“If it wasn’t for her, Frank wouldn’t be alive and we wouldn’t have the championships we won after 1986,” Claire told me last year.
Ginny was equally central to his convalescence from that terrible car wreck. Her husband’s refusal to read it caused extreme pain to his daughter Claire, until she conveyed a poignant extract to him in the final scenes of Williams, the 2017 documentary on the team’s triumphs and travails.Ĭlaire never wanted the team’s followers to lose sight of the pivotal role Ginny played in Williams’s glories, injecting money behind the scenes throughout the Seventies to sustain Frank’s quest.
Prior to her death from cancer in 2013, at the age 66, Ginny wrote a book, A Different Kind of Life, spelling out the rage she felt in the aftermath of Frank’s crash. When Ginny took their three children on annual holidays to Marbella, he would never come. On his wedding day, he shelved any thought of lunch in favour of heading straight to the factory. Where his obstinacy made him a genius of the F1 paddock, it compromised his effectiveness as a family man. In spite of it all, a maiden victory would soon follow at the 1979 British Grand Prix, with Switzerland’s Clay Regazzoni at the wheel.Īny appreciation of Williams would be incomplete without highlighting how his stubbornness could cut both ways. Modern F1 giants would have recoiled from the scene in horror.
They started business out of an old carpet factory in Didcot, one that had no machinery, no equipment, and a hidebound floor. So it was that in 1977, with the support of his chief engineer Patrick Head, Williams Grand Prix Engineering was born. His pride and joy was ultimately sold to Canadian oil magnate Walter Wolf, but Williams was undaunted in his ambition of establishing a team that could prosper at the highest level. Their progress would be derailed when Courage was killed in a crash at Zandvoort, a tragedy that cut Williams to the core. It was courtesy only of Frank’s vision, not to mention the engineering genius of Patrick Head, that they overcame these ramshackle origins, finishing on the podium in just their second race in Monaco.
#Chief architect premier x8 turn off grid driver
Using only a second-hand Brabham chassis, propelled by his driver Piers Courage, he made his entrance into F1 in 1969. It is for this achievement that his name will endure, as architect of the last of the family-run teams who took on the world. His obsession with the adrenalin of speed originated in the late Fifties, when he hitched a ride in a friend’s Jaguar, but it was as a car dealer that he crafted a reputation, before breaking the previously closed shop of F1 wide open. He was the longest-serving principal in F1 history, amassing 16 world titles in total, all while battling severe paralysis. A self-educated talent and former travelling grocery salesman, he scaled undreamt-of heights in the most mercilessly demanding global sport. Not merely the founder of the country’s most decorated Formula One team but a man believed, upon his death on Sunday at the age of 79, to be the oldest living tetraplegic, he exemplified the virtues of invention, imagination and defiance. Sir Frank Williams was a totemic figure in British motorsport, a personality with as powerful a hold over the nation’s sporting imagination as Enzo Ferrari enjoyed in Italy.
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