In the hectic world of Formula One, January is a quieter time of year for the teams and it proved the right moment to photograph some more cars for GP Racing magazine’s ‘Now That Was A Car !’ feature.

So this week I visited Williams F1’s Grove HQ in Oxfordshire with photo assistant Rachel to shoot classic F1 cars in their superb museum.

With no one available to move the cars around we had no choice but to shoot each car on the list in the position it was set in the display. I’d usually set up black backgrounds and create a bed sheet lightbox, as I did at Mercedes,(https://www.jamesmann.com/2020/02/01/lewis-hamiltons-f1-championship-winnign-mercedes/) but there was no space to do this so we had to use more flash heads to light each panel.

Our target was to photograph three cars in a day FW10, FW15 and FW19 so we had to work fast. Using flash speeds things up as you don’t need to worry about using a tripod so it was all about maximising the number of angles and details we could manage shooting around the other exhibits.

Rachel and I have worked together on many projects but she has never worked this way before so it was a steep learning curve but we had captured our three cars by mid afternoon and managed to photograph a fourth car, FW09, below with minutes to go before our 4pm deadline. Here’s the retouched image below.

Jacques Villeneuve’s 1995 championship winning FW19