Frank Williams, founder of Formula One team, dies at 79
LONDON — Frank Williams, the founder and former team principal of Formula One’s Williams Racing, has died. He was 79.
Williams took his motor racing team from an empty carpet warehouse to the summit of Formula One, overseeing 114 victories, a combined 16 drivers’ and constructors’ world championships, while becoming the longest-serving team boss in the sport’s history.
“After being admitted into hospital on Friday, Sir Frank passed away peacefully this morning surrounded by his family,” Williams Racing said in a statement Sunday.
Williams driver George Russell remembered Williams as a “genuinely wonderful human being.”
Williams’ life is all the more extraordinary by the horrific car crash he suffered in France that left him with injuries so devastating that doctors considered turning off his life-support machine.
But his wife, Virginia, ordered that her husband be kept alive and his sheer determination and courage — characteristics that personified his career — enabled him to continue with the love of his life, albeit from the confines of a wheelchair.
He would remain in his role as Williams team principal for a further 34 years before F1’s greatest family team was sold to an American investment group in August.
“Frank was one of the old-timers who went back an awful long way,” former F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone told Britain’s Press Association. “One wonders that, if people like Frank had not been around in the early days, whether Formula One would have survived today. He was one of the people that built Formula One. It’s the end of an era.”
Francis Owen Garbett Williams was born in South Shields, England, on April 16, 1942 to an RAF officer and a headmistress. He was educated at St Joseph’s College, a private boarding school in Dumfries where he became obsessed with cars following a ride in a Jaguar XK150.
A traveling salesman by day, Williams fulfilled his racing ambitions at the weekend and, aged just 24, he launched his own team, Frank Williams Racing Cars.
Four years later, they were competing in Formula Two, and with flatmate and closest friend Piers Courage behind the wheel, Williams graduated to F1 in 1969 using a second-hand Brabham.
But tragedy struck at the 1970 Dutch Grand Prix.
Courage ran off the track, one of his front wheels hit his helmet, and his car burst into flames. Courage’s grisly death in a car bearing his name left Williams devastated. Broke and with spiraling debts, he reluctantly sold 60% of his team to Walter Wolf in 1975.
But Williams was not made to be a back-seat driver and, desperate for independence, he severed ties with the Canadian businessman.
He set up shop at an old carpet warehouse in Didcot, Oxfordshire, and signed a promising young engineer named Patrick Head. The double act would go on to make grand prix history.