While Williams has embarked on a new era under owner Dorilton Capital, which took over in 2020, the team’s heritage remains an important element.
In fact, on the day of the takeover, continuing under the Williams brand and retaining its famous FW chassis moniker (in honour of founder Frank Williams) were singled out as two things that would never change.
The chassis tradition has continued to today, with this year’s design raced by Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz being the FW48.
But as part of its celebrations next year for the 50th anniversary of Williams Grand Prix Engineering’s debut race – which was the 1977 Spanish Grand Prix when the team ran a March chassis for Patrick Neve (pictured below, courtesy of Paul-Henri Cahier/F1-Photo) – it is understood Williams is going to skip the FW49 name and will instead jump to the FW50 for its next car.
The slight break of tradition in jumping a number for symmetry reasons is not the first time that Williams has done this.
Back in 2017, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the team, Williams elected to skip the FW39 and instead jumped straight to the FW40.
That move should have put it in perfect sync to not need to miss a chassis number again, but the impact of the COVID pandemic put paid to that.
For 2021, as part of the cost-cutting measures agreed with F1, teams were allowed to roll over their chassis – and that meant Williams entered that season with its updated FW43B rather than immediately moving to the FW44.
There have been many occasions throughout Williams’s history that it has raced chassis into the following campaigns – with it famously dominating the 1992 championship with the FW14B (pictured above, courtesy of Paul-Henri Cahier/F1-Photo) that was a development of the car that had fought for the title the previous year.
The very first car that was produced by Williams Grand Prix Engineering under the technical leadership of Patrick Head was the FW06, which was raced in 1978 by Alan Jones (picture below courtesy of Paul-Henri Cahier/F1-Photo).
