Think about writing something representative of Frank Williams, a few minutes after his death on Sunday 28 November, it is like hoping to empty a lake with a spoon. Its history can be reconstructed, like everyone’s: a few reliable golden books, a few period newspapers, are enough. A long era, because between its beginnings with the ISO brand and the last few days it unfolds almost half a century, with a series of victories and world titles to scare the number one legend, the one called Ferrari. In 1997, the year of the last world champion conquered by the Grove team, thanks also to the irreverence of Jacques Villeneuve, the centuries-old primacy of the Cavallino in terms of world titles seemed even in danger. It took the 2000-2004 double gold ride, with five Schumi titles paired with the five Constructors’ laurels that followed the 1999 one, to put the Red Myth back on top of the Everest of Formula 1 triumphs.
In 1997, Frank Williams had been quadriplegic for eleven years already. The fault of a car accident, which occurred with him at the wheel of a car and rental as he descended towards Marseille at breakneck speed where a plane was waiting for him at the end of an F1 test session at Paul Ricard. “We were late and he was running – said the English journalist Peter Windsor, then his assistant within the team and that day sitting next to him -. In a curve he lost control and we found ourselves down a slope, among the trees. The car was badly damaged, but I wasn’t hurt. At one point Frank started yelling ‘Can’t feel my legs! Can’t feel my legs’. He could no longer feel his legs. It took a while to get it out of the car and it was immediately clear that something bad had happened “. The bad thing was a quadriplegia. It took months to see him again in a paddock, assisted by physiotherapists and soon with a machine that allowed him to stand erect, held by straps and with the possibility of exercising at least his arms, which he flexed upwards in an attempt to regain sensitivity and strength. . For the legs, nothing to do: the wheelchair accompanied him for all his days to come.
But that didn’t stop him from closely following his Williams queen of most of the 80s and 90s from inside. Alan Jones (1980), Keke Rosberg (1982), Nelson Piquet (1987), Nigel Mansell (1992), Alain Prost (1993), Damon Hill (1996) and Jacques Villeneuve (1997) are its world champions. Drivers also of great character; no one able to impose their own law on that of the team. Nigel was even torpedoed in Monza 1992 when he was already world champion in the mathematical sense, but he was not yet awarded in Paris. Frank had already taken Prost for the following year, indulging the courtship, even short, of Alain who brought with him the greatest favor from the Renault engineer, at that time tempted by the proposals of other teams. Mansell was not very happy: Frank had revealed the agreement with Prost on the starting grid of the Brazilian GP, at the beginning of the season and with the English driver in a great state of form, so much so as to dominate the first five GP of the championship . The Drivers’ World Championship arrived already in August, in Budapest. That Constructors had never even been in question. Yet the diktat arrived in Monza: if Mansell had wanted to stay with Williams, he would have had to accept a half-cut fee. Nigel didn’t answer within the time limit and here’s the new diktat: now, if he wants to stay, he has to settle for a quarter. As if to say: divorce provoked, even if not proposed. But Mansell had no other way than to go to the United States, to dominate the Indy Championship with the Newman-Haas team.
Better to focus on Prost, who in fact walked in the 1993 World Cup until he pinned him on his chest as his fourth personal star. What about him, Frank? Not a crease. One or the other, always pilots are. “Pilots are like light bulbs – one of his memorable releases, often mistakenly attributed to his technical conscience Patrick Head – when they no longer go well, they change ”. But other words tell very well who / what Frank Williams was. He let them escape in an interview in the mid-80s, when the championships saw him as a less and less occasional protagonist and when the roaring times of the beginnings began to gild in myth. A myth in which the young Frank Williams, ex-driver with high hopes but timid results, began to invent himself a team manager, if not a constructor. In the early days, he didn’t even have an office. To call around Great Britain and therefore the planet, looking for partnerships and especially sponsors, he would go to the telephone booths in north-west London stocked with stacks of half-pound coins. And if those days were full of adventure, those nights brought out his innermost conscience. “When, dead tired, I always went to bed thinking about work, racing – he told on a particularly inspired occasion – at a certain point I turned off the light and then the thought became fixed: Enzo Ferrari. What did the Drake think when he was alone in the dark? Who knows what kind of nocturnal thoughts had allowed him to become Ferrari …“.
He had clear goals, Frank Williams.
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