever more undignified. First they hired the terminally slow Kazuki Nakajima to drive for them in exchange for a cheap deal on Toyota engines that were themselves so lacking in power the drivers would have been better off removing the floor of the car and pushing themselves along Fred Flintstone style. Then when the team’s switch to Cosworth power proved no more fruitful the team floated shares on the German stock market, and far more damagingly, got rid of the promising Nico Hulkenberg in return for Pastor Maldonado, a Venezuelan driver who just happened to have several million dollars of funding from his home country’s state-owned oil operation stuffed into his overalls.
Admittedly, Maldonado was the reigning GP2 champion, but he took four years to win it, which rather diminishes the achievement in the same way that it would if Usain Bolt won the 100m sprint at his local school sports day. Not to mention that in the previous year’s championship he’d been thrashed by the same Nico Hulkenberg whose drive he’s just taken. Of course, we’re used to seeing teams at the back of the grid hiring pay drivers but for a team like Williams to do this seemed to this writer to be the final straw.
Golden Age
Except I really hope it isn’t. Because in Frank Williams and Patrick Head the team has owners who were once on the grid alongside the likes of Enzo Ferrari, Colin Chapman, Ken Tyrrell and Ron Dennis. At a time when the World Championship can be won by a drinks company they are the last link to the golden age of Marlboro, moustaches and Murray Walker that so many of us remember fondly. And the fact remains that whenever a commentator mentions Williams even today it isn’t the Venezuelan rich kid of today that I think of, but Nigel Mansell going wheel to wheel with Ayrton Senna in Barcelona, inches from disaster with sparks flying and neither prepared to give way. Or Damon Hill, heroically fighting his way through the pouring rain in Suzuka to take the fight to Schumacher. These are the moments that I remember Williams for, and my only hope is that hiring the likes of Maldonado will not erase the fact that they belong not with Toro Rosso and Force India, but up there with Ferrari and McLaren as one of the sport’s undisputed giants.