Imagine that you juxtaposed photographs taken in the late Eighties, one of Ronald Reagan, the other of Frank Williams, one showing an intense scowling figure, the other a light-hearted joker.
You then asked an observer with no previous knowledge (the time-honoured Martian, let us say) which one had the cares of the world on his shoulders and which was involved in a sporting activity. Our Martian would surely opt for Williams as the former United States president. This is the first count in my three-part indictment of the man.
Sir Frank Williams is by any normal worldly standards a towering success. He has been racing cars since the late Sixties, has notched up 16 world championship titles in formula one (F1) and has employed virtually all the best drivers of the past 20 years: Nelson Piquet, Nigel Mansell, Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Damon Hill, Jacques Villeneuve and, most recently, Juan Pablo Montoya.
It is also possible to view Williams as a tragic figure. His close friend Piers Courage died racing a Williams car; he himself barely survived a horrifying automobile accident in 1986, which left him a quadriplegic; while in 1994 the world was convulsed by the death on the Imola track of Senna, the driver whom many consider to have been the greatest of all time, in his third race for Williams. Due allowance should be made for all this, and no portrait of Williams that omits these considerations makes any sense.
Yet the man himself has always seemed robotically inhuman, a familiar figure at grand prix meetings with unblinking eyes riveted to a monitor screen, never smiling, never revealing emotion. His interviews evince a ruthless figure, from whom all sense of humour has been surgically removed.
The wheelchair adds an extra sinister dimension. One thinks of Dr Strangelove or General Sternwood in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, who laments to Philip Marlowe: ‘Nice thing when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.â€
But the villain Williams most reminds me of in his corporate unsmilingness is Ian Fleming’s Hugo Drax.
Sometimes when one sees Williams gazing at his monitors, it is almost impossible not to hear the words: ‘Ten minutes and counting, Mr Bond.â€
The second count in the indictment is that he is one of those who is responsible for reducing F1 to a high-tech bore, where overtaking is all but impossible, pole position largely determines outcome, and technology is exalted above spectator interest.
Purists say that circuit racing of the F1 kind is superior to the oval tracks of the American Champcar or Indy Racing League system; but from the spectator point of view the American wins out every time.
In this connection it is significant that Williams regards Michael Schumacher as the great racing driver. His questionable racetrack practices and gamesmanship aside, Schumacher has never tested himself in US conditions, as Mansell, Villeneuve, Graham Hill, Jackie Stewart and the great Jim Clark did. His formidable tally of world championship wins has been technology-based, in that he has usually been driving a car that is superior to the others and in which Mickey Mouse could win.
This sort of boring perfectionism-cum-technical superiority is the essence of the Williams mindset and it is not so far from the world of the technophile Dr Strangelove: ‘Mr President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap to develop.â€
Yet possibly the most serious count in the indictment against Frank Williams is the final one: his inability to establish a human relationship with his drivers. Here perhaps the worlds of Hollywood and Williams finally diverge. Oscar winners usually expect their asking price to double, but a driver who wins the world championship for Williams knows it is the kiss of death and will almost inevitably lead to a parting of ways.
It is not just that Williams gets rid of all his most successful drivers; he usually does so when they are at the peak of their achievement.
Williams is too shrewd for outright sacking. He can employ the old management trick of keeping person X on at their nominal position in the hierarchy but bringing person Y in over them. For instance, when Mansell was sweeping all before him in 1992, Williams chose that moment to sign Prost as the senior driver for the next season.
Similarly Damon Hill and Villeneuve found that winning the world championship for Williams did nothing for their prospects. And this season, when Williams was close to a revival of its best performances, both Montoya and Ralf Schumacher announced they are to quit the outfit for more money. Mark Webber and, perhaps, Jenson Button are to replace them.
How is one to explain this? Some say that Williams is notoriously mean and simply will not pay the extra wages that world champions expect for their triumphs. Others claim that Williams’s behaviour is closer in sensibility to an old-style Hollywood mogul than a modern business person.
The contrast with that other motor-racing buccaneer, Colin Chapman of Lotus, is instructive. Williams has many qualities Chapman did not possess — financial probity for one. But Chapman knew how to build rapport with his drivers, and his entente with Jim Clark was a lesson in that regard.
Williams is on record as justifying his brutal and insensitive treatment of his star drivers as ensuring that the tail does not wag the dog, but the current fiasco at Williams makes it seem likely that this particular dog will simply fail to bark in the night.
Williams should heed Alfred Hitchcock’s words to Ingrid Bergman when she was agonising on the set: ‘It’s only a movie, Ingrid.â€
Come on, Frank, lighten up. It’s only a sport. —