Williams
by David Finlay (14 December 2009)
For a period in the early 1990s, the dominance of Williams in the F1 World Championship foreshadowed that of Ferrari a decade later. It seemed, at the time, almost beyond possibility that any other team could match what Williams was doing, and it took a significant rule change (banning the electronic devices which Williams had so brilliantly developed and was using to such awe-inspiring effect) for the status quo to be changed. In 2009, by contrast, Williams has been an also-ran, its most recent glories now far in the past. Surely this is not a good time for the journalist and author Maurice Hamilton to write a book about Sir Frank Williams and the team he created?
Well, yes, it is. There is never a bad time to pay attention to Williams. And that is not just because this remains one of the most successful teams in the sport, one of the very few to have achieved over 100 Grand Prix wins; it is also because the story is fascinating, exciting and romantic.
And this is strange, in a way, because Frank Williams himself has never come across as a romantic man. Admittedly, few team bosses ever have, but while Ron Dennis, for example, has devoted a great deal of energy to building and maintaining relationships with his drivers, Williams seems to regard them as being different from other components in his cars only in the sense that they are more expensive and troublesome.
Yet McLaren, the team Dennis took to stardom, is fiercely efficient, a team to be viewed with awe but perhaps not with any great personal emotion, whereas there has always been something lovable about Williams.
And no wonder. There are so many stories worth reading and re-reading. There is Sir Frank's early struggle, in which he just about managed to make ends meet buying and selling race cars. There was the personal tragedy (one of the first but definitely not the last) of losing his friend Piers Courage in a racing accident. There was the formation of his own team in 1977, followed three years later by the first World Championship title (earned by Alan Jones, very much a character in the Frank Williams mould). There was the love affair with and marriage to Virginia (a much more romantic person than her husband, it seems - perhaps it's an attraction of opposites).
Perhaps most famously, there was the dreadful road accident in 1986 which might easily have killed Williams, and which in fact forced him into a state of disability which must have been desperately hard for a man whose great passion outside motorsport was to run. And - alas - there was the fact that Ayrton Senna was driving a Williams when he died during the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix at Imola.
That was a bad time for F1. Roland Ratzenberger's death the previous day was horrific, and so were the injuries sustained by Karl Wendlinger not long afterwards. But the Senna fatality brought the sport to a standstill in a way that nothing had since the death of Jim Clark 26 years earlier.
Maurice Hamilton could have written all about this himself, but in fact only the first part of each chapter is in his own words. For the rest, he relied on transcriptions of interviews with Williams himself, drivers, employees, rivals, and often (at times quite movingly, especially when his children speak of him towards the end of the book) family members. Don't imagine this is a cop-out on Hamilton's part: it's harder to do than it looks, and it can be, as it is here, very effective.
For this reason, the lasting image of Williams and his team is a three-dimensional one. The book is also a tribute to Patrick Head, the designer who has been with Sir Frank for so many years. And in some ways it is a guide to creating and maintaining an enormously successful business.
If you are a Williams fan, this book is indispensable. If you are not, perhaps you will be after reading it.
Williams: The Legendary Story of Frank Williams And His F1 Team In Their Own Words, by Maurice Hamilton, is published by Ebury Press at £20. ISBN 978 0 091932671. More details at www.rbooks.co.uk.
