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INSIGHT: How Williams revived its FW14B

Saturday, 19 August 2017


Mark Glendenning / Images courtesy of Karun Chandhok

If there's an image that can represent an era, this is it. Under a gray sky at Silverstone – gray being the default setting for sky at Silversone – a bark of noise from the Williams garage heralds the appearance of Nigel Mansell's FW14B in pitlane.
As the car wails around the track, pitching and calming itself through the corners, fans clamor for the best vantage point they can find. This is what they came to see. This is the ultimate representation of early-1990s Formula 1; a time when there was still scope for a group of clever designers to come up with a car so advanced that much of its trickery remains banned to this day.
The illusion that this is 1992 is tempered by closer scrutiny of the grandstands: a lot of people holding up phones; not a lot of Right Said Fred fans. And also by the helmet bobbing around in the FW14B's low-cut cockpit, where Mansell's familiar white, red and blue scheme has given way to a design dominated by blue and orange. After a few tours, Karun Chandhok returns the car to the pits, leaving the Silverstone crowd – and paddock – buzzing at the 14B's first laps in a quarter of a century.
Bringing the FW14B – or virtually any retired F1 car from the early 1990s onwards – back to life is not the work of a moment, as evidenced by the 25 years that Mansell's championship-winner spent in mothballs. Williams Heritage, led by Jonathan Williams and managed by long-time mechanic and team manager Dickie Stanford, was formed in 2014 as a step towards addressing that by getting the team's vast collection of museum cars back into running order, as well as serving as a sales and support service for historic customer cars. The culmination of restoring noise and motion to any of these machines is having someone on standby to take it out onto the track, and that's where Chandhok comes in.
Chandhok's job as official Williams Heritage driver is just one entry on a diverse resume that includes F1 (with HRT and Lotus), Formula E, Prototypes, FIA GT, TV punditry, and driver management.
"My role with Williams Heritage is on various fronts," he says. "I get involved in the business side in terms of helping to grow the business and sell the cars, and drive the cars for clients, and just help to grow Williams Heritage as a business as much as everything else.

"The ultimate goal is to turn it into something like [Ferrari's F1 customer program] Ferrari Cliente. Obviously we're a long way from that – what Ferrari Cliente has done is extraordinary; they've taken all these cars and turned it into such a massive money-earner. It's incredible, what they do with it. And that's obviously the ultimate goal. But Williams has a huge disadvantage in that it's not an engine company. We're relying on Renault and BMW and Cosworth, the various people that have supplied engines to Williams over the years to help us out."
Indeed, engines are one of the major factors that help determine which Williams cars are given the Heritage treatment. From initial conversations, the process of getting the FW14B running again took around a year, and Chandhok explains that some of that time was spent getting the engine running and reverse-engineering the electronic trickery that made the car famous.
"We had to get Cosworth involved with the engine because Renault didn't have the capacity to help us, because they were maxed out on their F1 program," he says.
"So we had to get Cosworth to do whole new electronics, ECU, wiring loom, engine management system. And fair play to them, they did a bloody good job – in less than two months they got the thing running. To effectively start from scratch and work out how active suspension from 25 years ago worked was not an easy task."

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Nor was getting the car to start once the engine was built. By the time the 14B arrived, laptops were required to start F1 cars. When you consider that 1992 cars require 1992 laptop technology – and the challenges involved in keeping any laptop alive for 25 years – the complications quickly become apparent.
"In the end Cosworth managed to get a new computer to run the 14B, so they ran it from their laptops, but we still needed the old laptop," says Chandhok.
"Which is hilarious, it's pre-Windows. I can't remember the last time I saw an MS DOS program. The engineers are sitting there typing 'C, colon, slash, whatever' to get the thing working. And the memory card is massive, but it only holds 1MB. In today's world, 1MB is a third of one photo on your iPhone...
"Patrick [Head] told me these stories about how in the early days of their data logging, how in the early days they had this ream of paper connected to the car, and as it's going around its writing this data directly onto the paper. It's amazing, the way technology has moved on.
"But for me, that's one of the nice things about being involved with Williams Heritage. I'm a proper, old-school geek, and I love the history of the sport and talking to people who were involved."
That advice also came in handy from a driving standpoint, particularly with a car like the 14B that was literally adjusting itself through corners.
"If I hadn't spoken to them before I drove the 14B, I would have been completely spooked," he says. "But because I'd spent a bit of time with Paddy [Lowe] and Patrick beforehand, it was, 'Oh, this kind of makes sense'.
"The car moves – it hops around; there's a lot more movement in the overall package to keep the aero stable. And some of it is unexpected, like in corner entry, the outside front wheel lifts to keep the platform stable. And that movement would spook you completely if you weren't expecting it. Mid-corner, the front dives down to generate more downforce. And the rear pops up, but then it's got a blown diffuser so you have to hammer the throttle to get the blown diffuser to work... it was so far ahead of its time. Blown diffusers, they were talking about those again in F1 in ... 2012, was it? And this is technology that was generating an extra 36 percent of downforce with a blown diffuser back in 1992."

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From a purely driving standpoint, Chandhok's impressions of the 14B were further shaped by the fact that he was able to back-to-back it with the current FW40 on the same day. Both experiences were instructive ¬– Chandhok's last F1 start came at Hockenheim in 2011, so the FW40 was his first experience with a hybrid. There are YouTube videos that record his impressions of current machinery. ("Unbelievable amount of downforce," he exclaims as he heads into Stowe. "Your head goes straight into the headrest... but the traction is SO good!"). But that seat time also spoke volumes about how the cars of the 14B's era compare with the cars of now.




"It was a pretty amazing experience to drive them back-to-back; to jump out of one and into the other," Chandhok says.
"The 2017 car... everything feels filtered. That's the best way I can describe it. None of the sensations feel pure. Everything comes through a computer – the throttle, the brakes, the steering – everything feels like it's coming through some sort of filter before you feel it in your body. That's what the modern cars are like.
"You contrast that with the car from '92, and although the technology at the time was extraordinary, with the active suspension, launch control, traction control, all of these things that were completely revolutionary at the time, it still doesn't have power steering, it still doesn't have fly-by-wire throttle. It's a cable throttle; you have to blip on the down-change. You're feeling vibrations through the engine. All of that stuff that you can feel is totally different to a current car. You feel everything much more purely and unfiltered. That's what comes to mind, is how pure it feels in contrast to the modern cars."
Despite Williams Heritage having only been around for three years, and the work involved in getting a museum car back onto the track, Chandhok is rapidly ticking Williamses off his list. He has driven most of the team's championship-winners, including Rosberg's FW08 from 1992, and the FW18 and FW19 used by Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve in 1996 and 1997 respectively, with the FW15C that took Alain Prost to the 1993 title scheduled to join that list next year.

"The Damon car is stunning," he says. "The driveability on that engine is so, so good... it's just a nice car. It looks right; everything is proportionate. It's actually really comfy as well. The 14B is ****ing uncomfortable. A lot of these cars are uncomfortable – they're Newey cars. But the Damon car is really comfortable when you're in the cockpit. I asked Damon about it, and he said it was the first car that his big feet fitted in comfortably. He said that he told Adrian at the end of 1996, 'If you'd given me a car that my feet fit in early, I'd have won the championship earlier'.
"The one I'd love to drive is Nelson Piquet's '87 car with the Honda turbo, just so I can experience 1000-whatever it is horsepower. OK, the modern hybrids are 1000bhp, and having now driven of one of those, it was seriously impressive how powerful those cars are. But the Honda turbos... there was NO driveability in those days. The power was like an on/off switch. I think that would be a pretty immense experience."
If engine availability is one major factor in determining which Williams cars get the 'Heritage' treatment, heritage itself is another. The FW14B was chosen in part because of its significance in Williams' history, but the response from fans surpassed even the team's expectations. With modern F1 trying to establish a path for itself into the future, Chandhok believes that there are lessons to be learned from the reception to the past.
"When we put a video of the 14B onto Facebook, we'll have 100,000 hits in two days," he says.
"You just don't get that with modern cars. Most of our videos get 20,000 to 26,000 views on average. And that makes you think about things like the sound. I understand the importance of road relevance to manufacturers and this, that and the other, but things like this show that F1 is at a crossroads. Back in 1992, did they really think about road relevancy? No. They talked about the sound, the entertainment, and the show. So does F1 need to say, 'You know what, we have categories like Formula E and sports cars and stuff, which can be road relevant. Should we just focus on making the loudest, most fearsome cars that people like watching?'.
"I remember standing at Beckett's at Silverstone years ago during a mid-season test and Michael Schumacher came around and I thought, '**** me, that is amazing'. And you don't get that anymore. On the Williams Fan Day we ran the hybrid car at the same time that we ran the 14B – Paul di Resta was in the hybrid and I was in the 14B – and without fail everyone came back saying, 'huh, the modern car sounds a bit ****, doesn't it?'. And you can't hide that."
But issues like that are for Liberty to worry about. For Chandhok, any Williams Heritage-related stress is likely centered around how quickly someone can get a Renault turbo working so that he can drive an FW11B. And that sounds like a pretty good problem to have.

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Karun Chandok drives Williams FW14B at Silverstone

Karun Chandhok fulfills a lifetime dream of driving the revolutionary Williams FW14B that carried Nigel Mansell to the 1992 Formula 1 World Championship!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_c...&v=oM7yLMHlX4o

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Revisited part 1
In company with Finland's future F1 star, Valtteri Bottas, Peter Windsor looks back at the most technically-sophisticated F1 car of all time - the 1992 Williams FW14B-Renault

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9xKdyyIdac

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Revisited part 2
Part 2 of Peter Windsor's look back at the Williams FW14B-Renault. Valtteri Bottas is on hand to give the car a quick run.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo6OQ64zAQg

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Williams heritage stories shorter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbmUweOy0G8

longer complete version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6rd-L7OhTY