Williams » F1 Drivers

Williams call in Michael Johnson to save precious fractions in F1 pits

Jan 282012

The former athlete Michael Johnson has been helping the Williams F1 team by looking for ways to speed up their pit stops

When Williams announced that they had signed Michael Johnson to help their Formula One team the first reaction was that the great American athlete would be employed to push their jalopy round the track.

Williams, after all, were the most disappointing of the 12 F1 operations last year. The once dominant team finished ninth, ahead of the three minnows on the circuit. They were the weakest of the midfield outfits, scoring only five points – and four of them came from their departing veteran, Rubens Barrichello.

The car’s tiny gearbox appeared to symbolise the team’s meagre ambition and only three times did one of their cars make it through to Q3 on Saturday afternoon.

However Johnson, four-times winner of Olympic gold and famous for his upright and short-stepping style, has rather been brought in to sharpen up the Williams pit crew.

This may sound about as important as touching up the livery and logos – and Williams certainly have bigger issues to concern them as they work to improve on last year’s desperately disappointing FW33 – but last year Red Bull, followed by Mercedes, were the sharpest operators in the pitlane and, in a sport where fractions are famously vital, this is an area that cannot be ignored.

The problem is that mechanics and engineers are not necessarily renowned for their physical fitness, outside getting down to the Ferret and Firkin for a pint and pie and double chips. Johnson may have his work cut out.

Watch out, then, for the first Williams tyre change in the opening race of the new season, in Melbourne on 18 March; it could be deeply impressive or tummy-slappingly hilarious. But at least the move does win originality points for Williams.

Johnson, who has been following Formula One since 1996 – the year Damon Hill won the world title with Williams – says: “I feel extremely confident in myself and my staff in terms of what we have put together in training methodology and biomechanical efficiency. I don’t think anybody knows it better than us. There is a tremendous amount of biomechanical movement going on in the pit stops so it stands to reason we can make that quicker.”

Johnson, who owns one of Michael Schumacher’s old helmets and was once introduced to a number of drivers by Bernie Ecclestone, the sport’s supremo, warms to his subject at the team’s Oxfordshire headquarters.

“The amount of steps that it is going to take for the guy that has got that tyre and has got to put it on – it makes all the difference in the world which is his lead leg to how many steps he is going to take.

“And the guy with the gun – it jumped out at me immediately that you can do it two different ways. You can take it off the wheel and bring it straight back into your chest or you can take it off and point it upwards to get it out of the way [he looks a little like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry at this stage]. What has never been done is to evaluate the guy from a sensory stand-point to see how accurate can he be.”

And what does the guy himself think? Ben Howard, who has been with Williams for three years and works on the left front wheel, says: “I think everybody was excited, but possibly a little bit apprehensive as well. Michael is well known and trains top-level sports people but we’re not professional athletes so there was some nervousness as to what he might make us do.

“To be honest not everyone goes to the gym to train because we use our own activities and hobbies outside of work to keep fit. It’s been good, though, really interesting, and obviously a privilege to be working with someone of his calibre.

“At the track you have teams either side of you doing their practice stops so you’re always watching to see if you can learn anything. We’re fighting each other all the time, in a friendly way, but we’re not going to be showing them any of the new secrets we learn from Michael.”

Johnson is already talking about working with Williams again next year. So how long is his deal? “We’ll be going until it gets done,” he says. But something tells you that this particular job may not feature among his world record times.

Paul Weaver

Sport: Motor sport | guardian.co.uk

Bruno Senna shows promise but not Uncle Ayrton's F1 genius at Williams | Richard Williams

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Jan 252012

The young Brazilian is a capable driver but he is yet to show the genius of his uncle Ayrton Senna, who died driving a Williams

Given that his uncle Ayrton died in a Williams-Renault car, the announcement that Bruno Senna will drive for the Oxfordshire team in 2012 might have seemed an odd choice on both sides of the deal. The historical and emotional resonances, however, will take a distant second place to performance on the track as both the driver and his new employers battle to assert their Formula One credibility.

At 28, and about to embark on his third year in the sport’s top tier, the amiable Brazilian with the familiar features and the famous name remains something of an unknown quantity. A season with the hopeless rookie HRT team in 2010 proved nothing. Last year he was put into the cockpit of a much more competitive Lotus-Renault halfway through the year, replacing the sacked Nick Heidfeld, and conducted himself well. While not definitively eclipsing his team mate, Vitaly Petrov, he convinced most observers that he can be a useful grand prix driver.

The genius that distinguished his uncle has not made itself apparent, which is no surprise since most authorities would place Ayrton Senna among the half-dozen greatest drivers in the sport’s history. His much repeated remark – “If you think I’m good, you should see my nephew” – has yet to be substantiated but, of course, it was made when Bruno was a small boy, before the tragedy at Imola in 1994 led him to put his racing career on hold for 10 years.

That self-imposed exile from the sport meant that, after a promising start in kart racing, the younger Senna missed out on the apprenticeship served by all recent champions, including Michael Schumacher, Fernando Alonso, Lewis Hamilton, Jenson Button and Sebastian Vettel. Their teenage years were filled with constant competition in national and international series, building up a store of priceless experience of how to work with engineers and how to race against each other.

Nowadays it is unthinkable for a driver to come straight into the sport as an adult, as Graham Hill did in the 1950s, and turn himself into a champion. In that sense Bruno Senna’s achievement is even more remarkable, and it also suggests that there may be more scope for him to develop than would normally be expected from a driver in his late 20s.

“Until you understand how things work, you’re going to be struggling a little bit and you’re going to be beaten,” he told me. “You need a strong head to accept that. But I had a different life from other drivers. I had an almost complete education, and that makes a difference in how I look at things and how I deal with my career.”

To date, his most significant achievement was a victory in the GP2 race at the Monaco Grand Prix meeting in 2008. This is a showpiece event closely observed by all the F1 team managers and talent scouts, and Bruno’s win was the high point of a successful season that led to him finishing runner-up in the championship to the vastly more experienced Giorgio Pantano.

That should have been the cue for an entry into the top tier and he was promised a seat alongside Button in the Honda team for 2009 – only to learn, a few months before the start of the season, of the Japanese company’s sudden decision to withdraw from the sport. When the team’s British management pulled off a rescue act, led by Ross Brawn, it was decided that the slimmed‑down operation, now functioning under Brawn’s name, would derive more benefit from the experience of Rubens Barrichello, an older Brazilian, alongside Button. That piece of bad fortune cost Senna a seat in a team that went on to capture the championship, while he, rather than mope around the fringes of Formula One, occupied himself with a season in sports cars.

Now, after two seasons of intermittent promise, he is back. The 2012 Williams team is different to the one his uncle joined 18 years ago, with a diminished reputation. Sir Frank Williams is still the figurehead, but the team is now run by his protege Adam Parr and a revamped technical team following the retirement of Patrick Head. Eyebrows were raised when it was announced that the team’s new technical director would be Mike Coughlan, who was at the centre of the scandal in 2007 when, while working for McLaren, he accepted confidential documents from the Ferrari employee Nigel Stepney, leading to a 0m fine for his employers.

Last season Williams posted their worst overall performance in three and a half decades, their drivers, Barrichello and Pastor Maldonado, collecting a mere five points between them. Those 113 grand prix wins – the last of them in 2004 – and nine constructors’ championships seemed to belong to history rather than a vibrant present. A switch from Cosworth engines back to Renault, who powered the Williams cars of Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost, Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve during the glory years, ought to help bring the new pairing of Senna and Maldonado closer to the frontrunners.

But F1 is an unforgiving world. A glittering history is simply the yardstick against which a team’s present performance is judged, and the advantage of a famous name ends the moment the engines start up.

Richard Williams

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Peugeot's Le Mans withdrawal a blow to team but the race will endure | Richard Williams

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Jan 202012

Peugeot’s new hybrid 908 is destined to make its only journey straight to the company’s museum, a casualty of the recession

A group of Peugeot Sport engineers and mechanics had barely touched down in the United States on Wednesday, on their way to a test session at the Sebring circuit, when they were given the news that the company was pulling out of this year’s Le Mans 24-hour race and of the inaugural FIA World Endurance Championship as a whole, with immediate effect. So their new car, a hybrid 908 intended to challenge similar vehicles from Audi and Toyota, is destined to make its only journey straight to the company’s museum.

This is a great shame for the technicians and the drivers who were looking forward to a challenging season and hoping to repeat the team’s Le Mans victories of 1992, 1993 and 2009. A disappointment, too, for the hundreds of thousands who make their way to the historic circuit of the Sarthe each June, many of them wanting to support a home team.

But it was always thus in motor racing, and particularly in endurance racing. Le Mans, an event founded in 1923 as a way of showing potential customers that your headlamps, windscreen wipers and canvas hoods could function at high speed around the clock, remains an effective shop window for major motor manufacturers. But those companies are at the whim of the global economic climate and the wishes of investors who may have no interest in the sport, paying attention only to the bottom line of the annual balance sheet.

After the Bentleys had dominated Le Mans in the 1920s, during the first decade of the race, it must have been a disappointment to their fans to see them depart. Ditto the Alfa Romeos and Bugattis that took over in the 1930s. Jaguar’s four wins in the 1950s were followed by a withdrawal, while Mercedes-Benz and Aston Martin had to be content with a single win apiece before bowing out. Ferrari and Ford divided the spoils in the 1960s and were seen no more; the same with Matra in the early 1970s. Porsche took over for the remainder of the decade, their victories continuing throughout the 1980s and sporadically during the 1990s.

Ten wins for Audi’s R8 and R18 models in the past 12 years, interrupted by single victories for a car in Bentley’s colours (itself based on the Audi) and for Peugeot’s diesel-engined 908, represent the sort of hegemony that can intimidate rivals. There will always be the suspicion that the Peugeot board’s decision might have been different had their team followed up that last success two years ago, but they seem to have folded their tents not through the fear of enduring an invidious comparison between their hybrid technology and that of their German and Japanese rivals but because of a worldwide recession that calls into question the spending of many tens of millions of euros on a nonessential activity.

So the Peugeot 908 has gone the way of the supercharged Bentley, the Alfa 8C, the Bugatti Type 57 “Tank”, the Mercedes 300SLR, the Jaguar D-Type and XJR, the Aston DBR1, the original Ferrari Testa Rossa, the Ford GT40, the Porsche 917 and 956, the Matra MS670, the Sauber C9, the Mazda 787 and the Williams-designed BMW V12 LMR. Not a bad museum to be in. And Le Mans, of course, will carry on as it always has, not just a monument to its own tradition but a proving ground for worthwhile new technologies.

Richard Williams

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Bruno Senna signs for Williams, following in Ayrton's F1 footsteps

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Jan 172012

• Ayrton Senna killed 18 years ago driving a Williams at Imola
• Nephew Bruno partners Pastor Maldonado in 2012 F1 season

Bruno Senna will race for Williams this season, following in the footsteps of his late uncle Ayrton, who died in one of the Formula One team’s cars at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix.

The former champions, who have carried Senna’s name on all their cars ever since that fateful May afternoon at Imola, said in a statement that the 28-year-old would partner Venezuelan Pastor Maldonado.

Senna, who made his Formula One debut with the struggling HRT team in 2010 and competed in the last eight races for Renault last year as a stand-in, will start testing with Williams at Spain’s Jerez circuit on 9 February.

He replaces his 39-year-old compatriot Rubens Barrichello, a family friend who made his race debut in 1993 with Ayrton as his mentor. Barrichello’s F1 career now appears to be at an end after 19 seasons, 11 race wins and more starts than any other driver.

“It will be very interesting to drive for a team that my uncle has driven for, particularly as quite a few of the people here actually worked with Ayrton,” Senna, whose mother, Viviane, was Ayrton’s older sister, said in a statement.

“Hopefully we can bring back some memories and create some great new ones too. I also want to get some good results in return for the support my country has given me to help get me to this position today. I am very proud to be Brazilian and more motivated than ever to demonstrate what I can do.”

No financial details were given, but Senna is expected to bring a significant Brazilian sponsor with him to a team currently searching for a new title backer after the departure of the telecommunications giant AT&T.

Senna, who raced karts with Ayrton on the family farm and also features in the recent award-winning documentary about his uncle’s life and death, wears a blue cap with the branding of the Brazilian telecoms company Embratel, his personal sponsor.

The ever-smiling Brazilian made several visits to the Williams team’s factory at Grove in Oxfordshire before and after Christmas. The marque, who endured their worst ever season last year, secretly tried him out in their simulator and put him through his paces in the gym.

The team’s principal, Frank Williams, said: “The circumstances of Bruno’s two seasons in Formula One have not given him an ideal opportunity to deliver consistently so it was essential that we spent as much time with him as possible to understand and evaluate him as a driver.

“We have done this both on track and in our simulator and he has proven quick, technically insightful and above all capable of learning and applying his learning quickly and consistently. Now we are looking forward to seeing that talent in our race car.”

Senna’s appointment leaves only one declared vacancy, alongside the Spanish veteran Pedro de la Rosa at HRT. It also means Brazil will have two drivers on the grid next season, with Ferrari’s Felipe Massa the other one.

Williams, once dominant but without a drivers’ championship since Jacques Villeneuve won their seventh in 1997, scored only five points last season, finishing ninth of the 12 teams, but will have a Renault engine this year as well as a reorganised technical team under the former McLaren man Mike Coughlan.

Senna said: “I’m really happy to be a part of a team with such a fantastic heritage. I am very proud that Williams has chosen me to race in what will be an important year for them. Everyone is extremely motivated for 2012 and it is great to be part of that motivation.

“It is true that they didn’t have the best season last year, but it is clear that the team is on a new path and everyone is pulling together to ensure that this year is a better one. I really hope that I can demonstrate what I can do.”

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When motor racing was a matter of life and death | Richard Williams

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Sep 062011

Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of Wolfgang von Trips’s death at Monza, when 15 spectators were killed in Italy

The red car and the green one were doing about 150mph as they started to brake for the long right-hand corner. Jostling for position behind three other cars, they touched and veered off the road. While the green car spun harmlessly to a halt, the red machine somersaulted up the sloping bank on the outside of the track, striking the wire fencing before falling back in a heap of disintegration. Its driver, Wolfgang von Trips, had been thrown out and would die before reaching hospital. Fifteen spectators who had been pressing against the fence were also dead or dying. Cars swerved around the wreckage as marshals rushed to clear the debris.

The collision of Von Trips’s Ferrari and Jim Clark’s Lotus occurred 50 years ago this Saturday, a day when men and cars will again assemble for the same race at the same location, the Italian Grand Prix at the Monza autodrome, albeit in rather different conditions. Von Trips’s death, and that of the spectators, came during the years when mortal injury was an accepted part of motor sport. Up to a point, although no driver has been killed in a Formula One race since 1994, it still is.

Single deaths – such as that of young Henry Surtees at Brands Hatch a couple of years ago – happen on the track from time to time. It is impossible to imagine, however, that a race held in 2011 could continue after the deaths of 15 spectators. Or nine, which is how many were killed (five of them children) when Alfonso de Portago’s Ferrari left the road near the end of the 1957 Mille Miglia. Or 82, the death toll when Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes was launched into a densely packed crowd during the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1955, a race that ended on schedule with the winner – who had been involved in the accident – drinking champagne.

And yet, reporting the Monza race, the correspondent of Motor Sport magazine would not mention the tragedy until two thirds of the way through his long article, after the usual meticulous description of the latest modifications to the competing cars. “For those in the grandstands and pits and around the rest of the circuit the race went on,” he remarked, “details of the accident being unknown and unannounced by the organisers.”

A victory for Von Trips would have given him the world championship. Instead the race and the title were taken by his team-mate, Phil Hill, a sensitive man who, unlike Mike Hawthorn at Le Mans six years earlier, found it hard to celebrate his good fortune.

The story of the converging destinies of Von Trips and Hill is told in The Limit, by the American author Michael Cannell, to be published in November. A writer with no previous interest in motor sport, Cannell does a decent job, although relying heavily on previously published sources. Pre-eminent among those is the work of Robert Daley, then the New York Times correspondent and a friend of both drivers. In his classic book, The Cruel Sport, Daley wrote of the events of 10 September 1961: “Neither Hill nor anyone else ever expressed regret for the 15 customers who died with Trips, beyond noting that there would now be much agitation to abolish motor racing again. This reaction is normal. The personal tragedy of Trips overshadowed the destruction of other, unknown people.”

Tony Brooks finished fourth on that day at Monza. “We weren’t aware during the race of the seriousness of the accident,” he told me on Monday. “As drivers, we were still conditioned by the attitude from world war two that danger was part of life. Nobody was making us race, and we accepted the risk. When the race was over, what really upset us was that innocent bystanders had been killed.”

Nevertheless nobody had thought of stopping the race. Were people more callous back then? I do not believe so, judging by the way human beings still do terrible things to other human beings. But today’s decision would be the right one for today’s world. And so, however shocking to contemporary sensibilities, was the one made half a century ago.

Richard Williams

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Williams look to overturn worst-ever F1 start at Turkish Grand Prix

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May 012011

• Seven-times F1 champions without a point after three races
• New rear and front wings and brake duct ready for Turkey

There is nothing European about the Blue Mosque, with its many minarets dancing in a heat haze, or the ridiculously opulent Topkapi Palace. But in Formula One, the Turkish Grand Prix is viewed as the sport’s return to Europe, even though the track is on the Asian side of the great city that straddles the Bosphorus and is the meeting place for east and west.

The early fly-aways are over, and this exorbitant circus will not make another long eastern journey until the Singapore race at the end of September. For the summer season, the sport concentrates on Europe. The championship will not be won here but it can be lost. And this is where the failures of early season will have to make up ground quickly to prevent the year ending in ruins.

At the top end, Ferrari and Mercedes must recover from poor starts, even though the German giant gave some signs of stirring in the last outing, in China, when Nico Rosberg and Michael Schumacher finished fifth and eighth respectively. For Williams, though, this is crisis point. This, remember, is one of the great teams. Seven times they have won the drivers’ championship, and between 1980 and 1997 they won nine constructors’ titles; a record, until surpassed by Ferrari in 2000. They have been graced by – among others – Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Alan Jones, Nelson Piquet, Jacques Villeneuve and the British pair Nigel Mansell and Damon Hill.

But Williams have not won for more than 100 races; they have gone 42 rounds without a podium position and they have just made their worst start to a season, without a point after three outings; the hugely experienced Rubens Barrichello and the new boy Pastor Maldonado have both managed to finished only one race, in China.

Their share value has stalled on the stock market and the pressure is intensifying on the company chairman Adam Parr, the technical director Sam Michael, the aerodynamics head Jon Tomlinson and the chief designer Ed Wood.

Michael is in danger of being made the scapegoat for a wider and deeper malaise. But his optimism before next Sunday’s race borders on rhetoric. “I feel we can turn around our season over the next three or four races, through Turkey, Barcelona, Monaco and Canada,” he said. “Istanbul is a very good track, a drivers’ track, and we are going there with a new front wing, a new rear wing and a new rear brake duct and with a lot more to come. There is no shortage of ideas and there will be a big difference in the coming weeks.

“Some of the gaps between the teams look very big. But I think they will close over the next few races, as the teams gravitate towards the best designs.”

In an interview with Autosport week, Parr said: “I’m not happy because I think we can do better. My goal was to make progress. We’ve finished eighth, seventh and sixth in the last three years and I wanted to take another step. So fifth, minimum would be good. We are only three races in, this is a long season and it’s not game over yet.

He added: “I would love to see more progress. The things that we are bringing are not developing so much. The morale in the team is not as high as it should be because we were expecting greater things and it’s the same for me. I’m here to drive fast and to motivate people, but I would like to see the team perform better.”

The shadow of Adrian Newey flickers over Williams, as it does over McLaren. Every team he leaves, it seems, suffers a dip in form. He had made up his mind to leave McLaren. But, before that, it was within Williams’s gift to keep the design wizard, who is the best in the game.

Newey only wanted a bigger role in Sir Frank Williams’s organisation. The last Williams car to carry Newey’s fingerprints was the 1997 version, and that was the year they last won the drivers’ and constructors’ titles.

There is no corner in Formula One more exciting than the high-speed, multi-apex T8 at Istanbul Park; it may just be the place, next Sunday, where Williams turn their season around.

Paul Weaver

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Williams F1 tean needs extra gear to benefit from stock market flotation

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Feb 132011

• Williams to be valued at €265m on the Frankfurt stock market
• Analysts forecast a profit of £4.9m for 2010 and £10m for 2011

It has been a gloomy seven-year victory drought since a Williams driver took the chequered flag on the Formula One circuit. And veteran Brazilian grand prix star Rubens Barrichello will shortly have a new factor to worry about – his team is heading for a stock market flotation. Won’t the shares crash every time his car does?

“I doubt it,” says Williams’s founder and majority owner, Sir Frank Williams, in an interview with The Observer. “I don’t think people are that emotional. I think most investors are pretty shrewd – they’re people who follow routine and judgment.”

Williams, to be valued at €265m (£225m) on the Frankfurt stock market, is breaking new ground by going public. Nobody quite knows how the financial community will respond to something as volatile as a Formula One stable, even with an array of perks – dinners with drivers and VIP paddock access for high-rolling shareholders.

“It’s the first serious [stock market] venture into Formula One,” says Williams, a familiar figure on the circuit who has used a wheelchair since suffering a spinal injury in a 1986 car accident. “Formula One is very well managed. Most of the teams are very professionally run businesses.”

He is quick to name-check Bernie Ecclestone, the billionaire impresario of the grand prix circuit who is at the core of all financial relationships in Formula One: “Our leader, Mr Ecclestone, will continue finding new markets and increasing revenues to be distributed among the teams.”

Therein lies the oddity of Williams as a business. Every team on the circuit depends on a web of complex commercial ties with Ecclestone’s Formula One empire, which earns up to .5bn a year in broadcasting fees and sponsorship deals. The cash gets distributed in prize money under a private contract called the Concorde Agreement – which can’t be made public. That lack of disclosure is one of the reasons Williams, which is based in Oxfordshire and has 470 employees, is floating on the German equivalent of Aim, rather than on the London Stock Exchange.

Claudio Steffenoni, head of corporate finance at Switzerland’s Bank am Bellevue, co-ordinating the flotation, says this money is what makes Williams different from the myriad of football teams which have found the stock market a tough crowd: “It’s a completely different business model from a football club. They receive a regular revenue stream from Formula One which is growing at 9 or 10% per year.”

Williams’ share of prize money, though, is obviously dependent on its performance. A far cry from its 1980s and 90s peaks with Alan Jones, Keke Rosberg, Nelson Piquet, Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost, Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve, the team finished seventh among constructors in 2009, and sixth last year.

On the commercial front, too, Williams’s recent history is patchy. The team’s prospectus makes much of its flywheel accumulator fuel efficiency technology and its driver training – used by Sainsbury’s delivery fleet. But its profits slumped from £6.6m to £3.7m in the first 10 months of 2010, partly due to the loss of a lucrative sponsorship and engine-supply deal with Toyota. Then there’s the thorny issue of succession – Williams’ co-founder and engineering boss, Patrick Head, is selling shares worth €51m in the flotation and intends to retire, depriving the team of a key figure. Sir Frank, 69, is cutting his stake from 56.7% to 50.3% and hints that his active involvement is on the wane.

“If I didn’t come in tomorrow for a year or two, not much would go wrong and not much would go backwards,” says Sir Frank. “That’s the way it should be when one’s dynasty, if you like, comes to an end.” So why keep a controlling stake? “Because I want to be important, I don’t want to be parked in the paddock somewhere behind the FT and the Telegraph. I love what I do and I want to be involved.”

Analysts at Bank am Bellevue forecast a profit of £4.9m for the calendar year 2010, followed by £10m for 2011 and £14m in 2012 – assuming a consistent sixth place in the constructors’ championship. Not a foregone conclusion, admits Sir Frank: “Talk’s easy. The only proof of the pudding is how good your racing car is. If you’ve got a top car, drivers will want to get in it.”

So will Barrichello and his team mate, Pastor Maldonado, be buying shares in their employer? Not likely, says Sir Frank: “Drivers never spend any money on anything.”

Andrew Clark

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Williams see stock market flotation as solution to loss of sponsorship

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Feb 052011

• Shares will start trading on stock exchange on 2 March
• Frank Williams to remain as the majority shareholder

The Williams Formula One team have confirmed they will go public to secure their long-term future as an independent concern. The British team said in a statement today that they expect their shares to start trading on the Frankfurt stock exchange on 2 March.

The team principal and founder, Frank Williams, said last month that the team opted for a stock market flotation after losing a number of sponsors in 2010. Williams will remain the majority and controlling shareholder.

Williams is F1′s third-most successful team after Ferrari and McLaren with seven drivers’ titles, nine constructors’ championships and 113 victories in 565 races. But the team’s last championship success came in 1997 and they have not won a grand prix since 2004. Williams finished sixth in the constructors’ championship last season.

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Mr Ferrari adds fuel to his anti-austerity argument | Richard Williams

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Dec 292010

Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, Ferrari’s president, is pleading with Formula One to go easy on cost-cutting measures

I invited you here,” Luca Cordero di Montezemolo said, tapping his water glass with a fork and quietening the dozen journalists seated around the table at the Scuderia Ferrari’s headquarters, “because I have decided to form my own political party.”

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then Montezemolo’s sober expression cracked, and the laughter began. The president of Ferrari had been winding us up, in response to a report a week or so earlier that he was planning to make his long rumoured entry into Italian politics, to stand directly against Silvio Berlusconi.

A couple of hours later, as the lunch broke up, he remarked that it would be a pointless exercise, by which he meant that Berlusconi is effectively immovable. Probably no other living Italian, however, would stand as good a chance of unseating the country’s controversial prime minister.

Montezemolo had studied law in New York and driven rally cars before, in 1973, being recruited by Enzo Ferrari to turn around the fortunes of the celebrated but ailing Formula One team. He was 25 at the time. In partnership with the equally young and ambitious Niki Lauda, he breathed life back into the Scuderia. He did the same in 1991, when he returned as president of a company floundering in the wake of the founder’s death.

In between times he managed Italy’s first America’s Cup campaign, ran the 1990 World Cup organising committee, occupied several senior posts in the Fiat empire before becoming its chairman, and served as president of the confederation of Italian industries. A serious man, then, as well as a charismatic figure whose arrival in the grand prix paddock invariably provokes a flutter among the paparazzi.

Last week’s lunch at Fiorano, the test track located across the road from the Maranello factory, continued a tradition begun by Enzo Ferrari, at which the past year is assessed and the future examined. As he swept aside the disappointment of Abu Dhabi, where Fernando Alonso failed to clinch the title in his first season with the team, high on Montezemolo’s agenda was a plea to the governing body to go easy on the sort of cost-cutting measures introduced in the latter days of Max Mosley’s reign.

“I’m in favour of cutting costs, but there has to be a limit,” he said. “Look at the really successful football clubs – Internazionale, Chelsea, Real Madrid. If you want to compete at the top level in sport, you have to spend money.” He does not feel that this year’s new teams, operating on tiny budgets and three seconds a lap slower than the established outfits, are adding lustre to grand prix racing.

Nor is he keen on Formula One’s projected switch in 2013 to a turbocharged 1.5-litre four-cylinder engine, not least because all current production Ferraris have engines with eight or 12 cylinders. (He seemed to have forgotten that Alberto Ascari won the Scuderia’s first two world titles, in 1952 and 1953, with a four-cylinder car.)

But Ferrari’s perspective is somewhat different from that of the majority of their competitors. They are the only team still active in 2010 to have competed in the first world championship season in 1950, and their aura is vital to the image of grand prix racing. The company is also unique in that its parallel businesses of running a racing team and building 6,000 road cars a year are interdependent: the reputation of one fuels the profits of the other, and vice versa. So Montezemolo’s words tend to carry extra weight.

His argument against austerity included a request to the rule-makers to reconsider the stringent restrictions on track testing. Outside, in the bright winter sunlight, the tight little circuit – created by Enzo Ferrari as a tool to help his engineers develop the cars – lay deserted, silenced by the regulations.

I thought back to another sunlit winter afternoon at Fiorano, on which the Scuderia launched a new car for the 1996 season. As the light started to fade, Michael Schumacher took the scarlet machine out for a handful of exploratory laps. Hearing the scream of the racing engine, workers on their way home from the local ceramic factories parked their cars and got out to watch in the gathering dusk: a precious tradition, much missed.

Espanyol in fanfare to Iniesta’s heartfelt gesture

When Andres Iniesta scored the only goal of the match to win the World Cup for Spain last July, he stripped off his jersey to show the global audience a T-shirt bearing the message “Dani Jarque – always with us”. It was a salute to the captain of Espanyol, who had died of a heart attack in October 2009, aged 26.

As he paid tribute to his friend, Iniesta was probably not expecting any sort of reward. He got it on Saturday evening, however, when Barcelona made the short journey to Espanyol’s new stadium. The home crowd’s hostility to their local rivals, exacerbated by a 5-1 defeat, was interrupted just once. When Iniesta was withdrawn in his second half, they rose as one to applaud him, many of them raising placards expressing their gratitude for his gesture in the summer. The players of Espanyol joined in, too. It was a moment of grace to drive away the bad smells currently being generated by big-time football.

Prune time television

An historic wrong was righted on Sunday when AP McCoy became the first jockey to win the BBC’s sports personality of the year award. But it may now be time to reverse the galloping grandiosity of a show that has grown too big, too loud, and too stupid. Curbing the producers’ compulsion to mimic the garish drama of The X Factor would probably save enough money to fund the government’s endangered school sports programme. An austerity drive could start by eliminating the dry ice, two of the three presenters and the decorative but pointless Katherine Jenkins.

Desperate housewives

The wives and girlfriends of the England cricket team were ordered to stay away from the first two Test matches of the current Ashes series. Result: a draw in Brisbane and a resounding win in Adelaide. They were flown in ahead of the Third Test in Perth. Result: a couple of batting collapses leading to a demoralising defeat. Any temptation to start drawing conclusions should, of course, be firmly resisted.

Richard Williams

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Williams sign Venezuelan Pastor Maldonado for 2011 F1 season

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Dec 032010

• 25-year-old will partner Rubens Barrichello at Williams
• Frank Williams keen to work with ‘unquestionable talent’

The Venezuelan driver Pastor Maldonado will partner Rubens Barrichello at Williams for the 2011 Formula One season.

The 25-year-old Maldonado joins the British team after winning the championship in GP2, which acts as a feeder series to F1.

“GP2 is a very good championship, it really prepares drivers well for F1,” Maldonado said. “I have worked very hard to get to this position and – yes – I definitely feel ready.”

Maldonado will be the first Venezuelan driver on the starting grid since Johnny Cecotto competed in 18 races in the 1983 and 1984 seasons.

“It has been nearly 30 years since Venezuela has had a driver in Formula One, so the country has been pushing young drivers in the hope of having someone represent them,” Maldonado said. “I am happy to now be that driver.”

Williams, the third most successful team on the grid after Ferrari and McLaren, will have an all South American driver line-up with Barrichello returning for a second season with the team. The 38-year-old Brazilian has competed in a record 305 F1 races.

“I can learn so much from him,” Maldonado said. “I think it is going to be a very interesting team.”

Maldonado replaces Nico Hulkenberg, the rookie who was released by the team after one season despite the German driver scoring pole position at the penultimate Brazilian GP.

The team principal, Frank Williams, said Maldonado first caught his attention with his “masterful” win in the 2007 Monaco GP2 race.

“Since then, he has regularly reminded us of his unquestionable talent with some skillful wins, particularly during this year’s GP2 championship, taking an unsurpassed record of six successive victories,” Williams said. “We are very much looking forward to developing his talent over the winter and a fruitful season with him next year.”

Maldonado has already tested for the team, at Abu Dhabi in November, and will begin the transition in the 2011 car when testing begins in February.

“I will be looking to get some good results in return for the support my country has given me to help get me to this position today,” Maldonado said.

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