Sir Frank Williams, who has died aged 79, was one of the greatest Formula 1 team owners in history and a man who became an icon through his determination to compete at the highest level despite a severe disability.
To those who had studied his career closely, this sort of decision was no surprise, for Williams had to endure a number of difficult and painful years of financial struggle before finally establishing himself in the sport. Helped by increased resources allowed by Saudi money, Head's first car for the team, FW06, established them as serious contenders for the first time in 1978. And from the mid-point of 1979, with the new FW07 - one of history's great F1 cars - Williams became the sport's absolute pace-setters.
Racing his driver Nelson Piquet to the airport in hire cars after a pre-season test in the south of France, Williams turned his car over, and the impact broke his neck. Williams's team manager Peter Windsor, now a journalist, was in the car with him and was unhurt. There followed months of recovery, through which Head kept the team going, and public-school educated Williams never betrayed any sense of self-pity, depression or any of the other emotions that might be expected of someone in his situation.In it, she describes how, in the months after the accident, he talked about it very little, and simply said that they had had several good years of one kind of life together and now they just had to get used to a different one.
"Frank's always been quite private in his own emotions and in control of his interactions with other people. Once we'd got used to the fact that he wasn't the same person he was before, that he was in a wheelchair, things just sort of carried on as normal." But in 1987, with Williams now back at work full time, they dominated, Piquet's consistency trumping Mansell's greater speed and poorer reliability.At the end of that year, Williams lost their Honda engines, the dominant force in F1, and many feared for the future of a team without a factory engine supply and with a man in a wheelchair at the helm.
And Ross Brawn, who started his F1 career at Williams and went on to win two world titles with Benetton before moving to Ferrari and running their technical department in their dominant period with Michael Schumacher, and is now managing director of F1.Williams was the first team to give the great Brazilian a trial in F1, back in the summer 1983, but decided against signing him.
RIP Frank. Sincere condolences to the Williams family.
R.I.P.
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