Tech secrets of a Formula 1 legend

Twenty-five years ago Williams built what would become one of the most dominant Formula 1 cars that grand prix racing has ever seen, allowing Nigel Mansell to seal the 1992 title at the 11th of 16 rounds - a record for early-clinching that has only been bettered once, by Michael Schumacher's 2002 triumph for Ferrari.

The Williams FW14B was overseen by technical director Patrick Head and chief designer Adrian Newey, but it's worth recalling too that on his first stint with Williams a young Paddy Lowe also played a key role as head of the active ride programme. It was an impressive array of talent.

The active ride system was the beating heart of FW14B, designed in essence to provide a stable platform for the superb aerodynamic package created by Newey.

Under Head's direction it took years of blood, toil, tears and sweat from the rest of the team's engineers and test drivers Mark Blundell and Damon Hill to get the system to the point where it could be raced reliably and effectively, after a few false starts along the way.

"We had a nice little team on the active programme," Head recalls. "And some of the people are still at Williams.

"Credit for the active system and its reliability has to be given to people like Simon Wells, who's now general manager at Williams. He ran the prototype and test department, and did most of the work on the struts and aeration and de-aeration, and all that sort of side. He didn't just do what he was told to do, he got on and worked it out for himself.

"David Lang designed all the dampers, but also designed all the active ride components and tricky stuff. Such is the nature of things that they never go down in history."

And then there was Lowe: "He joined us in 1987. He was first interviewed by Frank Dernie, and Frank said to me, 'I've interviewed a guy who seems to be quite a bright bloke, and we could bring him in on the active programme'. So we had a second interview, where I was present.

"Then we had the debacle of active ride in 1988, when we had to take it off the car for all sorts of reasons. Frank left at the end of 1988, so I then put Paddy on the active programme, while having oversight of it myself. Paddy was a software man, so he was very good at writing algorithms."

While the point of the project was to optimise his aero, Newey had little to do with the active hardware, other than engineering cars at races.

"Adrian never really had any involvement in the active system at all," Head confirms. "And by that I'm not trying to take anything away from him. He wasn't really interested in it.

"When we raced the car he was interested in its capability and optimising its capability at the track. He was very familiar with all the functionality of the active car, but he didn't play any part in the development of it, mainly because he was of the view that we should be developing a different system.

"He was in favour of what was in truth a better system, but which didn't exist at the time - the one that McLaren ended up the '93 season with.

"Our system came from Automotive Products way back in 1985, and we'd developed it from there. When you're 95% down the line on the system you've been using and at point zero on a different system, we decided to develop the one we had."

Despite those misgivings it was nevertheless sophisticated: "The moment the steering wheel started turning it pumped oil into the outside and took it out of the inside, so it actually didn't let the car roll and then come back again.

"Under braking as soon as the brake pressure lifted up it pumped oil into the front and out of the back to stop the car pitching down at the front and up at the back. All of these things were variable, so it was quite complex."

Lowe, Wells and Lang, with Blundell and latterly Hill doing most of the driving, worked to the point where by the end of 1991 the 'active' car was clearly ready to race. One of the biggest challenges was to convince a sceptical Mansell to get fully onboard.

"Nigel had experience of active ride at Lotus, and was a bit negative," says Head. "Not so much about performance, but about reliability and safety.

"The FW14 was a good car, no doubt about that, but we were seen off by Senna and McLaren at Suzuka at the end of '91, so we thought we'd have to lift our game.

"And by that time the active car was beginning to do better lap times than the passive car, and delivering the promise that was always seen theoretically.

"In Australia we actually went as far as flying an active car out there, with the thought that we might race it, in order to help us make our decision.

"There was a lot of trying to persuade ourselves whether we were just trying to be too clever by half, which is what we were in 1988: in the aftermath of losing Honda we tried too hard really, and gave ourselves too many engineering challenges. We didn't really want to repeat that.

"So we were always in a position where we thought let's give it a go in the first couple of races [of 1992], and then sit down and have a think if we need to convert back."

Mansell readily acknowledges that he was no fan of the concept, but as the 1992 season approached he was more amenable to the idea - given that it was now clear that it would make the car quicker.

"Going back to '88, at Silverstone it was so awful we changed the car back to passive," he says. "And I came second in the rain. Obviously I wasn't there to see the progress that happened in the next couple of years [when he switched to Ferrari], but when I did drive it again it was still, shall we say, very good at times, and extremely awful at times. And it was very dangerous too.

"But the crunch came in '91, of course. You have to put all your eggs in one basket, and say if we really want to go for the championship, we've got to trust it. Can we develop something which then might be better overall? It was a very difficult decision.

"We had a test and I said I'd race it as long as there's a fail-safe system, where it just drops onto solid blocks of suspension, so it doesn't throw you off the circuit into the barriers - not forgetting that the barriers were very close to the edge of the circuit then. Because what I didn't want to do was lose my life in a potentially fantastic car. What's the point if you're not here any more?

"So a big decision was taken, and we went that route."

Initially Williams left some wiggle room. The plan was to start the 1992 season with an upgraded FW14B, which could be converted to non-active spec if something went badly wrong. Meanwhile the original idea was that FW15, which wouldn't have that option, would be introduced later in the year.

"We started work on the 15 towards the end of '91," says Head. "And it was intended to be the '92 car, but we decided to start the season with the 14B. With the 14B it was a relatively straightforward conversion from 'off' to 'on', whereas the 15 was a committed active car, with no either/or. However, we seemed to be so strong, and thought, 'Maybe we don't need to bring the 15 in this year'.

"I think the 14B was a good car, it was just an add-on improvement to the 14. Apart from the bulges around the actuator and the top of the front pushrods, you couldn't really see a lot of difference from the outside. We added ABS during the year. It was a very clever system, and extremely expensive, but it worked very well."

Indeed the whole package worked superbly well, and a run of five wins at the start of the season gave Mansell the momentum that led to him clinching the title in August. Head recalls that there was little pressure to develop the car's aerodynamics, something that seems unthinkable given the pace at which R&D moves at today.

"What was interesting is that we did almost no aero development at all," he says. "I suppose we didn't have to. We were sort of working on the 15, and that was ready very early for 1993.

"At the time Adrian quite rightly was not impressed with our quarter scale windtunnel, and was using [one in] Southampton. Because we didn't need to we really didn't use it very much, and meanwhile we pushed the button on building our own bigger scale tunnel."

One of the more intriguing aspects of the 1992 season was the huge leap in performance made by Mansell relative to team-mate Riccardo Patrese. They had been evenly matched the previous year, but the Briton was able to extract much more from the active FW14B, and there was a clear explanation why.

"Although there was feed forward in the software, it was mostly a reactive system," Head explains. "The driver would turn in, there would be load transfer from the inside to the outside, that would make the car start to roll, and the system would correct that.

"So there was a slightly uncertain bit on corner entry, which didn't give total confidence feedback to the driver. Nigel worked that out and was of the type that he was prepared to ignore the first milliseconds, whereas Riccardo liked instant feedback from the car."

"At the transition from certain speeds there was a quirk in it," says Mansell. "When you went over certain bumps and you had the air attach and reattach under the car, the car always had to respond to that gap being squashed down, so the aerodynamics would be consistent, then volatile for a short period of time, and then consistent again.

"It was about having the trust and the ability, strength-wise, to catch the car in the middle of the corner when it tried to spin on you. Back then we didn't have power steering.

"Having great upper body strength, I found I was able to catch the car in the middle of the corner, and then having - well not total trust, but trust in my ability to give it a go - I found I could go round the corners quite bit quicker than Riccardo at times."

Head concedes that the team could have done more to make Patrese comfortable.

"It was a pity in a way because actually they were very alike on performance, if not results, in '91," he admits.

"But when you got to '92 and the active car there was a very definite gap between Nigel and Riccardo.

"It would have been nice if we'd spent a little bit more time trying to understand exactly what Riccardo didn't like, and sort that out. As a driver he was just as quick as Nigel."

To be fair to Patrese even the 1993 world champion would find the even more complex FW15 a challenge, as Head recalls.

"If you talk to Alain Prost about the car in 1993, he liked its performance, but he found it very difficult to understand because it wasn't the same as the cars he was used to running previously. He didn't like the fact that he didn't understand every aspect of it."