Editing Williams Racing (section)

====1996 season====
[[File:Jacques Villeneuve 1996.jpg|thumb|Jacques Villeneuve in the FW18 at the [[1996 Canadian Grand Prix]]]]
For {{F1|1996}}, Williams had the quickest and most reliable car, the [[Williams FW18|FW18]].<ref>{{cite news|url=http://www.grandprix.com/ft/ft00244.html|title=Review of the year 1996|first=Joe|last=Saward|date=2 December 1996|access-date=1 October 2010|publisher=GrandPrix.com|archive-date=9 April 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160409175501/http://www.grandprix.com/ft/ft00244.html|url-status=dead}}</ref> Coulthard had left Williams to join [[Mika Häkkinen]] at McLaren, and Williams replaced him with Canadian [[Jacques Villeneuve]], who had won the [[Champ Car|CART]] series title in 1995, while [[Damon Hill|Hill]] remained with the team. [[Michael Schumacher|Schumacher]] left [[Benetton Formula|Benetton]] to join [[Scuderia Ferrari|Ferrari]]. Williams won the first five Grands Prix, Hill winning all but one of them. [[Olivier Panis]] would take victory at the sixth round in [[1996 Monaco Grand Prix|Monaco]] after both Williams cars retired. Hill would retire for the second time in a row after he spun-off in [[1996 Spanish Grand Prix|Spain]], while his teammate, Villeneuve, took third place. Hill and Villeneuve dominated the next Grand Prix in [[1996 Canadian Grand Prix|Canada]], with a 1–2 in qualifying and a 1–2 finish. Williams made it a second 1–2 after Hill won the [[1996 French Grand Prix|French Grand Prix]]. Villeneuve won his second race in F1 at [[1996 British Grand Prix|Silverstone]] after Hill retired with a wheel bearing failure on lap 26. Hill was victorious in the next Grand Prix in [[1996 German Grand Prix|Germany]] while Villeneuve won the race after that in [[1996 Hungarian Grand Prix|Hungary]]. Schumacher's Ferrari would then take the next two Grands Prix at [[1996 Belgian Grand Prix|Spa-Francorchamps]] and [[1996 Italian Grand Prix|Monza]]. Villeneuve mounted a title challenge going into the final race of the season at [[1996 Japanese Grand Prix|Japan]], but Hill reasserted his dominance to take the race and the 1996 title, while Villeneuve lost a wheel and retired.

Williams's dominance was such that they had clinched the Constructors' Championship and only their drivers had a mathematical chance of taking the title, several races before the season concluded. Around that time, [[Frank Williams (Formula One)|Frank Williams]] announced that Hill would not be re-signed after his contract expired, despite Hill's successes and eventual Drivers' Championship, so he joined [[Arrows (F1)|Arrows]] for 1997. [[Adrian Newey]] had ambitions as a technical director (rather than just chief designer), but this was not possible at Williams, as [[Patrick Head]] was a founder and shareholder of the team. McLaren lured Newey away, though he was forced to take [[garden leave]] for the majority of 1997.

In the middle of the 1996 season, Williams moved from its longtime [[Didcot]] headquarters to [[Grove, Oxfordshire|Grove]], 15 kilometers away.<ref>{{Cite web |date=2016-09-14 |title=Moving the Factory from Didcot to Grove |url=https://www.williamsdb.com/moving-factory-didcot-grove/ |access-date=2024-10-21 |website=The Williams Grand Prix Database |language=en-GB}}</ref> Before the move, the racing press occasionally referred to Williams as "the Didcot team."<ref>{{Cite web |date=1995-07-24 |title=Has Schumacher signed for Ferrari? |url=https://www.grandprix.com/news/has-schumacher-signed-for-ferrari.html |access-date=2024-10-21 |website=www.grandprix.com}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last=Cooper |first=Adam |date=2014-07-07 |title=The Domination Game: How Mansell and Williams made 1992 their own |url=https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/archive/article/july-2002/30/the-domination-game/ |access-date=2024-10-21 |website=Motor Sport Magazine |language=en-GB}}</ref>