For all the optimism surrounding Williams ahead of its first season under new ownership, it still has some way to go before it can reach the heights of its last title push, when tyre politics and unreliability proved crucial in its defeat to Ferrari. Patrick Head explained all to NIGEL ROEBUCK in the 20 November 2003 issue

Patrick Head is ever the realist: no excuses, no blarney. "We started 2003 very weakly," he says, "then were strong in the middle of the season - and then it ended awfully. There were lots of mistakes, including some circumstantial things, but part of the business is to foresee every circumstance and try to make sure you've got it covered.

"And that we didn't manage to do. At one point, we were eight points ahead in the constructors' championship and we finished 14 points behind Ferrari - we lost 22 points to them from Hungary onwards."

By Head's own admission, the recent past of Williams Grand Prix Engineering has been patchy. Four wins - more than expected - in 2001, one in 2002 and back to four this year. After Hockenheim, Michael Schumacher and Ferrari still led on points, but Williams-BMW was on a roll, with both Juan Pablo Montoya and Ralf Schumacher in strong contention for the world championship.

"Juan won there by 65 seconds," Head muses. "We're all experienced enough not to count chickens, but I don't think any of us came away from Hockenheim thinking we weren't going to win another race this year."

The previous season had been disappointing, and the feeling was the FW24 had been simply too conservative to get the job done. That being so, it was decided FW25 should be a smaller, more compact, more agile car.

"It wasn't simply a matter of a shorter wheelbase," says Head. "Obviously, if you make a car smaller you tend to make it lighter, which gives you more ballast to play with, a lower centre of gravity, more room to change weight distribution, front to rear, and so on. However, fundamentally, the biggest development was a more effective, more capable windtunnel department."
Archive: How Williams's last F1 title bid unravelledWhen Montoya briefly went back to the FW24, at Indianapolis in June for Jeff Gordon's test in the car, he was astounded. "Compared with the FW25," he laughed, "it feels like a boat! So lazy in its response."

By then, JPM had won the Monaco Grand Prix, and the latest Williams-BMW was getting into its stride, but its early performances had been less than scintillating, as Head admits.

PLUS: The rollercoaster ride of F1's fastest and slowest team

"We'd made various decisions," he says, "some of which were beneficial, but one which was not, in that we decided to put a lot of our winter aerodynamic testing towards a set-up that hadn't been used before, based around a sort of rearward-mounted bargeboard: we were trying to create a car that was less pitch-sensitive.
"Juan was then quite a bit quicker than Rubens Barrichello, who was second, and I suspect he would have finished there - which would have been very useful to him later in the year. As it was, he didn't score" Patrick Head
"The thing is that, if you make a decision to focus on a forward guidevane, then all of the aerodynamics - from in front of the item to behind it - change. The FW25 appeared first as a 'bargeboard' car, but during early testing we undid that decision and decided to go back to the forward guidevane. That proved more fruitful, but any changing route mid-flight is going to be damaging.

"We'd done a new back end for the car too, but we got some confusing data from the tests and that made us uncertain about the way to go. We had what was called the LG7 gearbox and rear suspension, and then the LG7B - the gearbox was unchanged, but the suspension was different. The 'B' made its debut at Interlagos, the third race."

The first, though, was in Australia, a learning experience for everyone, given the new rules concerning qualifying and parc ferme. In fact, everything went more smoothly than might have been anticipated.

"Between them," says Head, "Sam Michael, Carl Gaden and Dickie Stanford did an amazing job to rejig everything on race preparation. Previously, it had taken all of eight to 10 hours, but now it had to be compressed into two-and-a-half hours. A lot of that was by doing on Thursday all the normal procedural checks that had been done on Saturday afternoon.
Archive: How Williams's last F1 title bid unravelled"As for the new qualifying rules - running with 'race' fuel in the car - we had had a look at it beforehand, and by a third of the way through the season we were fairly stable in our approach."

In Melbourne, Montoya qualified third, Schumacher ninth; weather conditions at the start were uncertain.

"We started on dry tyres," says Head, "which very few people did, and everything was looking good - Juan was 25 seconds in the lead - but then we had two safety-car periods, and a very powerful position was wiped out - twice! Then Juan spun, and in fact we were lucky, because the car slid into the tyre barrier, but wasn't damaged, and he was able to finish second. Ralf... two spins, eighth."

Two weeks later at Sepang, Schumacher was fourth after a steady drive, but he had qualified only 17th, and there were suggestions he was unsettled by stories about his private life in the German papers. Whatever, his employers were concerned.

"Juan made a far better job of qualifying, but at the first corner he lost his rear wing - our former test driver, Antonio Pizzonia, drove into him," says Head. "But he was then quite a bit quicker than Rubens Barrichello, who was second, and I suspect Juan would have finished there - which would have been very useful to him later in the year, obviously. As it was, he didn't score."

At Interlagos there were no points for Williams. "At first," says Head, "we were going quite well, but then Juan went off in the same river that claimed Michael [Schumacher], and Ralf came in for his final stop the lap before the Mark Webber/Fernando Alonso accident: a large number of the cars in front of him were due to come in, but the race was stopped at 75% distance."

To Imola, then, and by now the FW25 was progressing well, not least because the aero department was regularly adding performance. "I didn't go to Imola," says Head, "but we were in quite good shape there - not to win, perhaps, but certainly to finish second and third. We didn't achieve that - mainly because of errors around the pitstops - but at least both cars were in the points.
Archive: How Williams's last F1 title bid unravelled"At Barcelona, we definitely underperformed. Although we qualified reasonably, we converted to a two-stop strategy, where others - notably Renault and Ferrari - stayed on a three-stop, and that proved to be the better solution. Then, later, Ralf went off, and we had to change the floor and so on. He finished fifth, behind Juan."

Although things weren't coming together as the team might have wished, there was a feeling of optimism now, the more so after Austria.

"Ralf had an off on the Friday," says Head, "which put him close to the back for qualifying, which wasn't ideal. But Juan was in good shape, and by this time we were certainly making progress. We took Frank Dernie and John Davis to Austria as well: both good, experienced engineers, and they were a definite help.
"It's true I did think Juan would have had more of a go, but when I looked at the data afterwards, I could see Ralf did have one or two problems" Patrick Head
"Michael led from Juan until the first stops - where Michael had his fire of course. Fairly remarkable to have a fire in a 17-second pitstop, wasn't it? After that, we were steadily pulling away from Kimi Raikkonen, with Michael seemingly unable to get by him.

"Then we had an engine failure - we'd known for at least 10 laps it was going to happen: there was a leak in the cooling system. Had we not had the problem, it would have been a close-run thing. Although Michael was faster than us on the day, I'm not convinced he would have got by. At least we knew we were thereabouts."

PLUS: How BMW took Williams to the brink of F1 glory and back

At Monaco, the team was there.

"We were really keen to win there," says Head, "because it was so long since we'd done it with Keke [Rosberg]. And Juan drove an absolutely brilliant race, really quick when he needed to protect himself, particularly against Raikkonen. He could have won at Montreal, too."
Archive: How Williams's last F1 title bid unravelledIt was an all-Williams front row in Canada, but Montoya spun early on and lost 12 seconds to the leaders. "In the late laps, he was right up with them, which is why I believe he could have won," says Head. "This was a race controlled by strategy around pitstops - and also by brake wear. Michael was certainly driving to conserve his rear brakes."

Afterwards, Patrick was simmering that Schumacher hadn't been more aggressive against his brother. "Mmmm," he says. "I have been known to say one or two things in the heat of the moment, and it's true I did think Juan would have had more of a go, but when I looked at the data afterwards, I could see Ralf did have one or two problems."

At the next couple of races, though, he didn't have any at all, winning at the Nurburgring and at Magny-Cours. Now, with the FW25 the class of the field, Schumacher seemed temporarily to have the edge on Montoya, who was second on both occasions.

Head puts forward the theory that, when the car wasn't working well, Juan would get more out of it than Ralf, but that when it came good Ralf's greater set-up experience allowed him to get it closer to perfection. Although they finished 1-2 in France, the race was not without controversy. Schumacher built up a 10-second lead, but late in the race Montoya had pared it down to almost nothing.

"I don't think Ralf would willingly have let that happen, let's put it that way," says Head. "Getting towards the last stops, he radioed to say 'I'm coming up on traffic - can I stop early?' Juan was not informed - not deliberately, but because everything was happening so quickly.

"He had also stopped a lap early, and then did two very fast laps, expecting Ralf to come out of the pits just behind him - but in fact Ralf came out a lap earlier than he was expecting - and still just ahead. Juan was definitely pissed off by that - he thought we have connived to bring Ralf in early, because he had, but it hadn't been like that."

JPM's victory at Hockenheim was the most dominant of the season, but Ralf was again in the wars, involved in a startline accident with Barrichello and Raikkonen.
Archive: How Williams's last F1 title bid unravelled"Up to that point," says Head, "our starts had been extremely competitive against our immediate opposition - Ferrari and McLaren - although Renault's had always been the best. We were due to bring a new starting strategy to Hockenheim but, because of a component failure on the Saturday morning, we weren't able to do so.

"Both cars made a relatively tardy start but, while Juan kept the lead, Ralf went off his line and moved left, not to crowd other drivers as much as to get the line into the first corner. Had he made a better start, he wouldn't have had a problem, of course. We went through a period of making poor starts and it had a serious impact on our title aspirations.

"It was even worse in Hungary. Both drivers were told, 'Whatever you do, do not be on the outside at the first corner!' We were in second and fourth places on the grid, and after the first lap we were eighth and 18th - because at the first corner both drivers had found themselves on the outside, and about to run into each other!
"I'm not using this as an excuse for not winning the championship, but it did definitely cause an upset" Patrick Head
"I'm not saying it was all their fault, because if their cars had had better starts it wouldn't have happened - they were both on the dirty side, but so was Jarno Trulli, and he overtook both of them before the first corner. Both drivers made very good recoveries, but we could have done better."

By this stage, Montoya was but one point behind M Schumacher, and the world champion looked to be on the ropes. But then came the major controversy of the season: the suggestion from Bridgestone, via Ferrari, to the FIA that Michelin's front tyre, when worn, was wider than the rules permitted.

"Not surprisingly, that did quite a lot to destabilise our - and McLaren's - preparations for Monza," says Head. "We had a very difficult test beforehand, some of which was self-inflicted, starting with Ralf's accident.

"Car failures are something that we've generally been quite good at avoiding - it was a bond failure in a composite suspension component. Obviously, if you have that sort of thing happen, until you've understood exactly what caused it, and can be certain it isn't going to happen on other components, you can't run a car again.
Archive: How Williams's last F1 title bid unravelled"We lost time with that, after which most of our running was done, essentially verifying that we could run the modified tyre. Michelin did it very quickly - and it was not to comply with the regulation: the actual geometry of the tyre was exactly as we'd run from Imola 2001 on.

"It was basically a change of interpretation, with the FIA suddenly saying, 'We're going to measure the tyres when they're worn, as opposed to when they're new'. I'm not using this as an excuse for not winning the championship, but it did definitely cause an upset. Had we not put so much time into that, I suspect we would have been able to get more performance from the car at Monza."

At the press conference, Head was in very fine form, making clear his feelings about what Ferrari had done. "Well, I thought I was very restrained actually!" he says. "I know Ross [Brawn] quite well, because he used to work here, but he's quite good at putting on a holier-than-thou act, and saying Ferrari would never do anything that might be... I mean, we know the record over a number of years, don't we? And some of it sticks in my craw, and I'm not prepared to stay quiet when that happens, that's all."

One trusts he will never change.

"For the race, we ran too much wing on Juan's car, and that was damaging," says Head. "In terms of pure lap time, Monza is fairly flat-topped, using more wing or less wing, because there are some fairly significant corners. Juan was keen to run the higher amount of wing, and we eventually - and reluctantly - agreed.

"In qualifying, he was up until the end of sector two, but then clipped a kerb, which cost him a bit of time. Not beating Michael to pole position was critical - and so also was not being able to compete in terms of straightline speed."

Montoya dogged Schumacher much of the way, but eventually settled for second, with stand-in Marc Gene an excellent fifth.
Archive: How Williams's last F1 title bid unravelled"In the last stint, Marc was the fastest guy on the track," recalls Head. "I thought he had a fantastic run - after all, he was in the traffic on Saturday morning when he got a call to say, 'You're racing, mate!' As far as he'd known, Ralf was going to be driving."

Indianapolis put an end to Montoya's championship aspirations. Again his car got away poorly, and he found himself behind Barrichello, with Schumacher away in the lead.
"Over the season, our car's come out top on reliability, in terms of distance covered, but that doesn't make you feel any better when you go out at the last race, pulling away" Patrick Head
"Juan was under pressure to get Rubens - and they touched," says Head. "We got a drivethrough penalty, which we had to do within three laps of notification, then he had to stop again immediately for fuel - and then, on the lap he went out, it started to rain, so within three or four laps, he had to make three pitstops.

"Although he fought back to sixth place, he needed to be fifth to stay in the championship fight. He was very upset afterwards.

"For obvious reasons, people don't want the race result to be changed retrospectively, but if you're on the receiving end, you think to yourself, 'I just don't think those guys had adequate information to take somebody out of the championship,' which is what happened to Juan.

"As for Ralf, he was going well early on, but then he came on the radio and said he needed 'shallow wet' tyres - that's what Michelin call their intermediate. We said OK, but then he came back to ask if his decision was right - and sailed straight by the pits again! And, of course, on that lap he spun off."

Suzuka, the final race, yielded no points for the Williams-BMW team, although, at first, Montoya led comfortably.
Archive: How Williams's last F1 title bid unravelled"When Rubens began to pull him in, Juan said, 'Where's he faster?'' says Head. "His race engineer, Tony Ross, told him, and immediately he started pulling away again - until a hydraulics problem occurred. Over the season, our car's come out top on reliability, in terms of distance covered, but that doesn't make you feel any better when you go out at the last race, pulling away.

"Ralf's qualifying was destroyed by rain, and he then had a massively messy race, with lots of spins, bumps and so on. He was very angry afterwards at the way Michael had chopped him into the first turn. Brotherly love..."

So how, in the round, does Head look back on 2003? "I don't feel we were robbed - basically, we lost the championship," he concludes. "Ferrari did a fantastic job of coming back, and we did badly at the end of the year when it counted. What we have to do is start off next season with a much stronger package than in '03, simple as that."

Ever the realist, as I said.
Archive: How Williams's last F1 title bid unravelled

What happened next?

After its near-miss of 2003, Williams had a nightmare in 2004 with its radical tusk-nosed FW26 failing to mount a challenge to Ferrari and slipping to fourth in the constructors' standings behind BAR and Renault.

Only after the concept was abandoned - and Head stepped down as technical director, with Sam Michael taking the reins - would Williams prove a competitive force again, as Montoya won the last race of the year in Brazil. But, by that point, he had already committed to joining McLaren for 2005, while Ralf Schumacher's final season with the team before a big-money move to Toyota was hampered by a concussion that resulted from a tyre deflation at Indianapolis and caused him to sit out six races.

Gene failed to score in two substitute appearances and was himself replaced by Pizzonia for the next four races, although three seventh places hardly set the world on fire.

The BMW partnership continued for one more season in 2005, with Mark Webber and Nick Heidfeld joining the team in an all-new line-up, and ended with a whimper rather than a bang as Williams slid back to fifth.

There were no victories, a second and third at Monaco the team's brightest showing, while Heidfeld utilised a light fuel strategy to take pole at the Nurburgring and inherited second when a puncture pitched Kimi Raikkonen off the road on the final lap.
Archive: How Williams's last F1 title bid unravelled

Adam Cooper
Tue, February 9, 2021, 4:08 AM·10 min readJust as Hamilton held out in his discussions with Toto Wolff, so Senna went into 1993 without having signed a new McLaren deal with Ron Dennis.

When he finally signed the initial contract covered less than a third of the season. Only later would he agree to do the remainder of the races.

Throughout that year his participation each weekend was subject to a contractual clause that would keep McLaren’s legal team and accountants on their toes. If the team didn’t pay, Senna wouldn’t play…

“I remember it was a million dollars a race!,” recalls then McLaren operations director Martin Whitmarsh.

“In 24 and a half years I was at McLaren we were profitable in F1 and our other businesses every single year apart from 1992-'93, when we lost £1.5m, and we were paying Ayrton a million dollars a race…”

The delay in putting pen to paper was primarily a result of Honda’s withdrawal from the sport, announced at Monza in September 1992.

The season had already been a difficult one for Senna, with the latest Honda V12 proving disappointing, and Nigel Mansell dominating in the Williams-Renault.

Now McLaren’s post-Honda engine plans for 1993 remained fluid, and he was wary of going into the new season with a compromised package.

“As soon as Honda left, he didn’t want to continue,” says Whitmarsh. “Like any driver you want a works deal, and I think he was right.”

Ayrton Senna, McLaren MP4-8

Ayrton Senna, McLaren MP4-8Ercole ColomboErcole Colombo

One plan was to buy Ligier, with Mansour Ojjeh’s help, and in effect asset strip the French team’s customer Renault contract. That would at least provide some chance of taking on Williams.

That plan failed, and by early December it had become clear that McLaren would have customer Ford HB engines, although nothing was officially confirmed.

Commercially the switch from works Honda support to paying for Cosworths represented a huge shift for McLaren. Quite simply, there was less in the pot with which to pay Senna.

After the 1992 season finale in Adelaide he had disappeared to Brazil for his traditional off-season break with his family.

Then a few days before Christmas, and encouraged by his pal Emerson Fittipaldi, Senna travelled to Arizona to test a Penske IndyCar at Firebird Raceway.

He thoroughly enjoyed the outing, and made it obvious that Dennis couldn’t take it for granted that he would ultimately partner the incoming Michael Andretti in 1993.

“I am not committed to any team yet because I’m seriously considering what I should be doing next and what’s best for my career,” he said after the test.

“That includes not driving in ’93 and thinking about Indy. I will now go home and have a quiet think about it and see what possibilities I can have for the immediate future.

“I must make it clear that there is no commitment from anyone regarding me driving in the future.”

Ayrton Senna, Penske Chevrolet PC22

Ayrton Senna, Penske Chevrolet PC22Sutton ImagesSutton Images

Senna duly returned to Brazil to continue his break and have a proper think about his future. Along with his plans for 1993 he was also focussed on the longer term, and how to get into a Williams in ’94.

Relations with Dennis were strained, despite their shared history of success.

“They were both highly intelligent,” recalls Senna’s manager Julian Jakobi.

“They were both pretty ruthless in what they wanted to achieve. They clashed occasionally. But fundamentally, they were reliant on each other for success.

“And it was a very good partnership, they actually got along very well. They fought their own corner. But they knew that they were better together than apart.”

Dennis meanwhile kept McLaren’s options open by signing Mika Hakkinen, who had impressed over two years with Team Lotus.

The Finn’s position was a little hazy. He could step into a race seat if no deal was done with Senna, but the risk was that former world champion would return after all, and he’d thus spend a year as a test driver.

Dennis kept Hakkinen’s hopes up by suggesting that the team might be allowed to run a third car at some stage, and that one way or another, he would get to race.

However what the McLaren boss really wanted to do was sort things out with Senna, and eventually both parties met at the Swiss home of main sponsor Marlboro.

“Ayrton was a bit concerned about ‘93, because McLaren only had a customer Ford engine,” Jakobi recalls.

“We had the first meeting in late January or early February in Lausanne at the Philip Morris offices.

“I flew into Geneva from London on a scheduled flight, and Ayrton flew private, I think he came from Brazil. Philip Morris sent to a car to pick us up at the airport, and we went to their offices.”

Ayrton Senna, McLaren MP4/8

Ayrton Senna, McLaren MP4/8Sutton ImagesSutton Images

Senna and Jakobi duly took part in a meeting where the Brazilian’s future was discussed. Also present were Dennis, and top Marlboro marketing men John Hogan and Graham Bogle.

Senna had a clear idea of his market value, and knowing that his former teammate Gerhard Berger had signed a very lucrative deal with Ferrari, he was in no mood to compromise.

“It sort of came up that Ayrton's retainer for '93 hadn't yet been agreed,” says Jakobi.

“Ron was having to pay for the customer engines. And he said that he only had $5m available, and therefore he couldn’t pay Ayrton what he'd paid him in the past.

“So Ayrton said, ‘That's fine. I'll do the first five races, and that's it.’ And so that's how the million per race happened. He didn't say, ‘I want a million per race,’ he just said ‘I'll just do the first five races.’

“There was kind of a silence in the room. And John Hogan started laughing and he looked at me. Graham Bogle didn't laugh, he was the most serious guy out of them! And there was a silence from Ron.

“And then Ayrton said, ‘Well, if you find you have any more money later on, fine, we'll discuss the extra races after the first five.' So that's what happened, the first contract was signed for five races, and a million a race.

“But we put a provision in the contract. Ayrton said, ‘But I'm not coming unless the money is in my bank account by the Wednesday before each race…”

Ayrton Senna, McLaren MP4/8 Ford

Ayrton Senna, McLaren MP4/8 FordMotorsport ImagesMotorsport Images

Perhaps to Senna’s surprise the new Ford-powered MP4/8 was reasonably competitive in testing and in the opening race in South Africa, but it was still overshadowed by the Williams, now driver by his nemesis Alain Prost.

Then helped by bad weather and a little magic of his own he won his home race at Interlagos and the European GP at Donington. With rookie teammate Andretti struggling it was clear that McLaren needed every ounce of Senna’s talent.

Prior to round four, the San Marino GP, he played his contractual trump card. An opportunity arose to remind the team of his value.

“The first hiccup was in Imola,” says Jakobi. “I always had to confirm by fax or a phone call that the money arrived. Anyway, the money hadn't arrived on the Wednesday, and Ayrton was in Sao Paulo.

“And so he said, ‘Okay, fine, I'm not gonna race this weekend then.’ And that was it, so I had to tell the team that he wasn't coming, because the money hadn't arrived. The team said they'd sent it – banking wasn't quite as efficient in those days!

“Anyway, lo and behold, the money pitched up on Thursday morning rather than Wednesday.

“So I called Ayrton’s office in Sao Paulo, and they couldn't find him. He gone off with some girl somewhere. He wasn't in his apartment, he wasn't in the office, and they couldn't find him.

“And they found him Thursday lunchtime. So he jumped on the plane. McLaren sent Jo Ramirez to Rome to pick him up, but he went to the wrong airport.

“Ayrton got to the track late on Friday morning, got into the car halfway through first practice – and had an accident. So that was the first one that went haywire…”

Ayrton Senna, McLaren MP4/8

Ayrton Senna, McLaren MP4/8Sutton ImagesSutton Images

A third victory of the season in Monaco was further proof of Senna’s value to the team, and after six races he actually led the world championship, before Prost and Williams began to gather momentum.

Meanwhile Senna stuck rigidly to his principles.

“The second one was in July,” says Jakobi. “We were way beyond the first five races by then, so it was the second part of the contract, but still with the same clause – the money didn't arrive, so Ayrton didn't leave home.

“I think it was the French Grand Prix. Ayrton was due to fly from Sao Paulo to Frankfurt on Varig. His plane and his pilots were going to pick him up, and fly him to Magny-Cours.

“The money didn't arrive, Ayrton said he wasn't coming, so it was a major issue. I was in our lawyer's office in London at midnight, and Ron was on the phone.

“We said Ayrton was not coming, because the money didn't arrive by Wednesday. We prepared all sorts of drafts to terminate the contract, and so various drafts were circulating around.

“And Ron said ‘But you're not going to do that anyway, because I know Ayrton's on the plane. I've been informed he's on the plane, and it has left Sao Paolo.’

“About half an hour later the phone rang, and it was Ayrton. We put him on the speaker. Ron was on the other phone and Ayrton said, ‘I'm still in Brazil, Ron.’ He said, ‘No you're not, the plane left, you can't be!’

“And Ayrton said, ‘Yeah, I am. I'm in Rio. I'm in the office of the head of police in the airport, and I'm not getting back on the plane until you confirm that that money is there.’

“What Ayrton had done was get the pilot of the Varig plane to stop off in Rio. All the other passengers were on the plane, and he got off.

“I think Ron gave a personal guarantee – I can't remember exactly what it was, but we resolved it.”

After that glitch things ran more smoothly. Eventually Senna was confirmed as a Williams driver for 1994 – replacing Prost – and believing that he had secured himself the best car, he was able to enjoy his final races with McLaren. He signed off with a pair of wins in Suzuka and Adelaide.

“In ’93 his nemesis had 60 horsepower more than him,” says Whitmarsh. “When you are in the car and you reach the rev limiter at 10,500 or something and you hear a Renault at 13,000rpm, it must be a bit demoralising!”

“I think he always knew what the limitations were,” says Jakobi. “I think ‘93 was his best ever season, in terms of the way he drove, even though he didn't win the championship, because of the equipment he had.

“McLaren was still a very, very good team, but with an engine down on power. It wasn’t as good in '93 as the Williams with the Renault.”

Ayrton Senna, McLaren

Ayrton Senna, McLarenSutton ImagesSutton Images

1982 United States Grand Prix East launch.Detroit, Michigan, USA.Nelson Piquet (right) and Frank Williams push their car out of a snow bank on what would be the site of the 1982 Detroit Grand Prix.

Johnny Dumfries, who started 15 Grands Prix for Lotus in the 1986 season, has passed away at the age of 62.

Dumfries, the 7th Marquess of Bute, whose real name was John Colum Crichton-Stuart, was most famous for partnering Ayrton Senna at Lotus for the 1986 season – the Brazilian having allegedly chosen him over the tougher team mate prospect of Derek Warwick – with Dumfries achieving a best result of fifth at that year’s Hungarian Grand Prix in the team’s 98T.

He also achieved a sixth place at the 1986 Australian Grand Prix, where his car was famously adorned with an onboard camera, providing the footage you see in the video below.

Two years after his sole F1 season, Dumfries cemented his reputation as a more-than-useful pedaller by taking overall victory at the 1988 Le Mans 24 Hours alongside Jan Lammers and Andy Wallace, at the wheel of a Jaguar XJR-9LM.

In a statement confirming his passing after a short illness, Dumfries’ family said: “The indomitable spirit and energy which Johnny brought to his life will be greatly missed, and the immense warmth and love with which he embraced his family.”

If you want to learn more about his life – including his take on being team mates with Senna and driving vans for Frank Williams early in his career – tap here to listen to his appearance on F1's Beyond The Grid podcast last year.

Recognise this guy? It would be quite understandable if you didn’t. Yet for the best part of 30 years, he was considered one of the most powerful and influential figures in the Formula 1 ‘Piranha Club’. Niki Lauda, James Hunt, Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and many more counted him as a trusted friend, while Bernie Ecclestone and Ron Dennis listened when he spoke. Actually, strike through the past tense. John Hogan is still working the boardrooms and paddocks today. He just doesn’t make a song and dance about it.

“One of the things I’ve discovered is you’ve got to stay around young people,” says the 71-year-old known universally in F1 as ‘Hogie’. “If you mix with people your own age you’re going to be in a box before you know it. Being challenged all the time by younger people is what keeps you going.”

Today, Hogie remains forever young as a valued consultant to the JMI empire, motor racing’s dedicated sponsorship and marketing agency. He describes company founder Zak Brown as “inspirational”, but the compliment would surely be returned in spades. They’re cut from the same cloth, these two, as deeply rooted racing enthusiasts with a shared understanding of how to make the wheels turn. Money men with soul? You’d better believe it.

Between 1973 and 2002 Hogie was the real ‘Marlboro Man’. He didn’t wear the hat, but he was the self-confessed “cowboy” who controlled the purse strings of motor racing’s most powerful and prolific spender. These were the frontier years of big tobacco sponsorship, and Hogie was the fastest gun in town…

Without him Hunt wouldn’t have joined McLaren, but if anything Dennis owes him a bigger debt. It was Hogie who pushed him forward as the man to replace Teddy Mayer at the flagging team in 1980, igniting a force in motor racing that has defined generations. But as is common with such men, Hogie reckons it started by chance.

“I’ve been a motor racing fanatic all my life,” he says, Australian roots still audible in his soft tones. “My father was in the army and we were living in Singapore, where there was no motor racing, no TV and little radio coverage.

“Then I went to school in England and had a friend called Malcolm Taylor, who subsequently became Malcolm McDowell, the actor. His father had a pub in Aintree and I went to the Aintree 200 when Jack [Brabham] won [in 1964]. There you go: that was my first real motor racing experience.”

His life in advertising began straight from school, Hogie working for various London agencies on accounts that included Coca-Cola in 1969. “Then I just fell in with a lot of people who knew a lot about motor racing. To cut a long story short, I got to know Tim Schenken, which led to Gerry Birrell, which led to James Hunt and so on. That’s how it all started. I actually got them sponsorship: £500 a race, but that wasn’t bad in those days.”

The defining career move came in ’73 when he joined Marlboro’s parent company Philip Morris. By then he’d already tasted the motor racing life, and struck up a friendship, through Schenken, with Dennis and his partner Neil Trundle at Rondel Racing. The nascent team set new standards of presentation with its F2 Brabhams, inspired by the exacting principles of the former mechanic at its helm, but aided in no small part by the man who brought sponsorship from Motul and 208 Radio Luxembourg.

“Ron had a notion about sponsorship that nobody else had,” Hogie recalls. “At the time, both Ron and Tim were trying to get [Brabham co-founder] Ron Tauranac to put one foot in front of the other. I got wheeled in, as a friend, to talk to him about sponsorship. Can you imagine? He was as uncomfortable as anything. ‘You want to talk about sponsorship?’ – cue spiky Tauranac impersonation – ‘Well, here’s how I see it. We need money to go motor racing. If you can get us some money, that’s fine, we’ll go motor racing. If you can’t, tough shit’. Hmm, bit more to it than that, Ron.”

“I used to hang around with Prost. Mostly we’d talk about sex”
These were pioneering days in motor racing sponsorship, Hogie and his ilk mining gold in a sport still naïve to the possibilities that lay ahead. But he plays down the speculative visionary reputation. “I was the man with one eye in the land of the blind… I had read a John Whitmore article in Penthouse, believe it or not, and he was an advanced thinker on sponsorship. The references back then were Indianapolis: the Dean Van Lines Special, for example. Not that I had any idea what Dean Van Lines was – I subsequently discovered it was a furniture removal company! But the name sticks, you know? All this slowly went in.

“At Philip Morris I improved it, got better at it. Being at a tobacco company meant there were certain things you couldn’t do. But we were very adventurous, well run and managed. As long as you didn’t make a complete prat of yourself you could do what you liked.

“People used to call us cowboys and at first you get offended by that, but then I realised, no, actually that is what we are and it’s great. I loved being a cowboy! It was fortunate that we had quite a lot of money to spend, so you could let rip on your fantasies.

“When I joined in ’73 the Marlboro brand was by no means international. One of the marketing goals was very clear: it’s got to be on a global scale. There were other potential sponsors around. Player’s Gold Leaf had already come in, but they weren’t as adventurous. They were a British company and were quite happy to be doing well at the British GP. Philip Morris was a great education because it emphasised continuously that the world is international. Even today I get very irritated when I hear the ‘little Englander’ attitude… People who don’t think internationally are very boring, as a general rule.”

By now, you might have sensed why James Hunt and Hogie hit it off. Already friends, the ‘Marlboro Man’ was about to create Britain’s next world champion.

“It was actually very simple,” he says. “We got to the end of 1975. We thought Emerson [Fittipaldi] had re-signed and that also taught me something – nothing’s done until it’s on paper. We had agreed with Emerson for 1976. Emerson, meantime, got a very big offer from Copersucar to join his brother Wilson’s team, funnily enough with Embraer, which had constructed the car. Every time I get on an Embraer aeroplane these days, I always think, ‘Shit, I hope the guys who built that car didn’t have anything to do with this aircraft!’

“So Emerson was nabbed by Copersucar. We were up the creek without a paddle and it really came down to only two people, one of whom was Jacky Ickx, who McLaren liked. But I said, ‘Look, I know James Hunt from Formula 3 through Schenken and so on, I think he’s a bright young bloke. Let’s have a shot at him’. He’d won a Grand Prix by then [for Hesketh, at Zandvoort in ’75]. So we went for James.

“It was either a Friday or Saturday night. I tracked him down on the phone at Alexander Hesketh’s house in South Kensington. James was such a straightforward, honest guy. He said [cue plummy Hunt impersonation], ‘Oh, so I’m going to have to negotiate, am I?’ And I said well, that’s what you do, yes. ‘Oh dear’.

“So we had one of those conversations, and ended up doing a deal. A very cheap deal because he didn’t have a leg to stand on, although he had an offer from Lotus. But he wouldn’t drive a Lotus because he reckoned they were death traps. He’d been quite cosy with [Jochen] Rindt and was really shaken up by his accident [at Monza in 1970], even though he was only an F3 driver at the time.”

At this point, I have to ask: what did he think of Rush, Ron Howard’s hit movie about that fabled ’76 season? “It wasn’t bad,” he says. “They had to put a bit of antagonism in, which wasn’t there. There were a few incidents through the year where they got a bit excited, but the pair were very amusing, Niki in his wonderful Germanic manner and James in that Battle of Britain Spitfire pilot way of his.”

For all his commercial nous, Hogie cheerfully admits that he didn’t realise at the time how the ’76 season was ‘Year Zero’ for F1 in terms of its global popularity. But he says someone else did. “By the time we got to the British GP that year, lots of TV companies suddenly thought, ‘Hang on, something’s going on here’. They started following the circus around, and by the time we got to Japan the world wanted to broadcast it. And then Bernie [Ecclestone] said, ‘Yeah, you can have it – but you take every race next year and broadcast it in full’. If you know Bernie, that’s very much his mentality.”

He also credits someone else for recognising the reality of how F1 was changing. “Bernie had immense admiration for Colin Chapman going way back. I remember walking down the paddock at one race where there’d been a startline accident, and there was the usual chaos. The marshal had gone to lunch and couldn’t drop the flag to restart – all of that! Colin came marching along, Bernie was sitting with me in the back of the Marlboro hospitality tent, and said, ‘Bernie, we need to go and tell these people this f****** sport’s a business. They’ve got to get on with it!’”

Hogie retains great affection for Chapman. “At that time I was on the F1 Commission,” he recalls. “And in those meetings I’d always sit next to Colin because if you asked him about something technical he’d have no hesitation in explaining it in terms I could understand.”

What does he think Chapman would make of the increasingly restricted F1 of today? “Colin? He’d be in it right up to here. ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be all right!’”

John Hogan with baseball bat

By the end of the ’70s, Hunt’s halcyon days were fast becoming a distant memory for McLaren, which had slipped into ground effect-era mediocrity. Change was needed, but the conduit would be the sponsor rather than the team management. Rondel had morphed into Project 4, and Hogie identified his old friend Ron Dennis as the man to raise McLaren from its doldrums. “Ever since square one I was always impressed by his drive, energy and charisma,” he says. “He was brilliant with engineers and the people who ran his team.”

A golden era followed, under TAG-Porsche power and then Honda, but always in the unmissable DayGlo and white of Marlboro. “It was down to three key drivers: Prost, Lauda and Senna,” Hogie says. “Niki was a clever old fox. He did one lap behind Prost in Brazil [in ’84] and thought ‘f*** – I’m out of here!’ But Prost would say to this day that watching how Niki went about his job was what helped him become the driver we knew.”

Like Jo Ramirez, Hogie was one of the few who managed to remain on good terms with both Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna during their combustible rivalry between 1988 and ’90. “I had a problem because I liked them both,” he smiles. “With Prost, it got to the point where he could tell you if he was going to win during a weekend. I used to hang around with him in the back of the truck, and mostly we’d talk about sex, which was fine!

“After that silly Senna film, I bumped into him in Abu Dhabi. I hadn’t seen him for years, went up to him and said ‘Listen, I’ve just seen Senna and I think it’s crap’. He said ‘Don’t worry, John, don’t worry’. But it was unfair. Let’s put it this way: Senna was no angel. I was there in the back of the truck when they agreed the first-into-the-first-corner thing at Imola in ’89 – and Prost was first into the first corner. Ron subsequently went apeshit and had Senna in tears. But that was Senna’s weird, religious guilt complex. It was the deep Catholicism in him: provided the penance was big enough he could get away with being a shit.

“Senna wasn’t a very amicable individual. But towards the end of his time at McLaren he got to know James very well. I don’t know what James used to talk to Senna about, but regular conversations with him were usually about sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, and I think that opened Senna’s eyes. ‘Is that what you’re supposed to do with girls?’ His manager Julian Jakobi told me that once, after dinner, when Ayrton may have been persuaded to have a glass of red wine, James said to him, ‘Have you ever driven an Austin A35 van? It’s a traditional British kart! I’ve got one just around the corner and use it all the time’. They drove it to Cadogan Square and started doing laps… When Senna stopped the thing started to melt.

“In that last season [’93] he really started to mellow. And I used James to tell him in so many words to stop being a prick on certain things. Ayrton was very upset when James died.”

Hogie also recounts the ‘million dollar a race’ deal of that ’93 season. “Ron said ‘I haven’t got the money to pay Senna. If you want him, you pay’. Thanks, Ron. So I agreed a million dollars a race. And of course I hadn’t allowed for how intransigent Senna could get. When we got to Imola, he phoned from Brazil and said ‘I’m still in São Paulo’. The money hadn’t arrived. ‘When it arrives I’ll get on the plane’. He made the Varig flight land in Rio and wait there until the money arrived, then they could take off – with the other 360 passengers on board!”

❖

In ’97 a pair of McLarens lined up for the first Grand Prix of the season in colours other than DayGlo and white. Marlboro McLaren, an F1 fixture for nearly a quarter of a century, was no more – and again, it had been Hogie’s call. Marlboro Ferrari never did trip off the tongue in quite the same way.

“We didn’t really switch, we were already with Ferrari in a small way,” he says. “It was a question of whether we should ratchet up that involvement to a proper level and bail out of McLaren. I could see, and it didn’t take a genius to spot it, that Ron had got himself sucked into Peugeot, they tested the Chrysler [Lamborghini V12] and the early Mercedes, which was nowhere near ready – and I could see years of pain. I’d been through it before, in 1978 through to ’81 without winning a race, and you can feel the Bunsen burner… I was determined not to go through it again. And bluntly, Ferrari is the only team you can go to and have a bad year. So I decided we had to play safe.”

A tough conversation, given his long friendship with Dennis? “Hmm… actually with Ron it wasn’t! I remember very clearly it was the Spanish GP and I had all the press releases, and the lawyers outside – they wouldn’t come in with me! He said ‘I know why you’re here’. And I told him we were going to have to pull the plug. Ron being Ron, he very quickly had Ekrem [Sami] on the plane up to Germany talking to the West tobacco company. It was the end of a long relationship, which was sad.”

The Ferrari/Marlboro partnership would, of course, flourish once the Michael Schumacher superteam properly kicked into gear at the turn of the century. But by 2002 Hogie realised he’d had enough. “You get to a point in your life when you have to decide to move forward or stay still. I was coming up to 60. The next career step within the company was huge and I probably didn’t have the appetite for it.

“It was getting to the point that even motor racing was getting boring. The thought of having another demo from Michael Schumacher – who is a lovely guy, by the way – didn’t thrill me. And you get old! I’ve always had a thing in my mind that I never want to be the silly old prick. I’ve seen plenty of those in companies.”

He’d probably rather forget the next chapter, when Jackie Stewart tempted him back into the frontline with Jaguar Racing, a team he recalls as a “huge, unmitigated disaster”. Interestingly, he reveals that during his short time at the team he suggested the brand return to more familiar territory.

“I was trying to encourage them to go back to Le Mans,” he says. “It was something I learnt from some of the engineers at McLaren, there’s always an opportunity in every set of regulations. And at that point of time in sports car racing there really was a chink of light and we could have won Le Mans. I tried, but they didn’t want to know. Richard Parry-Jones was out there doing his Joan of Arc act, trying to prove everybody wrong that you could run an F1 team on £150m a season.”

Now John has been coaxed back again, but you sense in JMI he has found natural bedfellows. And while he is predictably frustrated by some elements of the modern world – “There’s a dependence on analysis instead of decision-making. It can work to a point, but it’s got to be instinctive” – he believes F1 remains a great sales pitch in a more competitive, more complex commercial world.

“Bernie feels, probably rightly, that there should be more GPs,” he says. “NASCAR runs 38 races a year, but that’s different. In F1 I think they could get up to 22, 23 races.”

And what’s his assessment of Ecclestone today? Hogie’s been around too long – and is too loyal – to be drawn. “He’s taking it all with him,” is all he says. “In his own funny way, he’s worked it all out. The car collections, the art and so on – when he goes it’ll be chaos…”

There’s a twinkle in the eye as he says it. They speak the same language, just as they did when first they met 40 years ago.

....“I think his individuality dictated his set-up. Whatever I did, he wanted to do something extremely different,” says Damon, “and by that time I’d done so many miles I really knew what I was doing, where I was going with the car. I’d been with the team for a long time so I knew what worked and what didn’t. But Jacques was very keen to do his own thing. He wasn’t content with the stiffest rear rollbars that Williams could make so they had another one made which we called the ‘infinitely stiff’ bar, and Jacques wanted it set at the most extreme end of the spectrum. That gives you some clue as to how the man’s mind worked. There’s a certain amount of machismo with racing drivers and if you can have the extreme, or the biggest, of something then it sort of proves your manhood. Jacques was definitely out to show that he could cope with the extremes. He was given that scope by his engineers so off he went, in various directions. Fine – it’s part of giving a driver what he wants.”

There was more than a ‘certain amount’ of machismo about the Williams team as a whole. Frank and Patrick are racers and they want racers in their cars. “Oh, yeah,” laughs Damon, “they like their men. They like big, strong guys – Alan Jones, Keke Rosberg, Nigel Mansell – they like that kind of driver.

“So here was Jacques, and he wasn’t afraid of anything. That went down well. At his first big test at Estoril he claimed it was possible to overtake around the last corner and this brought a wry smile to those of us who’d been testing there for months. Everyone thought, you know, this guy just doesn’t understand what F1 is all about, it’s not like Indycars on the ovals. But he said ‘no, I reckon I can do that’ and blow me, he bloody well did it, overtaking Michael Schumacher on the outside of that last corner onto the straight at Estoril. Jacques didn’t want for any outrageousness, that’s for sure.”....

“I think we drove how we dressed,” says Hill. “Alain Prost was always my model driver. The guy was just… You couldn’t even see what he was doing. A lot of people are attracted by a flamboyant driver, but it’s wasted energy a lot of the time. And it’s hard on the tyres too. I came from bike racing and there you have to be smooth, you can’t just chuck it around, and I’ve always tried to achieve a fluid style in the car. Jacques wanted to be right out there, on the edge, and that’s great. It was very exciting to watch.”.....



“He was great afterwards, absolutely brilliant,” says Damon, “a tremendous sporting attitude, no hard feelings at all. We went out to dinner and he was great about it. There was a good spirit within the team that year. There were two camps, yes, but we both knew that what will be, will be. I know the traditional relationship between team-mates is one of wishing to see the other guy not only defeated, but also crushed. But that’s just not necessary. It’s enough to beat him on the track and Jacques had the same attitude – you want to command respect for your driving among your rivals and then you can say, look, I did it, I won. That is important to me. F1 is like boxing, that rivalry between two guys, and sometimes – like Alonso and Hamilton – it boils over. For me, sport is all about watching that dynamic unfold. I’d never make rules about how drivers should behave but there are those who can lose their dignity, and those who keep it.”.......