Ex-team boss preparing to start watching F1 again following ‘painful exit’

Claire Williams, the former deputy team principal of the team founded by and named after her father, admits she regrets losing the backing of the Stroll family before being forced to sell the team.

Lance Stroll made his Formula 1 debut at Williams in 2017, through the financial support of his father. However Williams struggled the following year and Lawrence Stroll took the opportunity to buy Force India, moving his son there in 2019.

He has since spent heavily on the team, funding a massive upgrade of its facilities and hiring a raft of senior staff from rivals including star designer Adrian Newey. Stroll rebranded his team as Aston Martin in 2021, the year after the Williams family sold its team.

Williams admitted she regrets missing the opportunity to keep Stroll within the Williams fold when she ran the team. “It drives me nuts because Lawrence was with us,”

 

The Williams team was bought by Dorilton Capital after running into financial trouble during the Covid-affected 2020 season. Williams blamed the combined effects of the pandemic and the loss of income from former title sponsor Rokit, which it split from that year.

“We just ran out of money, not to put too fine a point on it,” she said. “For the 2019 season, we had a title sponsor, and then going into the latter part of ’19 talking about payments for 2020, which were contracted, never materialised.

“When you lose a title sponsor, when they’re not paying and it’s there now, we took them to court and we won. They owe us 30-odd million quid, which is half of the money they actually owed us, they’ve had the court judgement to say that.

“They obviously didn’t pay and that obviously left a huge hole in our budget going into 2020. But we were very fortunate in that we had somebody that came along and plugged that gap for us so we were able to start the season.

 

“Unfortunately, when we started the season and we arrived in Melbourne, Covid hit and we all went home again, we didn’t go racing until July that year. And when you don’t go racing, you don’t get money. So that was the final nail in our coffin. So it was a thing [that’s] completely out of our hands, unfortunately, as events transpired.”

 

Williams became deputy team principal in 2013, taking over the day-to-day running of the team from her father Sir Frank Williams, who died the year after the team’s sale.

“There is not one day when I ever, ever have the emotion that I’m pleased that we sold Williams,” she admitted. “No, never. I never, ever think that.

“Everyone will probably go ‘oh, she’s so dramatic’ and whatever, but I will live with the heartbreak of losing it every single day. Because it wasn’t a decision that we made as a family to sell because we’d had enough of Formula 1 or wanted to cash out. We all wanted to stay in it. It was our life for ever, that was the plan. I wanted to run the team for my son or my nephews.”

She said the team was sold for considerably less than it is likely worth today, following the growth of interest in Formula 1. “But that’s by the by,” said Williams, “it’s more money than most people have in a lifetime. And I don’t care about that.

“What I care about is that we were able to find… what we were very fortunate for was that we found people that wanted to buy Williams that were the kind of people we wanted to sell it to.

“Good people. People that – I’ll get upset now – but people that would look after the team, look after its legacy and look after the people that we loved and that were our family. We were very lucky because 2020 was a horrible time for everybody. People were not buying businesses and they certainly weren’t buying flailing Formula 1 teams.

“We were very fortunate that these people came along and they did exactly that and so that was the greatest outcome that we could have had.”

Williams admitted she regrets not trying to hold onto a minority stake in the team. “I’m quite gutted that as part of the deal I didn’t just say, well, we want to retain 5%, but never mind.”