Racing lines: remembering Sir Frank Williams

The FW07 served Williams in three seasons of evolution, from 1979 to 1981, scoring 15 wins and the teams’ first two constructors’ titles, and delivered Jones to the drivers’ crown in 1980. But it’s that first race win that stands head and shoulders for me, largely because of what it meant and represented to Frank. That Williams should win its first F1 race on home soil, at Silverstone on 14 July 1979, near the end of a generally torrid decade for the boss that would surely have sunk anyone else, was scripted to perfection.

Early knocks

Frank realised early on that he was much better at putting cars on grids than accelerating away from them. By 1969, he had transitioned from just another hopeful racing driver into a team patron, entering a smart blue Brabham for his close friend, the brewery heir Piers Courage, who finished second for Frank at Monaco. A year later, Courage died in a horrendous crash at Zandvoort. Frank, of course, was heartbroken. But there’s something hardwired into such competitive people. Instead of folding, he pushed on from one poorly financed F1 project to another, at times using a phone box to run his business when he couldn’t pay the bills for the line at premises he ran out of in Reading. 

Williams was always popular, because of his boundless energy, wide smile and wicked sense of humour. But in the mid-1970s, some unkindly called him “W***er Williams”, the “start-line specialist” who would run anything and anyone to make a dime.

It was meeting Head that changed all that – and Patrick saw a fire in his new friend that convinced him to bet everything on Frank for what had to be the last Williams F1 throw of the dice. My, how it paid off.

“Bravo, Frank”

Head openly admits that his FW07 was a, ahem, homage to the Lotus 79 that swept to the 1978 titles with Mario Andretti and Ronnie Peterson. Now, as Colin Chapman pushed the ground-effect aerodynamics that his team had pioneered to the edge and over it with the Type 80 ‘wing car’ flop, Head watched, learned and produced something close to what Lotus had moved away from – but engineered to his own exacting standards. The FW07 wasn’t innovative, but it was the near-perfect expression of the ground-effect generation. And Jones loved it.

The penny dropped when he tested it away from prying eyes at Ontario Motor Speedway after Williams had raced the FW06 at the Long Beach GP in April 1979. This thing had so much grip. Now Jones understood what Andretti meant when he said his Lotuses were “painted to the road”. Teething troubles held Williams back at first, but by the summer at flatout Silverstone, the FW07 was ready to make its mark. Jones took pole position, by 0.6sec from Jean-Pierre Jabouille’s turbocharged Renault. Now all eyes down the pit lane turned to Frank: who was the w***er now?

A wrinkle in Williams’ history means it was Clay Regazzoni, not Jones, who claimed that first win. A new weld on a water pump cracked, the ensuing leak causing a piston failure in the Aussie’s Cossie. But again, here was serendipity. ‘Rega’ was way past his prime and hadn’t won a GP since 1976, yet here he was delivering the breakthrough. “Bravo, Frank,” he purred in the midst of the gathered press as the boss savoured his sweetest moment.

After Silverstone, Jones swept four of the next five races, only his slow start to the year and a convoluted points system standing between him and a surprise world title that went instead to Ferrari’s Jody Scheckter. But Williams was up and running, its energetic leader pushing from the front. Even a neck-breaking car accident in 1986 couldn’t hold Frank back. He was a force of nature – and grand prix racing will never see his like again.

Top five Williams grand prix moments

So high did the Williams team often fly under Sir Frank that we can’t compile a list of its top five achievements without creating controversy about omissions. Here, we try our best anyhow…

5: 1987 British GP

One of F1’s most enduring images is the scrap between Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet at Silverstone, in the year when Williams would secure its fourth constructors’ title. Over the final three laps, Mansell hunted down his teammate, sold him a superb dummy and slid up the inside at Stowe, taking the chequered flag before being engulfed by the adoring home crowd.

4: 2012 Spanish GP

It was painful for all in F1, more than anyone Sir Frank, to see Williams toiling at the back as the 2010s dawned, having not won a race since way back in 2003. Then in Barcelona, the enigmatic Pastor Maldonado – sometimes having ace pace but incomprehensibly crash-prone – combined the few glimpses of promise that he and the FW34 had shown to take a shock pole; and then, to popular delight, masterfully hold off Fernando Alonso for a dazzling win. 

3: 1992 Hungarian GP

Mansell should have won the 1986 title for Williams but for a puncture and was beaten to it in 1987 by Piquet, so by 1992 it looked as if he would never get his just rewards. Cue updates to the genius FW14 that made him utterly dominant. Second 5 1 4 in Hungary was enough to bag the exhausted Englishman his coveted title with, incredibly, five grands prix still to go.

2: 1979 British GP

Williams-run cars had several times taken silver, but amazingly its first race winner was only the second car it had engineered as an independent constructor. The Patrick Headdesigned FW07 was initially an also-ran, but come Silverstone a solution had been devised to perfect its aerodynamics and Aussie Alan Jones comfortably stuck it on pole. His car failed on lap one, but veteran teammate Clay Regazzoni assuredly finished the job in the most appropriate arena imaginable.