Williams 2008 Season Review: Very Difficult Times For a Great Team
Chassis: FW30
Engine: Toyota
Team Principal: Frank Williams
.jpg?w=256 "Colts Jaguars Football")
Technical Director: Sam Michael
Debut: Spanish GP 1969
Pole Positions: 125
Wins: 113
Points: 2586
Championships won: nine
2008 Stats
Pole Positions: 0
Wins: 0
Podiums: Two
Points: 26
Championship Position: Eighth
Drivers
Nico Rosberg
Race Starts: 53
Debut: Bahrain 2006
Wins: 0
Pole Positions: 0
Podiums: Two
Points: 41
2008 Points: 17 (including two podiums)
Kazuki Nakajima
Race Starts: 18
Debut: Australia 2008
Wins: 0
Pole Positions: 0
Podiums: 0
Points: Nine
2008 Points: Nine (including sixth in Melbourne)
This season looked like it could be promising for Williams. Sadly reality set in very quickly, and they spent the majority of the season struggling in the midfield.
The last few years have been difficult for Williams. 2003 was the last time that Williams contested a world championship. 2004 and 2005 were average seasons for Williams. After this BMW decided to split with the team. Since that decision Williams have been sinking downhill at a fast rate of knots. They recovered and had a respectable season in 2007 but 2008 became very difficult.
Williams are the only team in the pit lane that exist solely to race. At the moment F1 is full of over-spending big manufacturer. This along with the added difficulty of the current economic climate crisis makes it a very tough time for independant teams. They now have a challenge just to survive in F1, never mind succeeding. It’s all very worrying.
However in pre-season testing there was a chance that Williams were going to surprise people. During the winter Mclaren and Ferrari were the stand out teams, but Williams were regularly best of the rest. This pattern seemed to persist throughout all the tests
At the first race in Australia Williams showed that this testing pace was real. Nico Rosberg qualified in a brilliant fifth position. He drove a very mature race. In a race full of incidents, and errors he kept his head and finished in third place. This was the first podium of his career, and the first for Williams since Canada 2007.
What was more impressive was their race pace. Overall they were only around 0.6 seconds off the front pace. This was a good achievement considering the lack of funds compared to the other teams. The big question would be whether it would last?
Sadly this is as good as it got for Williams in 2008. A week later in Malaysia their performance was very poor. The car was poor in the high speed corners, and very sensitive to the track surface, which was completely different in Sepang. In qualifying Rosberg was all the way down in 16th place. This was 11 places worse off than in Melbourne. The race wasn’t much better as he only finished 14th.
This ended up being the story of Williams season. Their performance was very different from race to race. Aero efficiency was a big weakness of this car. Therefore the car was better at tracks with slower corners such as Monaco, Montreal and Monza. The traction on the car was very strong, which aided the performance at these slow tracks. The car also worked very well at Singapore.
At tracks such as Spa and Silverstone the performance really suffered, due to the aero-dynamics playing such a big role. Importantly there aren’t as many slow tracks as there are quick circuits where teams are punished for having weak aero. This resulted in few competitive weekends for Williams. If the bulk of the tracks had been slow, then perhaps Williams would have had a better season. Teams have to build a car that will work well on all types of tracks. Williams failed to achieve that this season.
The car was quite nice to drive however so Rosberg and Nakajima could extract good pace from the car on slower tracks. The Toyota engine was also a very useful powerhouse and was very reliable. The only real disadvantage of this engine was that the wear rate of the engine, was higher than other engines.
By the second weekend the engine lost around 0.3-0.4 seconds. An area that had been an advantage for Williams in the past was the suspension, but this season all the other teams developed heavily in this area and caught up.
Nico Rosberg did brilliantly to fight for a point in Bahrain (the Third Round of the championship), Kazuki Nakajima finished seventh in Spain after a race of attrition.
By this point all the teams behind Williams were catching up and overtaking them. Williams had very well to get ahead of a truly tight midfield pack during winter testing. The big issue was that losing 2 or 3 tenths over your rival in 2008 would drop you two or three rows. That’s how close it was in the midfield in 2008.
The other problem for Williams that the teams behind were big teams such as Toyota and Renault. They were able to out-develop Williams very quickly and leapfrog them. With their superior funds and facilities Williams just weren’t able to keep up. That was the unfortunate truth.
In Monaco and Canada Williams were able to challenge. Rosberg qualified sixth but had a heavy shunt in the race. Nakajima drove a very mature race and finished seventh. Nico Rosberg qualified fifth in Montreal but made the same mistake in the pit lane as Lewis Hamilton, and ignored the pit red light. If he hadn’t ignored the red light then he had a chance of a podium in this race.
In these two races Williams had the chance to score bigger points than they did so this will disappoint them. Struggling teams have to get all the points they can at every single opportunity.
For the rest of the season qualifying in the top 10 shootout was a real struggle. There were only three more occasions when Williams appeared in the third part of qualifying. In fact at times getting past the first part of qualifying was becoming a problem. In Brazil neither Williams got past Q1.
The only other two memorable moments that Williams had were Monza and Singapore. In Monza Nico Rosberg drove to fifth place in the wet conditions. The damp track allowed him compete with faster cars.
In Singapore the Safety Car allowed him to race to second place. This was partly down to luck as Rosberg pitted under the red pit light. The stewards didn’t give the inevitable penalty for 15-20 minutes. This gave Rosberg the chance to build up a lead whilst others were being blocked by Fisichella and Trulli.
The stewards should have penalised him straight away but Nico made the most of the opportunity and drove very well. This was a morale booster which Williams desperately needed, as the second half of the season was turning out to be very disappointing indeed.
As mentioned above the teams around them were able to develop their cars quicker than Williams. The other main issue for Williams was the 2009 aero regs. Williams decided to spend more time on their 2009 car than on the 2008 challenger. This was probably the right decision as Williams were never going to get very much out of 2008.
If they can use their time on the 2009 car to good effect, then they could get themselves into a good position next season. Williams did in fact put a bit more effort back into the 2008 season late on but this was to no avail. Overall there was much less development on the 2008 car than the 2007 challenger.
Driver wise Nico Rosberg tried his hardest throughout the season. He got as much speed as he could out of the car. His drives in Australia and Singapore were stunning. These two races showed what he could do when circumstance allowed. His qualifying laps in Canada and Monaco were also quite spectacularly.
The only negative as far as Nico’s performance was concerned were two or three very untimely silly errors. The biggest error was the pit lane incident in Montreal. There was another podium for him up for grabs there.
Nakajima rarely matched Nico’s pace but he did defy people’s expectations. Although he wasn’t stunningly quick he was very calm and composed. He didn’t make many mistakes and showed good pace in the races. He finished well at crazy races with a high attrition rate, and kept his head whilst others lost theirs.
He was sixth at the mad season opener in Melbourne. He finished seventh in the damp streets of Monte-Carlo. If he can get more speed over a single lap then he could become Japan’s best ever F1 driver.
Over the Winter Williams now face a challenge to keep hold of all their sponsors. All of them are facing financial difficulties. In this economic crisis they may not be able to keep sponsoring Williams. Lenovo have already announced that they are leaving the team.
Williams have to somehow try and improve their performance over the Winter, otherwise Nico Rosberg will be very unlikely to stay loyal to the team. Although staying on the grid may be a good enough achievement for the team next season. It’s hard to imagine that this was the team that used to dominate championships back in the '90s.
Final Verdict
It’s been a troubled year for Williams. They still have great and clever people there. Unfortunately F1 in its current climate is very hard to compete in for the independent teams. The current economic crisis makes life even tougher. Williams exist solely to race in F1 so it’s very unlikely that they will ever quit the game unless they are physically forced to
Williams are still a bunch of fighters though. It may have looked like a poor season on paper but Williams were only around 1.0 second off the pace all season long. This is still quite respectable considering the lack of budget and facilities. Sadly in this current competitive and intense F1 it’s just not good enough.
In this writer’s opinion there is a possible way to be make Williams competitive again. What if Toyota joined up with Williams and they formed a new team—Williams-Toyota. Combine William’s know how and Toyota’s sheer budget and facilities and you would have a dream team.
Frank Williams would probably never let this happen which is a shame for both parties. He made an even bigger mistake, when he decided to not let BMW buy further into the team.
Read my other reviews so far via the links below
.jpg?w=480 "Colts Jaguars Football")
