'I love the speed and the noise'
By James Allen
Published: March 15 2008 02:00 | Last updated: March 15 2008 02:00
In early March 1986, the dynamic Formula One racing team owner Frank Williams broke his neck in a road accident in the south of France. It left him paralysed from the neck down at the age of 43. As his grief-stricken wife Ginny stood at his bedside, attempting to come to terms with the situation, he told her: "As I see it, I have had 40 years of one sort of life, now I shall have another 40 years of a different kind of life."
Twenty-two years on, Sir Frank Williams's new life is remarkable for how similar it is to his old life. Since 1986, his team, Williams, has won seven constructors' world championships and five drivers' world titles, triumphing in 91 grands prix in the process. His name is still above the door and he is still in charge.
His remarkable achievements, recognised with a knighthood in 1999, are defined not just by the victories he has enjoyed in one of the world's most competitive sports, but also by his personal victory over disability. This season, which starts tomorrow in Melbourne, will be Williams' 30th as a Formula One team boss and will feature his 600th race. It will see him overtake the legendary Enzo Ferrari, who supervised his team from 1950 until his death in 1988.
This is a remarkable feat, not least because the Williams team is one of the last of a vanishing breed in Formula One. Most F1 teams are now owned by car manufacturers and many of Williams' peers, such as Ferrari's Jean Todt, are heading for retirement and being replaced by a younger generation of professional managers. But Williams, now 65, soldiers on. And the signs are that after a three-year spell in the doldrums, his team could be on its way back to the front of the grid with a potent new car and a thrilling driver line-up of Nico Rosberg, the speedy son of former Williams World Champion Keke Rosberg, and the Japanese prospect, Kazuki Nakajima.
Williams' office is quite plain and spartan. The team's headquarters, in Grove near Oxford, used to be the offices of the pharmaceuticals company Jansen, and in the corridors leading to the management offices you feel like it still could be. Only a model of a Williams team car on a plinth betrays the true nature of business here.
Williams sits in the far corner of his office, behind a huge desk. On the wall, there are photos of Margaret Thatcher and the American sprinting legend Michael Johnson. He still takes a close interest in all aspects of his operation, although these days he refers to it as a "company", rather than a team. He wheels himself around every department of the factory, asking questions. He is often in on a Sunday, dropping in on the engineers in the wind tunnel, which works 24 hours a day, pushing them for every tiny improvement in car performance.
"I love what I do, I love F1," he says. "I love the competition. But above all it's the speed and the noise. You can work out for yourself that, driving the way I was driving in France all those years ago, I loved speed but was clearly not competent enough to do it myself. But watching these guys drive on the limit, it's such a turn-on. I am nuts about cars. I still look at a Ferrari road car and think, "Nice car." I would have killed for one when I was 22 and I used to look at them on the King's Road. But I've never owned one."
Frank Williams was born in South Shields, Tyneside, in April 1942. His parents' marriage broke down when he was very young and he attended a Roman Catholic boarding school, St Joseph's College in Dumfries, Scotland. It was an austere childhood and he was often left at school alone during the holidays. He emerged from this seclusion determined to make his mark on the world. His father, Owen, was an RAF officer and his own dream was to be a soldier. "I liked the regimentation, the discipline and the fighting. It all appealed," he says. "But I was rejected by Sandhurst. I love reading about military history, battles fought and lost and why. Wellington is my hero, he never lost, had a brilliant mind, a real gift."
Instead he turned to cars. As a boy, Williams fell in love with racing and would hitch-hike miles to watch events. But his driving career began by accident - literally. In 1961, in search of the fastest road car he could afford, he bought a race-prepared Austin A35. "I went for this car, with no intention of racing it, then I thought, 'This is a real racing car, I could race this.' So I went to Mallory Park [a circuit in Leicestershire] for my first event. It was wet and, on lap four or five, off I rolled into a bank. I climbed out of the back window and a sophisticated voice said: 'I thought you'd be joining me up here. How do you do, my name is Jonathan Williams.'"
Williams's namesake was a driver who took part in Formula Three events around Europe. He knew many of the well-known racing drivers of the time. "I became his helper in F3, went all over Europe, had a fantastic life," Williams recalls.
He progressed to running his own cars - although his early career as a team boss, in the late 1960s, was quite chaotic and he lived from hand to mouth, selling second-hand cars to raise money. At one point he was so broke that he ran his office from a telephone box after having his line disconnected. He became close friends with Piers Courage, heir to the brewing family, and together they moved into Formula One in 1970 in a deal with the De Tomaso car company. Tragically, Courage was killed while racing in the 1970 Dutch Grand Prix.
Williams refused to give up. But he knew that if he was going to succeed, he needed to design and build his own cars. The answer arrived in 1977 when he joined forces with Patrick Head, a young engineer he found working in a garage under a railway arch in London. The two formed Williams Grand Prix Engineering and landed a major sponsorship with Saudi Airlines. In 1979, the cars designed by Head started to win races and the following year the Australian driver Alan Jones won the team's first Formula One World Championship. They followed that with a second world title in 1982, won by the Finn Keke Rosberg. By 1986 the team, now known as Williams-Honda after a deal where the latter supplied engines, was one of the dominant forces in F1, along with Ferrari and McLaren.
By this time Williams, after a long struggle, was financially secure. He lived in a mansion near Newbury in Berkshire, with his wife and three children. Life was good. Then came the accident. He had been at a pre-season test session at Paul Ricard circuit near Marseille and was driving too fast en route to the airport. His rented Ford Sierra left the road and crashed, breaking his neck.
Williams was in hospital in France for 12 weeks. Before the accident, racing had been his obsession. Now it became his reason to live and to fight on. I ask him what - if anything - he misses about his former life.
"Running [he regularly competed in half marathons]," he says. "Going to the tailor - I was a vain little bugger in those days. But not much has changed really. I was out and about more back then, actively looking for money. But our method of looking for money was a lot less sophisticated in the 1970s and 1980s than it became in the 1990s."
And how would he sum up the "different kind of life" he has since experienced? "More sensible, less personal risk in driving too fast. I can't get about so much and I am very focused on the business. I think more deeply now than I did, to some extent. There are a lot of very clever people around me. When you are around people like that it really pushes you and keeps you sharp, you don't want to let the side down or have people thinking behind your back, 'I wish he would leave.'"
The past couple of years have been difficult for the Williams team. BMW, who joined forces with them in 2000, left at the end of 2005 to set up its own team and Williams slid, finishing eighth (out of 10 teams) in the 2006 championship and fourth last year (after the exclusion of McLaren for the espionage scandal). Although key sponsors stayed loyal, they made it clear that only serious improvement would keep them on board.
"It [failure] hurts financially and it weakens you for the following year," Williams says. "We had a bit of a spiral on our hands after BMW left us - it was very difficult. We stopped the slide last year and we will ratchet ourselves up again this year. We had to put our hands in our pockets to shore things up, sold a few assets."
Those assets included Williams' private jet, which made travel tolerable, allowing him to stand up on board in a special frame. Its sale paid for a new wind tunnel. Williams felt the slide keenly. Despite slipping to eighth, the team still had front-of-the-grid standards and aspirations. He is reluctant to talk about past glories, admits to feeling embarrassed that they are in the past and not the present. Familiar with the winning formula, he is determined to re-create it.
The signs from pre-season testing are that Williams has build a fast and reliable car for the coming season, which will allow the team to fight for third place in the championship behind the currently uncatchable McLaren and Ferrari teams. Williams is characteristically cagey about the team's prospects. "Our competitors are just as competitive," he says. "F1 is never easy - it's not supposed to be easy - so to think that we are going to sail into third place in the first few races is pie in the sky." Nevertheless, in Nico Rosberg the team has one of the sport's most highly prized drivers: McLaren were prepared to pay a significant premium to get him as partner to Lewis Hamilton, but he remains at Williams.
Away from the track, last season was notable for the scandal involving one of Ferrari's senior technicians passing secret technical documents to McLaren's chief designer, with whom he was planning to join forces at Honda. After being found guilty of using the material, McLaren were hit with a £50m fine and excluded from the constructors' championship by F1's governing body, the FIA, whose president is Max Mosley. Despite being rivals for more than 25 years, Williams has great sympathy for McLaren boss Ron Dennis, who has lost the most since the controversy.
"I do sympathise," he says. "Ron, to his credit, had the bottle to stand up to Max, but paid the price. I'm not having a go at Max, but Ron took him on and lost. Ron's a man who is very sincere in what he does, works very hard and has raised the standards of preparation and presentation in F1 to a very high level. It's sad it's happened to him."
Does Williams believe the sport has been damaged by the spying scandal? "It must have made some people who were fans of the sport think that it was not a pretty state of affairs," he says. "But I don't think it has derailed the train at all."
His own obsession burns on and shows no signs of dimming, although he is gradually facing up to the inevitable. "My grip loosens every year, I do a bit less and other people do a bit more, but I love it. One day I'll say 'I can't be bothered, tell the boys to go without me.' I don't see it now, but it is coming."
James Allen is the FT's Formula One correspondent and ITV Sport's lead F1 commentator
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Comments