It had seemed just a temporary setback for Williams when its engine partner Renault withdrew from F1 at the end of 1997. Yes, it meant a couple of seasons as a customer team, but the link with BMW had already been made and in time that was surely going to become the new gold standard partnership. After all, Williams had bestridden the sport for two decades, often steamrollering the opposition with outrageous performance superiority regardless of which manufacturer’s engine was in the back of the cars. It had made world champions out of Alan Jones, Keke Rosberg, Nigel Mansell, Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve (as well as adding titles to the rosters of Nelson Piquet and Alain Prost). No team had ever been the fastest for so long.

So the quiet ’98 and ’99 seasons as a temporary customer team seemed likely just to be a repeat of ’88, merely a punctuation between partners. Yes, they had lost the services of technical genius Adrian Newey and that did seem like a careless error of judgement on the part of Frank Williams and Patrick Head. But they’d been successful before he joined and BMW was on its way.

But despite BMW redefining the power limits of Formula 1 with its 2001 engine (after a promising but conservative start in 2000), there was to be no continuation of Williams’ golden lineage.

“Energy ran out. In hindsight, letting Newey go was a catastrophic error of judgement”

Oh, there were occasional bursts of speed (and even a faint title push in ’03) as the kindling of Williams’ magic reignited briefly. But the energy just ran out. In hindsight, not only was letting Newey go a catastrophic error of judgement but the structure and processes just did not keep up with the massive expansion of the teams in the 2000s. Keeping the plates spinning was more than Frank and Patrick could do, especially as there was no adequate succession plan. BMW left at the end of ’05 – Frank and Patrick having refused to sell them the team – and it gradually dwindled to almost nothing, a nomadic hostage to fortune, and hanging off the back of the grid by 2019, its absolute nadir.

The spirit of Williams was very much like that of Frank himself – inspirational reactions to crisis its speciality more than structured planning and strategy. It was an opportunistic entity and it exploited such opportunities brilliantly well in the freewheeling entrepreneurial days of F1 expansion in the ’80s and ’90s. It swashed and occasionally buckled but was incredibly charismatic out there on the ledge redefining F1’s performance parameters through sheer audacity. With a team of engineers running along behind, tidying up the occasional mess as best they could.

“We are in the s**t, Patrick,” Frank once smiled mischievously at his partner, “and I want to know what you are going to do to get us out of it.” Often as not, Patrick Head would do so with only a few bruised egos of those around him as the price.

Innovation became especially intensified under Newey, but the place adapted to new technology on an ad hoc basis. Newey’s insistence on active ride for the ’92 FW14B was the basis for perhaps the biggest performance advantage any car has ever had over the field. Paddy Lowe was the engineer charged with making the system work and he later recalled that even then, at the height of the team’s blockbusting success, there were precious few foundations being laid down. “We prided ourselves on being more ingenious than McLaren whereas Ron Dennis prided himself on getting more sponsors and spending it on making the car quicker. That was the particular satisfaction of the ’92 season at Williams, doing a dominant car on a relative shoestring.”

That was the team BMW joined, but perhaps it had been dazzled by what it assumed Williams was. The problem was that the automotive era of F1 was now getting into full swing, the size of the teams was growing exponentially and Williams was not structured in a way which allowed that expansion to be fully exploited. It remained a cottage industry team at its core even as the technology around it was being kept up to date and shoehorned in as best as could be managed. Team structures and processes quickly became beyond the control of Frank and Patrick alone and, besides, their energy was beginning to fade. Not unnaturally, after all those years and all the success. There was no coherent succession plan at the very time it was sorely needed.

BMW’s resources could have refashioned the team into the sort of McLaren-rivalling cutting-edge entity which was now needed, but they felt they required full control of the team to do that. Frank and Patrick, fiercely proud of what they’d achieved together, were not up for surrendering it all to a corporate entity with which they had next to no rapport. What success the partnership had achieved had been despite the personal relationships between the two entities. So BMW, just like Newey before it, left to continue its own adventure.

“It was as if Frank and Patrick didn’t forgive Mark Webber for not being Alan Jones in the 1980s”

Williams’ decline went into freefall after BMW’s departure. In the customer team nomad days it ran Cosworths, Toyotas, Cosworths again, Renaults and finally Mercedes. There were occasional escapes from mid-grid mediocrity, but mere bursts rather than signposts. A few times Mark Webber transcended the team’s circumstances – a contender for victory in Monaco ’06 until traffic and subsequent engine failure brought the dream to an end – but he left disappointed not only in the team’s level but also in the lack of simpatico from Frank and Patrick. It was as if they didn’t forgive him for not being Alan Jones and for it not still being the 1980s. It was emblematic of where the team was, with no clear future vision and deteriorating results shrinking the income. Everything at the factory was beginning to creak as rivals ramped up faster methods of production, better simulation tools, better processes. There remained pockets of great skill and ingenuity but there was nothing to pull it all together. Individuals would go way above and beyond, only to burn themselves out without the organisation to support them.

After Patrick sold up, Frank would remain for several years until recognising that he needed to step down from direct control. In between times new technical bosses were brought in (Sam Michael, Mike Coughlan, Mark Gillan, Pat Symonds, Paddy Lowe) and invariably later fired, unable to change the culture. Some of those weren’t really personally equipped to make the wholesale changes necessary, but neither were they to blame. Any attempt at modernising was met with strong resistance by those whose talent and experience had contributed to the great years. Fierce pride and disdain for change ran through the team.

Sir Frank stood down as Williams’ team principal in 2013 (he died in 2021) and had been there to witness a final and unlikely bit of glory as Pastor Maldonado somehow scored victory in the 2012 Spanish Grand Prix. But it was an outlier. Sir Frank’s daughter Claire assumed part of his role, with business guidance from Group CEO Mike O’Driscoll. The latter rescued the team from financial oblivion. But the underlying problems remained.

Toto Wolff had briefly been a shareholder of the team, a man with all the vision, financial, racing and leadership smarts to have modernised Williams. But he was recruited by Mercedes before he could begin doing that. But there was a nice consolation. Williams would receive Mercedes power units for the new hybrid formula taking effect from 2014. Such was the massive advantage conferred by that PU in the first couple of years, Williams enjoyed its best seasons in ages, finishing third in the 2014 and ’15 constructors’ championship – despite all the old limitations. But an idea of how it might be when engine performance converged (as it was about to) was evident when looking at the actual lap time gap between a Mercedes and a Williams-Mercedes (around 1.1sec in 2015).

Between 2015 and ’19 all of the other teams inserted themselves into that gap. Even worse, the big formula change of 2017 exposed a serious limitation in Williams’ aero department. By 2018 the deficit to the front was 2.8sec, rising to 3.4sec the next year. “Our approach to aerodynamic development is many years behind,” said tech director Paddy Lowe in 2018, “and we can’t just switch it on like a light switch.”

It wasn’t only aero, though. It was almost everything else too. The team was essentially two decades behind and that fact had come home to roost.