AT&T Williams F1

“My father formed part of a motorcycle trials team in the army. He was contesting an event in Germany on the day World War Two broke out, but a local colonel urged them all to finish the event and promised to arrange safe passage home.  That was all very well, but they weren’t sure Hitler would see things the same way so they jumped on their bikes and did an overnight flit…”

There was an air of inevitability about the competitive gene in Patrick Head’s DNA.

The future Williams linchpin spent plenty of time at racing circuits as a youngster, watching his father’s exploits (mostly in Jaguars), but his early career offered precious few clues about the future. Having enlisted in the Royal Navy, at Dartmouth, he bought himself out after three months and so incurred Head Snr’s displeasure that he was obliged to live for a while with his aunt and uncle in Wales. He found work with a couple of building contractors and played a part in the construction of both a Newport hospital and the M4. “Eventually,” he says, “somebody noticed that I had a half-decent education and I was moved away from painting the loos and placed in the drawing office.”

From there he moved into the soil testing laboratory. “I was 19 years old and it was quite an interesting process,” he says. “I had to explain to much older men that they couldn’t put down the next layer of soil until moisture had evaporated from the previous level. I ended up in charge of the soil testing because the previous manager, a Scot, would get drunk at lunchtimes. I went from £4 per week in the Navy to £300 per week – a huge amount of money at the time.” He returned to education and commenced a mechanical engineering degree – although he flunked his first year at Birmingham University, mainly because he spent too much time ether rallying or tinkering with Minis at the famous Broadspeed team’s workshops.

Finally graduating from University College London at the age of 23, Head’s motorsport career began in earnest when he landed a job with volume racing car manufacturer Lola. He spent three seasons there before moving on to design an eponymous Formula Two chassis for racer Richard Scott and then switching to Trojan, where he worked on F5000 cars and, in 1974, the company’s short-lived F1 project. “While working for Trojan,” he says, “I was also building a boat – a 50ft schooner. It was a typical situation for a young man, because my ambition was greater than my means. It was about two-thirds complete when I realised I wasn’t going to have enough money to finish the job.
 
That’s when I received my first phone call from Frank Williams.” He was recruited to spearhead the design department, but soon afterwards Williams sold a controlling stake in his team… and new partner Walter Wolf had his own chief designer, Harvey Postlethwaite.

“I was told I could carry on as number two or leave with a £500 pay-off,” he says. “I was in such desperate straits financially that I had no choice but to stay – and it was the best thing I could have done. The car that came with the deal – the Hesketh 308C – was truly one of the worst F1 cars of all time. Harvey got all the flak, but I was able to keep my head down. It was a massive learning year, because I wasn’t directly in the firing line and gained the experience of learning how not to do things.”

When Williams left to set up once more on his own, it wasn’t long before Head’s phone rang again. The first F1 car he designed, the Williams FW06, was rich with promise. The second, the FW07, was one of the sport’s all-time greats. The foundations of one of F1’s finest, most enduring partnerships were sown. “I’m much more driven by contempt for failure than joy at success,” he says. “I hope that doesn’t sound too negative, but I’m not one for jumping up and down when we win, because I always feel that’s why we’re there in the first place.

“I am very much an engineer first and a racing fan second. I love motorsport, but I’m not really a petrolhead and don’t have a great passion for road cars. My everyday transport is a VW Golf diesel. For the last 25 years I’ve been lucky enough to have a company car: if somebody else sorts out the tax and insurance and it always starts when you turn the key, that’s fine by me.”

And that schooner? “I eventually finished it in 1980,” he says. “I took it to France a couple of times and planned to do some blue-water sailing, but ended up selling it to a couple of divorcees. They spent five years travelling the world and had a wonderful time. If I wasn’t involved in motor racing, I suppose I’d probably be doing something nautical.”

Patrick picked up his interest in sailing recently, crossing the Atlantic in 70 hours in 2005.

In his own words: “I’m a straightforward, no-nonsense type. There are no agendas with me and people tend to know what I want.”