Claire Williams grew up playing around one of the best toy sets a child could ask for, but when her own chance came to run Williams it was sadly all-too short-lived, and the family was forced to sell the iconic F1 team.
She blamed a perfect storm of factors for finally forcing the sale of the family-run race team in 2021 to Dorilton Capital after more than forty years of independent competition in Formula 1.
The combined effects of the pandemic together with the loss of income from former title sponsor Rokit left the team unable to continue in its existing form.
“We just ran out of money, not to put too fine a point on it,” Williams told Business of Sport this month.
“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, [they] 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," she said. "They owe us 30-odd million quid, which is half 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," she continued. "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," she recalled. "We didn’t go racing until July that year, and when you don’t go racing you don’t get money.
"That was the final nail in our coffin, so it was a thing completely out of our hands unfortunately, as events transpired. I will live with the heartbreak of losing it every single day.
"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.”
The sale of Williams came just before a boom in business interest in F1, which meant the family wasn't able to get the sort of big numbers people expect from F1 these days.
“It’s more money than most people have in a lifetime, but I don’t care about that," she insisted. "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.
©Williams
“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.”
However her one regret was not trying to hold on to a small piece of the business for the future. "I’m quite gutted that as part of the deal I didn’t just say we want to retain five per cent, but never mind."
One path not taken for Williams was a partnership with Lawrence Stroll, whose son Lance had joined the team as a racing driver in 2017. Stroll eventually bought up Force India and transformed it into today's Aston Martin business.
“It drives me nuts because Lawrence was with us,” Williams admitted when asked about the missed opportunity to keep Stroll at Williams.
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