Monday, June 7, 2010

No cycling - my guilty pleasure F1 - visiting Williams Racing

Finally I can get around to posting this. I saved the draft over the weekend - it is a few pictures of a visit, on Friday 4th June, to the Williams Racing Team's factory in Oxford. The company is called Williams Grand Prix Engineering Ltd - but takes on the name of its main sponsor. For the past few years the title sponsor has been RBS - but is now AT&T. It seems that the website name also gets changed to reflect the branding. So the Williams website is http://www.attwilliams.com/, but their conference centre (on the same site) is http://www.rbswilliamsf1conferences.com. These links will presumably fail whenever Title sponsors change?


Despite the fact that I am a passionate cyclist (not fast though) and cover more miles on my bike each year than I do in my car I have long been a follower of Formula 1 motor-racing. I used to live quite close to Silverstone and remember the massive queues that used to build up in the area around a race weekend. On race day there used to be a line of helicopters in the sky flying in and out. I have been in front of the Ferrari garage (at Silverstone) just as Michael Schumacher drove out to get to the grid for the start of the race. (I won a competition and was a VIP guest of Shell). In fact a friend who went with me was almost knocked down by Michael Schumacher as he pulled out of the garage.


Nowadays I watch the races each Sunday they are on and try to watch the qualifying. I don't race and never have - although I have driven a Formula Ford (a baby racing car) around at Thruxton race track. So it was a great pleasure to visit the Headquarters of one of the historic teams. They were founded in 1977 (although Sir Frank Williams had a previous company founded in 1967). Patrick Head joined and they have formed one of the more enduring F1 partnerships. The team has over the years won nine Constructors' Titles and seven Drivers' Championships. Although having recently moved to a new engine supplier (Cosworth) are going though a lean patch.


This is the FW14B used by Nigel Mansell in 1992 - he won the drivers' championship and Williams won the constructors' championship. From memory I believe that Red Five was associated with Nigel and he "took" the lucky number with him.


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Typical attention to detail - they have the wheel and tyre the right way round to show the manufacturers.




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The predecessor to the last car - FW14 - used in 1991 with Nigel's RED 5 right behind!




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This was Alain Prost's car - this was in the years when Tobacco companies were heavily sponsoring Motor racing - although Prost's car seems to have lost it in this picture. This might have been when certain countries banned Tobacco sponsorship whilst others didn't.




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back to Mansell's car - he did not race alongside Prost in Williams having been unhappy with his experience of being a Team-mate at Ferrari previously. In 1993 Nigel left for CART racing in the US (proper race cars - not go karts.)




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One of the challenges the teams face is how to retain their "brand" whilst over the years getting sponsorship from different companies also wishing to "highlight" their own brands. Ferrari is known for its red cars. In the case of Williams there have been a number of colour changes. The familiar yellow and blue colours are nostalgic - more recently they have raced in blue and white. This car has sponsorship from NiQuitin - aimed at those wishing to give up smoking - ironic really.


This Museum has the largest collection of Formula 1 cars apparently with examples from every year Williams have been racing. The collection also included cars in red - dictated by the Tobacco sponsorship of the time - they did not look very nice to me - so no pictures.




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The museum was not well lit - or rather it was lit for dramatic effect - my feeble on-camera flashgun was not really up to the job.




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This picture was taken as above but I moved the zoom (zoomed in) at the same time as I took the picture which gives the blurry effect despite the front wing being sharp. It took quite a few attempts to get the timing right to account for the delay between pushing the shutter button and the camera actually taking the picture.




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There was far more pictures to take than would make for a short Post, but it was impressive to see how many famous drivers had raced with Williams. Along with the cars were other memorabilia - showing a racing helmet used by Button. There were pictures of Coulthard, Senna and Prost to name but a few.


How do they manage to change the tyres so quickly when the car pulls in for a pit-stop you may ask - here is the secret - they hedge their cars!




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We also toured the factory where preparations were in full swing to ship equipment over to Canada for the forthcoming Grand Prix. As you can imagine we were not allowed to take pictures there. It was impressive though and it seemed to be a friendly place to work, despite, or perhaps because of the huge pressure to perform.



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