How the cocktail for F1's superteams became outdated

Since Stirling Moss and Tony Brooks spearheaded Vanwall's charge to the inaugural Formula 1 constructors' crown of 1958, the badges of just 14 other teams have been affixed to the trophy. Ferrari (16), Williams (nine), McLaren (eight), Lotus (seven), Mercedes (seven) and Red Bull (four) account for some 51 of the 63 titles. Like it or loathe it, grand prix racing is a breeding ground for one-team supremacy. Seemingly, one unstoppable force is only usurped by the next. What is it then that creates these 'superteams'?

Once such 'superteam' was Williams, which enjoyed a meteoric rise from the ashes of the hand-to-mouth Frank Williams Racing Cars and then Wolf-Williams efforts to become the most potent squad of the early 1980s.

When co-founders Frank Williams and Patrick Head dispensed with March 761 machinery after the first season of the new-look team in 1977, in came genesis - the FW06. With Alan Jones as the sole driver, Williams wound up ninth in the points. But, as part of a two-pronged attack alongside the Australian, new recruit Clay Regazzoni scored the team's first win in the 1979 British Grand Prix. Polesitter and early leader Jones was eliminated by a cracked water pipe, and Regazzoni picked up the pieces at Silverstone aboard the FW07 in only the car's fifth race.

The team was second in the table come season's end, then arrived the FW07B with which Jones and new team-mate Carlos Reutemann would guide Williams to its maiden constructors' championship triumph in 1980, then another in 1981.

Loughborough University automotive engineering graduate Neil Oatley walked through the Williams door in 1977 as employee number 13, but the ingredients for the glory that was soon to follow weren't immediately apparent. "A lot of my friends who were interested in racing thought I was an idiot going to work there," he recalls.

Oatley credits the "wonderfully talented and inspiring" duo of Williams and Head as the "driving force" that propelled the team up the order. But all was not so straightforward when it came to finding a driver. Williams had wanted to sign 1975 British F3 champion Gunnar Nilsson as his leading light. But the Swede turned down the deal, leaving second-choice Jones to occupy the seat. Rather fortuitously as it would turn out, Jones would become the driver around which the team and its success would be galvanised.

"Alan had a tremendous relationship with both Frank and Patrick," explains Oatley. "They socialised outside of the racing environment. There was a very strong link there; Frank and Patrick were completely focused on Alan's car. That gelled and drove the team forward."

With Jones in place as the definitive number one, that left Williams and Head to cultivate the necessary management and design environment to take the team to the top.

"I've never found Patrick particularly gruff," says Oatley. "He certainly didn't suffer fools gladly. If you did something wrong or failed to deliver on what he thought you were capable of, he would certainly make you aware of that fact. Both him and Frank were incredibly competitive individuals - very driven. They were hungry and relatively young at that stage.

"Ron was very good at getting the money side sorted out. He brought the right people together to run the team. John was very good at spending the money; he was a really gifted engineer" Tim Wright

"By the start of 1979, we were probably at around 100 staff, so it had rapidly expanded. Because of the inspiration from Frank and Patrick, they managed to absorb people and inspire them in each of the areas of the company to create a mass of people that worked well together and pushed forward at the same time."

Oatley adds that what transformed the fortunes of the Didcot-based squad stemmed from Williams and Head's relative youth - they were in their mid to late thirties come the start of the 1980s.

With the vigour to work around the clock, Head could take the ground-effect concept pioneered by Colin Chapman with Lotuses 78 and 79 and take it a stage further with the FW07, "engineering the car very well to sustain a level of competitiveness over many years".

It seemed, for the rest of the decade, that a fresh-faced two-person leadership was what was required to rise to F1 prominence. Project Four was a case in point. Founded in 1976 by Ron Dennis, it enjoyed decent Marlboro-backed success at F2 and F3 level before joining Osella in constructing the non-works BMW M1s of the Procar championship. On an upward trajectory, Dennis hired designer John Barnard and in 1980 - led by Philip Morris, parent company of Marlboro - Project Four took over the running of the then uncompetitive McLaren team.

Under the stewardship of Dennis and Barnard (pictured above with Niki Lauda and Tyler Alexander), also both in their mid-thirties and, with TAG-branded turbocharged Porsche engines nestled in the middle of the MP4 (McLaren Project 4) series of cars, the 1984 and 1985 constructors' titles fell to the Woking concern. Over the next two seasons, the success swung back in Williams's favour, before Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna (and latterly Gerhard Berger) ensured a McLaren clean sweep of teams' wins between 1988 and 1991.

McLaren's former designer Tim Wright explains why the combination of Dennis and Barnard - which lasted until Barnard's departure amid acrimony for Ferrari in 1987 - steered the team back to the top.

"Ron was very good at getting the money side sorted out," says Wright. "He brought the right people together to run the team. John was very good at spending the money; he was a really gifted engineer.

"I remember a lot of arguments at the time between Ron and John, because John just wanted to spend a lot more money than Ron was bringing in. Ultimately, he was right. That sort of taught Ron a lesson. They were extremely fortunate because Ron already had Marlboro under his wing. They made everything possible. With TAG coming in as well, it all gelled."

Oatley joined McLaren in 1987, working with Wright for four years, and can now reflect on why the Williams/Head and Dennis/Barnard pairings worked with such devastating effect.

"The characters of Ron and John and Frank and Patrick were quite similar in their ruthlessness to be competitive and the hunger for success," says Oatley. "They were all relatively young and looking to establish themselves in the wider world of grand prix racing and instil what they'd been previously doing. They did that to great effect.

"All four of them are incredibly competitive individuals in everything they do, not just in their sport. That drive and hunger was a level above most other human beings and that's why they were able to push forward. They held those beliefs in themselves and their own ability at a higher level than a lot of the other teams on the grid. That's why they, in both cases, established themselves and became successful actually very quickly."

But speaking to Autosport in the week that Lewis Hamilton would eclipse Michael Schumacher and score a record-breaking 92nd F1 triumph in the 2020 Portuguese GP, Oatley and Wright reckon the formula for creating a modern 'superteam' has changed from what they witnessed first-hand.

The pair point to Mercedes and the managerial set-up of Toto Wolff and non-executive chairman Niki Lauda, but also how this needed to be matched with the engineering prowess of Paddy Lowe, Bob Bell, Andy Cowell and James Allison as being crucial to building a team that has won every constructors' title since 2014. Naturally they both single out Hamilton, around which the whole team pivots in the model of Jones at Williams.

It's not a wholly dissimilar set-up from the one employed by Ferrari during of the height of its powers at the start of the new millennium. Its run of constructors' titles between 1999 and 2004 was led by a team of Jean Todt, Ross Brawn, Rory Byrne and Schumacher.

"Although we were on an upward stretch at that time when Adrian came along, he added the icing on the cake and made us" Neil Oatley

"There are a lot of similarities from an engineering point of view," says Wright, who worked with Brawn and Byrne during his tenure as a Benetton race then test engineer. "Ross had a very calm head and again brought the right people together, much as Ron did with John. Rory was very inventive, a bit of a wild inventor, but Ross kept him under control."

Oatley explains that the mould of Ferrari and then Mercedes shows how the composition of the great teams has evolved.

"It's incredibly difficult for one person to have a significant effect now," he says. "Go back 20 years, Adrian Newey certainly had a very big effect on McLaren when he arrived in 1997. We were much more successful the year after."

Newey, a contemporary of Wright at Copersucar-sponsored Fittipaldi, developed Oatley's MP4/12 before setting to work on its successor, in which Mika Hakkinen would win the drivers' title and - with team-mate David Coulthard - restore McLaren to the top of the constructors' standings for the first time since 1991.

"Although we were on an upward stretch at that time when Adrian came along, he added the icing on the cake and made us," reckons Oatley. "It's certainly very different today. When I joined Williams, all Patrick had to do was steer me! But now, the same person will have to sort 200 people, so it's a completely different way of working."

It's that staggering growth - Mercedes counts 950 staff at its Brackley site alone - that has diminished the direct impact that the likes of Williams/Head and Dennis/Barnard are able to have on a contemporary F1 team. Perhaps the exception to the recent rule comes with the Newey and Christian Horner-led supremacy of Red Bull in the 2010s, only for it to be replaced at the front four years later with the dawn of the turbo-hybrid era by the Silver Arrows.

Oatley, still operating as McLaren's design and development director, adds: "I wouldn't necessarily say the people that were successful in the 1970s or 1980s would immediately be successful in the environment they would have to work in today. The way of working is much different.

"Both Frank and Patrick and John and Ron were very hands-on people, which is a lot easier to do when you've got a relatively small company of up to 100 people. But when you're talking 600-plus people, you get the different approaches, and then you have to filter through a pyramid of other people, rather than having that direct contact.

"The attributes of the people that are successful are probably not the same now as they would have been 30 or 40 years ago. Now, it's incredibly difficult for one person to have such an influence."

One example is Lowe's short-lived return to Williams to replace Pat Symonds as its technical director in 2017 (in his first spell, he had developed the software for its ultra-successful active suspension programme before leaving for McLaren in 1993). During Lowe's term, the team slumped to the foot of the standings, with the FW42 challenger of 2019 arriving too late for the first week of pre-season testing. By March of that year, he had taken the fall. Although Lowe's initial leave of absence was announced on the grounds of personal reasons, come June he departed for good.

"Paddy had worked for us at McLaren for a long time," says Oatley. "He was a really key part of how we developed through those years. Obviously, he also had a very strong influence on how Mercedes went from a mediocre team to a very strong team.

"I'm not quite sure what went wrong at Williams, to be honest. I know people who have joined the team subsequently and felt they were just way behind the times in their approach to the technical side. It's something where you can't just flick a switch and suddenly go from one year to another and fix everything. It's a hard slog to overcome all the sins of your past and rectify all the problems you've got. Paddy wasn't there long enough to change the culture of the place."

The notion that the 'superteams' of F1 can no longer be led by just two people is something Wright agrees with. Those days are "long gone, unfortunately", he adds.

"Now you're so hemmed in by a multitude of regulations that there is no silver bullet to change the performance of the car. You have to increment tiny amounts on every single component that's on the car to make it more competitive" Neil Oatley

"Obviously, there has to be somebody in charge at the head," Wright explains. "But there are just so many different spheres now to an F1 car that it's got to be one person leading a huge team of other engineers. The problem is nowadays things are so complex - not just the cars themselves but the engines, everything. No one or two people can keep on top of it and get the best out of it. As soon as computers came in and all the big electronics, it required people with that specific area of expertise to be involved."

As Wright alludes to, the current nature of F1 car design has also evolved beyond what created the 'superteams' of a few decades ago. Although there are fleeting exceptions such as the double diffuser of 2009 and the F-duct from the following season, the concept of silver bullets that suddenly find chunky performance gains don't co-exist comfortably with the increasingly restrictive regulations.

Oatley expands, saying: "Now you're so hemmed in by a multitude of regulations that there is no silver bullet to change the performance of the car. You have to increment tiny amounts on every single component that's on the car to make it more competitive, which is what all the teams are doing. It's having the tools and making the right decisions on how you direct those incremental gains that brings you forward again.

"When you lose your way a little bit on how you're designing the car and developing the aerodynamics, there's never one thing that you press the button on and suddenly it's fixed again. It's just trying to bring together solutions to lots of problems that certainly makes you become more competitive. It's not a quick process. You have to work with the zeitgeist, with whatever's around you at that point in time."

Wright is more specific. He reckons it takes "at least three years" for current teams to identify and rectify problems before they can truly have designs on prolonged success.

If there was a blueprint for what makes an F1 'superteam', every competitor would try to mimic it. But such is the rate of evolution, and given that nothing can be unlearned, even with the cost-cutting and downforce-slashing new rules that will come into play for 2022, it's unwise to expect Mercedes to be toppled any time soon.

"The new regulations," says Oatley, "it's chipping away rather than really hitting it with a sledgehammer. It will have an effect on the level of incremental changes you can make. It will bring the grid closer together, but all the good teams have, over the years, accumulated incredibly talented people in good positions."

In lieu of a clean sheet of paper for the regulations, and in an era where a two-person system won't cut it, are there any takeaways from the dominant forces of F1's past? What, if anything, can be learned from the precedents set by Williams and McLaren in their 1980s pomp?

"The will to win, the competitiveness, the hunger for success," replies Oatley. "For the teams at the back of the grid, perhaps they haven't quite got that dynamic and real push to win that the people at the front have. That's what makes the difference. It's very much the case now with Mercedes."

For now, with Hamilton and company emphatically on top, it's a matter of waiting. Waiting to see who steps up to the mantle, evolves the formula, to become the next great grand prix 'superteam'.