Patrick Head Interview

By Andrew Hooper
January 31 2003

	Patrick Head Interview
	Was the team’s 2002 performance a profound disappointment for you? Well, second place in the Constructors’ Championship was a step forward from 2001, but you can’t duck the old adage that we were, in truth, the first of the losers. We heaped expectations upon ourselves, and these were added to by the public at large, our sponsors and the media, to be competitive with Ferrari. We fell short of that, and there is no other way of describing that than disappointing. Naturally, we intend to do better next year. And what was the key to Ferrari’s success? Well, although the obvious answer might appear to be ‘speed’, in many respects it was their unrivalled reliability that underpinned their success. If you remember, every time a Ferrari got away from the grid last season, it finished the race, which is remarkable really. Because of a significant performance advantage, though, they were able to run their engines less hard than us or perhaps McLaren, and this probably in turn contributed to the reliability they managed to achieve. It seems that WilliamsF1 is responding to the challenge. What precise changes and developments are underway at Grove? The growth you refer to goes right across the company, but from a technical perspective, we are expanding the design group, the wind tunnel operation, and manufacturing as well. What can you tell us about your plans for a new wind tunnel? Well, first and foremost, it won’t have any impact on the 2003 car of course. Our existing facility has not remained static, and we have been developing the tunnel continuously, but aside from increasing our capacity and effectively doubling our experimental resource, current tunnels should address how the wheels are supported, how the model is supported, the quality of the airflow in terms of how good the boundary layer is, transient testing and so on. Away from Formula One, do you have any different aspirations? Yes, I do enjoy sailing, and before I joined Frank – more than 25 years ago now – I had aspirations of doing some deep-water sailing. I did in fact build a very large sailing boat – a 50 ft schooner. I sailed it intermittently for 10 years and then sold it to a man who went off round the world on it with his girlfriend. There were two bills of sale – he bought the port side of the boat, and she bought the starboard! I don’t harbour any desire to sail round the world, but certainly to do some deep-water sailing before I am clattering up and down the deck in a Zimmer frame would be good.e