Sir Frank Williams would swap every one of his 41 years of British Grands Prix for the one second a lap which would bring his team their first victory of any sort for five years and their first at Silverstone since 1997.

Williams are one of two teams to have kept faith with the Formula One establishment, opting to remain with the FIA World Championship next season instead of joining the rival breakaway series announced by eight teams, including McLaren and Ferrari, late last week. Unfortunately, F1 does not award points for longevity or loyalty.

The boys in the grandstand who pitch their tents beneath Union Jacks and cry St George for Jenson Button or Lewis Hamilton still reserve a space in their hearts for Williams, though cheering for Nico Rosberg and Kazuki Nakajima is trickier than shouting home Nigel Mansell or Damon Hill, even if Rosberg and Nakajima did qualify seventh- and fifth-fastest respectively for today’s race. If Nakajima can convert that into a position on the podium, nobody at Silverstone will begrudge Williams a glimpse of the past. It has been a while.

Williams and Force India have stood alone in honouring their existing contracts with the FIA. That is not entirely a matter of principle. Williams are different, an independent team who have effectively been working with a budget cap, ostensibly the source of the current tension, for several years now. They are an F1 team, not car manufacturers.

“It was straightforward,” says Patrick Head, technical director of Williams GP. “We sat down with the Fota teams and said, ‘We’re not in a position to take as bold a step as you’. Our view was that we were participating in a binding contract which was being honoured 100%.”

Sir Frank is sceptical about the news of a rival championship being set up. “Which races are we talking about?” he asks. “How much TV coverage will there be? Who’s putting up the money? Where and how much? No-one is talking about that.”

Williams and Head are the pitlane’s eternal double act. Their first full budget for an F1 season four decades ago was £200,000. “Only £180,000 of that turned up,” adds Head. They have been ever-present members of the grid ever since, at times dominant, more recently in the role of plucky Brits battling against the odds, but always recognisable and always passionate.

“We have a niche in F1,” says Williams. “We’re an independent team, we’re always going to be there, God willing, and we do it because we want to. We love it, we live for it. I’m sorry, that sounds a bit sanctimonious and it’s not meant to be, but I’m just telling the truth.”

The niche they would prefer to occupy, that of serial winners, is confined for the present to the photos on the wall of their factory in Oxfordshire and a display of their championship-winning cars in the museum. There are some “originals”, those who have experienced every up and down of the ride, roaming free on the factory floor. Steve Fowler still holds a particular affection for Carlos Reutemann, a long forgotten driver in the Williams pantheon. “He’d come down and read my magazines and have a chat,” says Fowler, now 61 and in his 31st year with the company. “I’d tell him to buzz off so that I could get on with my job.” The laminators shop, his first workplace, has long been replaced by more modern composites and Fowler, who was on the race team for three years, has long since stopped coming to the races, but he still feels as nervous watching from the sofa as ever he did at the racetrack.

“I was working on Clay Regazzoni’s car when he won Williams’ first GP at Silverstone in 1979,” he says. “There was a real sense of fun and camaraderie in the pitlane. Frank and Patrick were pretty easy-going too. I remember one year we took one of the hire cars for a spin round the Paul Ricard track and rolled the tyres off the rim. You’d get fired for doing that now. These days, I’m getting more involved in the historic stuff, such as the Goodwood Festival and things like that.”

Williams have had to blow with the economic winds, just to survive. Even the big manufacturers are finding life hard, but Williams have trawled far and wide in their search for sponsors and brought on board modern companies such as AirAsia, who regard F1 as the most glamorous billboard in world sport and Williams as a near perfect mixture of slick present and illustrious past.

Banishing the ghosts falls to men such as Tony Ross, the race engineer for Rosberg, Williams’ number one driver. He is very much a Williams man, joining the team in 1997 on the sports car team and quickly graduating through the ranks to become a race engineer in 2001.