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Revision as of 12:17, 3 December 2004
The name Frank Williams can also refer to Frank Abagnale, famed impostor and forger, or Frank Williams, an actor in the BBC sitcom Dad's Army.
Sir Francis Owen Garbatt Williams (b. April 16, 1942) is founder and manager of the WilliamsF1 Formula One racing team.
Born in Tynside, England, to an RAF bomber pilot and a special education teacher, Williams spent much of his childhood at a boarding school in Scotland. In the late 1950s a friend gave Williams a ride in his Jaguar XK150s; Williams was immediately hooked.
After a brief career as a driver and mechanic, funded by his work as a traveling grocery salesman, Williams founded Frank Williams Racing Cars in 1966; he ran drivers Piers Courage, Richard Burton, Tetsu Ikuzawa and Tony Trimmer for several years in Formula Two and Formula Three. Williams purchased an old Brabham Formula One chassis; Courage drove it in several F1 events, coming in second place twice.
In 1970 Williams undertook a brief partnership with Alessandro de Tomaso; after the death of Courage at the Dutch Grand Prix, his relationship with de Tomaso was over by the end of the year. In 1971 he raced Henri Pescarolo in a chassis he had purchased from March Engineering; 1972 saw the first F1 car built by the Williams works, the Politoys FX3 designed by Len Bailey, but Pescarolo crashed and destroyed it at its first race.
Williams, short on cash, looked to Marlboro and Iso, an Italian car company, for sponsorship. Though they pledged their support, they did not come through in time and in 1976 Williams desparately took on a partner, oil magnate Walter Wolf. Though the team continued funtioning, it no longer belonged to Frank Williams, so he left in 1977 along with one of his old employees, engineer Patrick Head. The two acquired an empty carpet warehouse in Didcot, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom and announced the formation of Williams Grand Prix Engineering; this same team still competes in Formula One and is known as WilliamsF1.
A car accident in southern France in March 1986 left Williams paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair.
In 1987 the British government awarded Williams the title of Commander of the British Empire; he became a Knight of the British Empire in 1999. He is also one of the few non-Frenchmen to have been made a Chevalier of France's Legion d'Honneur; this honor was accorded for his work with the Renault team.
References
- People: Sir Frank Williams. GrandPrix.com.
- Horton, Roger (1999). All Rise for the Honourable Sir Frank. Atlas F1.