16/08/2005
FEATURE BY MIKE LAWRENCE
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Williams and Cosworth are getting together again, great news. For me it is like hearing that that your favourite two people, once married, been through other relationships, known good times and bad, are once again dating. We who wish them well can only stand by and let the relationship take its course, this time he will, we hope, remember their anniversary and she will make more of an effort to understand the off side rule in football. It's very simple, if the salt cellar is the goalkeeper and the mustard pot is the... or should that be the pepper mill?
I have always tried to be non partisan but, out of the blue, a few years ago I was asked who is my favourite F1 team. I was taken off guard and I said 'Williams' because, the bottom line is that that I admire Frank Williams and Patrick Head above all others.
Let me tell you a story. In 1977, I met Rob Widdows and, both being racing nuts, who also wrote poetry, we hit it off immediately. Rob was Head of News at Radio Victory, one of the new local radio stations which had just sprung up in the wake of the government releasing air bands. Radio Victory sounds like it should have been directed at the French Resistance, but was Portsmouth's local station, since Portsmouth still is the home to HMS Victory, Lord Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar,
When was Nelson last on Victory? The answer is 1978 because I was at Goodwood with a tape recorder when Nelson Piquet was testing his Ralt RT1 F3 car.
Rob managed to persuade his bosses to give him an hour a week to run a motor racing show and I was taken on as the rest of the team. Track Torque went out at 9pm on a Thursday, which was radio graveyard, nobody listened, but we had an hour every week and it was the only motor racing show in the country so we had everyone on.
Radio Victory was in a run down area of Portsmouth, close to where Charles Dickens was born, and was housed in what had been a school built in Victorian times. The station did not have a large staff, but it did a pretty good job. It was the size of the staff which was our undoing.
I met up with Rob one night at the station and we did what we normally did, we went to the pub next door. It then dawned on Rob that he had left his key ring on his desk in the newsroom. Not to worry, we pressed the bell outside the station, but nobody answered. We tried phoning the station and nobody answered, the place was deserted. The programme going out was on a tape machine and when it finished we would be on live and towards the end of our show a disc jockey would turn up and take over.
We were locked out of a radio station and our featured guest was Frank Williams, by then a constructor who had won Grands Prix. From our position in the pub we could monitor everyone going into Radio Victory. Frank, we knew, drove a Jaguar and there were few of those in Portsmouth. The minutes ticked by and to compound our woe there was no sign of Frank. Even had we been able to get in, we had no show, just an hour of air time with the two of us winging it and not even someone on a switchboard so we could not do a phone in, the last resort of a desperate broadcaster.
With about ten minutes to go, we thought that we should press the bell one more time before falling on our swords. Miracle of miracles, the door opened and it was opened by Frank Williams who was on the phone to Patrick Head discussing the hiring of Carlos Reutemann and there was still nobody else in the building. How had he done that?
Frank never did tell us how he got in, let alone how he was able to drive into the station without us noticing. I am not a superstitious man, I am stainless steel atheist, sceptic and rationalist, but Frank caused me problems that night.
There have been bad vibes coming from the Williams and BMW partnership for some time. It was clearly an unhappy marriage and perhaps BMW working with Sauber will be better. I doubt it. To be able to win in Formula One requires a particular set of the mind, which few have. Peter Sauber did well in sports car racing and has shown a good eye for talent, and that's it. Sauber has never, ever, looked like it might surprise us in Formula One.
BMW makes very good road cars, but has only occasionally succeeded in motor racing because there is not at its core a culture of competition. Of all manufacturers currently involved in the sport, leaving aside Fiat/Ferrari, it is Honda which has had the longest and, this is important, the most intense commitment to racing. Honda was founded on racing which is why it has won more than 500 motorcycle Grands Prix. Racing is in Honda's bloodstream, it is essential to the company's culture.
When Mr. Soichiro Honda set up Mugen for his son and heir he announced that Honda was not a company tied by old Japanese alliances and practice. By doing that Mr. Honda invited the best Japanese engineers to join him in his venture and they did join him and they established a culture then unique in Japan.
One cannot stress too much the culture. Look at Porsche, which has done everything imaginable in sports car racing but, in Formula One, has to its credit only one World Championship win (1962 French GP) and one non Championship win (1962 Solitude GP). The last time Porsche tried to build an F1 engine, it was so useless that Arrows abandoned it. I have not forgotten the TAG V6 engine, used by McLaren, but all Porsche did was to provide the basic lump, after John Barnard told them what to do and how to do it, the real work was done by Bosch and KKK and Porsche decided not to be associated with the project, money would have had to change hands, which is why the TAG engine never bore the Porsche name. Porsche remained merely a sub contractor on the TAG engine.
Cosworth exists primarily to make racing engines and always has done. When I read in the official press release that there will be a partnership and an exchange of information and expertise between Williams and Cosworth, I believe it. It makes sense to me because there is a unity of culture.
I am not one for predictions, but I make an exception for this: the partnership between BMW and Sauber will end in tears. I base that prediction on the fact that neither has been able to compete at a high level in racing.
Now that BMW has gone, I expect a shake up within the Williams team. It has long seemed that some changes came about as a result of pressure from Bavaria because some people there, holding the cash box, thought they knew best. I wonder where Dr. Mario Theissen will go after things fall apart at Sauber, as they will. Believe me, nothing is going to happen there.
When you look at the histories of the greatest figures in Formula One: Colin Chapman, Bernie Ecclestone, Enzo Ferrari, Ron Dennis and Frank Williams you see mavericks who set their own rules outside of a company structure. Dr. Theissen is a company man and while he can be relied upon to make useful contributions to the next generation of BMW road cars, which will continue to be wonderful, he will never understand the thinking of a man like Sir Frank.
Williams has a particular culture and so has Cosworth (so does BMW, but it is not a culture much good for success in F1). Cosworth has had a bumpy ride of late, but the guys within the company still operate to the culture laid down by Keith Duckworth and Mike Costin. Anyone can set up a factory, buy the tools and hire the people, but not everyone can establish a culture.
Keith Duckworth was once in Chrysler's design offices in Detroit and he was shown some drawings for new engines. He was asked what he thought. The rule was that the Great Man would approve, because that is what visitors were supposed to do, but Keith declared that the designs were 'crap'. There was consternation among the executives and then Keith explained: 'Imagine that you are the gas in a cylinder and there is a bloody great piston coming up your chuff, wouldn't you look for the quickest way out? Have you provided the quickest way out?'
It takes genius to express something as complicated as thermodynamics in such simple terms. It gives a clue to Cosworth' company culture which allows the hunch as well as pure science. Cosworth has always allowed for the intuitive line of thought.
Cosworth has been without a top team for some time, but no outfit has more experience of building racing V8 engines and now they have Williams with all of its accumulated knowledge of working with Renault and BMW. Even if the rumours are true, and the deal will be for 2006 only and then Williams will run Toyota engines, badged as 'Lexus', we should be in for an interesting time next year.
There is no culture of competition at Toyota save in the sense they have made road cars ever better which means refining things like the shut lines, the gaps you see around car doors. Williams and Cosworth makes sense because they come from the same background, they have similar and complementary cultures.
Mario Theissen has persuaded the board of BMW to allow him his head. If I held shares in BMW I would sell them because the board of directors is clearly incompetent.
Williams has won nine Constructors' titles, two with Cosworth, and has won more than 110 races. Sauber has never finished above third in a Grand Prix in twelve years of Formula One and Sauber never will achieve a better result.
The best which could happen would be if a company like Hyundai picked up the bills and put their name on the cam covers of the Cosworth engines as Petronas (who?) puts its name on the Ferrari units currently used by Sauber. It would still be Williams and Cosworth at heart, but Hyundai, a company with global ambition, could be in Formula One for a fraction of what it is costing Toyota which looks no closer to winning a race than it did on the day it started.
Formula One races are there to be won by the likes of Frank Williams and Ron Dennis, the recent Ferrari renaissance is a peculiar, and particular, event. Mario Theissen is going nowhere with Sauber, but Williams and Cosworth might just achieve something special.
It all comes down to culture.
To check out previous features from Mike, click here