Williams F1

Jonathan Williams, responsible for a variety of jobs at Grove, talks us through his week in the latest of our team blogs... 

Monday’s are always fairly busy days for me, I suppose they are for most people in motorsport as all the action in our world takes place over the weekends and there’s always lots of tidying up to do after a race. For my part, I have to keep up to speed with who’s doing what so I’m fully informed should Frank or Patrick require information on up-and-coming drivers. As there was lots of track activity last weekend – an Indy Car race, NASCAR and a British F3 round, I came into the office and spent the best part of the morning checking all the usual motor racing sites for the latest reports.

The rest of this week has been pretty much entirely consumed by Goodwood and our involvement in it. Frank Williams is celebrating his 40th year in motorsport this season so Goodwood are honouring the achievement at the Festival in July. We are sending a series of cars from our historic collection to the event. We are running three – an FW08 (driven by Keke Rosberg in the early 80s), an FW18 (Damon Hill’s 1996 Championship-winning car) and our latest show car, the FW29, which will be fully branded in this year’s livery. There’ll also be a host of static display cars – from Frank’s pre-Williams Grand Prix Engineering days such as the 1970 De-Tomaso Cosworth and the 1973 ISO Marlboro-Cosworth, to the Patrick Head-designed FW06, FW11 and FW14.

The large majority of the cars within our Collection are ready to be run but, as you can imagine, there’s still a considerable amount of work to be done on the running cars to make sure the cars are “Festival” ready from diagnostic to safety checks. As a result, our museum workshop, which I oversee, has never been so busy. At the moment, we have ten mechanics working on five cars – more people than we have in the Racebay!

Tuesday was a particularly big day for us as we had to order all the tyres for the cars going to Goodwood. As none of the current, more mainstream manufacturers were involved in Formula One in the “old” days, we’ve had to source all the tyres that we need – and there are a lot! – from Avon. It was a big job making sure we had everything we needed, but we’re there now and that’s one job off my mind.

The last of my Goodwood-related jobs this week was to do an interview for our Comms department who are putting together a promo video to highlight our involvement in the Festival. I was basically interviewed for half an hour or so in front of Jacques Villeneuve’s car in the museum. I like doing things like that as it’s a bit different to the usual stuff I get up to. 

Away from the Festival, BMW are visiting us next week. As it’s Silverstone this weekend, they are taking the opportunity to come to the factory after the race and carry out some outstanding work on the BMW cars we have in our museum. Both of us are contracted to maintain them to a certain level so we are making sure the cars are all ready for when they get here in order to make the jobs they have to do that bit easier.

As I mentioned briefly earlier, another element to my job is to keep a finger on the pulse outside of Williams and keep abreast of young drivers, and to look after the ones we have. We have a young driver coming in to use the simulator next week so I’ve also spent some time this week ensuring the Vehicle Dynamics department responsible for the sim are prepared for the driver’s run and then to arrange overalls etc for the driver involved. Not a big job, but something I managed to cover off.

We’ve announced two new partners over the past few months, Hell and Ridge, so I’ve also had to have all our driver kit updated with the new branding. The final job on my list this week I finished on Friday morning and that was preparing the Tom Wheatcroft Trophy for its return to the Wheatcroft family. Frank was awarded this last year but, as it’s an annual accolade, its new recipient will receive it at the end of this month. Come the afternoon, I left the office early to go and move house! This week has been nothing if not busy and I don’t expect anything to change next week with the British Grand Prix!