The origins of the Wolf team trace to the 1976 season, when Canadian oil magnate Walter Wolf purchased a 60 percent stake in Frank Williams Racing Cars, retaining Frank Williams as team manager. The arrangement proved short-lived; Williams departed before 1977 to found Williams Grand Prix Engineering. Wolf, now operating independently, chose to build his own car rather than continue with the Hesketh 308C he had run in 1976. He recruited a talented engineering group led by Harvey Postlethwaite, who had previously worked at Hesketh Racing. The result was the WR1, the team's first wholly self-constructed Formula One car.
Four chassis were produced under the WR1 designation. The original WR1 was completed well before the start of the 1977 season. Two identical cars, WR2 and WR3, followed: WR2 was ready before the opening race, WR3 in March 1977. A fourth chassis, WR4, was produced with slight adjustments late in the season, and WR1 itself was remodelled to a similar specification for use in 1978.
Jody Scheckter drove the WR1 exclusively throughout 1977. His win at the Argentine Grand Prix in Buenos Aires at the very first start of the new car was a sensation in the paddock. He went on to add victories at the Monaco Grand Prix and the Canadian Grand Prix at Mosport, giving the team three wins in its debut season as a constructor.
The WR1 chassis was the most raced and most successful of the four 1977 cars, appearing in ten of the seventeen championship rounds. Those ten starts produced all three team victories, one fastest lap, and ultimately second place in the Drivers' Championship for Scheckter — who finished behind Niki Lauda's Ferrari. WR2 contributed a pole position at Hockenheim for the German Grand Prix, while Scheckter added another fastest lap in WR3 at the Japanese Grand Prix in Fuji.
The arrival of ground-effect aerodynamics for 1978, pioneered by the Lotus 78, rendered the WR1 design increasingly uncompetitive even in its updated WR4 form. Walter Wolf Racing introduced the new Wolf WR5 halfway through the season to attempt to close the gap to the leading ground-effect cars, but without success.
WR3 and WR4 were transferred to Theodore Racing for Keke Rosberg, a future 1982 World Champion who at the time was a promising but under-funded young driver. Rosberg finished just one race in those cars, at the 1978 German Grand Prix. Scheckter, meanwhile, continued to campaign the remodelled WR1 and scored a podium finish with it at the 1978 Monaco Grand Prix before the team moved on to the WR5.
The WR1 was a conventional, well-executed coil-spring Formula One car of its era rather than an aerodynamic pioneer. Postlethwaite's design drew on his experience at Hesketh and produced a reliable, well-balanced package suited to Scheckter's driving style. The car used the Cosworth DFV engine, the dominant customer power unit of the period, and Hewland gearbox, following the established practice of the privateer teams of the time.
The Wolf WR1 stands as one of the most successful debut cars in Formula One history. Few new constructors have ever won a race, let alone three, in their first season of operation with a self-designed car. The car's success was tied closely to the talent of Scheckter, who moved to Ferrari for 1979 and won the World Championship there. With Scheckter gone, Walter Wolf Racing struggled to maintain its early promise, and the team folded at the end of 1979.