Interview: Williams looks to the future

Former champions Williams are celebrating 30 seasons in the sport this year as well as 500 Grand Prix appearances but the boss's reaction to his team's achievements is, pun intended, typically frank.

"It's just numbers, isn't it," he told Reuters.

"I learnt quite a while ago that if you start to let the word pride get into your head, you will fall on your face very quickly.

"You are only important in F1 as long as Max and Bernie allow you to be important," smiled the 65-year-old Englishman, referring to FIA President Max Mosley and Formula One's commercial supremo Bernie Ecclestone.

Williams, now Toyota-powered but still fiercely independent, have plenty to boast about but they have also had a few setbacks over the years.

They finished last year in fourth place, thanks to McLaren being stripped of all their constructors' points for a spying controversy, after a dismal 2006 in which they slipped to eighth with Cosworth engines.

They last won a race in 2004.

For a team who have won nine constructors' championships and seven drivers' titles, and who finished 2002 and 2003 as runners-up, the fall from grace has been hard but they are fighting back.

The new FW30 car has looked quick and reliable in pre-season testing in the hands of Germany's Nico Rosberg and Japan's Kazuki Nakajima.

"We've been struggling for a few years to get back right to the top and we are way off that," said Williams, the longest-serving team principal in Formula One.

"We know what we must do, get back to the top again and be a serious player. But it takes a little while to do that and we recognise that. Life is tough up there but that's where we need to get to in the next few years."

Williams have run a series of liveries in pre-season testing, celebrating their anniversary and highlighting their record in figures - 233,787 km raced, 34,651 km led, 2,552.5 points scored, 129 fastest laps, 125 pole positions, 113 victories and so on.

One of them carried handwritten messages from the seven champions - Australian Alan Jones, Finland's Keke Rosberg, Brazilian Nelson Piquet, France's Alain Prost, Canadian Jacques Villeneuve and Britons Nigel Mansell and Damon Hill.

"I was the first," wrote Jones.

"Thanks Frank", declared 1996 champion Hill.

The official 500th race should be at Monza in Italy in September while the team's 50,000th racing lap could come in Barcelona in April.

The anniversary of March 8, 1986, when Williams suffered the car crash in the south of France that left him paralysed from the neck down and confined to a wheelchair, is rarely mentioned.

"Sometimes I might think about it," he said. "But I'm not a sentimental man."

Nor is team co-founder Patrick Head, the title-winning designer whose FW07 'ground effect' car brought the team's first win in 1979 with Switzerland's Clay Regazzoni at Silverstone.

"I have to say I probably would be put down as an old cynic or whatever, but all this stuff is a bit the product of our marketing and media department," said Head when asked about the team's three decades in Formula One.

"It actually isn't the 30th anniversary of Williams Grand Prix engineering because we started on the 28th of March 1977," he added.

"But when I pointed that out, they said 'Ah, well, but you were running a March that year'. So it's the anniversary of when we first started running our own chassis. But that car was called the FW06. So what was the FW01?

"And the only reason I'd know whether I'd been to something like 500 Grands Prix is that Bernie very kindly gave me a bit of assayed silver or whatever at Spa last year with the number 500 on it."

Head felt the decision to celebrate the team's achievements lay more in the pain of 2006 and the increasing domination of manufacturers.

"All this stuff about the manufacturer teams, it's like Williams are a minnow," he said.

"So I think somebody in our organisation felt that it might be a good idea to remind people that we have been a fairly significant part of Formula One for quite a long time."

They intend to continue being so. Williams are hopeful that the season-opener in Australia on March 16 will show the car's promise to be real.

"I don't really know where we are going to line up," said Head. "All I know is that general comments in the team about our car and the feedback from the track is that it's quite a bit better than the FW29 from last year.

"Ultimately our target is to compete with the front-runners, and the front-runners at the moment look to be Ferrari and McLaren."