2006 was a desperately hard season for the Williams F1 team, in 18 races they scored just 11 points and struggled home in 8th spot on the constructors standings; their worst position in 30 odd years. Formula One is a cyclical sport, and despite the best efforts of all the teams success comes and goes. It’s fair to say that Williams is on the downward curve of performance at the moment, success has well and truly gone from Grove. Almost everything in F1 tends to get blown out of proportion however, and as the results failed to come for Franks men a cloud of doom and gloom settled over the teams pit garage the questions changed from ‘when’ would Williams be winning again, to ‘if’. With Eddie Jordans demise at the forefront of peoples minds it seemed as though the pitlanes greatest independent could be on the brink of disaster.
On the Friday before the Brazilian GP Williams came out swinging, announcing a new title sponsor in AT&T, new technical team members and a reshuffle of management with Patrick Head taking more of a hands on roll at GP weekends. Along with the move to Toyota engines one could be forgiven for thinking the teams fortunes are on the way up, but is it really that simple for them? In a weekend dominated by Schumacher, Alonso and Massa it seemed odd timing for the team to make their most important announcements of the year.
If the announcements were designed to give the team a morale boost going into the winter perhaps they should’ve waited a few days; instead of ending the season with good news about the future the team left Brazil aghast at their worst performance of the year. On a weekend where Bridgestone were the tyres to have both drivers failed to make the top 10 in qualifying then collided with each other on the first lap of the race. Williams had been intent on sending Cosworth out on a high but ended up red faced and out of contention within one minute of the race starting. The hits kept coming for the team, as the season ended the shocking news came that Williams had completed the least amount of laps for the year, even behind Super Aguri with their car cobbled together from horse and cart technology (SA did less than 10% of the testing Williams managed in 06!!!).
Williams supporters have been quick to point out the return of Patrick Head to the pitwall, though this is unlikely to have much of a positive impact on the teams results. Williams will be saddened by the fact that their unreliability wasn’t so much from pushing the boundaries with an insanely quick car this year, or from a single design fault a la RBR. Not bundling cables that are near exhausts and other simple problems like cracked hoses tend to point to fundamental quality control issues within the team. They are reacting to issues as they arise, rather than putting systems in place to make sure they don’t happen at all. Head will be focusing more on the racing now, but if he couldn’t get the factory in order when he was focusing on it full time what chance does Sam Michael have?
More bad news comes for Williams with the departure of driver Mark Webber. While in itself not a major problem, the circumstances of his moving to Red Bull Racing must raise a few eyebrows. Webber left relatively late in the season and despite efforts from Frank Williams to keep him. One must assume that Webber was given a look at the short-term future of the team in an attempt to retain him, and it appears he didn’t like what he saw. The speed of his departure to RBR indicates that the FW29 will not be challenging for wins, while the Red Bull (who finished one spot ahead of Williams in ’06 and will be in direct competition in ’07) RB3 is ‘looking great’ in the wind tunnel.
Despite this though, the AT&T signing is very good news for the team, while it won’t mean an overwhelming boost monetarily for the team (Williams were being paid a significant amount by Honda this year) it does add some security and stability in that department while they try and find their feet again. They still have probably the best development driver in the world with Alex Wurz and they have managed to keep hold of hotstick Nico Rosberg while boosting their design team. Williams will also be entering a technical partnership with Toyota to try and boost both teams up the grid, while this may take some time to gel in the medium term it will be invaluable. The door is also open in the long term to full factory support from Toyota if the board in Tokyo decides running their own team is too expensive. Add to this their first class facilities (Williams run two windtunnels 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year) and one begins to realise that Williams are failing to capitalise on their resources and potential, a position while not something to sing and dance about does point to an almost inevitable resurgence once they get their ducks in a row.
More short term pain has to be expected for the team in ’07 and it is unlikely they’ll be troubling the top 5 teams consistently next season; this will intensify the amount of negative press, but long term Williams appears to be on the road to recovery with a solid foundation the likes of which Jordan never had. The team is set to follow in the footsteps of Ferrari, McLaren and Renault who in the past have all recovered from abysmal slumps to become the envy of the paddock and racing world.
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