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LONDON — Frank Williams, the founder and former team principal of Formula One’s Williams Racing, has died. He was 79.
Williams took his motor racing team from an empty carpet warehouse to the summit of Formula One, overseeing 114 victories, a combined 16 drivers’ and constructors’ world championships, while becoming the longest-serving team boss in the sport’s history.
“After being admitted into hospital on Friday, Sir Frank passed away peacefully this morning surrounded by his family,” Williams Racing said in a statement Sunday.
Williams driver George Russell remembered Williams as a “genuinely wonderful human being.”
Williams’ life is all the more extraordinary by the horrific car crash he suffered in France that left him with injuries so devastating that doctors considered turning off his life-support machine.
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But his wife, Virginia, ordered that her husband be kept alive and his sheer determination and courage — characteristics that personified his career — enabled him to continue with the love of his life, albeit from the confines of a wheelchair.
He would remain in his role as Williams team principal for a further 34 years before F1’s greatest family team was sold to an American investment group in August.
“Frank was one of the old-timers who went back an awful long way,” former F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone told Britain’s Press Association. “One wonders that, if people like Frank had not been around in the early days, whether Formula One would have survived today. He was one of the people that built Formula One. It’s the end of an era.”
Frank Williams’ rise to the top of Formula One
Francis Owen Garbett Williams was born in South Shields, England, on April 16, 1942 to an RAF officer and a headmistress. He was educated at St Joseph’s College, a private boarding school in Dumfries where he became obsessed with cars following a ride in a…
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Source : time
