NATURAL BORN RACERS
Officially, it all started 43 years ago – but that’s not true at all. Within just two years of its founding, Williams Grand Prix Engineering was the shiny, new irresistible (down)force of F1, but its rise begs the old question: ‘how many nights does it take to be an overnight sensation?’ Eight long years of turmoil, tragedy, of missed and wasted opportunity, of false starts and disappointment
– the same length of time as the current drought – preceded what was Frank Williams’s last chance to really make his F1 ambitions stick as he’d always belligerently believed they would.
Frank had briefly raced himself before wisely recognising his strengths lay in the hustle of getting racing cars on to grids rather than away from them. His first muse was good friend and brewery heir Piers Courage, who scored a promising second at Monaco in a smartly turned out blue Brabham in 1969 – only to lose his life in a horrifying accident at Zandvoort a year later, driving a de Tomaso born from a collaboration with talented Italian engineer Gian Paolo Dallara. So much promise, cruelly snuffed out in the Dutch sand dunes. Most would have quit this violent game there and then, but racing people are wired differently – and oddly. Williams was devastated, of course he was – but there was no question of stopping. He knuckled down and went again.
FORGET THE PAST FEW SEASONS. PARK THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH THAT THE LAST WIN WAS EIGHT YEARS AGO. THE CURRENT, DEVASTATING BACK-OF-THE-GRID MALAISE CAN’T TAKETHE HISTORY, MEMORIES, IMAGES, VICTORIES… THEY’RE INDELIBLY BRANDED INTO THE FABRIC OF FORMULA 1. NINE CONSTRUCTORS’ WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS, SEVEN DRIVERS’ TITLES, 114 GRAND PRIX WINS (THIRD IN THIS REGARD BEHIND ONLY FERRARI AND McLAREN) ARE THE STOIC FOUNDATIONS OF THE WILLIAMS LEGEND– AND WHAT MUST NOW INSPIRE, RATHER THAN WEIGH DOWN, THOSE WHO ARE WORKING SO HARD ON THE REVIVAL.
