The string of successes achieved in the 1990s is now a distant memory for the Williams team, and the dreadful season just concluded has pushed Jacques Villeneuve, the last World Champion crowned with the cars from the English Grove-based team, to look for a change of scenery and move to the newly founded BAR team. Technical director Patrick Head, having lost the genius of Adrian Newey, continues to follow the path laid out by the brilliant British designer, retaining the group of engineers who had already worked on the 1998 car.
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| WILLIAMS FW21. Alex Zanardi Monza, Italian GP 1999 |
The new Williams FW21 was designed by Gavin Fisher, a mechanical engineer with honors from the University of Hertfordshire and a close collaborator of Newey until 1997, along with Geoff Willis, an aerodynamics engineer from Cambridge who had also been working with Newey since the Leyton House days. Following a disappointing 1998 season, Patrick Head decided to break entirely from the concepts of previous cars, attempting to apply new development approaches. Alongside Fisher and Willis, the engineering team included Brian O'Roake as Chief Engineer for Composite Materials, Mark Tatham as Chief Mechanical Engineer, and for the increasingly important aerodynamics department, Jason Sommerville and Nick Alcock. Despite retaining the same group of engineers from 1998 and introducing some innovative elements, the FW21 closely resembled Newey’s designs from two seasons earlier. The car’s shapes remained largely unchanged compared to the previous season’s FW20, except for a more squared and slightly higher nose, with the removal of the deflectors in front of the side pods. The new chassis was still a carbon fiber monocoque, a material now also used for the gearbox casing, a longitudinal semi-automatic six-speed unit. As with the 1998 car, to make the most of the new grooved tires, the suspension system used a push-rod configuration with a torsion bar at the front and coil springs at the rear, while from this season, the damper units were supplied by American company Penske. The cooling system consisted of four radiators, two for water and two for oil, provided respectively by IMI and Secan, while the braking system used carbon fiber discs from Carbone Industrie with six-piston AP calipers.
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| WILLIAMS FW21. Ralf Schumacher A1 Ring, Austrian GP 1999 |
The new FW21 was a simple, no-frills but functional car, penalized, however, by an underpowered engine that was no match for Ferrari and Mercedes. Despite their past successes, the partnership with Renault engines continued into 1999, but the French manufacturer had not been directly contributing to engine development for two seasons. After Renault’s withdrawal from competition in 1998, its V10 RS9 engines were handed over to its affiliate Mecachrome, which renamed them GC37/01 and supplied them to Williams and Benetton under a customer contract, meaning no direct factory support, development, or updates. In 1999, these V10s were managed by Supertec. In 1998, Super Performance Competition Engineering, run by Flavio Briatore, made a deal with Mecachrome to supply the French V10s starting from 1999. All the old Renault RS9 engines were handed over to this new company, rebranded as Supertec FB01, and supplied to Williams and BAR, while those for Benetton were renamed Playlife at the request of Briatore’s main team sponsor. These engines were essentially the same units used in the 1997 World Championship-winning Williams FW19 driven by Jacques Villeneuve, but in the world of Formula 1, where development is relentless, a two-year-old engine was a significant handicap. The Supertec FB01’s main feature was reliability, at the cost of considerably lower power than its rivals.
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| WILLIAMS FW21. Alex Zanardi Hungaroring, Hungarian GP 1999 |
Regarding the drivers, after Villeneuve’s departure, German driver Frentzen also chose to leave the team, replaced by compatriot Ralf Schumacher, younger brother of two-time World Champion Michael, and Italian driver Alessandro Zanardi, who had been away from Formula 1 since 1994 but came back following a brilliant career in the American IndyCar Series, where he had won the title twice with Chip Ganassi’s team and Morris Nunn (designer of the 1970s Ensign cars) as his race engineer. Despite a third-place finish in the season-opening Australian Grand Prix and another podium mid-season at Silverstone, the 1999 campaign yielded even fewer results than the lackluster 1998 season, with just 35 points, all scored by Schumacher. Zanardi struggled all year to adapt to the grooved tires and the performance of the new Formula 1 cars, which were much lighter and faster than the American open-wheel machines he was used to. The 1999 season could be considered transitional for Williams, as they had already secured an exclusive deal with BMW for a new V10 engine to be introduced the following year. In late 1999, BMW completed the preparation of its new engine and decided, together with Williams, to fit it into the FW21 chassis for a test session at the A1-Ring in Zeltweg.
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| WILLIAMS FW21B BMW, Jörg Müller Zeltweg, A1 Ring |
On that occasion, BMW test driver Jörg Müller drove the car, designated FW21B, in a special livery that was used only once before the introduction of the new design with the new millennium, which would form the basis of the team’s colors until 2005. In early 2000, Williams, in collaboration with Michelin, conducted another test session at Paul Ricard with the same experimental car, again driven by Jörg Müller, this time fitted with French tires ahead of Michelin’s planned return to Formula 1 in the 2001 season.
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