Barrie ‘Whizzo’ Williams
Racing driver who started out in a car nicknamed ‘Sin-tin’ and went on to compete for 60 years
BARRIE “WHIZZO” WILLIAMS, who has died aged 79, was a popular star of saloon and touring car racing whose competitive career began in 1957 and ended with his retirement at the end of last year.
He contested more than 800 races and 250 rallies, becoming a firm favourite with fans as much for his sunny personality as for his exuberance behind the wheel and his skill in recovering from seemingly impossible speedwaystyle slides and veerings. He could be relied on to be entertaining, and for many years no race report was complete without a shot of Williams beaming through the window of his latest set of wheels.
He first came to prominence with a sensational win in the 1964 Welsh International Rally driving a Mini-cooper S – the first international rally win for the car – and over five decades he became a trusted pair of hands for owners of classic racing cars who wished to deploy them at top events. He became a regular winner at the Goodwood Revival. Indeed, he was one of a select band of drivers who had raced at Goodwood not only at the Revival meeting, but when it was a full-time racetrack.
He was prepared to drive anything, from historic sports cars worth millions to the tail-happy Morris Minor that he drove in his first race at Rufforth, York, on Easter Sunday 1960. “If it’s got wheels I’ll drive it,” he told The Daily Telegraph in 2002. An exception was the single-seater, though in the late 1960s he had a couple of years in Formula Three: “I was racing against people like Derek Bell, Ronnie Peterson and Frank Williams. They were wonderful days, but when my team-mate Chris Lambert was killed at Zandvoort, I decided to stop racing single-seaters.”
Williams is thought to have acquired his nickname after his Welsh rally win, when Autosport magazine asked: “Who is this Welsh whizz-kid?” In fact he was born on November 14 1938 at Bromyard, Herefordshire, where his father, Tony, ran a small engineering firm and was also a works rider for Sunbeam motorcycles.
Young Barrie passed his driving test at 17, but had been driving long before that and reckoned that by 12 he “was just about the quickest thing in Herefordshire on a Ferguson tractor”. Aged 13 he wrote to the industrialist David Brown, owner of Aston Martin and Lagonda, asking for a job as a racing driver. That did not work, but after leaving Hereford Cathedral School at 17 he got an apprenticeship with David Brown Tractors. Later, he became a lorry driver to pay for the racing.
He had begun at Prescott hill-climb course in 1957, rushing up the slope in a Singer Le Mans nicknamed the “Sin-tin”: “It attacked a milk float once, and had a magnetic attraction to hedges.”
Before long he was hillclimbing an Austin A40 Devon: “It wasn’t competitive, but it made a lovely noise with a tractor exhaust on.” Then came the Morris Minor in which he made his circuit debut at Rufforth.
When his father became involved in karting, building his own “Fastakart”, Barrie became a member of his speedway team, later joking that the experience might explain “the difficulty I have keeping the car straight”.
By now his road car was the Mini Cooper S, in which he triumphed at the 1964 Welsh Rally. From then on he found himself in demand as a works driver. For BMC he took part in the Swedish Winter Rally, becoming one of the first British drivers to finish a Scandinavian rally. During his brief career in F3 he won the Wills International Trophy at Silverstone in 1966.
Williams tackled saloon, sport and historic cars, and caused a stir at the 1975 British Grand Prix when fans voted him Driver of the Day: “[Emerson] Fittipaldi couldn’t understand why I’d got it, not him, because he’d won the Grand Prix.”
He was a works driver for Colt in the British Touring Car Championship and won a series of titles in the 1980s, though it would be some years before he won another high-profile race. This was in 1985, when Renault’s Alpine GTA series came to Brands Hatch to support the European Grand Prix and Williams was invited at short notice to deputise for Jan Lammers. Against all expectations, he trounced the regulars and won. “Dear old Murray [Walker] hugged me and said he’d lost his voice commentating because of me,” Williams recalled.
There were, he admitted, gaps in his CV: “I would love to drive a competitive modern Formula One car – just once. Then when I’m a really old man, I could lean on the bar and regale anyone who’d listen with the story.”
Williams served as president of the British Motorsport Marshals Club and in 1976, with the children’s author Sandy Barrie, he founded the Under 17 Car Club, in which children with an interest in motorsport could learn to drive.
Barrie Williams is survived by his partner, Cathy.
Barrie Williams, born November 14 1938, died September 8 2018