Frank Williams: Brief Biography by Pete Fenelon


Frank Williams used to do a bit of FJunior and F3 racing in
the early/mid Sixties but ended up spending most of his
time running cars for other people; he also ran a fairly
successful business dealing in secondhand racing cars.

Frank ended up running quite a successful F2 team, notably
a Brabham for Piers Courage. In '69 Courage, who'd 
previously experimented with a private BRM in F1, ended up
driving a Cosworth DFV-engined BT26 in F1 for Frank.

This apparently displeased the Brabham works somewhat since
(A) Frank had bought the car ostensibly to run in Tasman
trim with a DFW (a 2.5-litre DFV-derivative), (B) Piers
managed two excellent second places with it and (C) his
tyre contract clashed with the works team's. 

A connection with De Tomaso saw an F2 car and in 1970 a De
Tomaso F1 (designed by Gianpaolo Dallara). This was just
beginning to work when Courage was tragically killed in it;
various other drivers took turns in it for the rest of the
1970 season but De Tomaso lost interest.

In '71 and '72 Williams ran F1 Marches (notably for Henri
Pescarolo) backed by Politoys and others, but commissioned
his first F1 car from Len Bailey -- the Politoys FX3, which
although it only appeared very rarely (not precisely sure
how many times) became the ancestor of the team's own cars.

'73 saw the Williams team racing under the name Iso
Marlboro -- the italian Iso sports car manufacturer backed
his programme -- with heavily updated variants of the FX3
called the IR; drivers varied throughout the season.

'74 and '75 saw further-revised cars under the FW04
designation -- the only decent result was a second place by
Laffite at the Nurburgring. Walter Wolf, the Canadian
multimillionaire, bought 60% of the team for '76; the team
purchased much of the redundant assets of the Hesketh outfit
which had folded at the end of '75 and the Wolf-Williams
FW05 was in fact a thinly disguised Hesketh 308C; the
season was a disaster and Williams soon escaped.

In '77 he ran a March 761B for Patrick Neve; although it
didn't score points in the background Williams had Patrick
Head working on the FW06 for the '78 season, which, with
Alan Jones at the wheel and considerable Saudi Arabian
backing, marked the beginnings of Williams Grand Prix
Engineering as a successful team... 

WGPE grew through the late Seventies and early Eighties,
although the departure of Alan Jones marked the beginning
of Frank's oft-repeated opinion that drivers are ``just
employees''.

Subsequently, the team has won championships with Rosberg,
Piquet, Mansell and Prost and has brought Damon Hill and
now David Coulthard to the point where they are 
front-runners -- some line-up of employees! -- despite
Frank being almost completely paralysed after a near-fatal
road car accident in France.

The Williams-Renault dynasty suffered a serious blow with
the death of Senna at Imola in '94, but the team has great
strength in depth and is fighting back...

The Williams empire has also expanded into touring car
racing, running the works Renault Lagunas in the UK. 


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Source: Pete Fenelon 
http://dcpu1.cs.york.ac.uk:6666/pete/racing/index.html