F1: motor racing’s improbable legend
Sir Frank Williams, who has died aged 79, was a legend of Formula 1, said Giles Richards in The Guardian. Single-minded, sometimes ruthless, he created, from a warehouse in Didcot, one of the most successful teams in the history of motor racing. In their heyday in the 1980s-1990s, Williams utterly dominated the sport, winning nine constructors’ and seven drivers’ titles. Almost all the great names of the era raced for them, including Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna. (He was driving a Williams car when he fatally crashed in San Marino in 1994.)
An autodidact former car dealer, Williams “started his own team back in 1977, with no cash and only a disused carpet warehouse as a base”, said Rebecca Clancy in The Times. Lacking money to pay the phone bills, he conducted business from a telephone box. Nonetheless, success arrived quickly: after claiming their first Grand Prix in 1979, Williams did the “double” the following year, winning both the drivers’ and constructors’ championships. Yet just when he was on the “cusp of greatness”, all that Williams had built was imperilled, said Oliver Brown in The Daily Telegraph. Rushing to catch a flight in the south of France in 1986, he crashed his rented Ford Sierra, suffering a spinal injury that deprived him of the use of all four limbs. In the agonised weeks that followed, his wife, Ginny, was “given the option of turning off his life support”. She never countenanced the idea. Just six weeks later, Williams was back, watching his team at Brands Hatch. “The feats over which he later presided, from his wheelchair at the back of the Williams garage, are inscribed in F1 folklore.” Williams’s obstinacy didn’t always make him the nicest of men: he could treat drivers capriciously, and his family came second to his dreams of track glory. Yet what he achieved was truly remarkable: in an age when it “takes a billionaire or sovereign wealth fund to gatecrash F1’s golden cartel”, we will never see his like again.