There and Back Again — How Williams Went from Cash Strapped No-Hopers to F1 World Champions
To many modern Formula 1 fans, the name Williams is sadly synonymous with the back of the field.
From 2018 to 2022 the long-time fixture of the F1 grid was permanently glued to the lower reaches of the championship points table — often being on the very bottom.
It is only recently that the team has entered a new era which has seen the Williams family supplanted in their leadership of the team, and a gradual rebuilding effort to take them up the field, culminating in their best placing since 2017 in the recent 2023 season with 7th place.
Many are quick to point out that it wasn’t always this way though, and that Williams were once a team at the absolute sharp end of Formula 1. Indeed, by almost every statistical measure, Williams are one of the most successful teams in the sport’s history.
However, going back even further in the history of Frank Williams’ Formula 1 endeavours reveals a striking circularity to the narrative of his teams’ trajectory in Formula 1, with his early struggles in the sport being met with many of the same jibes that have been thrown at Williams during their recent period at the back of the field.
This begs the question — exactly how did Frank Williams and his team manage to go from being the butt of jokes to one of the dominant forces in Formula 1?
Frank Williams’ involvement in Formula 1 started in 1969 when he opted to make the leap up from the lower Formulas where he had been running cars under the moniker “Frank Williams Racing Cars” for his close friend Piers Courage, as well as a few other drivers.
Like many at the time, Williams made the jump up to F1 by running a customer chassis for Courage— a Brabham BT26A, which he adorned with what would become the classic Williams colour scheme of dark blue with white accents.
This approach did not allow Williams to compete in the constructor’s championship, but it provided a simple and relatively cheap avenue into F1 for the ambitious Williams.
With the backing of his friend, Courage really began to deliver on his promise as a driver, securing two second place finishes at Monaco and Watkins Glen. This was enough to see him finish 8th in the drivers’ championship — by far the highest placed privateer driver.
Buoyed by this strong performance, Williams sought to make another leap in 1970 and struck up a deal to run chassis made by Italian automaker De Tomaso, whose founder Alejandro De Tomaso clearly had ambitions in Formula 1, after competing briefly as a driver in the 1950s, before running various chassis into the category in the early 1960s on a one-off basis.
This deal seemed mutually beneficial. Williams would be able to make another step up the F1 ladder by operating what was effectively a works team, while De Tomaso would get his name into F1 without having to worry about running the team himself.
As it turned out though, it would be a complete disaster…
The De Tomaso chassis for 1970 was designated the 505/38 and was designed around the ubiquitous Cosworth DFV engine by a young Gianpaolo Dallara, who now owns the company which manufactures chassis for an enormous range of single seater series, as well as for the Haas F1 team.
Despite using a proven engine and being driven by the talented Courage, the 505/38 proved woefully uncompetitive and extremely unreliable. In the first 4 rounds of the season, it retired twice, finished so far down the order that it wasn’t classified in Monaco due to a seized steering rack, and failed to even start the race at Jarama after a major shunt in practice.
The only glimmer of hope came at the non-championship BRDC International Trophy race in April, where Courage was able to pilot the troublesome car to a distant third position.
This would prove to be a false dawn however, and at the Dutch Grand Prix the Williams effort went from laughable to calamitous.
As early as the practice session, Courage had a scary off on the undulating Zandvoort circuit, as he braked as late as he dared to try to make up for the De Tomaso chassis’ deficiencies. Despite the scare, his heroics seemed to be worth it, as matched his best qualifying position for the season with 9th place, which set him up to potentially score some points if the car could run reliably.
Sadly, it was in the race that tragedy struck, as on lap 23 the De Tomaso’s suspension broke on the high-speed Tunnel Oost kink. Courage was powerless to do anything, and his car speared into a sand bank and burst into flames — partially due to its usage of a highly flammable magnesium chassis.
Such a construction for a car had already claimed the life of Jo Schlesser in 1968 and had become known as a major safety concern by 1970, but De Tomaso had soldiered on anyway in a desperate effort to be competitive. The result was that Courage was killed, and remaining 63 laps of the race were run with the deceased Courage still in his car at the side of the track.
The death of his close friend in one of his cars understandably impacted Williams heavily. His team missed the following race in France, and then saw out the rest of the season with substitute drivers before De Tomaso wound up their involvement in F1 completely at the end of the year.
Williams chose to soldier on, though he vowed to never again get as close with a driver as he had with Courage — a rather cold attitude, but one similarly taken up by fellow team owner Enzo Ferrari.
After the De Tomaso partnership came to an end, Williams briefly returned to running customer cars again, before managing to convince various companies to finance development of new chassis — notably including Marlboro in 1973 and ’74, though results still proved extremely hard to come by.
It was in this period that some members of the F1 establishment began using the jibe “Wanker Williams” to refer to the tendency of Williams’ endeavours to fail. Indeed, at one point things got so desperate that Williams was forced to take business calls from a public phonebox after service to his home address was cut off.
Williams’ team was mostly kept afloat by an ever-rotating cast of pay drivers during this period, and with their backing he was able to scrape together the funds to build his very own chassis for the first time — the FW04 (FW01–03 had been the earlier Marlboro-funded chassis), which was built to contest the 1975 F1 season.
As it happened, one of the many drivers who came through the revolving driver door at the Williams team was a young Jacques Laffite, who joined the team starting in 1974.
The future 6-time race winner would provide a result in the FW04 that would essentially save Williams’ team, as he drove to an outstanding second place in an attritional 1975 German Grand Prix on the fearsome Nürburgring — matching Williams’ best result with his customer cars and marking the first ever podium for a Williams chassis.
1975 would be a fateful year for Williams in other ways too, as it was the year that he hired a young engineer named Patrick Head, whose work on the FW04 has been credited with the increased performance that allowed Laffite’s surprise podium late in the season. In years to follow, the Williams-Head partnership was to prove absolutely pivotal to the Williams team’s performance.
For the time being though, Williams had secured what seemed to be a major coup when he was able to obtain funding from Canadian oil magnate Walter Wolf. However, to attain this funding, Williams had to sell a 60% stake in his team to Wolf, which was rebranded as Wolf-Williams Racing for the 1976 season.
The FW04 chassis was also done away with, as Wolf had purchased assets from the largely defunct Hesketh team, whose 308B chassis had won the Dutch Grand Prix in 1975. Wolf therefore opted to use a development of that car, which was rebranded as the Williams FW05 and fettled by former Hesketh designer Dr Harvey Postlethwaite, who had also been brought onboard by Wolf.
Unfortunately, the hoped-for breakthrough with the new funding wasn’t to come in 1976. The FW05 proved to be overweight and recalcitrant, and failed to even qualify on several occasions, despite the team for once having an established quality driver for once in the form of Jacky Ickx. It seemed to be more of the same from Williams, who was increasingly becoming the butt of jokes in the paddock.
Williams himself was also growing weary with being a subordinate within his own team, and therefore resolved to leave at the end of the 1976 season, despite development on an all-new car being underway and looking promising with input from the skilled Postlethwaite.
“Wanker Williams” wasn’t to be deterred however, and chose to set up a new team of his own, except this time he vowed to do it right. He chose the name “Williams Grand Prix Engineering” for his new team — foregrounding that this would be a team where technology and innovation would come first and foremost.
To that end, he sought to lure Patrick Head away from his old team, which was now renamed Walter Wolf Racing.
If Williams was nothing else, he was a sweet talker, as evidenced by his uncanny ability to secure backing in previous years despite having little in the way of results. After working his magic, he was able to convince Head to join as co-founder and technical director.
The new Williams team’s first season in 1977 was to be a painful one, however. To begin with it was the same old story of customer cars and pay drivers as at the previous Williams team, due to the lack of time to develop a car of their own.
Meanwhile, Williams had to watch on enviously as Walter Wolf Racing’s WR1 chassis won on debut in the hands of Jody Scheckter, and went on to contend for the championship — finishing a fine second behind Niki Lauda’s Ferrari. All in a car that could have quite easily borne the Williams name had Frank not opted to up sticks and leave.
While this was going on though, Head was quietly working away on the reborn Williams team’s first self-built car — the FW06, which was being built in a former carpet factory in Didcot.
Two other big developments would also come in the run up to 1978. One was the signing of the new team’s first salaried driver — the stocky Australian Alan Jones, who had won the 1977 Austrian Grand Prix in middling machinery. After seeing off competition from Enzo Ferrari to secure Jones’ signature, Williams and Head would later admit that the driver they ended up getting far exceeded all expectations they had when signing him.
Incoming too for the 1978 season was a major new sponsorship deal, as Williams put his wheeling and dealing skills to good use. After personally flying to Saudi Arabia to broker a sponsorship deal, Williams came away with sponsorship from Saudia Airlines and Techniques d’Avant Garde — run by the Saudi-born Mansour Ojjeh, which put the team on a firm financial footing.
The pieces were therefore all there for a strong first proper season for Williams’ reborn team. He had a strong driver, a neat chassis and enthusiastic backing — a combination which had always seemed to elude him since the passing of Piers Courage.
It didn’t take long for results to appear. Jones was able to secure a strong fourth place in just the FW06’s third race, with the tidy if rather conventional car proving pleasant to drive and being one of the quicker non-ground effect cars of the season.
The following race in Long Beach looked even better, as Jones contended for a podium or even a win. He was harrying race leader Carlos Reutemann for much of the race, and seemed to be the quicker of the two cars until the challenge came undone when the FW06’s front wing spontaneously failed, causing him to drop down out of the points.
The reborn Williams would therefore have to wait for its first podium, but it didn’t take too long. At the penultimate round of the season at Watkins Glen (one of Jones’ strongest tracks), the Australian was able to qualify the FW06 well up in third position — behind only newly crowned champion Mario Andretti in the dominant Lotus 79, and Reutemann’s Ferrari.
On race day Jones repeated his performance, and despite losing a position at the start he drove a tidy race to come home in second place. The result was made all the sweeter by the fact that he finished just in front of Jody Scheckter in the Wolf that had evolved from Williams’ old team. Their duelling also provided viewers with a taste of what was to come in 1979 as Scheckter moved to Ferrari, where he and his teammate Gilles Villeneuve would again battle Jones extensively.
The 1978 season had been an unequivocal success for the new Williams team. While a first win had eluded them, they had still shown sufficient promise that the team was now an attractive prospect for many. The car had increasingly filled up with sponsors as the season had gone on, and the team had also been able to attract talented young aerodynamicist Frank Dernie to assist Patrick Head in designing the FW06’s successor.
The driver line-up too was to expand for 1979, with former Ferrari driver and 1974 world championship runner up Clay Regazzoni joining the team in a second car, and bringing with him valuable experience thanks to his long tenure in the sport.
The new season started with Williams still using the old FW06 chassis, as its replacement — the ground effect based FW07 was not yet ready. While the car had clearly been outstripped by the flood of new ground effect competitors by 1979, Jones was still able to secure a podium at the Long Beach circuit where he had run so well in 1978.
By round 5 of the season at Jarama, the new FW07 was ready to break cover, having previously appeared in the paddock at Long Beach in a non-raceable condition.
The reveal of the new car caused something of a stir, with some critics being quick to dismiss the sleek ground effect car as merely a clone of Lotus’ Type 79 which had utterly dominated the previous season.
As it happened, the FW07’s debut was a rather inauspicious one which saw both Jones and Regazzoni retire, as the team struggled to get to grips with the new car. It didn’t take long though before the FW07 showed that it was far more than just a Lotus clone.
At its second race in Zolder, Jones qualified the FW07 in fourth position, and put in a charging drive to lead the race by lap 24, impressing onlookers and comfortably outpacing the Lotus 79s it has supposedly copied. Again though, issues struck the new Williams car, and Jones retired from the lead on lap 39 after looking well-on to win Williams’ first grand prix.
In Monaco, Jones retired yet again while in a position to take victory, albeit this time due to an error of his own after he clouted the wall and damaged his car. Regazzoni meanwhile gave the first real show of what the new Williams could do, as he put in a hair-raising drive to climb up from 16th place on the grid to be P2 and right on the rear wing of winner Jody Scheckter by the flag.
It was clear that the pace was there, but the car had a few issues which needed sorting to be a real contender. Fortunately, Patrick Head and Frank Dernie were hot on the case of solving these problems, and Williams arrived at their home race at Silverstone with a shiny new upgrade package which revised the car’s aerodynamics. Most notable among the upgrades was the car’s skirt system, which Dernie had redesigned to make more consistent contact with the track to ensure maximum downforce.
The upgrade would catapult Williams to the very front of the field almost immediately upon introduction. Jones took pole position comfortably on the high-speed Silverstone circuit, while Regazzoni started a solid fourth, as Williams well and truly put the “Lotus clone” accusations to bed.
In the race, Jones simply drove off into the distance, leaving everyone else in his wake and looking a shoo-in for victory. Regazzoni too made good progress, climbing up to run second only to Jones as the white and green machines toured around smoothly and made all other cars look distinctly ordinary.
Unfortunately for Jones, the win seemed fated to elude him, as on lap 38 his engine failed after a water pump failure. The advantages of having a second driver were now clear though, and Regazzoni duly cruised home to claim a memorable first win for Williams. Despite having a reputation for sometimes being irascible, Regazzoni was understandably elated on the podium, while Frank Williams himself was on the verge of tears.
From there on, Williams were the dominant force in the 1979 season. Jones finally broke his duck and won for Williams at the following race in Germany, where he led Regazzoni home for a 1–2 finish, before claiming a further three victories in the final five races of the season.
This meant that Jones took the maximum number of points possible for the latter part of the year, as the scoring system of the time took only the best 4 results from the first seven races of the season, and the best 4 from the last eight (where Jones had won four races).
However, even this spectacular run was not enough to see Jones claim the title. The early part of the season using the outdated FW06, and the FW07 being unreliable when initially introduced meant that the Australian scored just 4 points in the first leg of the season, and was forced to accept third in the championship behind the consistent Ferraris of former Wolf driver Scheckter and the mercurial Villeneuve.
Nevertheless, Williams were on top of the world, and went into the 1980 season as clear favourites for the title based on their form in the second half of 1979.
Regazzoni would unfortunately not be joining them for their 1980 campaign, however. While he was well-liked by everyone in the team, and his race pace was solid, most within the team agreed that his qualifying pace was not sufficient to allow Williams to mount the title challenge they craved. He was therefore replaced by Carlos Reutemann — the Argentine being an established top driver after stints with Ferrari and Lotus, though he was forced to accept a firm number 2 contract to Jones.
Williams also undertook a development program for 1980 to hopefully maintain their advantage over the other teams, with Head and Dernie developing a B-spec version of the FW07 for deployment.
Jones ran the first race using an old 1979-spec car, but even so the 1980 season opened just how the previous one had ended, with the Williams looking to have maintained their advantage from the end of 1979 and being comfortably the quickest car.
Jones duly won the opening race in Argentina in the old car, though his drive was not without hiccoughs as he twice had off-track excursions and had to fight back after a pit stop to clear his radiators, which he managed in fine style.
The Aussie’s start to the season was undeniably shaky though, with only a middling showing at the second round in Brazil, and three retirements in the first six races of the season. This allowed a new rival to spring up and get in the way of his championship ambitions.
This was the Brabham team, who had switched from Alfa-Romeo to Cosworth engines and introduced a new BT49 chassis towards the very end of 1979. The team’s young number 1 driver Nelson Piquet had found the new car to be very effective, and quickly established himself as Jones’ main rival for the championship.
After his iffy start to the year, Jones was able to find form though, and he snatched the championship lead after the French Grand Prix, where he took great pleasure in beating the two Ligier cars on home soil after they had initially looked dominant.
There was also some controversy afoot which made Jones’ title challenge more difficult, as the Spanish Grand Prix in early June — which Jones had won— was deemed by F1 governing body FISA to not count towards the championship, as a political dispute led to three teams who were aligned with FISA to boycott the race. FISA’s response was to remove the race’s world championship status, and Jones therefore lost 10 points and had his championship lead slimmed down significantly.
Nevertheless, Jones was on good form by midseason, and produced a string of other wins and podiums that gave him an 11-point lead with just four races to go, which looked comfortable considering a win at the time only gave 10 points.
Just as the championship was looking reasonably assured though, Jones managed to throw his lead away. At the Dutch Grand Prix he damaged his car with an off-track excursion on the second lap while leading, which forced him to pit for repairs and dropped him well down the order and out of the points.
Piquet meanwhile won, closing the championship gap to just two points, before winning the following race at Monza as well, as Jones was forced to accept second place.
This result secured the constructor’s title for the team thanks to strong showings from Reutemann in the second half of the year, but Jones was clearly flustered after seeing what seemed to be a comfortable championship lead transform into a slim deficit in the space of just two races. With only two more rounds to go and Brabham looking to be in the ascendency, things at Williams were getting desperate.
Qualifying for the penultimate race in Canada seemed to confirm the worst, as Piquet thrashed round a full 8 tenths of a second quicker than Jones in a Brabham equipped with a tuned-up qualifying engine. Jones’ lap was nevertheless good enough for second place though, which set up a dramatic race with both title contenders beside each other on the front row of the grid.
As might have been expected from the grid arrangement, the race start was a dramatic one. Jones got a slightly better launch than Piquet, and squeezed his rival hard as the cars went through the kink on the start straight. The result was contact between the two of them, and a huge pileup which forced the race to be stopped.
Both contenders had suffered damage, and duly swapped to their spare cars — a decision which would have a major bearing on the outcome of the title fight.
As it turned out, Piquet’s spare car had been set up with the high-powered but fragile engine that the Brazilian had used in qualifying, which made it extremely unlikely that the Brabham would be able to last the race distance.
Jones’s spare car on the other hand was set up conventionally, and the Australian was able to tour around at a relatively leisurely pace until Piquet’s engine blew up on lap 23, leaving Jones to take victory after his only other challenger — the Ligier of Didier Pironi — was penalised for a jump start.
There were some accusations that Jones had deliberately taken out Piquet in full knowledge that his spare car wouldn’t be able to last the race, but these could not be proved, and indeed the television footage of the accident made it extremely unclear what had happened between the two contenders.
What was clear was the outcome though. Jones had secured the driver’s championship to go along with the constructor’s title secured at Monza. With it, the man who had been decried as “Wanker Williams” and dismissed by so many in the F1 establishment when he had started out had reached the very peak of Formula 1.
The fact that Jones was able to cap off Williams’ historic first championship season with another victory at Watkins Glen after a fightback drive made it all the sweeter. After years of grafting away on a budget of whatever could be found down the back of the sofa, the Williams name was on top of them all.
Of course, this wouldn’t be the end for Williams by a long shot, as the team — and Williams himself — endured all manner of ups and downs over the years. Perhaps most notably including a road car accident in 1986 which left Williams himself permanently quadriplegic.
His enthusiasm wasn’t dampened however, and his team if anything reached new heights following the accident, giving the F1 world technological monsters such as the dominant FW14B and securing an eventual total of 9 constructor’s and 7 driver’s championships, before he and his family bowed out of the sport by selling the team on in 2020, followed by his sad passing a year later.
Perhaps someday though, given the same vision, technological focus and devotion that were shown in the team’s heyday, the reborn Williams team and its new ownership will be able to mirror the climb up from the doldrums to the very front of the field that Frank Williams and Patrick Head masterminded back in the day.
Maybe they could even add to those championship totals…
