Claire Williams 'will always live with the grief' of selling her team

It has now been four years since the family Williams is no longer associated with the eponymous team. Four years have passed since the team was reluctantly sold by the daughter of its creator, Claire Williams. Bought in 2020 by the investment fund Dorilton Capital, the British team is gradually getting back on its feet and starting to move up from the back of the grid, a place it has occupied since 2018, thanks to the investments launched at Grove and thanks to the management of James Vowles.

However, this return to form does not erase the regrets of the former Williams team manager. In a podcast available on the Business of Sport channel, Claire Williams acknowledged that selling her team was "the biggest sorrow" of her life, she who had taken up the torch from her father, the late Sir Frank Williams, at the beginning of the 2010s.

"There's not a single day that I feel happy about selling Williams. No, never., she says. Everyone will probably say, 'Oh, she's so dramatic,' but I will always live with the grief of losing her. It wasn't a decision we made as a family to sell, just because we got tired of her. Formula 1 or that we wanted to wind up our businesses. We all wanted to stay. This was our life forever, that was the plan. I wanted to run the team for my son or my nephews. (…) I'm quite disappointed that we didn't say, as part of the deal, that we wanted to keep 5% of the capital, but it doesn't matter."

Stroll's regret for Williams

The Briton also returned to this painful period of the sale of the team, in an economically difficult context for Williams… and for Formula 1 because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Claire Williams acknowledged with one regret in particular: that of having missed an opportunity with Lawrence Stroll when his son, Lance, drove for Williams in 2017 and 2018 before moving to Racing Point… a team that had just been bought by his father. A team that would become Aston Martin subsequently, with the colossal investments and mass recruitment that we now know.

“It drives me crazy because Lawrence was with us, she admits.We just ran out of money, to make a long story short. For the 2019 season, we had a title sponsor (ROKiT, Ed.), and then at the end of the year, we talked about payments for 2020, which were in the contract, but never materialized. When you lose a title sponsor, when they don't pay, (…) it left a huge hole in our budget for 2020. But we were lucky enough to have a sponsor who came forward and filled that gap, which allowed us to start the season."

“Unfortunately when we started the season and we got to Melbourne, Covid hit us and we all went home, we didn’t race until July of that year. And when you’re not racing, you’re not getting any money. So that was the final nail in our coffin. It’s something that completely slipped away from us, unfortunately, the way things turned out.”

Claire Williams pleased with Dorilton's direction

In her grief, Claire Williams admits however that she is happy with the direction her former team is taking in the hands of Dorilton Capital and James Vowles. Currently 8th in the Constructors' Championship, the Grove team will welcome Carlos Sainz next year with the aim of returning to the top half of the table in 2026.

“What matters to me is that we were able to find (…) people who wanted to buy Williams and who were the kind of people we wanted to sell it to. Good people. People who care about the team, its legacy and the people we loved and who were our family, Claire Williams emphasizes. We were very lucky because 2020 was a horrible time for everyone. [At that time] people weren't buying businesses and they certainly weren't buying failing Formula 1 teams."

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