AT&T Williams F1

PERSONAL
Age: 33
Star sign: Pisces

Start date at Williams F1: March 1996, although I did some van driving for the team between September 1993 and March 1994. That was when my parents wanted to get me into the outside world and get my hands dirty!

Favourite Williams F1 driver: It’s so difficult to choose and I’d much rather give you my top 10… If I had to choose, I’d have to say Juan Pablo Montoya. He’s the driver with whom I’ve been most closely associated and he was very fast. I didn’t get to meet him until the British Grand Prix in 1997, when he was driving for Helmut Marko in Formula 3000, but I’d followed him since ’95. He had amazing car control and gave us a lot of poles and race wins. Unfortunately, there were no championships.

Hobbies: I have no interest in any sport other than motor racing. Once you’ve seen an F1 car going through Becketts at Silverstone, it makes 22 people with waxed chests on a football field seem rather boring. But I do enjoy doing family stuff and I also love being in London and have an interest in fashion.

PROFESSIONAL
How did the RBS Williams F1 Conference Centre come about? It was someone else’s brainchild back in 1987, when I was only 12 years old. The museum actually started life at our second Didcot factory and moved with the rest of the team to our current site at Grove in the winter of 1995/’96. It was then integrated with the RBS Conference Centre, which used to house BMW’s sportscar programme, in the spring of 2002.

What’s in the RBS Williams F1 Conference Centre? We have a large audiovisual presentation cinema, a banqueting room, a bar area and the Williams F1 Museum, in which there’s every car that we’ve raced since our first year as a constructor in 1978. There are a few other projects in the museum as well, such as the FW08B, the six-wheeler and there’s a test car specific to Ayrton Senna, which has got some very interesting cockpit modifications on it.

How important is Williams F1’s heritage? It’s very important because it demonstrates our experience in this field. It’s also something that our sponsorship department can use because, while other teams have had greater on-track success then us, very few can touch us in terms of the commercial partners that we can attract.

Is the museum close to capacity? With last year’s FW29 now installed, we’re running at capacity. But we have a plan in place to create more room, which should give us enough space for six more cars. One of the ideas is to give the FW14B – the dominant ’92 car – its own position in the middle of the hall. We might even take off some bodywork so that people can see the inner workings of one of our most successful cars.