Friday favourite: The Williams that put Hill in an exclusive F1 club

Even the very best of cars can have their areas of weakness, or diva-like tendencies as they have been coined by Mercedes in recent years. But on the 1996 Williams FW18, weak spots were few and far between.

Damon Hill took it to eight wins, nine pole positions and that year’s world championship title, making it a shoo-in for his favourite car. He also achieved a feat matched by only two other drivers in the past 40 years, by qualifying for every race on the front row. To put that into perspective, only Ayrton Senna (1989), Alain Prost (1993) and Hill in the FW18 have done so since the 1950s.

In the first decade of the world championship this was fairly common. Excluding the anomalous Indianapolis 500, Juan Manuel Fangio (five times), Nino Farina (three times), Alberto Ascari and Jack Brabham all held 100% front-row start records, albeit in an era of fewer races, fewer truly competitive cars and three-by-three grids. Hill’s tally of 16 was eclipsed in 2015 by Lewis Hamilton (18), but that was only good enough for 94.7% thanks to his fifth on the grid in Singapore.

The FW18 was fast everywhere in 1996 and only beaten to pole four times all year by an inspired Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari F310, as rookie Jacques Villeneuve also contributed three poles. The FW18, Hill says, “was just a good car, it was good in every way”.

Top 10: Ranking the best Williams F1 cars

“Every year you get a car and you get immediate feedback from it, whether it’s going to be good or not, and it just felt good straight away,” Hill tells Autosport. “You jumped in, and just thought, ‘wow, this is amazing’. It felt really nimble and compact and beautifully put-together.”

It marked the culmination of a tricky journey for Williams, which had lost the