Claire Williams, who was born in the hot and arid summer of 1976 in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, in Berkshire, has faced both advantage and disadvantage throughout her professional life. The obvious advantage in the world of Formula 1 is her parentage – and the inexorable disadvantage is her gender, for, even now and certainly in the 2000s, when she was cutting her F1 teeth, making career progress was harder for women than it was for men, and significantly so. We will come to that later.

First, I ask her about that parentage, and the childhood it served up for her. “We don’t get to choose what world we’re born into, do we?” she begins, smiling broadly. “And I was born into a world where F1 became my life, and in which my dad [Frank Williams] was an extraordinary man who did extraordinary things, and to grow up watching that and surrounded by that, well, I couldn’t think of a better childhood.

“Yes, it came with some downsides, in that Dad wasn’t around much, but the odd thing is that I never remember him not being around. OK, he took me to school only once in my life. OK, he never came on family holidays. But I never felt negatively impacted by that kind of thing because of all the positive impacts of being Frank Williams’ daughter, and therefore growing up in and around F1. It was wonderful.”

It is a great answer but I want to push her for more: on the early years – before Frank had had any real success.

“Dad had only just about managed to get established in F1 when I was little, and when I was born [in 1976] there wasn’t a ton of money about. For example, our house had no carpets and no curtains, and my brothers and I were dragged behind the sofa and told to keep out of sight when the landlord used to knock in vain on the door, then peer through the window, attempting to collect the rent.

“But by the 1980s and 1990s, by which time Williams had become super-successful, the scale of what Dad was achieving obviously began to dawn on me. Our big day out was the British Grand Prix. Our outfits were planned weeks in advance, and we got to go in a helicopter, but we never went to any overseas races and at Brands Hatch and Silverstone we were always told to be seen and not heard. But we loved it.

“We used to spend a lot of our weekends at Williams’ [Didcot] factory, even as children. In fact I used to want to spend as much of my spare time at the factory as possible, and, whenever I think of my childhood memories, most of them are F1-related things. Williams’ drivers used to visit our home – eventually we had carpets and curtains – and Jacques Laffite was a particular favourite of mine because he was a complete tearaway and he used to do crazy things.

“Before Dad’s accident [in March 1986, when Claire was nine] he and Mum used to throw these fantastic Christmas parties. Jacques used to come, and some of the other drivers, and Ron [Dennis] used to attend them, too. And Ron would bring magic tricks and do them for my brothers and me. People who don’t know Ron might not necessarily associate him with being so sweet with us kids, but he was.”

What are her memories of her mother, Ginny? “She was the perfect example of the phrase ‘Behind every strong man is a stronger woman’. She always remained behind the scenes, allowing Dad to be the superstar, but she was the engine room. And the elephant in that engine room, which I’m sure you’re going to ask me about next, is Dad’s accident. And, yes, after 1986, when Dad became tetraplegic, having been a fitness fanatic, she suddenly had to become a different kind of engine room, and that wasn’t easy. There are many words that you could choose to describe Mum, and the best is ‘formidable’, but she was also gracious and classy.

“Dad would ask Mum for her opinion on driver selection”

“She loved Williams every bit as much as Dad did, and she had influence on the team’s operation, too. Dad would always ask her for her opinion when it came to driver selection, for example. She was always heavily involved in that. And she was in charge of the team’s presentation, working hard to make the paddock motorhome, the team kit, and all that kind of thing look spot-on. On the Thursday morning before the British Grand Prix she’d go to New Covent Garden Market at 3am, buy the best flowers, then drive them up to Brands Hatch or Silverstone and arrange them beautifully in our hospitality areas. And she used to coach our chefs, and take them to top-class London restaurants like the Wolseley, on Piccadilly, so that they could experience the level of catering that she wanted our guests to enjoy.”

At this point in our interview Claire Williams obe excuses herself because she can hear the tumble dryer beeping and she wants to hang the clothes out.

She returns, sits down, and launches into painful reminiscence: “As for Dad’s accident, well, I remember that day very clearly. I was nine, and Mum had just taken me on a lovely bike ride, with a picnic, and we’d just got home. Mum was getting Dad’s supper ready, because he was due back [from a Williams test at Paul Ricard]. He was doing a half marathon the next day, and he always liked a big meal before he went on a long run. And the phone rang, and it was Patrick [Head], and he told Mum that Dad had crashed his hire car on the way from the circuit to the airport. I don’t know how much he knew, or how much he told her, and I don’t remember her reaction. But I know I was in the room, the kitchen, because I can see the scene in my mind’s eye even now.”

A short silence develops. “It’s hard to distinguish between actual memories and what I’ve learned over the years,” she says, not overcome but clearly emotional.

Did she discuss it a lot afterwards with her mum? “Oh no, we didn’t. We were a typical British family. Stiff upper lip. We never talked about anything deep. We just got on with stuff. We never complained. And, anyway, straight afterwards, Mum flew to France to be with Dad, and the next few weeks and months are now a bit of a blur. Even when Dad had been flown to a London hospital, and my brothers and I used to be driven by our nanny to see him, and I used to bake him shortbread, which was a favourite treat of his, my memories are sketchy. But I remember that he was in a very bad state at that stage. He couldn’t speak, for example. And he couldn’t eat the shortbread that I’d make for him, because he couldn’t eat any solids, although I wasn’t told that at the time. The nurses used to eat it. Then, when he finally came home, I kind of became his little nurse, and I used to play him Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which was his favourite piece of classical music. I can’t listen to it now. It would make me too emotional.”

You were extraordinarily brave, and impressively stoical, I suggest.

“It’s how we were brought up. We just got on with it. It was only in my twenties that I began to struggle with the enormity of it all. I’d always been so close to Dad, and so proud of him, too. I went to Newcastle University, which was near his birthplace [South Shields], but I didn’t enjoy it. It was a tough time.

“When I left, I moved into my own place in Oxford, and I started doing a bit of part-time work in the Williams travel office with a wonderful woman, Donna Robertson, the race team secretary. And it wasn’t at all inevitable that I would end up working full-time for Williams, and actually Dad was against it at first because he didn’t want me to be the beneficiary of nepotism, so I got a job as a junior press officer at Silverstone, working with Peter Morris, a lovely man. I enjoyed my time at Silverstone, even though it was a difficult time for everyone there, and eventually I ended up getting made redundant, along with a series of others.”

In the end, via a part-time sojourn in the Williams travel office again, she landed a full-time job in the team’s comms/PR department, despite her father’s protestations. “I loved it straight away. I worked so hard to show that I’d got the job because I deserved it, not just because I was the boss’s daughter. I was the first in and the last out almost every day.”

“I love that Dad and Patrick had lunch together every single day”

If the team’s patriarch and matriarch were Frank and Ginny, then we should not underestimate the importance of Patrick Head, the technical director and 30% shareholder, to whom Frank was always keen to assign great credit for his many successes. “In my early years, as a press officer, I found him rather intimidating, perhaps almost frightening. He was a larger-than-life personality, and he had this very loud voice. But I always admired Frank’s and Patrick’s relationship. It was one of the most enduring in F1 history, and it certainly worked. I loved the fact that they had lunch together every single day. Sometimes they chatted; sometimes they sat in companionable silence; but invariably, without fail, they would always, always lunch together. Patrick is a remarkable individual actually, and what he achieved in his F1 career was extraordinary, because Williams absolutely was Dad and Patrick, and I’m so pleased that that was eventually recognised by Patrick’s knighthood.”

Nonetheless, as F1 moved into the 21st century, the feeling took root that Williams was no longer keeping pace. Yes, there were some excellent BMW-powered results in the first few years of the 2000s, and had the FIA not (a) suddenly declared Michelin’s tyres illegal ahead of the 2003 Italian Grand Prix, and (b) served Juan Pablo Montoya with an iffy drive-through penalty at Indianapolis two weeks later, perhaps Juan Pablo might have been able to win that year’s F1 Drivers’ World Championship. But after that things at Grove began to slide.

“It was a really odd time,” Claire admits, looking suddenly doleful. “The BMW engines were powerful, but the working relationship was pretty acrimonious. So when it came to an end, I felt that the Williams organisation was able to breathe once again. On the other hand, I never felt it got its breath back properly, if that makes sense. After 2005 we partnered with a series of engine manufacturers [Cosworth, Toyota, Cosworth again, then Renault], but those partnerships didn’t result in particularly competitive chassis-engine packages. On top of that came the financial crisis of 2007, and the government bailout of our title sponsor RBS [Royal Bank of Scotland], and I think Williams started gradually coming apart at the seams, and one of the results of that was that we began to lose our grip on performance. By 2009 that was definitely the case.” That year Williams finished seventh in the F1 Constructors’ World Championship, in 2010 sixth, and in 2011 ninth.

Frank and Patrick were getting on in years, both of them now in their sixties. They were still involved, but they had taken a step away from the captain’s tiller. In their places they hired first Chris Chapple (as chief executive), an ex-officer of the Royal Marines who had spent time at the giant US investment bank and financial services company Goldman Sachs, then, replacing Chapple, Adam Parr (as chairman), who brought with him banking and business experience gained at the British financial powerhouse Barclays Group and the British-Australian mining corporation Rio Tinto. But neither of them had any racing experience, and it showed.

“Yes, I had a few experiences in the F1 paddock that weren’t OK”

I do not think I have ever met two more die-hard racing men than Frank Williams and Patrick Head, yet here they were placing their beloved F1 team in the hands of two motor sport neophytes. I have often wondered why they did it, and I have settled on the following possible explanation. Patrick had long grown used to focusing more or less solely on the technical and engineering aspects of the team’s operation, as well he might, leaving the strategic and commercial side to Frank. That worked extremely well before Frank’s accident, and for quite some time after it as well, but, as the 21st century drew on, and F1 became bigger, more complex, and more political, the teams also had to grow and evolve, and running them became a trickier enterprise. Aware of that, and conscious of the insularity that his physical condition had unavoidably thrust upon him, Frank figured that bringing in business expertise earned on the global stage would give Williams an edge. Certainly, at the time, he spoke in glowing terms about Chapple and Parr. They were not bad blokes, but the lack of relevant expertise that they introduced at such a senior level dealt Williams a double blow from which it was, perhaps unsurprisingly, slow to recover.

Chapple left in late 2006, unmourned by Williams’ rank and file. Towards the end of Parr’s tenure, in 2012, he began to lean heavily on Claire for advice and support, promoting her to the position of director of marketing and communications. Then, in 2013, soon after Parr had departed, she became deputy team principal. She is unwilling to criticise either man. Equally, she will not confirm what we all began to realise at the time, which was that by 2013 she was not merely deputy team principal but also de facto team principal, and that she always retained the ‘deputy’ bit of her job title out of respect for her beloved but diminishing father. It must have been a tough time for her. Her mum died of cancer that year, and her dad, now no longer the sunny side of 70, had ceased to be the audacious racing/business dynamo that he had been for most of the past 40 years.

I push her on the impact of such human tragedies, but she will say only this: “Mum’s death was massively hard, but she was so incredibly brave. Dad was over 70 by now, as you say. But Dad really liked Adam – he was charming, dapper and articulate – and actually Adam and I worked well together, and I became a bit of a confidante for him. We’re still friendly now. He and I used to do a lot of trips together, to North and South America, to drum up sponsorship. At that point my focus was still very much on the comms, PR, marketing, brand and commercial side of the operation, and above all trying to find sponsors.”

Did she encounter more sexism as she became more senior? “Yes, absolutely. But there are bad eggs everywhere. I once had a summer job, as a waitress, when I was 18, and I was groped by some idiot then. And, yes, I also had a few experiences in the F1 paddock that weren’t OK, and I think quite a lot of F1 people judged me more harshly when I took on the deputy team principal role than they would have done if I’d been a man. Or, to put it more diplomatically: I’d definitely say that my gender was discussed more than the gender of my male counterparts. But after a while I decided to close my ears to it. I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t need to hear it. I couldn’t have cared less about it, to be honest with you. I knew why I was in the job, and I didn’t care whether I was a woman or a man.”

She has dealt with that subject convincingly, so I loop back one more time to the subject of her mother and father and what those two losses meant to her.

She composes herself, says nothing for a while, then begins: “Mum had been suffering from cancer for three years before we lost her. And, my God, she put up an extraordinary fight. She must have been in awful pain a lot of the time, but she never once bemoaned her situation, complained about it, or cried. She was extraordinary. And sometimes, even to this day, I can’t quite believe what happened, that she would predecease Dad I mean, because my brothers and I had spent the past 27 years worrying about Dad’s fragility. We never worried about Mum. She was the strong one. But her cancer came so suddenly, and it spread so fast.

“The last race she ever went to, the last one we managed to take her to, was Barcelona, in May 2012, to belatedly celebrate Dad’s 70th birthday, which had been the month before [April 16]. Mum was really suffering by then, she wasn’t in a good way, yet she bravely made it to the circuit. Lewis [Hamilton] was given a penalty in qualifying, so he lost pole position, and Pastor [Maldonado, who had posted the second-fastest qualifying lap] therefore inherited it, then he won the race for us the next day. I have no idea how he managed to keep [Fernando] Alonso’s Ferrari behind him for 46 laps, but he did, and Mum got to see Dad’s last win. She’d found the team’s decline hard to take, so I’m so glad she was there for that.

The winter of 2012/13 was a very tough time. There was a bit of a power struggle going on behind the scenes at Williams – involving Adam, Toto [Wolff, who had become a Williams shareholder in 2009] and a few others – and that was when I was asked to take on the deputy team principal role. So I was wrestling with all that while Mum was becoming more terminal, and I couldn’t stop working even when she died, on March 8, 2013. She left us just days before the first grand prix of the year [which took place in Melbourne on March 17], so I was now planning Mum’s funeral at the same time as working on all the preparations for the Australian Grand Prix.

I didn’t go to Melbourne because of Mum’s funeral [which took place on March 21], but I flew straight to Kuala Lumpur on the very evening of her funeral, for the second grand prix of the year, in Malaysia [which took place on March 24]. I was supposed to be flying the next day, but that flight was cancelled, so I had to go that very evening. My brothers were in the pub, and Dad had gone to bed, so I went upstairs to pack, on my own, then off I went.

“Remembering that time still makes me upset today, because, well, I’d just buried my mother, but, even so, I had to get on that flight. I felt I had no choice. For me, very much, one of the reasons I agreed to take over the running of Williams was duty. I felt I had a duty to the team, and also a duty to my parents. Williams needed to be run by a Williams, I felt, and I’d been asked to do it, so I did it. So it was my duty to go to that race in Malaysia. I flew overnight. As soon as I landed I went straight to the F1 paddock, and that was my first day running the team, the day after I buried its greatest fan.”

We move on to happier topics: she took over the running of the team after its glory days, that can’t be denied, but, even so, what were the highlights and good times?

“OK, well, 2013, my first year in charge, wasn’t a good season, but it gave me time to get my feet under the desk and make the changes that we needed going into 2014, when there would be a big regulatory upheaval [not least the introduction of 1.6-litre V6 turbo hybrid engines]. And one of the best decisions I made in my first weeks in charge was to bring in Mike O’Driscoll, ex-Jaguar, one of our non-exec directors, whom I didn’t know that well but to whom I already felt a strong connection in terms of how we reckoned things should be done. Also, he was a gentle soul, and I needed that, and he was a grown-up, and I needed that too [O’Driscoll was 57 in 2013]. I absolutely, without a shadow of doubt, knew where my weaknesses were, and that I had many of them. I was still only 36, I’d never run a business before, and I was being asked to run one of the most famous F1 teams of them all.

“Things started to go wrong, and it was a rapid fall from grace”

“I couldn’t have done what I did without Mike. We worked brilliantly together. We were kind of yin to each other’s yang, and in 2013 we rolled our sleeves up and made a lot of quite sweeping changes, especially on the technical side [for example drafting in experienced engineers Pat Symonds and Rob Smedley]. We’d inherited a team that had just finished eighth in the F1 Constructors’ Championship, so we absolutely needed to make improvements. We brought in Valtteri [Bottas] and, the next year [2014], Felipe [Massa]. You could say that 2013 was a rebuilding year, but by 2014 we were once again in much better shape. We had two great drivers in Felipe and Valtteri, we’d replaced our Renault engines with Mercedes units, which turned out to be a genius move, and we brought in Martini as our title sponsor. So our cars looked the part and they went well, too. The result was four great years.”

Williams finished third in the 2014 F1 Constructors’ Championship, behind only Mercedes and Red Bull, and third again in 2015, behind only Mercedes and Ferrari. In 2016 the team slipped to fifth, and in 2017, having drafted in 18-year-old Lance Stroll to replace Bottas, who had gone to Mercedes, fifth again. During those four years the team delivered 15 top-three finishes, and only Toto Wolff and Christian Horner were more frequent podium visitors than Claire was. “Yes, it was a great time,” she recalls, “but then, starting in 2017, things began to go wrong, and it was a pretty rapid fall from grace.” It was indeed. In 2018 the Williams drivers, Stroll and Sergey Sirotkin, finished respectively 18th and 20th in the F1 Drivers’ Championship, and Williams finished 10th.

“But,” she says, her enthusiasm visible, “I want to say something about three great drivers: Valtteri, Felipe and George [Russell, who raced for Williams from 2019-21]. They were all awesome. They were all marvellous, wonderful individuals. It was a privilege to work with them.”

In 2019 Russell’s team-mate at Williams was Robert Kubica, who was and remains astonishingly talented but was never the same after his horribly injurious shunt in a Skoda Fabia rally car on the Ronda di Andora in 2011. The 2019 Williams FW42 was not a great car, and the highlight, if we can call it that, of a gruelling 21-race season was 10th place for Kubica at Hockenheim. The single world championship point that that drive earned was the sum total of Williams’ success that season, and it finished 10th in the F1 Constructors’ Championship again.

To complicate things further, Williams had a few sponsor issues, which Claire is not keen to discuss even now. The result was a gap in the team’s budget. In January 2020 she flew to Melbourne to meet a high-net-worth individual whom she would prefer not to name, and she asked him to fill the void. “I met him for breakfast at a hotel, and I’d never been more nervous in my life because if he’d said no we would have been in very big trouble. But he said, ‘Yes, of course, no problem, how much do you need?’ I still get emotional thinking about that breakfast, even now, because Williams was saved in that moment. I’d always been a big believer in the phrase ‘something will always turn up’. That’s how Dad had operated over the years, especially early on, and, sure enough, something always did turn up for him – and for Williams. And, that day, over breakfast in that hotel in Melbourne, that wonderful gentleman turned up for me, and for Williams.

“Then came Covid-19, and the 2020 Australian Grand Prix was cancelled as a result, and that caused big financial problems for many of the teams, Williams included. The first race of the season was postponed until July [in Austria], and in the end 17 grands prix were run instead of the originally scheduled 22. We knew our revenues were going to nose-dive, and we had no choice: Williams had to be put up for sale. I think I’ve deleted from my memory the board meeting during which we made that decision, because it was too painful.

“It was scary, too, because the pandemic had got a grip on business people’s confidence and they simply weren’t up for buying F1 teams. We were fearful that we wouldn’t find a buyer, or at least that we wouldn’t find a good buyer that would safeguard the team, protect its people and nurture its legacy, let alone give the shareholders who’d put so much into the team over the years any kind of return or reward for their loyalty.

“When we finally went racing again, in July, I was having to try to sell the team behind the scenes at the same time as running it at the circuit. So, in Austria, I was busy at the circuit every day, then I was going back to my hotel room, taking off my team kit and putting on a business suit, and doing five or six hours of sales calls with strangers, selling my F1 team, never having met any of them in person. They were just faces on Teams and Zoom, and I was having to pitch Williams to them. Then, after a few hours’ sleep, I’d have to get up, rush off to the circuit, put a smile on my face, and do it all again.

“In many ways it was the worst time of my life because I was having to work incredibly hard to do something I didn’t want to do: sell my mum and dad’s beloved team. But we got through it, and we found Dorilton [US-based global private investment firm], who were and are brilliant. But, for me personally, as a result of the sale I couldn’t foresee a future in which I could be running Williams when it would be owned by anyone other than Dad. I’d run the team for Dad for eight years and I just couldn’t get my head around having to report to anyone else.”

In a sense her work in F1 was done. She’d saved Williams, after all.

“It’s interesting that you view it that way,” she replies, “because I genuinely believe that, if we’d had a budget on a par with what the top teams had at their disposal, I could have done a good job at Williams. Also, I’d love to have been able to continue my DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] work. I did so much in that area and a lot of it went unnoticed outside Williams, but we were doing brilliant stuff behind the scenes around DEI, and I was gutted that I didn’t get to continue that. We gave roles to Susie [Wolff] and Jamie [Chadwick], and that was visible, but also, when I’d started as deputy team principal, 9% of our workforce was female, and when I left that number had gone up to 19%. That was done by a lot of hard work.”

So what next? A hint may be found in the fact that she studied politics at uni and in the past told me how much she used to enjoy meeting senior politicians when they visited grands prix. Might she ever consider a career in politics?

“Well, it may be a pipe dream but, yes, I’ve thought about it. I mean, if you’ll allow me to brag for a second, I recently had a meeting with the Duke of Edinburgh [Prince Edward] and he asked me to be on his development board for the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, and in my wildest dreams I couldn’t ever imagine that someone like me would get the chance to do something like that. I miss F1, but what I miss most is having a real purpose in work and focusing on something that I really, truly, deeply love and am passionate about.”

Might she ever consider becoming an MP?

“Yes – then see what that might lead to. I’d like to drive positive change, to make life better for people. On a much smaller scale, doing that was what I loved most about running Williams. You know, the team aspect of it, making sure that everyone had what they needed to do their jobs, that the environment was right, and that the culture was conducive to good performance and human happiness. And the UK should be like that too, and politicians should be devoted to making people’s lives easier, not giving them more to worry about. And, you know, certainly, when I look at what’s going on in the UK today, you kind of think, Jeez Louise, maybe…” She stops, then smiles.

Would you vote for her? I think I might.

Born: 21/07/1976, Windsor

• 1999 Graduates from Newcastle University with a degree in politics.
• 2000 Becomes Silverstone press officer.
• 2002 Joins Williams as communications officer; promoted to head of comms, 2010.
• 2011 Takes on head of investor role; team listed on Frankfurt Stock Exchange.
• 2012 Now director of marketing and communications; Frank steps down so Claire represents the family on the board.
• 2013 Becomes deputy team principal, i.e. the Williams F1 team chief.
• 2020 Williams is sold to Dorilton; Claire resigns after the 2020 Italian GP.