Why Williams had to look after itself

I posted here on Sunday morning that I had heard Williams were going to break ranks with the other Formula 1 teams and put in an entry for the 2010 season this week and they have done that.

I’ve been thinking about this, about why they have done it, what it will do to FOTA unity and where it leaves the other teams.

Williams have become the team closest to the FIA in recent times. In part this is down to a personal relationship between Williams CEO Adam Parr and Max Mosley. Both trained as barristers and I think they understand each other as a result. I also think Adam knows how to read Max pretty well. On a more basic level Williams need to stay close to the FIA because all they do is race F1 cars, they don’t sell energy drinks or road cars. So if they didn’t put an entry in for 2010 what would they do with themselves and their 500+ employees? They also stand to benefit from budgets coming down to £40 million. At that level they will not only be able to survive but to make a profit. And the technical department reckons that with many teams scaling down, they will do the best job on that level of money.

Williams signed a contract back in 2005, shortly after Ferrari, to stay with the FIA and with FOM, rather than join the manufacturers’ breakaway series being proposed at the time. The contract they signed then obliges them to race in F1 until the end of 2010. I don’t know what time frame is in the agreement Ferrari signed at the time, but Bernie Ecclestone referred to it the other day when he implied that he would sue them if they didn’t enter next year.

The question now is, will the other teams who signed up in 2005 also now be obliged to put an entry in for 2010? These teams are Red Bull, Toro Rosso and Force India (was Midland at the time). It is unlikely that their deals are all the same as Williams, because Ecclestone tends to like doing different deals with everyone.

For example, Frank Williams said on Friday that he knew Ferrari’s deal paid them more money than Williams but he did not know that they had a right of veto over the rules.

It has been reported in the last couple of days that the other teams within FOTA are angry with Williams because they signed a collective letter saying that they would not enter the championship. This isn’t quite true. They refused to sign that letter, but they did sign a second, modified letter, which did not commit them to that collective action.

Williams have painful memories of a time when they didn’t put in an entry; in 1993 they missed the deadline for entering the championship – a championship incidentally they went on to win with Alain Prost – and there was some pain to be taken over that.

Judging from the noises coming out of Toyota at the moment, governance and transparency are their big bugbears, more than budget caps. Toyota and Ferrari have been working closely together at all levels and if Toyota are to leave the sport, I’m sure that they will say that it is because of the governance.

There is another meeting of FOTA this week, so the story will move on quite a bit before the deadline for entry on Friday.

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Brawn still a clear second ahead of the rest

Today is the final day of the group pre-season test programme for Renault and Brawn. McLaren and Williams continue until Thursday. It’s the last chance the teams in Jerez will have to try out new parts and fine tune their cars on the track before Melbourne. We have Brawn, McLaren, Williams and Renault all operating with a single car.

So far this month the two main stories have been the stunning performance of the Brawn Mercedes cars, which came so close to never seeing the light of day after Honda pulled out of F1 and the trouble McLaren has been going through with a slow car.

Those two teams are to the fore in Jerez this week, with the Brawn car clearly a good second faster than the rest, while McLaren seems to have improved its car thanks to new aerodynamic parts, including a new diffuser.

Yesterday’s lap time sheet was misleading. It showed Alonso fastest, but that did not tell the story.

Rubens Barrichello drove the car yesterday morning and his lap times looked effortlessly fast and consistent. It’s not just the speed of the Brawn which impresses. It is the consistency, which makes it a formidable weapon in races as well as qualifying.

Rubens was easily circulating in the 1m 19s all morning. His fastest time, a 1m 18.398s lap, came on lap 4 of a 7 lap run, in which three of the laps were 1m 18s and three were low 1m19s. The car would go signficantly faster on a low fuel qualifying simulation. He handed over the car to Jenson Button, but the Brit managed only a couple of short runs before the car stopped with a gearbox problem, missing the last two hours of running. The car has done well to run fairly trouble free so far, but this incident shows that reliability is the main concern for Melbourne.

Renault’s Fernando Alonso ended the day a fraction faster than Barrichello, catching all the headlines, but his time came out of the blue, on a single lap qualifying simulation, so he would have been carrying quite a bit less fuel than the Brawn car. Looking at his other runs, they were manly quite short, but a 14 lap run saw laps mostly in the high 1m19s and low 1m20s, the thick end of a second per lap slower than the Brawn.

McLaren had Lewis Hamilton on track and the world champion did mainly short runs, mostly in the 1m 20s and 21s. He did a 21 lap long run with laps mainly in the low 1m20s, so a good second off the Brawn car.

Williams had Nico Rosberg doing long runs once again. The team seems to have focussed on long runs with heavy fuel at the recent tests, clearly working on reliability. The car showed that it’s pretty fast though, in Barcelona, when Rosberg took the fuel out and went for it. Yesterday the car was lapping in the low 1m 21s improving to 1m 20s on the third long stint.

It looks as though there isn’t much to choose between the McLaren, Williams and Renault in performance terms, but the Brawn is in another league altogether.

Extrapolating that out with the results from last week’s test, it seems that the pecking order at the moment is Brawn, then a gap to Ferrari, Toyota and BMW, then a small gap to Renault, McLaren, Williams, Red Bull with Force India and Toro Rosso somewhere just behind that group.

But as we saw last week with Renault and have seen this week with McLaren, the cars are so new, it’s possible for a team to make a big step with one development part. So the pecking order may not stay that way for long.

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Nico Rosberg – the secret of driving the 2009 cars

At the Williams team pre-season briefing the other day, I was mucking about with a Flip video camera and here is a clip of Nico explaining the big difference between last year’s cars and this years and the key to driving the 2009 spec cars. Sorry it’s a bit quiet, I’ll get the audio better next time…

Anyway as you can see, Nico looks very skinny. He’s had to lose some weight to compensate for the extra weight of the KERS hybrid system in the cars this season, as have all the drivers (not that he had much to lose).

If you want to follow the Rosberg plan and shed a few pounds, it’s all about keeping your heart rate at around 110 beats per minute while you exercise, so he told me. That way you burn off fat. Above 110 beats and you are burning sugar. While you watch this, I’m just off to buy a heart rate monitor….

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Tapas and optimism from Williams

Just had a very enjoyable day at Williams HQ in Grove where a few of us were treated to a series of briefings by the team. The drivers Nico Rosberg and Kazuki Nakajima were there, we had a talk around the car by technical director Sam Michael and then a briefing on the team’s health, FOTA and other general F1 matters from Sir Frank Williams and team CEO Adam Parr.

They even threw in some lunch, all very trendy, with small tapas-sized portions and lots of them. Being Williams though it was roast beef and fish and chips in the tiny bowls rather than some continental nonsense. Rhubarb crumble and crème brulee for pudding. Hardly anyone drank any wine except a few of the older generation journos…

Williams is a no-nonsense team which has been living beyond its means for the last couple of seasons in an effort to keep up and which is therefore grateful to the credit crunch for forcing its main rivals finally to agree cost saving measures. I actually think that Williams could have been in serious trouble if FOTA had not happened and with it the agreement to slash costs. Now Williams will be able to compete more fairly and will be able to pay off their debt. Despite losing RBS, Baugar and Petrobras as sponsors, they are more diversified than some other teams, a point CEO Adam Parr made. It was interesting to see Sir Frank together with Adam. He defers to him more and more and you could see that he has great trust in his number two. Could be another handover soon a la Ron Dennis…

The drivers spoke with optimism about the season ahead. The headline quote of the day was Nico Rosberg saying that he wants to be in a top car by 2010 and although he hopes it can be with Williams, that is his clear priority. He looked fantastic, no I mean even more fantastic than he normally looks. He’s slimmed down, like many drivers, because the KERS system has added weight to the cars and that means weight has to come off the drivers. Nico also said that he was relishing the challenge of the new rules with all the buttons to press and front wings to adjust. He feels that F1 is moving even more towards the intelligent drivers and he’s keen to position himself as a driver with a great interest in and feel for, the technology.

Frank said that he thinks the Honda team will be on the grid in Melbourne in some guise or other, Adam added that the fact that they are still making things for the car, planning a shakedown test next week ahead of an appearance at Barcelona test the week after, shows that Honda are serious about the proposals in front of them.
Looking at the opposition, Frank said that he thought Red Bull look particularly strong. Sam Michael pointed out that the RBR car was more developed at launch than other cars, but that other teams had major upgrades planned before Mclbourne, so you could really only judge at the first race.

Everyone agreed that it’s very close with no more than 3-4/10ths of a second separating the cars which have tested so far. That’s mind blowing if you think about it. Sam also said that Williams are not ready with the KERS system and hope to bring it to the car soon. He reckons BMW and McLaren are the two teams who are most bullish about their KERS systems and are most likely to use them in Australia.

One interesting undercurrent I picked up was that there is some muttering about the Renault engine. They were down on power last season and were allowed by the other teams to bring their motor up to speed with the others. This was done on trust through a FOTA agreement, whereby each manufacturer presented its power curve and they all agreed what Renault should be allowed to increase by. The implication is that perhaps the power curve they demonstrated at the start was a little lower than the reality….and so they may actually be a little ahead of the others now! This would also help Red Bull as they use the Renault motor.

Sam said that the adjustable front wing was going to make a bigger difference to overtaking than he and others had anticipated, Apparently the drivers can get really close to a car in front through a fast corner onto a straight and that makes passing very possible,. It will be circuit dependent of course and Shanghai for example, with the long fast corner onto the long straight will see a lot more passing. Same with Bahrain.

The boost from the KERS button adds 5mph to a car’s straight line speed so the cars which start the season with KERS will be able to take even more advantage of the adjustable front wing for passing.

Final note, Frank was very unhappy about the BBC News coverage of the RBS pulls out of F1 in 2010 story yesterday. He felt it was far too doom and gloom and also not accurate in its depiction of the facts of the story. I didn’t see it, so I cannot comment, I was engrossed in Liverpool vs Real Madrid football match, which had a good outcome as far as I’m concerned.

To sum up, Williams seem quietly confident about the season ahead, the car seems to be going quite well in testing and the key for them is going to be to take their chances when they arise this year on the tracks they always go well on, the street tracks for example.

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Latest quotes- Williams discuss RBS pullout

Williams CEO Adam Parr has just done a conference call with the media on the news that RBS is to pull out of F1 at the end of 2010.

“It isn’t good news for the sport for a sponsor like RBS to announce it’s withdrawing. We’ve suspected for some time that there wasn’t much chance of the sponsorship continuing beyond its term, ” he said.

“In the latter part of last year we lost two or three significant partners, Lenovo, Baugar and Petrobras. But we also had 10 of our partners renew and four of the partners who renewed were major upgrades, meaning they at least doubled. The FOM revenues are stronger this year than last year and there are some significant cost savings from the cut in testing.”

“Overall we have a solid budget for next year, but we are also in advanced negotiations with other partners. For 2010 we have 90% of the sponsorship for this year confirmed for next year and we will have further significant cost savings. ”

On Toyota he said that the manufacturers have committed for at least the next three years and he thinks that Toyota will stay beyond that if costs are brought under control.

Asked how hard it would be to replace RBS, Parr said,
“I’m confident that for 2011 we will have a strong sponsorship roster. No individual sponsor is make or break for us. It’s incredibly difficult to bring new sponsors in, but the return on investment is compelling.

“Last year RBS accounted for 10% of our revenue. They are one of our two senior sponsors”

Parr also said that the figure of £20 million on the BBC was “too high”. He was not specific, but the figure is likely to be more like £12 million per season.

Parr admitted that in the last three years the team had ‘spent beyond our means’ and that it would be paying off its debts this year and next. He reiterated that the cost savings FOTA and the FIA envisaged would make Williams’ budgets more closely aligned to the other teams in F1.

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Williams holds onto RBS until end of 2010

Williams has just announced that RBS will stay with the team this season and next, but that the sponsorship will finish at the end of 2010.

RBS is conducting a review of all its sponsorships in light of the critical situation in the banking sector and the huge corporate losses shortly to be announced.

The partnership with Williams began in 2005 and was renewed in 2007 for three seasons.

RBS points out that sponsorship costs have been reduced by 25% for this year and 50% in 2010 while hospitality has been cut by 90%. RBS has made further cuts by slashing trackside advertising for 2010.

RBS noted that Williams “have been very supportive in finding ways to reduce costs over the remainder of our contract. THis early announcement allows Sir Frank and his team to plan ahead financially.”

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Williams back in winners’ circle!

Williams picked up their first winners’ trophy in a while on Sunday, emerging victorious in the annual F1 mechanics’ football tournament at Milton Keynes. The event is organised by Grant Mundy, who is number one mechanic on David Coulthard’s car at Red Bull.

A full compliment of sixteen teams representing most of the grid, took part in the event. Grant’s RBR team has been the one to beat in recent times, but this year the final featured two great F1 institutions, Williams and McLaren in a head to head. The weather was atrocious by the time the final kicked off, so the game was a cagey 0-0 affair, which went to penalties.

The event is backed by the Grand Prix Mechanics Charitable Trust, of which I am a trustee along with Martin Brundle, Patrick Head, David Ryan of McLaren, Jo Ramirez, Prof Watkins and Norbert Haug among others.

Sir Jackie Stewart, the founder and chairman of the GPMCT came along to watch the action. The Trust is there to help current and former mechanics in times of trouble and hardship. It has helped a lot of people with issues like eyesight loss, hip replacements and other financial problems. The Trust also provides retraining advice for mechanics who have reached the end of their time ‘on the road’.

If you would like to find out more about the Trust’s work and even make a contribution, you can visit their website.

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