Williams F1

Williams is accustomed to championship-winning drivers, but it is not widely known that new signing Rubens Barrichello’s race engineer falls into that very category.

After an itinerant childhood in Britain and Germany – his father was in the RAF – Tony Ross studied engineering at Bristol University... and spent many a weekend watching events at Castle Combe, the local racetrack.

“My dad was interested in motorsport,” he says, “although he didn’t compete. I used to watch Formula One on TV in my teens, though, and always enjoyed tinkering with stuff, so I dabbled with racing for a while after I’d left university. I drove various things – including a modsports Davrian, a Porsche and a Metro – and in the early 1990s I won the MG Owners’ Club championship at the wheel of a two-litre Maestro. After a while, though, I decided it would be wiser to concentrate on earning money rather than spending it.” He does, however, still compete in karting events when time permits...

Tony almost followed in his father’s footsteps, and contemplated a career as an RAF pilot, but eventually plumped for engineering instead. As a student he garnered sponsorship from Austin Rover and subsequently spent six years with the company, working on engine design and development. “After that,” he says, “the only way to make further progress within the company was to step into a management role, but that meant moving away from hands-on engineering and didn’t really interest me.”

He subsequently moved into motorsport, with Nissan’s touring car programme (working in both the UK and Europe), and joined Williams at the end of 1997. At the time the company was preparing BMW’s factory assault on the Le Mans 24 Hours, which culminated in an outright race victory in 1999. “I started off as design development engineer,” he says, “but then took responsibility for running the test car. When that programme ended I moved across to the F1 team, again as test engineer, but switched to race engineering in 2001.”

His promotion coincided with Williams’ recruitment of Juan Pablo Montoya and the two spent four productive seasons together before the Colombian moved on and Tony was assigned to Nick Heidfeld and, from 2006 until the end of 2009, Nico Rosberg. “My race weekends are fairly regimented,” he says, “and my time at the factory is mostly spent analysing the events of one grand prix weekend and then preparing for the next. The work tends to be quite varied, but there has been one constant throughout my career – I have always been motivated by a raging desire to succeed.”

But which, though, is the real Tony Ross: is he a racing driver who happens to enjoy engineering or an engineer who would really prefer to be racing? “First and foremost, I guess I’m a frustrated racing driver,” he says with a grin. “That’s probably what I’d have done, given the choice, but engineering is definitely an acceptable alternative.”

In his own words: “I’m driven to win.”