Miguel Sánchez
For those of us who love sports like cycling, boxing or motor racing… It is very tempting for us to focus on stories full of individual epics. At the end of the day, they are sports full of characters who reached both the summit and the defeat through lives of the novel. Lonely, facing their own limits face to face with themselves.
However, the truth is that these sports are still, at heart, team sports. For a single face to shine on camera, there has to be a whole set behind it. Sometimes a whole saga. A saga like the Williams team, with the founder's daughter at the head of the group since 2013. A group, a team, that together with McLaren and Ferrari forms the historical tripod of Formula 1.
And all this thanks to the capacity of work and planning of a man: Frank Williams. One of those precise, meticulous and perfectionist motor professionals that every driver facing success in the solitude of his car needs to have with him for everything to go well. A living myth of Formula 1 that, in the coming months, will see his life reflected in a documentary film directed by Morgan Matthews and produced by BBC Films.
FRANK WILLIAMS: A LIFE MARKED BY SPEED
"In the most tense moment I always felt the need, the need for speed". With these words, Frank Williams perfectly sums up what his life has been. A life dedicated to racing speed. Races in which, paradoxically, he was never particularly brilliant as a driver. In fact, his only relevant victory was a Formula 3 race in Sweden in 1966. However, there is something that Frank Williams has been absolutely brilliant at from a very young age: mechanics and race planning.
It is because, although he had to abandon his dream of being a pilot very soon, this opened the way for him to develop his true capacity, thus founding what in a few years would become the team they all set out to beat: Williams. An adventure full of dramatic moments, like the death of Pier's Courage aboard a DeTomaso car of the Williams team at the 1970 Dutch Grand Prix, or that of the Williams team Ayrton Senna at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix.
In fact, Frank Williams himself was left quadriplegic in a traffic accident when he left the French Paul Ricard circuit in 1986. A tragedy that, far from separating him from his work at the Williams team, caused him to continue at the helm during what were some of its brightest years: the late 80s and early 90s.
Golden years with victories in constructors and drivers with such mythical names as Nelson Piquet or Alain Prost.
The human being grows in the face of adversity. After all, his resolute and rational spirit was summed up when, after the accident, he said “I've lived forty years one way, now I'll live another forty years another".
'WILLIAMS, THE FILM': A LIFE IN PICTURES
Adding forty plus forty… It makes eighty. Our character already accumulates 75. And since Frank Williams is not exactly someone who is bad at data, he senses that it is time to look back and put one of the greatest legacies in the world of Formula 1 in order. realization of "Williams, the film”, The documentary film that will be released this coming summer.
A documentary that not only covers the outstanding career of the Williams team, but also the personal and family ins and outs that made possible the maintenance of a project that, like all families, has had moments of great joy and passages of deep tragedy. In the end… If you give your team the surname of your own family, it is because you are putting the most personal thing that is in you in it. And that's just what Frank Williams did: make his passion his life.
