The gizmo-laden Williams F1 car that allowed Prost to retire on top

The Williams FW15C of 1993 was one of the most dominant Formula 1 cars of all time, at least in terms of pure one-lap pace. Between them, Alain Prost and Damon Hill secured pole position for 15 of the 16 races, losing out only at the finale in Australia. And yet somehow ‘only’ 10 were converted into race wins.

The man who made life so difficult on Sundays and who also took that stray pole in Adelaide was Ayrton Senna. The Brazilian conjured up five race victories for McLaren on days when either something went awry for Williams or his sheer brilliance allowed him to outperform a rival car that should have been quicker. In addition Michael Schumacher, building up the momentum with Benetton that would see him win the title in 1994, also managed to steal a victory from the clutches of Williams.

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The FW15C remains perhaps the most sophisticated F1 car ever seen in terms of the tools available to its drivers. They included active ride, traction control, automatic shifting, ABS, power-assisted brakes and power steering, and a drag-based push-to-pass option. Meanwhile CVT – constantly variable transmission – was being tested for 1994. The car was supposed to have raced in 1992, but that year Nigel Mansell proved to be so fast with the interim FW14B that the new model was held back.

“We weren’t expecting the performance dominance that 14B showed,” recalls former Williams chief designer Adrian Newey. “The original intention was to introduce the 15 for the start of the 1992 European season, and then go from there. But through winter testing our performance looked pretty strong and we started to feel that actually 14B had the speed to win the championship. So our most likely weakness was going to be reliability. And on that basis I think in January we stopped all design and manufacture of 15A, and instead just concentrated on making 14B as reliable as we could.”

At the time Williams led the way with its pursuit of high-tech gizmos under technical director Patrick Head.

“You could wake up at 3am and think of doing ABS, come in in the morning and start work on it, and deliver it in a few weeks,” says then control engineer Paddy Lowe. “Traction control was one line of software actually, the core part of it. It just took a few weeks to put together.

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Prost, Newey and race engineer David Brown were a formidable combination that earned pole for all but three races in 1993

“It was an amazing time, we did so much with very little resource. We didn’t do it all that well, all the time, but we did it well enough to make quick cars and win races. So it was exciting. The FW15 was essentially a properly packaged version of the suspension with the same concept as 14B. The 15 was the first car that was designed from the outset to be active, and only be active.”

“It was a faster car than 14B,” says Newey. “It had more downforce and better integration of the active, and we developed the active in terms of both hardware and software.”

That helps to explain why some of 1992’s lap records fell despite rule changes to reduce the cars’ track and tyre width. It may have all been done with the minimal computing power, but FW15C was a very impressive machine for its time.

"If Nigel did a lap time you knew that was the speed of the car. Whether it was qualifying or wet winter testing in Ricard, he just always went 110%. Whereas in testing with Alain you didn’t know where the car was, because he never really delivered it until he needed to" Paddy Lowe

“The components were manufactured to our specifications,” says Williams race engineer David Brown. “Nothing was turn-key, it was all specifically for the job. And the 15C was a really, really good car. It was fun. There were times when it was a proper headache because of the complexity. If something did go wrong, then it would tend to be a big problem.

“As an organisation, the people in R&D and the people who did the electronics created systems to enable them to better problem-solve, and to diagnose issues with the car so much better in 1993 than we did in 1992. So we had fewer of them. But if you let the technology get out of your grasp, it was really bad news. And I think a lot of teams found that out!”

Mansell had won the 1992 title at the Hungarian GP in August, but he didn’t stay around to defend it as team-mate to the incoming Prost, who had spent a season on the sidelines. With the champion departing for a new challenge in the USA, and Riccardo Patrese committed to a move to Benetton, Frank Williams had to find a new driver. After some procrastination he finally settled on Hill, the team’s established test driver, who had logged some extra F1 mileage with Brabham.

“He was our main test and development driver through 1992,” says Newey. “And he seemed to do a very good and very competent job, and looked pretty quick. The engineers, including myself, lobbied Frank – ‘Why don’t you just put Damon in the car?’”

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After impressing engineers with his performances in testing, Hill was parachuted into a race seat alongside Prost

“There was this big debate, was he ready for it and so on,” says Lowe. “I think to me, it was a no-brainer, because he was clearly really quick in testing and very disciplined and professional, and calm as well.”

Williams finally gave Hill a call one Friday evening and asked him to come to the Didcot factory.

“When I got there it wasn’t, ‘Oh, I really would love to have you in the car’,” Hill recalls. “It was, ‘There’s one or two people here who think you’d do a good job. And I have a lot of faith in my engineers’. He never said, ‘I think you can do it!’”

After a year out of the cockpit, and with no prior experience of active suspension and many of the other systems on the car, it took Prost time to find his feet. He also brought a calculated approach that was unfamiliar to the team.

“If Nigel did a lap time you knew that was the speed of the car,” says Lowe. “Whether it was qualifying or wet winter testing in Ricard, he just always went 110%. Whereas in testing with Alain you didn’t know where the car was, because he never really delivered it until he needed to. But his feedback was good.”

Come the first race in South Africa Prost was on it, winning from pole, while Hill had a frustrating first-lap spin. However second time out at a rain-hit Interlagos Prost went off on slicks.

“Alain came on the radio and said, ‘I’m going to pit’,” recalls Brown. “I said, ‘Yes, but be careful as you come over the brow into the pitlane because it’s very slippery’. And he misunderstood me, or misheard me, and stayed out. And afterwards he said, ‘I thought you were telling me to stay out!’ ‘Why would I tell you to stay out?’ Somehow those extra few words were enough to make him think he had to stay out, which of course was the wrong thing to do.

“It was a shame really, because he was having a good race and it would have been nice for us to win that one as well. As it was, we broke the car…”

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Head feels Williams lost the European Grand Prix by failing to adjust the rideheight for the wet conditions

Prost’s mistake left the door open for Senna to win his home grand prix and demonstrate to the world that he was there to take advantage of any slips by his old rival. Senna was to get another chance, again in the wet, at Donington Park. Both Williams drivers endured a nightmare afternoon of swapping back and forth from wets to slicks.

“I’m always reading about the brilliance of Ayrton Senna at Donington,” says Head. “It was actually the stupidity of us! The problem was that the active car ran 3-4mm above the deck to get optimum downforce. And the rain was so heavy at Donington that it was more than 3-4mm deep, so our drivers were suddenly finding that they were flying off the track like on a surfboard.

“We had the knobs in the cockpit where we could have got the drivers to raise the car, but we were too stupid to understand quite what was happening. I’m amazed that we finished second and third with our 13 pitstops!”

As the year progressed Hill also became more of a force, taking his first pole in France and coming close a couple of times before logging a hat-trick of wins in Hungary, Belgium and Italy

“We should have won that race,” Hill insists. “I was too inexperienced. Alain was slightly unsure of the car, so he didn’t have the confidence to stick with slicks when he should have stuck with slicks. Neither of us did. And we had no communication to the pits at all, it seemed to me, there was no kind of ‘we need to have a conversation about what’s going on’.

“It was just simply, ‘I’m coming in’, or ‘don’t come in’, or ‘stay out’. It was an absolute nightmare. You’d come down the pitlane and nobody would be ready with tyres. It was chaos. And I will forever kick myself for letting Ayrton through quite so easily. But after my shaky start to the year I thought it was probably best to just stay out of trouble!”

After that disastrous Donington race Prost knuckled down, winning six of the next seven races. The only loss came in Monaco, where a silly jumped start and subsequent penalty again opened the door for Senna. Starts were a regular problem for Prost, who perhaps didn’t grab hold of the FW15C in the way Mansell had with the FW14B.

“Prost had a real struggle with making that car pull away,” confirms former Williams chief mechanic and later team manager Dickie Stanford. “He just didn’t give it enough revs. Each time it stalled, the mechanic had to go down inside the bodywork, right to the front of the gearbox, put a tool in and get it into neutral manually.

“I’m not sure Alain understood everything about the car. Nigel understood it because he did all the development work at Lotus and we ran a system in the late 1980s. He knew what to expect from the system.”

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Hockenheim was one of several races where Prost struggled to launch from the line effectively and ceded the lead by Turn 1

As the year progressed Hill also became more of a force, taking his first pole in France and coming close a couple of times before logging a hat-trick of wins in Hungary, Belgium and Italy. Prost unexpectedly found himself facing strong competition from within his own camp.

“At Monza I tangled with Ayrton and then I had to charge back because I had front wing damage or something,” says Hill. “And I was catching Alain and they came on the radio and said, ‘Just make sure you don’t push’. We’d already had this thing in the French GP, where I was behind Alain and he was telling the pits, ‘Tell Damon to slow down’, because he didn’t want to push too much. I was getting instructions about how Alain’s got to win, this sort of thing.

“And then in Monza I was so pumped up and I was catching Alain and they said on the radio, ‘Don’t race Alain’, or something like that. So I came on the radio and said, ‘Tell Alain I will race’. And my engineer John Russell came back and said, ‘Thank you, Damon’. I was being told not to race. But I was catching Alain, and I was thinking to myself, ‘What am I going to do now?’ And then his engine blew up. So that solved that problem!”

Schumacher scored his single victory in Portugal on a day when Prost played the percentage game and accepted the second place that would secure his fourth world championship. Senna won the final two races of the season in Japan and Australia, essentially on merit. By then the FW15C had reached the ultimate in terms of the efficiency of its various high-tech systems.

“Alain and Damon had a bit of a battle going on there,” says Brown. “And it was the battle of the ABS systems, they were braking incredibly late. It was marvellous to watch. They were just crazy in the braking areas.

“Even earlier during the year, they would complain about a sore neck, because in those days, we didn’t have all the headrests that you have on a modern car, and they would get really sore muscles in the back of their necks. They couldn’t hold themselves up.”

Adelaide was to be the last hurrah for most of the gizmos perfected on FW15C as a ban on driver aids was imposed for 1994. It was also to be Prost’s final F1 start, and he remains one of the few drivers to walk away from the sport as world champion and not return.

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Hill posed a stronger challenge to Prost as the year went on, before the Frenchman bowed out in Adelaide

“I think in truth he was never pushed that hard,” says Newey. “And that’s no disrespect to Damon in any way. But it was Damon’s first proper season. I know he had driven the Brabham, but he was getting himself up to speed. To some extent Alain was from a slightly earlier generation, where you didn’t take any more risks than you needed to get the job done, which was admirable. And that was the way he drove the car.”

For Hill, the 1993 season was a springboard to the world championship that he would finally secure three years later.

“He’s had a lot of criticism over the years, and at the time,” says Lowe. “It’s funny how some of these heroes get in a car, and they make all sorts of mistakes, and that’s always sort of fine. But when you get somebody who doesn’t throw it away every afternoon, they’re considered boring! Damon stepping into what was a top team, and delivering points straight away, that’s always a sign of great quality.”

The FW15C represents both the end of an era – for Prost and F1’s regulations – and the start of a new one in the shape of Williams’s next world champion.

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Hill emerged as a winner in a breakthrough 1993 season that would set him up as a future title challenger

Damon Hill on the FW15C

Before landing the Williams race seat for 1993, Damon Hill conducted a lot of the testing of active ride and other trick systems for the team with the FW14 and 14B. However, even for a man used to the odd quirky issue, an early run in FW15C at Barcelona was something of a rude awakening.

“What you used to do was press the downshift button while you were on the straight,” he recalls. “And then the moment you hit the brakes, the engine would start changing down, as the revs dropped.

“Only this time some Renault guy forgot to put the bar in to stop it changing down before the revs had dropped. Down the straight I pressed the button, and it started changing downwards immediately. And then the revs just went up, up, up and eventually the engine just completely exploded. That was my first lap, and it threw me off the road…”

Despite that early setback it was soon apparent that the car was going to be hard to beat.

"The question was asked whether or not we were wise to show our true potential? Because inevitably people would try and rein us in. So we always tested with 60kg of fuel on board" Damon Hill

“It was blisteringly quick, and better than everyone else’s car out there,” says Hill of the FW15C. “There were some sort of similarities you could draw to the Red Bull today. The question was asked whether or not we were wise to show our true potential? Because inevitably people would try and rein us in. So we always tested with 60kg of fuel on board. No one ever did a low fuel run.

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“The Renault was the best engine. And it was amazing because they kept coming with upgrades, the engines kept getting more powerful, the fuel was getting better. Everything was going in the right direction.”

Hill loved the gizmos, but they were taken off for testing of the FW15D, the car that paved the way for the FW16 of 1994.

“I was completely lost because I hardly did any testing on a passive car at Williams at all,” he says. “I’d driven a Brabham, but that was the first and only passive F1 car I’d driven. Ayrton was asking me, ‘What is this like?’ I said, ‘Don’t ask me, because I've been driving an active car all the time, I thought you would know!’”