How Williams went 'Head-to-head' with Honda in F1's '80s turbo era

A block, sump and heads, plus two turbochargers in a box and three alternative length inlet manifolds were delivered to Williams by a van driver, with no paperwork at all. At that time, communication was by telex – I remember the ‘dah dah dah’ chattering away down below in the front office – so I sent a message by telex saying, ‘could you please advise for a heat balance for the engine?’. I asked for heat balance and installation details. They came back, and I have still got the telex somewhere, ‘Please design as you think’.

One of our engineers, Gary Thomas, started on the engine installation, which included learning about the thermodynamics of a turbo engine. Gary used to race motorcycles badly and come off them very often, including at the Isle of Man, so one was always worried about losing him… He worked away on the heat balance, with me checking in every now and then, and we worked everything out for ourselves. We produced this very basic car, the FW09. It wasn’t a beauty to look at, and it wasn’t hugely successful. It was usually a question of how far we’d get before the pistons came out of the exhaust pipe, as it still had F2 pistons. It didn’t have all the piston cooling, but it also had an incredibly low compression ratio, something like 6:1. If you put your foot on the throttle at low revs, you had almost nothing, maybe 150bhp, and then suddenly the turbos would kick in. How Keke [Rosberg] drove it I have no idea.

We were having a terrible time in 1984 – mostly with melted pistons and aluminium sprayed neatly down the inside of the exhaust systems. It would be like a nice skin neatly lining the exhaust, melted pistons!

Mr Kawamoto turned up at Zandvoort and he realised it wouldn’t work: ‘We are not taking this seriously and we’re getting a bad reputation for not being reliable’.

I remember once in Montréal there were six mechanics, three down one side and three down the other, changing the bearing caps and the bearing shells on the engine at the track like they had in motorcycle racing! It was very different.

I had to fly to Japan and Honda after that. We had won the constructors’ but hadn’t won the drivers’ title. Honda was pretty gutted. I got a sort-of dressing down from Yoshitoshi Sakurai. Mr Kawamoto was very clever because he was the nice one and Yoshitoshi was the tough one. He’d keep separate, and he wouldn’t be in the same room when Yoshitoshi was trying to give me a hard time. I went into this meeting, and there was Gérard Ducarouge from Lotus. Lovely man, but he had been blowing in Honda’s ear, saying that in a Lotus they would easily win the title.

I had been talking to Ichida for the whole of ’86 about the height of the engine because the oil filter was underneath the crankshaft, so the engine sat incredibly high in the car. I think we could lower it by something like 33mm if they changed the oil filter. Not only would we be lowering the engine, but we’d be lowering the gearbox, too.

Honda was definitely very concerned about staying with Williams with Frank as he was because they couldn’t see where the leadership was coming from. They could see I was the technical leader, as I had been beforehand, but they didn’t know where the business leadership would be because Frank was still pretty weak. Frank came back in 1987, but he was fighting his own battle to prove to himself, prove to the outside world, that he could still run the business side of the team, despite being in a wheelchair. I should have sat down with Frank and said, ‘Do you realise, Frank, that Honda is not happy? You have to find some way to keep them happy.’

Honda had told us that they would be supplying Lotus with engines for the 1987 season, and bloody Ducarouge was saying, ‘I don’t need a lower engine, I can win the title with the engine as it is’. Ichida had shown me an engine being motored with the low sump, but bloody Ducarouge was telling them ‘I can win the championship with the engine as it is’ and Honda would not supply two types, so we had to scrap the intended car for 1987 and upgrade the ’86 car. So I was pleased when we beat Lotus with the same engine. And [Ayrton] Senna. Nothing against Senna, they won some races, but by about the middle of the year Williams was stronger, finishing first and second in the drivers’ championship and easily winning the constructors’.

In mid-1987, Sakurai told us that ‘McLaren is going to be our lead team next year with Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna’. That low engine was the one that went to McLaren with the lower height. Gordon had done a low Brabham so was influential in doing a low car, and the low engine went there.

Well, with Prost and Senna, McLaren was going to be the lead team. Honda was in love with Senna; it had huge admiration for him, with good reason. We were told: ‘You’re to run Nelson Piquet and Satoru Nakajima’. The latter was a perfectly passable driver, but it meant that we had no chance in the constructors’.

Frank and I sat down and we talked about it. We already had a contract for 1988, but Honda said ‘We’re going to tear it up’ so it was very tough. They said, ‘That’s it, we will supply you, we’ll fulfil our contract for you, but it will be with Piquet and Satoru Nakajima’. It would have meant saying goodbye to Nigel, and I think we had a contract with Nigel, so it was complicated. It felt lousy because we were winning everything, beating their other team and being told they weren’t going to be with us next year. It was fairly unhappy.

The thing is, they really needed us in 1983, ’84 and ’85 when they were miles away, but by the end of ’85 and ’86 they were the cock of the north and had a very high opinion of themselves. It’ll be interesting to see if that happens this time.

Mr Kawamoto and I always got on, and when we had a historic car running a Honda engine, he would always help. You don’t make enemies unnecessarily in this world, otherwise you end up with no friends. In fact Mr Kawamoto had lunch with Frank and I in the Williams boardroom when he retired, it was a happy lunch with lots of stories, so we still get on well.”