Sir Frank Williams, dominant figure in motor racing who built his team into one of the greatest in the history of Formula 1 – obituary

Sir Frank Williams, who has died aged 79, was the tenacious head of the Williams motor racing team, after Ferrari the second most successful Grand Prix team of all time; despite being paralysed in a car accident in 1986, he overcame his physical disability to ensure that his team dominated Formula 1 for much of the 1980s and 1990s.

Williams was a slightly aloof man by nature, and his cool pragmatism was ideally suited to the task of managing a Grand Prix team, an occupation that demands a thorough knowledge of the sport, as well as technical and engineering sophistication and a shrewd business sense.

He had all this, though some disliked his cavalier attitude towards the men who piloted his machines. One journalist described his attitude as akin to “the kind of resigned disdain with which Alfred Hitchcock viewed actors”.

Unsurprisingly, discord between Williams and his drivers sometimes surfaced, notably in 1992, when Nigel Mansell – that year’s world champion – used the tabloid press to air criticism of the team during contract negotiations for the 1993 season. Four years later another British world champion, Damon Hill, was ousted from Williams in similar circumstances.

To his credit – and despite, in particular, the provocation of Mansell’s demands, which included six hotel suites at every race for his entourage – Williams never berated his drivers in public. Combined with dedication to his team and pragmatism, this generated respect among many of his charges.

“We got on well, but I don’t think Frank is the sort of man who builds great friendships,” Williams’s 1982 championship-winning driver Keke Rosberg once said. “He doesn’t let you come close. But he does have a sense of humour; he was very funny at times.

“He was a caring sort of person, but not as much as he liked to think he was. We used to tell a joke about how Frank would go into the workshop and pat one of the lads on the back. ‘How’s it going, Pete?’ he would ask. Pete would say, ‘Not so good, Frank. My wife died this morning.’ And Frank would say, ‘OK, never mind. D’you think that front suspension will be ready in time for the test at Paul Ricard [a racing circuit in France] next week?’

“It was a strange thing. He wasn’t distant – and yet he was very remote. The accident didn’t change him. He’s the same as he ever was.”

Frank Owen Garbett Williams was born at Jarrow on April 16 1942. Soon after he was born, his father, an RAF officer who flew bombers, left his mother, who taught children with learning disabilities at a local school.

Frank boarded at St Joseph’s College in Dumfries, where he developed an interest in motor racing after being given a ride in a Jaguar XK150S. He left school at 17 to work in a local garage, indulging his love of all things automotive. In 1961 he started racing an Austin A40 saloon and soon progressed to Formula 3, as both mechanic and driver, funding his efforts by buying undervalued racing cars and spare parts and selling them on.

By 1969, however, he had realised that his motor racing future lay in management rather than driving. That year he was working as a garage proprietor and living in a flat over his workshops in Slough when he acquired a used Brabham Grand Prix car, £100,000 for a year’s budget, and a transporter to drive the car to races. The car was dark blue, the colour that was to become most closely associated with his team in the years to come.

Piers Courage, a close friend, agreed to drive the car and managed second-place finishes at the Monaco and US grands prix, marking an impressive debut season for Frank Williams Racing Cars.

But things soon turned sour. Courage was killed in a crash at the Dutch GP the following year (some attribute the distance Williams kept from his drivers in future years to Courage’s death). Results were consistently poor, with no victories, no pole positions and regular starts from the back of the grid.

At the start of the 1976 season his team was bought by the Canadian oil millionaire Walter Wolf and the name was changed to Walter Wolf Racing. Williams disliked his role in the new outfit and the Wolf cars were uncompetitive, so in 1977 he left to found Williams Grand Prix Engineering, based at Didcot in Oxfordshire.

Williams made a couple of inspired early management decisions, such as appointing Patrick Head as his second-in-command and designer. And his approach to Saudi Airlines for sponsorship resulted in a lucrative deal that took care of the finances.

The team made its debut at the 1978 Argentine GP. A little over a year later the Swiss driver Clay Regazzoni notched up the team’s first win, at Silverstone, while his Australian team-mate Alan Jones won a further four races in the latter half of the season. In 1980 things got even better, with Jones lifting the world championship and the team winning its first constructors’ title.

In 1981 Williams won another constructors’ title, and the following year the Finn Keke Rosberg won the drivers’ championship. There then followed a transitional period, with Williams and Head moving from normally aspirated Ford engines to turbo-powered V6 offerings from Honda.

By the end of 1985 Williams was once again the team to beat, with cars driven by Rosberg and Mansell, the latter in his debut season with the team, then in 1986 the Brazilian Nelson Piquet replaced Rosberg.

The new pairing proved combustible, with no love for each other, and one of the most dramatic seasons in Formula 1 history saw them fight both each other and Alain Prost of McLaren for the title, the Frenchman clinching it at the last race of the year, in Australia. Mansell had been leading the race and looked certain to win the title until he suffered a dramatic tyre burst with 18 laps to go.

That year, Frank Williams crashed while driving his Ford Sierra rental car from a test at the Paul Ricard circuit to Nice. The man who had damaged an array of cars in accidents during his racing days still liked to speed, and he accepted that the accident was his fault. The crash broke his neck, confining the once athletic marathon runner to a wheelchair.

But the team’s progress was not interrupted. Although Prost had taken the drivers’ championship, Williams won the constructors’ title – and the following year Piquet was champion, while Williams successfully defended their constructors’ crown.

By the early 1990s Williams had established themselves, along with McLaren, as one of the two best teams in the sport. The arrival of the talented young designer Adrian Newey further strengthened the team, as did a new deal with Renault that provided the best engine on the grid.

Nigel Mansell returned from a two-year spell at Ferrari from 1989-90 and finished second to McLaren’s Ayrton Senna in 1991, going on to dominate the 1992 season, winning a then-record nine races and taking the drivers’ title with five of the 16 races to spare.

Williams’s ruthless attitude towards his drivers was showcased by the Mansell imbroglio that autumn. Despite his patriotic instincts (his political views received a favourable mention in the first instalment of Alan Clark’s diaries) he was unmoved by appeals for Mansell – and later Hill – on the grounds of their nationality.

“People in business are selfish,” he remarked. “Their own interests must be primary. You have to operate like that, and people who deny it are hypocrites. If it suits the Williams team in 1993 to spend whatever it costs our sponsors’ money to get Senna and that means dropping Nigel, if it means running across the toes of everybody, that’s what I’ve got to do. Sentiment doesn’t come into it.”

But Senna did not arrive until the 1994 season. The Brazilian had tested for the team in 1983 but, to Frank Williams’s eternal regret, they passed up the opportunity to sign him. By 1994, Senna had established himself as the most talented driver in Formula 1, and one of the sport’s all-time greats.

But it was a short-lived partnership. At the third race of the 1994 season, the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola, Senna was killed in a crash on the seventh lap. For years after Williams had to contend with a manslaughter inquiry, though in the Italian legal system such inquiries following an accidental death are a matter of routine.

Nevertheless, the case hung over Williams, who was eager to dispel suggestions that his outfit had been guilty of negligence. The Italian judiciary eventually absolved Williams and his co-defendants of any wrongdoing, though on April 13 2007 another Italian court found Patrick Head culpable for “badly designed and badly executed modifications” to the failed steering column of Senna’s car. But by that stage the point was moot, with the Italian statute of limitations having expired in 2001.

Williams won three more constructors’ cups, in 1994, 1996 and 1997, while Damon Hill and Canadian Jacques Villeneuve won drivers’ titles in 1996 and 1997 respectively. Villeneuve’s victory at Silverstone in 1997 made Williams one of only three teams, along with Ferrari and McLaren, to have won 100 grands prix (Mercedes have since joined that list).

The team then entered a fallow period: despite the occasional victory and pole position, Williams have not won a title since 1997.

Frank Williams was appointed CBE in 1987, and knighted in 1999. He was also made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur, for his work with Renault.

Frank Williams married Virginia Berry in 1974; she died in 2013, and he is survived by their two sons and by their daughter Claire, who went on to become the Williams team’s deputy principal. In 2020 Frank and Claire Williams stepped down from their management roles in the team.

Sir Frank Williams, born April 16 1942, died November 28 2021