Yeah, those pictures of these beautiful cars really help making this a thoroughly enjoyable read for the morning coffee!

Being based in Switzerland probably helps with that as well.

Many don’t realize Minardi became competitive for a very short time in the early ‘90s. They even almost nabbed a pole. If memory serves, they had a really good quali at Estoril during that time.

I did NOT suggest that. I thought it was quite clear that I made the distinction between name and identity.

Yet the inconsistency in defining identity is still valid, unless you can enlighten me what I missed.

Interestingly Ross Brawn actually considered changing the name of the team back to Tyrrell when he took over, before using the BrawnGP name.

Tyrrell had passed to BAR ownership for the 1998 season, and operations were transferred to Brackley in the very latter part of it, but the team remained Tyrrell throughout the year, in order to ensure the team kept its funding under the Concorde Agreement.
JV stayed with Williams to defend his championship in '98, but as Tyrrell morphed into BAR with his manager Craig Pollock as team principal, it was no surprise to anyone when he moved to Brackley for '99.
Incidentally, the Brackley site was opened in July '98 with the team's operations being switched from the old timber yard at Ockham that October. There was one race to go in the season, the Japanese GP on 1st November.
So though there are many who quite reasonably poohpooh the idea that the link back from Mercedes to Tyrrell was anything more than on paper only, it's an interesting factoid that for one unique race Tyrrell did indeed operate completely out of Brackley (and had done so at least partially for several months before), thus providing a reasonable case for arguing that the link from Tyrrell to Mercedes is more real than some would say.

A lot of excellent points there, @F1 Frog.

Williams seems fairly straightforward, but actually Frank Williams ran a team before 1977 called Iso-Marlboro. Between that and Williams there was a link with Wolf. And before Iso-Marlboro, I believe the privateer team that Piers Courage drove for was called Frank Williams Racing. So these teams are effectively still Williams.

Frank Williams Racing Cars was the name not just of Sir Frank's private entries for Piers Courage (running a Brabham in 1969 and a custom-built De Tomaso in 1970) but was the company name (and, off and on, the team name) for all of Frank's entries between then and 1976. During that period Iso-Marlboro was the name in 1973 and 1974 only, but it was a very rare example in those days of what Sauber have been doing in recent seasons with first Alfa Romeo and now Stake, giving full branding rights to the sponsors including the official name of the constructor marque. In fact, Frank had already done this the year before his deal with Iso-Rivolta and Marlboro (the Rivolta part of Iso-Rivolta wasn't used, presumably because Iso-Rivolta-Marlboro was too much of a mouthful): in 1972 his first ever own-construction car was branded a Politoys in a similar deal with the then sponsor (in 1971, after the tragic events of 1970, FWRC had run a privateer March).
By 1975, however, Frank had lost the Iso and Marlboro money and was finding long-term replacements difficult to come by and thus for the first time he ran his cars officially under the Williams marque. So it's not quite correct to say that the link with Wolf was between Iso-Marlboro and Williams, though it was between the original Williams and the second Williams which survives to this day.
That link with Wolf led to all sorts of confusing history! It began in 1976 as a sponsorship deal and the cars are sometimes referred to as Wolf-Williams, but as far as I can glean from all the historical sources, the marque remained officially just Williams. In any case, the cars were not Frank's original creations, they were rebadged Heskeths.
At the end of 1976, sponsor Walter Wolf had bought Frank out of his own team and from now on there was no doubt about whether it was Williams or Wolf-Williams: the marque would be Wolf, full stop. Frank Williams Racing Cars was gone for good. But, just days into the 1977 season, and fed up with being offered a demeaning minor job in what had been his own company, Frank left, phoned up Patrick Head, bought a former carpet warehouse and (back to the future) an old March and set about finding the Middle Eastern sponsorship which would allow him to be a constructor in his own right again in 1978. Williams Grand Prix Engineering, the company which still exists today, was born, and the rest is history.
Meanwhile Wolf, after a sensational start, fell rapidly down the grid, and at the end of 1979, by which time Frank's new team was the one causing a sensation, his former team was sold by Walter Wolf to Emerson Fittipaldi.
So yes, Williams 2.0 is fairly straightforward as you say, @F1 Frog, but Williams 1.0 was a bit less straightforward !
Inded, Williams 1.0 to Wolf to Fittipaldi was an early example, and at the time less common, of the sort of identity change which Keith's entire article is about!

@notagrumpyfan, Are we really going to suggest that the inclusion of the much-missed (not) Mission Winnow on team entry lists of the relevant period somehow meant those cars had a different identity to all of the Scuderia's other models?
If we counted sponsors on team entry lists as genuine changes of identity, we would be looking at many more different examples than "just" 33.
But if any of us are lucky enough to meet Mika Hakkinen one day and we ask him which team he drove for in 1996 and 1997, he isn't going to reply "well, it was Marlboro McLaren in '96 but West McLaren in '97". He's just going to say "McLaren". Funnily enough, I think he'd be right too :)

@F1 Frog and @anon, you both make essentially the same point that in 1970 Tyrrell/Tyrrell Racing Organisation began entering F1 while the team which Ken Tyrrell had run prior to that point continued without him as the works Matra team, but in both respects this isn't the correct reading of what happened.
To establish the true picture we need to go back first to 1968, when there were two teams running Matra cars - the works team using their own V12 engine and the Tyrrell Racing Organisation running as Matra International with Cosworth DFVs.
For 1969, the works team withdrew while Ken's outfit continued and of course took the world titles.
When Ken refused to switch to the Matra V12 engine for 1970, it spelt the end of his Matra International arrangement but his team, the Tyrrell Racing Organisation, continued, first with March chassis and then, from near the end of that season, with his own chassis.
At the same time, the works Matra team which had competed in 1968 but rested in 1969 returned for 1970 with the V12 cars. This was emphatically not a continuation of Ken's team from 1969, which Ken was most certainly continuing himself.
And that 1969 team, though it was indeed known as Matra International, was also the Tyrrell Racing Organisation. Yes, that's confusing and complicated, but it's the fact, and if you look at programmes and entry lists from 1968 and 1969 you will sometimes see Ken's entrant name being listed as Matra International and sometimes as the Tyrrell Racing Organisation.
But he was far from the only entrant who was named variously from race to race in those days, when these things were much less formal and left to the whim of the race organiser. It's not the point: the point is that the Tyrrell Racing Organisation which was running a March 701 and a Tyrrell 001 in 1970 was very much the same entrant that was running Matra-Fords in 1968 and 1969.
For further proof, I invite you to do a Google image search of the terms "Tyrrell Racing Irganisation", "Helen Stewart" and "1969" and you will find a nice Sutton photo of Helen from 1969 under an entry placard which says "Matra-Ford" at the top and "Tyrrell Racing Organisation Ltd" immediately underneath.
In a nutshell, it's why the Companies House listing for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd gives that present day company's date of incorporation as 9th January 1964 - 60 years ago next week, which is worth noting - with its name from that date until 10th November 1998 being given as Tyrrell Racing Organisation Ltd.

You can talk about heritage (and authenticity), but they are just man-made concepts in the end. We, humans, often fail to recognize that things are always evolving and nothing is ever as it for ever will be.

I remember an article in the 90s that claimed that The Big 4 of F1 (Williams, Benetton, Ferrari and McLaren, of course - who else) would always dominate and always return to the top after a slumber. As proof, the author pointed to a timeline that clearly showed the rise and fall of former Big Teams like Lotus, Tyrrell and Brabham - which he did not seem to pick up on.

Things evolve. Teams evolve. Sport evolves. And so they should, if they want to stay relevant. Nor F1 nor the teams exist to create a lineage or safeguard a presumed heritage.
I do not consider McLaren to be more F1 than Red Bull Racing.

Mercedes did. But the team currently known as Mercedes didn't.

Villeneuve (and Frentzen) drove the red Winfield Williams-Mechachrome in 1998

3 teams have been around for that long with the same name

It's not exactly correct.
Only five years ago two of those teams were called Rokit Williams Racing and Scuderia Ferrari Mission Winnow. I don't recall when McLaren last included a sponsor to its official team name (Vodafone McLaren Mercedes).

The difference to Sauber is probably that they kept part of the 'identity' as the official team name.
But then again as mentioned above, Sauber remained part of the name during the BMW years. And (partial) ownership changes happen all the time without a change in identity. Williams has a new owner and Mercedes is now only 1/3 owned by Mercedes and the team is officially called Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team.

Mercedes should be older then that as they raced in the mid fifties! as the Silberpfeil was called back then.