CHARTING WILLIAMS’S F1 PERFORMANCE HISTORY

As Williams embarks upon a new era, it’s to assess the peaks and troughs of one of motorsport’s most successful teams. For this analysis, we have used supertimes, based on the fastest single lap by each car at each race weekend, expressed as a percentage of the fastest lap overall (100.000%) and averaged over a season. We have calculated how far away Williams has been from the fastest team each season or, when the team was quickest, how far ahead it was.

We’ve started in 1978, when Frank Williams and co-founder Patrick Head produced their first car together. The FW06 was neat and conventional. In the hands of Alan Jones it showed flashes of pace, though on average it was eighth fastest across the season, 1.9% behind