27 How did Frank Williams get into Formula One ?
Description
This article is from the Motorsport FAQ, by A H Henry bspahh@midge.bath.ac.uk with numerous contributions by others.
27 How did Frank Williams get into Formula One ?
Frank Williams used to do a bit of FJ/F3/F2 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 old Tasman series
with a Cosworth 2.5l DFW. Frank had the DFW rebuilt as DFV's and
entered F1 on Dunlop tires. (B) Piers managed two excellent second
places with it.
A connection with De Tomaso saw an F2 car appear followed in in 1970
by 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, became the ancestor of the team's own cars.
1973 saw the Williams team racing under the name Iso Marlboro -- the
italian Iso sports car team 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...
For more info on Frank Williams:
http://dcpu1.cs.york.ac.uk:6666/pete/racing/fw.html
Continue to:
My Books
