AT&T Williams F1

Nelson Piquet won the first race for an active ride Formula One car at the 1987 Italian Grand Prix. One of the system’s designers, Simon Wells, takes up the story.

“Williams F1 started work on active suspension in 1984. Initially we tried a purely mechanical system, with no sensors or computers on the car at all, but by ’86 we’d included an electro-mechanical control system. This gave us a step up in terms of performance, but it also presented us with a range of new issues and I think it was pretty hairy for the drivers.”

“Nelson Piquet did pretty much all the testing of the system and as we ramped up our programme during ’87 he became increasingly enthusiastic about it. Our breakthrough came at a Paul Ricard test in mid-July when Nelson went considerably quicker than the pole position time at the race two weeks earlier. He wanted to race the system immediately, but Honda asked us to do more reliability testing because they didn’t want to risk losing the World Championship. So we did race distance after race distance and Honda eventually agreed to let us race the system at the Italian Grand Prix.”

“I remember being incredibly nervous prior to the race because it felt like an R&D project going into production. However, the race went quite smoothly and I don’t remember having many problems with the system at all. Nelson was blindingly quick all weekend, taking pole position and winning the race in what was a record time of 1hr14.47s.”

“All of the front-running cars stopped for tyres, except Ayrton Senna, whose rubber was shot to pieces by the end of the race. He ran wide and went through the gravel at Parabolica with about eight laps to run, which handed Nelson the lead. It was a fantastic moment and this victory remains the highlight of my career at Williams.”

“After the race Nelson called me into his motorhome, where he signed the champagne bottle that he’d sprayed on the podium and gave it to me saying, “Well done, this is for you. Good work! It was a nice touch and I still have the bottle in my office.”

“Such is the nature of the corners at Monza that it wasn’t the kind of track where we expected to see the full benefit of active ride, so, to be as quick as we were that day, gave us a lot of confidence for the future.”