POWER THE HISTORY OF WILLIAMS WITHOUT PART 5: 2000-05 CONTROL
Formula 1 erupted in a collective surge of jubilation when Juan Pablo Montoya dived down the inside of Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari at Turn 1, Interlagos in 2001. In that moment, an audacious late-braking pass by an F1 rookie in only his third grand prix felt seminal, as a bright new contender stepped up to challenge the threatened dominance that Schumacher and Ferrari were coming to represent. Mika Häkkinen had been just as fast as Michael, if not a shade quicker over one lap, but increasingly he seemed a spent force. Instead, here was Montoya: fresh, cocksure, charismatic, funny – and on the face of it, a true Williams driver in the mould of an Alan Jones, Keke Rosberg or Nigel Mansell. This was going to be good.
And it was. But it would never be great, at least by Williams standards, and certainly not for any significant length of time. These were the BMW years, featuring all the ingredients for a tally of world titles – which never quite followed. Instead, the potent team-manufacturer partnership would register bests of two third places and back-to-back runner-up finishes in the constructors’ table between 2000 and 2005.
As for Montoya and Ralf Schumacher, his team rival (‘team-mate’ is simply the wrong term for this pair), they would harvest 10 grand prix wins between them. It feels like they won more – until we recall just how tightly Schumacher Sr and Ferrari gripped F1 by the neck in those first years of the new millennium, almost throttling it to the
