Williams Page #5

Frank Williams' team

is at its lowest ebb

the cars are well down the grid

in seventh and ninth places.

Frank came round to see me

"and said Brode I can't carry on"

and he had a bit of paper

with debts on it and they were huge,

and then overnight uh... this guy

who had been creeping around with Frank

and giving him

little bits of money, Walter Wolf,

did something that happens

in business all the time.

Walter bought out Frank's debt

and took control

of the Williams Formula 1 team.

Walter was clearly

a pretty clever business man

he'd made a fortune many, many

tens of millions by himself.

I thought let's give this a crack.

But by half way through 1976,

it was very plain to Walter

that the race team wasn't running well,

and that Frank didn't have

the capability to turn it around.

And then Frank went to the factory,

put his key in the front door,

it wouldn't work. Then,

the side window opened and a guy said,

Frank that's your things there, you can't

come into the factory,

you're banned from the factory now.

He couldn't believe it, he'd been

locked out of his own factory,

it was his life, his life was in that box

and inside that factory.

And then six weeks later, Frank's car,

which was renamed 'The Wolf',

went down to South America

won its first race.

The thing that Frank had been living for,

for all those years.

One day,

Ginny phoned me up and she said,

Brode I've got a lot of problems

with Frank, he's in a fit of depression,

"he hasn't got out of

his pyjamas for six weeks."

Sol turned up 11 o'clock

and I looked at him and I said,

What the f***'s going on here Frank?

"You've got your pyjamas on."

"And he said Brode, I can't quite

get my mind together about things"

and I knew what was killing him.

I said to Frank,

"Look there must be some way

you can get into Formula 1 again."

"And he said Well I don't know,

I don't know" he said,

but I've been thinking about it

and I might be able to get 185,000

out of a Belgian beer company

called Belle-Vue

but we'd have to have a Belgian guy

called Patrick Nve as driver.

"I said So what?

That's the start of a new Formula 1 team."

Do you think so?

I said, Yeah Frank,

"I said get out of them poxy pyjamas

and go to work, do what you're best at."

We sat

at my kitchen table and I said right,

"You do a list of Formula 1 team

names and I'll do a list."

And what was the name

that you came up with?

Oh it was really tough,

very testing, very brain stretching

but we kept it

Williams Grand Prix Operating Limited.

I said

Right I'm taking 2 days off.

We're gonna go find a factory."

"Yeah!" he went.

It was very much

hand to mouth but uh...

I loved what I was doing

I'm very optimistic

and I felt it would all come right.

At the end of the day,

when you're a racer, you're a racer,

- it's a bit of a bug.

- A bug?

It gets you.

140,000 fans packed into Silverstone,

so Hamilton's on the right as we

look at it, Nico Rosburg on the left,

the British Grand Prix

about to get under way,

lights out, away we go

and who's it gonna be,

it's a good start from the second row,

the Williams and Massa,

Williams out getting

both cars past both Mercedes.

Massa leads,

Bottas trying to get

second from Hamilton,

Hamilton in a bit

of trouble but he's fighting back

but we have a race on our hands,

what a start from the Williams guys.

- I think Valtteri is quicker.

- He is quicker, he should pass them.

He should pass them.

Be careful, be careful! And he's off!

Hamilton goes off in his attempts

to try and rest the lead

and that might give an

opportunity here for Valtteri Bottas.

Bottas goes into second place.

And up front ifs Williams

one and two at the moment.

Bottas comes in from the race lead

as Lewis Hamilton

continues around the track,

let's see how the stop goes

for Valtteri Bottas, ifs pretty good,

Hamilton's already along the start

finish straight, he's alongside,

Hamilton retakes the lead

and where does Bottas come back out?

He comes back out behind

his team mate, Felipe Massa.

Oh, Hamilton is pulling away in front.

Lewis Hamilton

wins the British Grand Prix,

he had to fight for it,

ultimately Williams have

to settle for fourth and fifth

but you have to feel for Williams.

Patrick Head is

the technical genius inside Williams,

the engineer swot who

bestows power

on the charismatic leader.

When I met Patrick,

which is the best thing,

apart from marrying the wife I married,

was the best day

to ever happen to me in my life.

He was a gifted engineer.

Patrick is a person who,

he doesn't suffer fools gladly...

Oh he's a bully, if he wanted it

and it wasn't coming

he'd bully his way through.

A lot of people are frightened of him,

you know he's a broad guy

and he can be quite aggressive looking

but his character is not one that

junior employees found comfortable,

you know what I mean, they knew when

they had made a mistake.

I think most of

my father's forbears were military,

one of them General Michael Head

had been a soldier under Wellington,

I think not wanting to fail was a very

strong motivation.

This car's half a second slower

on the stop watch than the other car.

Yeah.

The thing that was unique,

that Patrick brought to the show,

he was responsible

for making Formula 1 reliable.

So Frank's cars

almost instantly finish races,

which they hadn't been doing before

and that's

where life changed for Williams.

The British teams have

kept ahead with innovative designs,

the most recent

being the aerodynamic skirt,

a rigid panel that scrapes

along the ground

between the front and rear wheels,

creating a phenomenon

called ground effect.

For Frank Dernie a simple graph

shows the rise in suction

under the Williams wood skirts.

If you remove the skirt you actually

get so little flow in this area...

The thing

that really made a big difference

was a fairing

along the side of the engine

which allowed

the flow to remain attached

all the way to the back and I tested

that in a wind tunnel test

just before Silverstone in 1979

and it was the biggest gain

of performance I've ever seen on a car

so I rushed back from the wind tunnel

and drew the parts

and we got them made so we

could use them at Silverstone.

I remember going out there

and hopping in it for the first time

and thinking bloody hell.

What was

the difference with the car'?

It was better

it was just better.

Don't start getting me,

trying to be technical

because I'll look like a complete goose.

We went to the test

and in the morning,

everybody had been running and I think

the best lap time would of been uh...,

I dunno 12.9 or something

by somebody and Alan went out,

I remember the time absolutely,

he did a one minute 11.88 just like that,

bang, and the rest of the pit lane

were doing mid 13s

and it was most peculiar because

you were standing there with your thing

and everybody went...

and looked down at us,

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