How an underrated Williams proved its worth beyond a brief competition career

“It tests every aspect of a driver. It doesn’t feel old, it just feels like a light, nimble race car.”

Aston Martin Autosport BRDC Award winner Joseph Loake is a fan of the MotorSport Vision-run Formula 2 car, or Williams JPH1B, and he’s not alone. Despite the fact that the car is nearly as old as the 19-year-old and the series it was built for finished 12 years ago, only now is the Williams being retired.

It’s been the backbone of the Award, now run in conjunction with Silverstone, since 2010 and has helped the judges led by Derek Warwick pick winners that include F1 stars George Russell and Lando Norris, Formula E aces Jake Dennis, Oliver Rowland and Dan Ticktum, and current up-and-comers Zak O’Sullivan, Luke Browning and Loake himself. The design dates back to 2008 but can still provide a challenge and excitement to drivers used to modern machinery.

“The biggest difference is how much more power it has compared to the grip,” continues Loake, on hand at Silverstone to drive the spare car after the 2024 finalists have finished their runs. “And it’s so light, which is what makes it awesome.

“In the wet it’s petrifying, which is cool. The modern cars are heavier and lack rawness – they’re not scary enough!

“I was taken aback by the amount of power it has with the turbo. Being an older engine, it takes a while to get going but when it does… it takes your breath away. And I really like the carbon brakes – it really stops as soon as you hit them. It’s an incredible car. I’d love to give it a go with 25 other cars out there.”

Loake was born too late to race the car, but between 2009 and 2012 it provided a low-budget route into high-level single-seaters.

Soucek suffered reliability glitches at the Valencia first round, but went on to win the inaugural title in 2009

Photo by: Drew Gibson / Motorsport Images

“The FIA, particularly [president] Max Mosley, were understandably concerned about the high cost of GP2 and wanted to do something dramatic,” recalls MSV CEO Jonathan Palmer, the driving force behind the project and who had run the low-budget, national-level Formula Palmer Audi championship since 1998.

“He came up with the idea of a Formula 2 championship and someone could run it at a cost of under £200,000 a season. Virtually everybody said no but we’d had the experience of FPA, and a lot of experience of running a whole championship of cars under one banner, which was the only way to match the cost requirement. I thought, ‘Let’s have a go’.”

Meetings with Mosley followed, a tender was submitted and MSV got the gig. Then the problem was how to make it happen…

The cost target and tight timeframe made just getting to the first race with 25 cars a challenge

“I had a long professional relationship with Williams and Patrick Head, so when this came up, I went to Patrick and said, ‘What do you think?’,” continues Palmer. “Patrick was interested in the challenge and I was thrilled that Williams was prepared to design the car, while we manufactured it using suppliers.”

Head, who was still heavily involved in the F1 team, immersed himself in the project from the outset. 

“We had already been handling some commercial programmes, but not at this level,” he says. “We took on just three people for the design, and I oversaw the project. The chassis had to be capable of passing the quite rigorous FIA crash test requirements of the time, not much less than required for F1 cars. The project proved more challenging than I predicted, much because of the high safety requirements, with front, side and rear impact tests.

“Although no wind tunnel testing was conducted, a CFD evaluation supported the design. The Williams composite chassis design was manufactured by Universal Race Technology in Bognor Regis and then the cars were assembled by PalmerSport at Bedford Autodrome.”

Palmer was joined at the launch of the new Williams JPH1 by legendary designer Head

Photo by: Drew Gibson / Motorsport Images

The timescale was tight. There was just a year between the design process beginning and the first car hitting the track. Steven Kane drove the JPH1 at Brands Hatch in March 2009, with the first race set for Valencia on 30 May. MSV group operations and engineering manager Giles Butterfield believes the cost target and tight timeframe made just getting to the first race with 25 cars a challenge.

“Like all these projects there is never enough time,” he says. “It was really tight and probably fairly ambitious to decide to create our own cars with Williams.

“To set yourself up as a car manufacturer for one car build is tough because people who do it regularly have systems and routines, and people are used to doing this regularly. Those of us who were in it will probably never forget! Williams had to expand the design team because the original head count wasn’t enough. It was quite difficult to dovetail this into what was already a pretty busy F1 operation.”

The 580kg car was launched with 400bhp – 450bhp on overboost – from the four-cylinder 1.8-litre turbocharged Audi engine, and used a Hewland six-speed paddleshift gearbox. There were limited set-up options; front and rear wing angles, anti-roll bar settings springs, damping, bump, rebound and cambers all within a range specified ahead of each event.

The other key element was the series being centrally run, with a pool of mechanics and engineers, who rotated between the drivers. For much of the championship’s life there were three cars per engineer, which cut costs but created other challenges.

“We had to have a rota system where people were allowed a prescribed amount of time with the race engineers and they could always go back for more at the end,” explains Butterfield. “If you weren’t careful the first driver would spend an hour and a half with the engineer so you needed a level of discipline to make it work. It was bonkers value for money and you are only able to do that by avoiding the duplication of overheads: one workshop, and the staffing model was lean.”

James Goodfield, who was involved from the start as a race engineer and became chief engineer in 2010, believes the centrally run ethos had other knock-on effects: “The restrictions forced us to do some things in quite innovative ways. For example, having a front wing you can adjust from the steering wheel meant a driver could do an aero balance adjustment without needing to come to the pits and asking a mechanic to change a wing.

Centrally-run model kept costs down, but required discipline to be workable

Photo by: FIA Formula 2

“This car actually has the ability to be incredibly adjustable but in order to make it possible to run centrally, a number of restrictions were put on the set-up. That’s not unusual, that happens in a lot of championships; you have a fixed number of spring rates you can run, for example, or certain rear geometries that you’re not permitted because they take too long to change. We were just much more careful with what we permitted and what we mandated to keep things as efficient as possible.”

An undoubted plus point was the Mountune-prepared engine that had already shown its worth in FPA, though the F2 version was a considerable step up.

“The engines were reliable from day one and Mountune did a great job,” says Palmer. “That old Audi engine has proven to be one of the most incredible engines of all time. It produced 150bhp in the A4 road car and we were running it with the same block and same head with a load of turbo boost at 425bhp all day long.”

The JPH1B, as it now became known, was between one and three seconds per lap faster in 2010. Attracting the leading lights on the single-seater scene was, however, proving tricky

Remarkably, the series hit the financial target. A budget for the first season was £195,000 at a time when British F3 was upwards of half a million and a GP2 season was twice that. But there were some reliability problems in the first season. Frontrunner Andy Soucek suffered a fuel-pump failure in the first race and electronic issues reared their heads during the season.

“The first year was tough,” concedes Butterfield. “When you are building racing cars to a budget the kind of things that people don’t want to spend money on are expensive plugs and connectors, and we had a number of those where we tried to retain OE parts on the Audi engine and things like that. Initially they were fine but by mid-season they were giving us problems, so we had to bite the bullet, spend some more money and re-engineer some things.

“Nobody building racing cars can do enough R&D to prove everything, it’s just not affordable in terms of time or money, so at some point you have to launch a bunch of racing cars onto the market and sort out whatever crops up. It still happens now. You sink or swim on your ability to fix problems quickly and effectively.”

As well as the technical challenges, the whole championship had to deal with the accident that claimed the life of Henry Surtees, son of 1964 world champion John, at Brands Hatch in July 2009. A loose wheel struck the 18-year-old on the head, which was inevitably fatal in an era before the halo.

The freak accident that claimed the life of Henry Surtees at Brands Hatch in 2009 was a low point for the series

Photo by: Drew Gibson / Motorsport Images

“Henry’s death was the worst thing that ever happened in my motorsport history,” says 83-time F1 starter Palmer, who was in race control that day. “John was a good friend, our sons came up together and Henry was a good driver. I went straight to the hospital and was there with John – it was absolutely awful.

“All the cars had wheel tethers and we had to look at the circumstances of how the wheel came off. It was a freak accident. The FIA was very fair and constructive but that was a massive blow and correctly absorbed a huge amount of time from everyone involved in the operation of the championship. It was a tough thing to be confronted with.”

Somehow, the series made it through its first season, with Soucek crowned as champion, for which he won a Williams F1 test drive. And, for 2010, the car was upgraded significantly.

The aero was improved, with bargeboards and a new rear wing (Williams estimated the package provided 30% more downforce), and power went up to 425bhp and 475bhp with overboost, plus Avon produced a new tyre. The car had shaped underside sidepods and gained from being run very low, so a ‘third spring’ was also added at the rear.

“The car was probably a bit heavy from day one, so we went on a pretty major weight-saving campaign,” adds Butterfield. “We were probably a bit closer to F3 and a bit further from GP2 pace than we wanted so needed to up the ante and adjust our position relative to everyone else.”

The JPH1B, as it now became known, was between one and three seconds per lap faster in 2010. Attracting the leading lights on the single-seater scene was, however, proving tricky, not helped by the arrival of the F1-supporting GP3. “GP3 was at a different price level but it was another powerful commercial challenge,” reflects Palmer.

Nevertheless, he did manage to attract former McLaren Autosport BRDC Award finalist Dean Stoneman, who would go on to beat Palmer’s son Jolyon to the second title: “I was very supportive of Dean – he was very determined, with a touch of the Nigel Mansell toughness about him, so I helped him get some sponsors.”

Mirko Bortolotti, latterly the 2024 DTM champion and perhaps the championship’s most successful graduate, took the crown in 2011 before Luciano Bacheta won in 2012, by which time the overboost was giving 500bhp. The series had a proven car and an F1 test prize, but never quite managed to break the established – and more expensive – single-seater ladder.

Stoneman became the second champion of the category, but it struggled to attract top line drivers despite attractive bugdets

Photo by: Kevin Wood / Motorsport Images

Palmer decided to end things a year earlier than planned, at the end of 2012: “We always knew we weren’t really competing with GP3, it was, ‘Was there a niche for a championship at this very low price level and still pretty high performance?’ I’m proud of what we achieved but commercially we were always swimming against the tide.

“The reality is that running things under one house doesn’t work. You need the teams in there to support the championship – a load of salesmen out there to say how great it is. Having teams also means that the most successful will charge the most money and the teams that are trying to get into it will charge a lot less, so it gives people the chance to get it at different price levels with different expectations.”

“Running it all under one roof is undeniably the cheapest way to do it and you do end up with the biggest fleet of the most equal cars,” agrees Butterfield. “But it flies in the face of the market, which is why it doesn’t work as a model.

"It’s had a second life and what an endorsement of the car. If it had a halo on it, it would still be regarded as a pretty good car, which given it’s 15 years old is quite remarkable" Jonathan Palmer

“The mentality of people who go motor racing, even though they say they want everything to be the same, they don’t. What they really want is to feel they have a relationship with a team and an engineer, maybe a few bits on the car they think are trick or a trick set-up; a bit of an advantage they think they can create.”

MSV’s subsequent single-seater series, particularly BRDC F4 (won by Russell in 2014) that morphed into current GB3, have proved more successful commercially – and involved teams.

“We learned a lot, about running cars, costs of things, and what drivers wanted – and we went totally the other way and embraced traditional teams,” confirms Palmer. “The lessons learned have always been useful.”

But the car itself wasn’t yet done. It had become the single-seater for the Young Driver Award in 2010, with an MSV-prepared car being provided for each of six finalists (and a spare) so that all could be on track at the same time and compared as fairly as possible. That became four finalists from 2016, when Norris’s success helped launch his McLaren career.

“It’s had a second life and what an endorsement of the car,” says Palmer. “If it had a halo on it, it would still be regarded as a pretty good car, which given it’s 15 years old is quite remarkable.

In the years since the championship folded, the cars formed the bedrock of the Awards test, with Luke Browning winning out in 2022

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images

“So many top drivers have been through these cars and they have run with reliability and equality. The equality we ran them in the Award is no different to what we did when we were running the championship.”

For Goodfield, who became Jolyon Palmer’s GP2 race engineer in 2013 and whose Award involvement has continued through to 2024, the tests became a highlight each year.

“Everybody was disappointed when the championship came to an end,” he says. “Everybody understood the reasons but nobody was anything but upset by the fact that we didn’t get a bit longer to improve whatever needed improving. We felt disappointed for Jonathan; he’d put a lot into it.

“We ended up with a car that’s way better than what we charged per season and to a certain extent it didn’t attract the level of drivers it should, purely because it’s perceived as being less good than it actually is, which was a huge shame.

“When the championship stopped, doing the Award has been really nice. It’s incredible that MSV managed to keep cars running, almost purely for this event. It is really lovely every year to get the cars back out, for the mechanics to give them a service at Bedford, and remind ourselves how good they are, how good they sound.

“Because of the way the championship was run and because we ended up being a relatively small close-knit group of people who worked very closely together and spent a lot of time together, a lot of it’s more about the camaraderie. We’ve got guys who do this event every year, engineers and mechanics who were with us in 2009. It’s almost like a big family.”

Along with Warwick, the F2 car helped raise the level of the prestigious Award.

“As a platform on which to evaluate drivers and their ability it’s jolly effective, which is why it’s been so good for Young Driver Award,” adds Butterfield. “The car’s a great platform for young drivers to take a step out of medium/lower single-seater heading towards the upper echelons. The car is fast. You’ve only got to see the expression on the face of the guys who have driven the car for the Award.

The spare car was never used in 14 Young Driver Awards such was the reliability of the chassis which now heads into retirement

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images

“It’s a challenging car to drive; it has a lot of power and not a phenomenal amount of grip for that power, so it makes it interesting. But it’s pretty well-behaved and predictable, quite a confidence-inspiring car. It’s taught a lot of drivers a lot about themselves and how to drive cars quickly, and some race car engineering as well.”

That the car achieved reliability is underlined by the fact that, across the 14 times the JPH1B was used in the Young Driver test, the ever-present spare was never required. Each of the main chassis has ‘won’ the Award at least once. Nevertheless, the time has finally come for the cars to rest.

“When the championship was current we had a lot of people working for us who were very familiar with running the car regularly, looking after it, maintaining it,” says Butterfield. “Gradually over the years the pool starts to evaporate. Having that first-class core of people who understand the car has become harder and harder.

"As a platform on which to evaluate drivers and their ability it’s jolly effective, which is why it’s been so good for Young Driver Award"
Giles Butterfield

“The cars aren’t getting any younger. It would be a lot more difficult for us to arrive at a conclusion if someone had to swap cars or had a major breakdown.

“We never wanted to get to that point where we were starting to have unreliability. And what tends to happen with large fleets of cars, if you have a problem on one car the chances are that within 10 minutes you’ll have the same problem on another. It was always our fear that something would become the Achilles’ heel and cause us problems on several cars simultaneously because they are all of similar age and mileage.”

For Palmer, there is only one big regret: “I’ve not driven the car.” Yet – there might be one more run for the Williams JPH1B next year, with the man who started it all behind the wheel…

Mirko Bortolotti on F2

Bortolotti (pictured left with Wickens and Eng in 2009) had two stints in F2 and became its champion in 2011

Photo by: Drew Gibson / Motorsport Images

Formula 2 did a lot for my career. In my first stint in 2009, I had just competed in single-seaters in Italy, so it was my first real opportunity to get into international motorsport.

That first season was a bit difficult on some topics, especially reliability of the cars, but also finding a way of running the whole thing in a professional way, trying to give all the drivers the same conditions. And that was the goal, which is something I really appreciated, something that I’m missing in many series nowadays.

As a concept, it was great. The problem is, in some cases, it was difficult to put in place. And that is where they made the biggest step in 2011 when I came back. I found a completely different, much more mature environment; the mechanics, the engineers, everybody involved had two seasons under their belts. Though I must say, also in 2009, for being the first year they did a good job.

It was a relatively heavy car and, with the turbo engine, was quite different compared to the engines we were driving at the time. If you compare cars like Formula Renault 2.0 or the 3.5 or F3, even going up to GP2, they were all naturally aspirated engines, so the turbo engine was something to get used to.

The car was nice to drive, really peaky tyres I remember, so it was important to get the peak in qualifying, because you had only one, maximum two, laps to make the tyres work. And then you had to manage them in the race, which was good preparation for any other series coming after.

I had to really adapt my driving style. It was not really comparable to an F3 car in terms of downforce, but it had a lot more power and a really interesting feature, which was the push-to-pass function.

It was a great series and it’s a shame not having it around anymore because, for a relatively low budget, it was offering a lot. And it was giving everyone in the grid a similar situation to fight for it. You could not, let’s say if you had a mega budget, go and do private testing. The test days were limited, everybody had the same conditions, and this is something I love. After 2010 I didn’t really know what to do and F2 gave me a great opportunity to launch my career again.

Bortolotti was speaking to James Newbold

Bortolotti believes F2 served a worthwhile purpose on a crowded market

Photo by: Drew Gibson / Motorsport Images