I’m Frank Dernie. I was at Williams from 1978 to 1988 and then again in the early 2000s.

I got a call from Jim Barker who just said, “Could I come over and visit?” Here at Williams they’re building the FW11 for Goodwood. This one has come from Japan [from Honda], and I haven’t seen this many FW11s in one place since 1987!

You see, the team was very small then. My job with these FW11s – I did all the aero. There was just me and a model maker in the wind tunnel at that time. But I also did all the testing. I did the engine installation from the point of view of cooling, flow rates, you know, that sort of thing. And I went to all the races to race engineer the cars. It’s quite funny. Nowadays you’d have about 300 people doing those roles, but back then one or two of us did it.

I have no idea [on the differences in F1 between now and then]. I retired 15 years ago and I don’t really know what it’s like now, but of course I used to quite like the testing and there isn’t any of that anymore. And there’s a lot more simulation going on, which is brilliant. But for me, I’d love to know – there are two absolutely crucial aspects to how a race car works, and I don’t know how they model them in a simulator. They certainly couldn’t when I was doing it. So the two most important parameters affecting the handling, grip and lap time of a Formula 1 car – I’d love to know how they model them in a simulator. Because certainly 15 years ago, you couldn’t do it. Not with any degree of accuracy.

Coming here today to Williams – to be honest, my first thought was how nice to see some old mates! Just all the people working here. People I’ve worked with for years. But yeah, it’s nice and nostalgic to see them. It brings back memories of new ideas that were new then, but obviously are pretty not new now.

In F1 [at the time] you didn’t have any data on the car. So all of my decisions on what to do to the car were entirely based on my interpretation of what the driver said about it.

And then once the work list was out for the mechanics, I just hung around while they were working on the car in case they needed to ask me a question or find out how to do something, because I knew the car backwards. So there were two engineers working in the team. And when you were doing the checkups and making sure it was legal and what have you, people would wander and have a look at other people’s cars, talk to the other engineers you knew. And nowadays, basically it’s a sackable offence to talk to somebody!

There were great years – for 10 years, we were winning races and championships all the time I was at Williams, so there are an awful lot of really good memories.

I worked with all of the drivers because I did most of the testing. Jones was brilliant because he had no thought about him trying to lead the team or interpret anything. He would just come out, tell you what was wrong with the car and then say, “I’m going for steak.” And he was gone. But he didn’t interfere because he knew he didn’t understand. But generally speaking, I think one of the things people expect from drivers is that they will be some sort of team leader or make contributions technically to the car. Well, most drivers stopped paying any attention to their education when they were about 14 because they were racing drivers.

Therefore, they have a zero foundation in the physics that would be required for them to understand how the car worked. I never expect the driver to understand anything. Just to be really quick. And if you’ve got a really quick driver, it’s all you need. You don’t need them to tell you anything more. So that when you change something, it shows on the stopwatch.

Well, my favorite car is actually the FW08 because we were up against cars with well over 100 horsepower more and it was tough and difficult. But this car really was – when it first ran and we saw how quick it was, I knew that it was going to be quite a good step because the wind tunnel model was an awful lot better than the FW07. So that was really quite exciting. But how much quicker than everyone else we were came as a bit of a surprise.

Yeah, I haven’t seen any of the FW11s for a while. But I’m not one of those who remembers that sort of thing. I remember, to be honest, when I was doing it, I was looking into the future. Whatever had happened in the past, I couldn’t fix. I was interested in what was going to happen in the future.

It’s a big project for the guys because they’ve got to go through all the bits that come off the car, check their provenance, make sure they’re not cracked or corroded, make sure they’re right for the period. And then when the car gets rebuilt, it’s a big old project to make sure it goes together properly with the right parts and is reliable and safe. But they’ll get it done!