Williams is plotting a significant expansion of its road car and engineering consultancy business by targeting electric/hybrid powertrains, carbonfibre body structures and advanced chassis work.
Under the banner ‘Williams Advanced Engineering’, the company is already working on 14 projects – the bulk of them automotive – and is taking on more engineers at its base in the UK to expand into a new workshop and engineering facility.
“We are commercialising the technology and the know-how of our F1 operation and, while we are still a young business, it is developing fast,” said Mike O’Driscoll, Williams Group CEO and former boss of Jaguar.
Rumours suggest that other Jaguar Land Rover projects are already under way at Williams, but neither O’Driscoll nor Craig Wilson, managing director of Williams Advanced Engineering, will comment.
Williams has also teamed up with Nissan’s Nismo performance arm. It has created an aerodynamic kit for the GT-R Nismo 500 shown at Tokyo last year and supported a special Nürburgring ‘Time Attack’ version of the GT-R.
It is understood that Williams is continuing to work with Nismo to extract more from the GT-R and has a stripped-down GT-R in its engineering facility at the moment. Williams is also hoping to win more major projects like the C-X75, and an obvious opening might be with Mercedes-Benz, which supplies the F1 team with engines and needs to respond to BMW’s carbonfibre i3 and i8.