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Claire Williams, deputy team principal, and Sir Frank Williams, team principal, at the 2014 Austrian Grand Prix.

Claire Williams ruled over Williams F1 for almost a decade, one of only two female leaders of an F1 team in the sport’s entire history.

Williams, the daughter of team founder and long-time team boss Sir Frank Williams, proved a hugely popular and erudite character during her time at the helm at Grove between 2013 and ’20. In a far-reaching interview with PlanetF1.com, Williams recounted her near-decade in charge of the family-owned F1 team.

Claire Williams: From press officer to (almost) team principal

It’s an unfortunate fact that Claire Williams has consigned herself to the quiet footnotes of any F1 history book, despite the fact she was the keymaker behind the last years of Williams’ successes.

Once a powerhouse in F1, particularly through the late 1980s and on through the 1990s, the tide began to turn against Williams in the late 2000s as the sport became a playground for wealthy automotive giants to battle against each other – independent teams like Jordan and Minardi fell by the wayside, while Williams and McLaren struggled to adjust to the new realities brought on by ever-increasing budgets and expanding infrastructures.

While McLaren has managed to adapt and overcome, the Woking-based squad bears little resemblance to the Ron Dennis-led outfit that powered Mika Hakkinen to the 1998 and ’99 titles, before giving Lewis Hamilton his first glories in F1.

Williams, a proudly family-led team with a history stemming back over 40 years, had a different fate. In mid-2020, the Williams family relinquished its grip on the team and sold up to US investment company Dorilton Capital mid-2020 – the team of today remains attached to the history created by Sir Frank and Patrick Head, and was overseen by Claire in its final years prior to the changing of hands.

But Williams, who became the defacto team boss at the start of 2013, unselfishly chose to perform her duties with the title of deputy team principal – in deference to her father’s legend and his continuation as the figurehead of the team – and thus means she doesn’t feature alongside contemporary Monisha Kaltenborn as being one of the sport’s only female team bosses. At least, not for the uninformed.

“My dad stepped down from the board in 2012, when I stepped up into the board,” Williams explains as we begin our chat. Speaking from her home in the UK, Williams is relaxed and jovial – evidently free from the pressures of F1 – as she recounts how her duties as the team leader began.

“When I took over the deputy team principal role, I effectively took over the day-to-day running of the team and the business. But I never took the team principal title. That was my father’s title and it was always in deference to him. I never pushed to take it over.

“I was very happy operating as deputy team principal. My father had been the team principal of Williams forever, and it didn’t feel right taking over that title – he was still there, he was still in the business every day, he just wasn’t functioning in an executive capacity.

“But I think now, it was probably to my detriment, because people say, ‘Well, Williams has only ever had three team principals’, and I am kind of almost forgotten.

“It’s definitely been tricky for me because, subsequently, doing the right thing by my father and not taking the team principal title – which I could have done, the board was keen for me to do it.

“Because, at the time, operating as team principal has much more weight than operating as deputy, particularly when your dad’s still around. But I never wanted to do that. I always kind of thought of myself more as a guardian for my dad’s team principalship, shall we say.

“I’m now known as the deputy team principal of Williams, somewhat forgotten, a little bit forgotten from the history books – I can’t call myself former team principal of Williams F1, I was deputy, which isn’t ideal. It is what it is.”

There’s visible regret coming through in Williams’ words as she speaks – it had been a long journey to take over the running of the team for which her family was most famous. Brought up surrounded by F1 and the glory days of Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost, Damon Hill, and Jacques Villeneuve, Williams had started with the family team shortly after her stint at Newcastle University, where she had studied politics.

“My career really started at Williams in 2002,” she explained. “I started at Silverstone in 2000 and then I moved to Williams, I was at Silverstone for two and a half to three years.

“I moved to Williams in 2002 as a junior press officer. Then I stayed in the press officer role up until 2009/2010, I think it was, when I was promoted to head of communications.

“Then I had a series of quick, quick promotions from then.”

Quick is very much the operative word at this junction. The Williams organisation was listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2011, with Claire taking on the role of Head of Investor Relations under CEO Adam Parr.

Following the listing, now-Mercedes boss Toto Wolff came on board as he bought some of the shareholding held by Sir Patrick Head and Sir Frank – he became an executive director supporting Parr.

“My father had already taken a step back, he had brought in Adam as a CEO in order to allow him to do that, but also had had a previous CEO – Chris Chappell – prior to Adam coming on board,” Williams remembers.

“So it was Adam who promoted me, I suppose – he promoted me to head of comms and put me in the head of Investor Relations role. Then, from there, I stepped up to Head of Marketing and Head of Commercial quite quickly, in 2011, going into 2012.

“But, in 2012, they created a board seat – a director – I was put into a new board seat, the title of which was Director of Marketing and Communications. I quickly found myself responsible for commercial marketing, and brand communications, so everything within that marketing function suddenly fell under my remit from 2012. Plus, I was put on the board.

“That all came about, courtesy of Adam and Toto –  it was really Adam’s brainchild I should take a seat on the board. But then Adam left, and Toto really took over the effective running of the team.

“I was almost operating as his sidekick, his number two, working with him. It was Toto’s brainchild of me becoming deputy team principal and that came about when Toto was offered the role at Mercedes to take over that team.

“He was very much of the opinion that if I agreed to take over the running of Williams, by then he’d feel comfortable to step away and move into the Mercedes role. Bernie Ecclestone may or may not have had something to do with it as well!

“Williams had a board at the time. And it was a board decision. It was not my father suddenly deciding, ‘I want to hand the reins over to Claire’ – Williams didn’t operate like that.

“At that point in time, we were part listed company, we were a PLC, it was a board decision.”

Irrespective of title, Williams was now in charge of the team heading into the 2013 season. It had been a rapid ascension and, for most people, being granted the responsibility of leading the family business – and overseeing a highly competitive F1 team – would be incredibly daunting. Were there many sleepless nights heading into 2013?

“I thought very long and hard about making that decision and knowing that the people who had asked me to do it, didn’t make a rash decision, they felt that I could do it,” Williams explained.

“That gave me confidence. I spoke to my mum at great length about taking on that position. She gave me confidence that I could do it. I felt in myself that I knew Williams pretty well, I’d grown up in the team, and I knew what it was about.

“I was fortunate in that I’d had, from sitting in the press officer’s seat, to see a 360-degree view almost of the team as a whole.

“I had seen the kind of gaps and what we could do quite quickly in order to effect some significant change. I thought, ‘I’m a Williams and this is a family team. Let’s give it a go’.

“I think I felt probably about half and half. I probably was quite daunted. But, equally, I knew the team.  I thought to myself, ‘I’ll give it a go. If it works out then, great. But, if it doesn’t, I will very quickly step down. I do not want to mess this up.’”

With Kaltenborn an immediate peer as an F1 team boss through her leadership of Sauber, Williams became another trailblazer by taking over at Grove. But, despite being surrounded by rampant machismo with most of F1’s leadership being male, Williams said she never felt she had been treated with anything other than respect.

“I never felt that I was treated unfairly,” she said.

“I was treated differently because I was a woman and it was unusual for a woman to run a team. But I don’t think I was treated unfairly. I would never say I was treated negatively because I absolutely wasn’t.”

Claire Williams meets with immediate success in F1

Williams’ ascension to leading the family team saw her take over an outfit with Renault engines for the final year of the engine rules – then a 2.4-litre naturally-aspirated V8. Her drivers were Valtteri Bottas and Pastor Maldonado, with the Venezuelan coming off the back of a season in which Williams had become race winners once more courtesy of his famous win at the Spanish Grand Prix.

But political complications surrounding Maldonado’s sponsors meant Williams was eager to make a change – and Felipe Massa was her target.

“I changed the driver line-up, it was one of the first things I did!” she laughed as she remembered her early decision-making.

“For 2014, I changed it and swapped Pastor out. Pastor had a relationship with a brand called PDVSA, which was the oil giant in Venezuela.

“Venezuela, the country, at that time, politically, financially, and economically, was not in good shape. I spent quite a lot of time in 2013, negotiating with PDVSA for Pastor’s exit from the team. I spent 2013 doing that.

“Valtteri was a keeper, he’d just been put in, it was in his rookie year and was great. Pastor was great, I loved Pastor and had a great relationship with him. But he had been on the team for a while and he delivered Williams’ last-ever race win and he will be forever in my heart. With Pastor, it was much more political, unfortunately with his backer, that we found ourselves in a position where we had to negotiate an exit with them.

“So, for a variety of reasons, we didn’t continue with him going into 2014 and we brought Felipe Massa in from Ferrari to partner with Valtteri.”

A key decision Williams had to make was whether or not to continue with Renault power into the revolutionary new engine regulations incoming for 2014. Swapping to 1.6-litre V6 hybrids, a formula that remains in place to this day, there were question marks over whether to put their faith in the French marque, or jump ship to Mercedes.

“We were going into the new engine maker period going into 2014 and we had to make a decision on which partner we wanted to go with, based on who we thought had done the best job with those new regulations, with these new hybrid units,” Williams said.

“It really almost was 50/50 whether we were going to stick with Renault or go with Mercedes – nobody knew really where anyone was with these new power units.

“We had all the data, of course, we did. We spent week after week after week analysing that data, talking to both our current partners at Renault and talking to everybody at Mercedes to get as much information as we could.

“We made the final call, we’re going to put our money on Mercedes, and fortunately, as we saw in 2014, that was absolutely the right decision.”

Mercedes ended up creating the benchmark engine for the beginning of the hybrid era, creating a V6 monster that resulted in their factory team sweeping all before it in the early years of the formula. Renault, by contrast, fell off the boil after winning multiple titles with Red Bull in the final years of the V8s.

The swap to Mercedes thus stood Williams in good stead, meaning Williams met with near-instant success – perfect timing for the team having secured the arrival of iconic brand Martini to add a touch of elegant class to the tidy package that was the FW36, the first car overseen by new chief technical officer Pat Symonds.

“We made a handful of strong decisions in 2013, which really laid the foundations for that success that we saw from 2014 onwards,” Williams said.

“We brought Felipe in, brought the Mercedes power unit in, and we did quite a significant restructure of our technical department and brought new personnel to augment those people that we already had.

“Then we brought in Martini as our title partner to give us that lovely new shop window, so to speak!”

More on the history of Formula 1

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Claire Williams: 2014 made me wonder ‘what all the fuss is about!’

Quick in pre-season testing, the FW36 became highly feared down long straights due to its straight-line speed potency. An all-Williams front-row in Austria yielded a third and fourth-place finish, the first podium finish of eight that season.

This included a double podium at the season finale in Abu Dhabi, with Massa and Bottas finishing second and third behind Lewis Hamilton in his title-winning race. Thanks to a quirk of the double-points rule used at that round, Williams scored the most points a team has ever scored at a Grand Prix weekend – a grand total of 66 points in one event.

This was enough to secure Williams third place in the Constructors’ Championship and, with everything going swimmingly, life leading an F1 team was proving almost too easy for Claire.

“It’s funny because you don’t think that when you’re making these decisions in the moment, you’re just hoping to God you’ve made the right ones,” she said.

“When it all comes good, then that’s brilliant. It’s when it doesn’t that it all goes wrong. when you make good decisions in Formula 1, they tend to do really well for you.

“When you don’t, it goes really horribly wrong for you. And I’ve learned both lessons during my time in the sport!”

2014, just her second season in charge, proved to be the high water mark of Williams’ years in charge – 2015, while competitive, didn’t yield quite the heady results of the previous season. It’s this time period that Williams looks back on with the most fondness, as I asked her if 2014 was her fondest memory from leading the team.

“100 percent, yes, but that’s not to say it also wasn’t hard work,” she said.

“There was a lot of stuff that was going on behind the scenes that we had to figure out internally at Williams as well. But, on the race track, it was just brilliant – we had so many podiums!

“Almost to the point where it was kind of like, ‘Oh, this is easy, what’s all the fuss about?!’ type of thing. But it was a great year, and 2015 was another great year for us as well.

“In hindsight, I always look back and I just wish to God that we’d had those first four years of my time at the end. In reverse, because obviously, the last three years weren’t brilliant and everybody remembers those times.

“But we had 15 podiums in 2014 and ’15, the highest behind Ferrari and the highest number of podiums outside the Big Three for the past decade, Williams has taken during that time that we were on the team still.

“It was wonderful to see that level of success, the team was just in a really good space and gelling really well.”

Quite a bit of that early success could be regarded as being dependent on the rampant superiority of the Mercedes engine – Ferrari and Renault had not come out of the blocks swinging with the new engine regulations.

But Force India and McLaren, also using the Mercedes engines, weren’t achieving what Williams was – McLaren, despite their experience of racing with Mercedes power, only managed a little over half the points Williams did.

Thus, it’s disingenuous and unfair to say Williams merely cashed in on that superiority – the car itself proved supple and versatile, and Williams herself gives short shrift to the suggestion.

“We did an analysis at one point, how much money our budget was and the points we secured off the back of that versus the bigger teams and what points they were getting,” she said.

“It was a really strong ratio. We were definitely punching above our weight, and we always really had at Williams.

“A lot of people will say, ‘Well, you got lucky choosing the Mercedes engine’.

“We didn’t get lucky choosing the Mercedes engine. We chose the Mercedes engine based on good decision-making tactics. How many other teams with the Mercedes power unit that we beat that year, and quite convincingly?

“You don’t just race with an engine, you have to race with a good race car as well. The team, at that time, developed a really great race car.

“As an overall package, that’s what took us to that success. I don’t think that it’s right for anyone to say, ‘Well, it was done all down to the Mercedes power unit’, because it absolutely wasn’t.”

Having finished third in the Constructors’ Championship in 2014 and ’15, Williams could be forgiven for feeling confident in her abilities as defacto team boss – but F1 is far from an easy sport. The tide began to turn in 2016, to the point where survival – not title glory – began to be the team’s main focus.

In the next chapter of PlanetF1.com’s interview with Claire Williams, published next week ahead of the Hungarian Grand Prix, the former deputy team principal recounts the final years of her tenure with her family’s team.

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