A right Royal occasion for Williams

His Royal Highness The Duke of York visits Williams Advanced Engineering at Grove, Oxfordshire to present the 2018 Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation.

Williams had a special guest at their facility in Grove, Oxfordshire this week, in the person of His Royal Highness The Duke of York.

Accompanied by the Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, Tim Stevenson, His Royal Highness was there to present managing director Craig Wilson with a special award.

Earlier this year, Williams Advanced Engineering was granted the 2018 Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation. It's for their work in successfully transferring battery technology they developed for Formula E into wider commercial applications.

Pretty much the whole company turned out to see the Duke of York tour the facility, and to watch him hand the prestigious award to Wilson.

As well as battery development, Wilson was also able to show his guest several innovative technologies which are developed on site, including Aerofoil, NETfficient, Babypod 20 and several vehicle programmes, from land, sea and air.

Congratulations to everyone involved on their achievement winning the award. It might have been a tough year so far for the Williams racing team out on the track, but hopefully this will have put the spring back in their step heading into the rest of the season.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.