For a generation, Williams Racing was the standard in Formula 1.
After his previous team, Frank Williams Racing Cars, failed to meet the level of success he had hoped for, Williams rebuilt his team as Williams Grand Prix Engineering, debuting on the F1 grid in the 1977 season.
That year, the team did not score a point, and their best finish was seventh, coming at the Italian Grand Prix.
Their first win as a team came in 1979, when Clay Regazzoni finished 25 seconds ahead of Renault’s René Arnoux.
The next season, they were the Constructors’ Champions.
That championship in 1980 kicked off a run of four titles in the decade, as Williams topped the F1 world in 1980, 1981, 1986, and 1987. Williams drivers took titles in three of those campaigns, as Alan Jones won the Drivers’ Championship in 1980, Keke Rosberg in 1982, and Nelson Piquet claimed a title in 1987.
But those titles were nothing compared to what Williams accomplished the next decade, when they changed the trajectory of the sport and forced F1’s governing body to intervene. When the 1992 season began, Williams arrived on the grid with the FW14B, described in The Formula as “the most complex race car F1 had ever seen.”
The FW14B contained the sport’s first “functional onboard computer,” designed by Paddy Lowe, a graduate of Cambridge. “Built from scratch in side the Williams factory, from hardware to software, the computer could reprogram the suspension remotely from the garage, raising and lowering the car in such subtle and rapid fashion that it remained perfectly level at all times.
“It was worth over a second a lap.”
The team’s 1992 challenger “seamlessly blended advanced aerodynamics with groundbreaking technology and mechanical reliability. The onboard computer managed not just the active suspension, but also a semiautomatic gearbox, traction control, onboard telemetry, and electronic data logging. Every part of the FW14B was at the bleeding edge.”
Nigel Mansell won his first and only Drivers’ Championship that season in dominant fashion, powering the FW14B to nine wins and 14 pole positions. His 108 points were nearly double that of teammate Riccardo Patrese, who finished second with 56 points.
Williams secured titles in 1992 and 1993, leading the sport’s governing body to step in and ban electronic aids for the 1994 season, legislating Williams’ onboard computer out of the sport.
Even with the rule change, Williams managed to win titles in both 1996 and 1997, raising their total number of Constructors’ Championships to nine. Add in the total of seven Drivers’ titles won by the team, and you have 16 championships over two decades in the sport.
The two titles won in 1997 — the Constructors’ Championship and a Drivers’ title from Jacques Villeneuve — are the last two championships won by the team.
They came close in both 2002 and 2003, when they finished second in the Constructors’ Championship during both of those seasons, but since then their best finish was a fifth place in the Constructors’ Championship during the 2017 campaign.
Matching that is on the table this year, with bigger things on the horizon.
The comeback at Williams is on.
Here is how they’ve got there.
Alexander Albon: The first piece
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The first step along the comeback trail for Williams?
Signing Alexander Albon ahead of the 2022 season.
A member of the Red Bull racing family, Albon got the chance to drive alongside Max Verstappen midway through the 2019 season, when he was promoted from Toro Rosso (now Visa Cash App Racing Bulls) to replace Pierre Gasly at the senior team next to Verstappen. Albon finished in the points in all but one of his races with Red Bull that year, his best result a P4 at the Japanese Grand Prix.
He began the 2020 campaign in the seat next to Verstappen, but a P13 in the season-opening Austrian Grand Prix was a harbinger of things to come. He managed just two podium finishes that year — one at the Tuscan Grand Prix and then a second at the Bahrain Grand Prix — and was demoted at the end of the season to a reserve role, with Sergio Pérez taking his spot for 2021.
Albon stayed in that role until the 2022 campaign, when a spot opened up at Williams. With George Russell on his way to Mercedes to replace Valtteri Bottas, Team Principal Jost Capito tapped the Red Bull reserve for a seat.
It was a tricky negotiation process, given Albon’s continued ties to the team. But ultimately, the deal was done, and Capito had the driver he wanted to push the team forward.
“We want to move forward, we don’t want to move backwards,” said Capito at the time. “With that in mind, a driver who is still at the beginning of his career and has quite a lot of experience already was appealing. Alex has been in one of the top teams, has driven a race-winning car, has experience of being successful and being on the podium – and is eager to do that again.
“He will also fit well in the team and already has with the relationship with Nicky, as they were team mates in F2. All this together was important for us. If take these attributes and put them through a checklist, Alex is the guy who is the one that fits the most.”
James Vowles: The second piece
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Capito stepped down in December of 2022 as Team Principal at Williams, opening the door for the next piece to the puzzle.
The hiring of James Vowles as the next Team Principal.
Vowles began his F1 career with British American Racing back in 2001, and was part of the Brawn team that shocked the F1 world in 2009 by winning both the Constructors’ Championship as well as the Drivers’ Championship with Jenson Button. He stayed with the organization when it was purchased by Mercedes at the end of the 2009 season, and was an integral part of the team as it won eight consecutive Constructors’ titles and seven Drivers’ championships from 2014 through 2021.
He was named the next Team Principal at Williams ahead of the 2023 season, calling it the “opportunity of a lifetime.”
Vowles delivered almost immediate results.
While Williams limped to a last-place finish in the 2022 Constructors’ Championship — scoring just eight points, trailing ninth-place AlphaTauri by 27 points — they shocked the F1 world in Vowles’ first season, as they finished seventh in 2023. Albon scored 27 of the team’s 28 points, with rookie driver Logan Sargeant adding a P10 at the inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Ahead of the 2024 campaign, his second at Williams, Vowles shared with SB Nation his vision for the team’s future.
“So everything is about long-term resolution, not short-term [and] as the result of that is that we took and we will continue to take enormous risks with this company. I’m not going to be withheld by the restriction that my job is on the line,” added Vowles. “If we’re not doing a good enough job, the only way to get this team back to the front is break everything.
“I’ve used the terms internally and ‘break the cycle’ and it’s exactly what we are doing, whatever we have done before that, even what we’ve done the last two months. I’m really proud of what we’ve achieved.
“It’s not good enough.
“This is what it looks like and how do we get there, and it’s just giving everyone the idea of ‘this is the gap.’ I’ll be with you on this journey and I’ll be shouldering it if things go wrong. But take that as an opportunity to not be withheld by fear of change and a fear of failure that goes with it.”
Vowles was confronted with that concept of change later that season.
He made the surprising decision to retain Sargeant for the 2024 campaign, despite the young driver’s struggles throughout the 2023 season. It was a patient decision in a sport not known for such a trait, and reflected the Team Principal’s vision for sustained growth.
But as Sargeant’s struggles continued into 2024, he decided to replace the American driver, calling upon Franco Colapinto midway through the campaign.
“It’s a good question. Why change it now? The cleanest point to have done it would have been at the beginning of the year. Logan, as I said from the outset, at the end of last year he was starting to get within a tenth of Alex, starting to be close, and it was good to see his progression,“ said Vowles in September of 2024.
“If that progression continued, we would have a driver, I think, in a very strong place this year. It didn’t feel like the right point to cut ties, sever ties, as a result of it. The reason now is straightforward. We’ve had enough experience under our belt to know that he’s reached the limit of what he’s able to achieve.
“It’s almost unfair on him, furthermore, continuing. Look at his face when he gets out of the car, he’s given you everything he possibly can, and it’s not enough.
“He absolutely never, from a human perspective, did anything but give me 100% of what he was able to do, but the realisation of where he is on his limits now is very clear – it’s clear to everyone.”
But Colapinto was not the long-term answer alongside Albon.
Vowles had already made that decision.
Carlos Sainz Jr.: The third piece
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The 2025 driver transfer market was shocked into motion in February of 2024.
That is when Lewis Hamilton stunned the F1 world by announcing he would be leaving Mercedes following the 2024 season to drive for Ferrari.
That decision not only sent shockwaves through the entire sporting world, but it also made Carlos Sainz Jr. the most attractive free agent on the driver transfer market.
There was no shortage of options for Sainz’s services, given his experience with one of F1’s top teams and his presence as a grand prix winner. A link was made between him and Sauber, given his father’s status as a rally driver for Audi, and Alpine was interested in his services as well.
Ultimately, however, he put pen to paper on a deal with Williams.
Vowles called it a “clear statement of intent” by the team.
“I have had the pleasure of winning races and being part of the race bay element, winning a championship and being in the race bay. I promise you, the emotional reaction to this was the largest I’ve ever seen in my Formula 1 career,” said Vowles of the reaction to the Sainz signing.
“And then what I’ve done after that is just follow it up by just walking around really and asking people what it means. The answer is what I hoped it would be, which is [that] it’s a statement of intent.
“It’s a very clear statement of intent; there’s no doubt now that we are investing at the right level, that we have in my opinion one of – if not the best – driver line-ups on the grid, as a combination between the two [Sainz and Alex Albon]. There’s no politics, they’re both just performance machines.”
The 2025 F1 season is entering its closing stretch, with the European portion of the schedule in the rear-view mirror.
And the work done over the previous seasons has Williams on the cusp of their best season in recent memory, with perhaps even more success on the horizon.
In the wake of Albon’s seventh-place finish at the Italian Grand Prix, Williams sits fifth in the Constructors’ Championship standings with 86 points, putting them 24 points ahead of sixth-place Aston Martin and at the sharp end of the midfield fight.
While the 86 points might not seem impressive at first blush, consider this:
Those 86 points are more than the team scored in the seven previous seasons … combined:
Yes, the comeback is indeed on.
And even better days may be on the horizon. 2026 will usher in a host of new technical regulations, and Vowles and the entire team have made it clear that their eyes are focused on the opportunity that presents. Speaking with SB Nation at the Miami Grand Prix, Sainz made that vision clear, as well as his trust in Vowles to execute that vision.
“I think it might be a bit of an outlier where this track seems to suit our car quite nicely because since FP1 the balance and everything just fell in the window and in the sweet spot,” said Sainz in Miami in May. “But at the same when I see those three-tenths to the top, my will to develop this car is there because I perfectly know where this car, the moment you put it in the wind tunnel and try and target the two or three areas that I’ve been telling the team where there’s clearly a lot more potential, and if the team manages to give me that, I think we could do a very big step quality wise.
“But the plan is the plan.
“We’re not going to do that.
“We’re gonna focus on next year and put all the eggs in that basket, but yeah, obviously that potential that I see especially only in my sixth race to be three-tenths off pole is encouraging.”
Even though Sainz sees the potential in this year’s challenger, he is trusting the plan, the process, and Vowles’ patient vision for the future. Even if he wants to push for more improvements to this year’s challenger.
“I like [James Vowles] because he’s a man of a very clear [vision].
“He has a plan and he will commit 100% to it.
“He trusts his feelings, his plan, his project.
“That’s why I committed to James as an individual but also as a team to Williams because I see a project and a very clear ambition, very clear targets, and we need to commit to them and stick to them.
“He also promised me this year’s car would be an improvement to last year and so far he’s been a man of his word and I’m glad that that’s going in the right direction.”
The comeback at Williams is on.
And next year could be even bigger.
