Williams

[Axel]

I have always been a music lover but I only discovered the existance of "hifi" when I left home in 1968. We had a radiogram at home, my Mum was a music lover and good pianist, my Dad had no interest at all in music.
I hadn't realised how varied and expensive the stuff was.
I did noise and vibration research before I entered F1 full time, including a period at Garrard looking at how unwanted vibration, and hence spurious signal, got to the cartridge (It gets to both sides).
I had to design my own transducers in the early days since suitable ones were either not available at all or very expensive and made to order.
I was interested in electronics even though I trained in Mechanical Engineering and used it a lot for measuring what was going wrong when fault finding.
I was the first person to use a computer in F1 also a digital data logger (analogue isn't accurate enough), CAD and CAE.
Now everybody is at it.
When I joined Williams we were 23 people with a limited budget and the most important thing I did was to work out the most beneficial place to apply engineering effort. Nowadays teams have 700-1200 people and sufficient budget to do anything they can think of.
It will change.
At Williams I did all the aerodynamics, ran the tests and the No1 car at half the races, Patrick did the other half. At its peak I had 2 model makers and a tunnel technician. Later I developed an active suspension system from concept to win its first race. It was massive fun.
My friend who is head of aero at Ferrari has 120 people doing only that. They don't seem to have mush fun at all.
I have friends throughout the teams so keep up to date a bit still but I retired over 10 years ago.

Thank you for the insight, Frank.
I find it staggering that it takes 120 people to do the aero at Ferrari. I’m aware of the importance of aero engineering, but has it really come on that much further since your day?