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."