Carlos Sainz in the Williams FW48 at the 2026 Chinese Grand Prix. Photo by Liauzh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
Williams turned up in Madrid this weekend in white, green and navy. The one-off wrap on the FW48 copies the FW07C, the car that won the team its second constructors’ championship in 1981 and the last Williams to race in this city, back when the Spanish Grand Prix ran at Jarama. The team showed it off on Tuesday evening at a fan event in the Plaza de Callao, a few kilometres from the new circuit.
Since then the conversation has been about a sponsor decal, not a race car. So let’s do the boring thing and check which names were on which chassis, because the record is specific and it is checkable.
What is actually painted on the Madrid car
The reference point Williams chose is narrow: the FW07C as it raced in 1981. Contemporaneous accounts of that team list three commercial names on the car — Saudia, the Saudi national airline; Techniques d’Avant Garde, better known as TAG; and Leyland Vehicles, the British truck builder, which pulled its money out partway through the season and left the Saudi backers to cover the gap. That is the car being honoured, and that is the set of names the paint scheme belongs to.
The syndicate that paid for it
Two years earlier, the arrangement looked very different. Frank Williams never landed a single title sponsor in the modern sense. He assembled a syndicate, and by the end of 1979 roughly ten Saudi business houses were buying space on the car: Saudia and Albilad, plus dallah AVCO, TAG, United Saudi Industries, the M&M house of Mouaffak al Midani and Prince Mohammed, Encotrade, the Baroom building-materials importers, the Kanoo shipping agents — and a road-building and electrical contracting firm carrying the bin Laden family name.
That last entry is the reason a livery reveal turned into an argument. Osama bin Laden, who directed the September 11, 2001 attacks, was one of many children of the family’s founder, and the family firm had cut ties with him long before those attacks. He had nothing to do with a Formula 1 sponsorship arrangement signed while he was a student. The company name sat on Williams’ 1979 car as one line in a long list of Saudi backers. It is not on the 1981 car Williams has recreated for Madrid.
Whether a team should reach into that particular era of its history in this particular week is a fair question, and Williams has not addressed it publicly. What is not in dispute is which decals were on which chassis, and a fair number of people arguing about it this weekend have the years mixed up.
Why the FW07C was worth a tribute in the first place
Here is the part that has gone almost unmentioned: 1981 was a season in which the rulebook deliberately broke the thing Williams was best at, and Williams won anyway.
Sliding skirts were outlawed from the start of that year and a six-centimetre minimum ground clearance was written into the regulations. Ground-effect cars lived or died on sealing the airflow under the floor, so the ban was meant to gut downforce across the grid. The paddock’s answer was suspension trickery — systems that let the car squat onto the road at speed and rise obligingly again when a scrutineer came near. Williams held out against that approach longer than most, and leaned instead on structure and aerodynamics: a much stronger front section to the monocoque, and reworked sidepods aimed at clawing back the load the skirt ban had taken away. The cars were built under the 585-kilogram minimum weight and ballasted back up to it, still on Cosworth DFV power. By late in the year the team had its own wind tunnel and could stop renting time.
The return: 95 points to Brabham’s 61, with Renault third on 54. Five wins, six second places and three thirds from 32 starts, and 25 of those 32 cars reached the finish. In a season where the reliability baseline was what it was in 1981, that finishing rate is the number that won the championship, not the wins column.
The last Madrid race Williams contested
Jarama, 21 June 1981, is worth pulling up if you have never watched it. Gilles Villeneuve won it in a Ferrari that was rapid down the straights and unhelpful everywhere else, and he held a queue behind him to the flag: the top five finished covered by 1.24 seconds. Carlos Reutemann was fourth in the Williams, 1.010s off the win after 80 laps. Alan Jones was seventh, nearly a minute back.
Reutemann lost that year’s drivers’ championship to Nelson Piquet by one point, 50 to 49, with Jones third on 46. A single place at Jarama would have changed the outcome of the season. Madrid has taken something from this team before.
The 2026 car underneath the paint
A constructors’ title from 1981 is a heavy thing to wrap around a car sitting ninth in the 2026 standings on 11 points, behind Audi and ahead of only Aston Martin and Cadillac. Williams committed to Sainz and Albon for 2027 from exactly that position, which tells you the team is measuring itself over a longer window than this season.
Saturday did not help. Lando Norris took pole with a 1:31.824 and beat Kimi Antonelli by 0.011s in a qualifying session settled in the final seconds. Albon was the lead Williams in 15th. Sainz went out in Q1 in his home city, 17th, and then collected a grid penalty for impeding Valtteri Bottas at Turn 7 — the stewards found the team had failed to tell him the Cadillac was closing. The driver whose face is on half the marketing for this weekend will start it from the back half of the grid, in a livery celebrating a championship.
What to watch on Sunday
The Madring is 5.414km, 22 corners and 57 laps, with cars touching around 340km/h. The corner that will shape the race is Turn 12, La Monumental: roughly half a kilometre of 24 per cent banking, the longest banked turn on the calendar. Banking loads a car in a way nothing else on this schedule does, and it punishes anything unstable in ride height or floor behaviour — a live question at a brand-new circuit running under a brand-new rulebook with no historical data to lean on.
For Williams specifically, watch how the FW48 behaves through the banking on a long run and whether the rear tyres survive it. Recovering from 15th and further back at a circuit nobody has raced on is a strategy problem as much as a pace problem, and Williams has more to gain from an early safety car than almost anyone on the grid.
The part of 1981 worth copying
Team principal James Vowles framed the livery as continuity: “Our mission to get back to the front of the grid is drawn from, inspired by and informed by everything we’ve done before.” Atlassian chief executive Mike Cannon-Brookes, whose company’s name now occupies the space Saudia’s once did, put it more bluntly: “The best teams don’t put their history in a trophy case. They wire it into the work.”
That is the right instinct, and it points at the awkward truth under the whole exercise. The syndicate model is gone — nobody sells a Formula 1 car in ten slices to ten trading houses any more — but the dependence on somebody else’s balance sheet has not changed at all. Williams was funded from outside the sport in 1979 and it is funded from outside the sport now. What made 1981 worth remembering was not who paid. It was a team reading a rule change faster than its rivals and building a car around the answer. A retro wrap earns its place when it points at an engineering idea rather than a merchandise drop. Williams has the story. Sunday is about whether the current car can carry it.
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