The race winner that really put Honda’s turbo on the map
WORDS STUART CODLING PICTURES JAMES MANN
NOW THAT WAS A CAR No125
At the turn of the 1980s few would have argued against Williams being the most technically accomplished team in F1. With the FW07 and its derivative specs Patrick Head and Frank Dernie had created the ground-effect benchmark, hitting the ideal compromise between maximal underbody aerodynamics and ideal chassis stiffness. Alan Jones might have won the drivers’ championship in 1979 had the car been definitively ready at the start of that season, and he showed everyone else the way in 1980; the following year team-mate Carlos Reutemann would have been champ but for his inexplicable flunk in the season finale. Tenacity and consistency, and the sad absence of Gilles Villeneuve and Didier Pironi, played a part in Keke Rosberg’s 1982 title but but so too did the FW08, one of the best non-turbo cars of that season.
The trajectory from that against-the-odds victory was generally downhill, though. Already having the best non-turbo car was barely enough; by 1983 Williams was desperate to secure a blown engine. And even once the deal with Honda was done, the team was becoming aware that its chassis and aerodynamic performance had slipped behind the state of the art. 1984 was all about McLaren and John Barnard’s beautifully integrated composite-chassis MP4/2 and TAG-Porsche turbo, very much the forerunner of the 21st century F1 cars shaped by aerodynamicists and engine builders working hand-in-hand.
In contrast the aluminium honeycomb Williams FW09 was boxy, rather inelegant and aerodynamically sub-optimal, largely as a consequence of the engine and ancillaries arriving from Japan as a technical fait accompli, with no indication of essential parameters such as cooling requirements. It’s difficult to separate the vicious eccentricities of the FW09 from those of Honda’s early V6 turbo; designer Frank Dernie has said the root of the handling issues which plagued Rosberg and Jacques Laffite through 1984 were mainly a factor of the team adopting unusual setups to ameliorate the effects of the engine’s binary delivery. The RA164E’s claimed 750 horses were said to arrive in one stampeding contingent between 10,300 and 11,400rpm – with little indication of their presence until that point.
Both Williams and Honda were going through a learning process of how to engineer a turbocharged car – and both parties recognised they had to scale up their efforts. Williams already built composite components suc
