The storied team had little money for improvements and is having another dismal season, but it is now in the hands of an investment firm.
When the Williams Formula 1 team announced in May it was for sale, it came as a shock to the sport.
Williams acted after the team lost $13.25 million last year compared with a profit of $21 million in 2018.
The forecast was for more losses this year because of the impact of the pandemic. The team also terminated its partnership with the title sponsor ROKiT, a telecommunications company. “They were the final nails in our coffin,” Claire Williams, the former deputy team principal, said in an interview. “When corona hit there was the bigger picture to think about, how we were going to go racing again and keep our business afloat during lockdown.
“It was like, ‘Right, we’re really scraping about here on what we’ve got.’ Then the decision came that we had to seek investment or sell. We didn’t have a choice. We’d literally done everything.”
Williams said two elements were behind the decision. “The first was saving the team,” she said. “When I say saving the team, I mean ensuring the people had the security of their job, that the team existed or survived for their benefit.”
The second reason was personal. Her father, and the team co-founder, Frank, had been in charge for 43 years. “I wanted to make sure my dad came out of it with money to show for his work, not that he would have cared,” she said.
“My dad’s never taken a penny out of the team over the years,” Williams added. “I wanted to ensure he had something to show for his legacy. That was really important to me as well. I felt that quite keenly considering the position the team had been in for many years.”
If the situation had gone unchecked, she said, the team would have gone into a legal review process known as administration with her father “coming away with nothing.”
On Aug. 21, Williams said it had been sold to the New York-based private investment company Dorilton Capital for reportedly about $200 million. The last of the team’s 735 race starts under family ownership took place on Sept. 6 at the Italian Grand Prix.
Williams returned to the team’s headquarters in Grove, England, to clear out her desk and her father’s.
“The whole Monza week ended, and then going around and saying goodbye to people felt horrible,” she said. “It was very emotional, particularly with people I’ve known for a really long time because they’re your family.
“I had always thought of Williams HQ Grove as my second home, and so leaving that was really sad. It was quite an upheaval, with the only saving grace, if you can call it that, was there were so few people there because they were home working, otherwise it would’ve been a whole lot harder.”
From a number of “interested and legitimate parties,” Williams said, the company decided to sell to Dorilton.
In a statement confirming the sale, Matthew Savage, the chairman of Dorilton, said his company was “the ideal partner” for Williams “due to our flexible and patient investment style, which will allow the team to focus on its objective of returning to the front of the grid.”
It is the first time a team has been wholly owned by an investment company.
Rob Wilson, head of the finance, accounting and business systems department at Sheffield Hallam University in England, whose expertise is in the economics and governance of professional team sports, said the team had a lot of promise as an investment.
“If you look at its history, the fan base it generates, in many ways, you would suggest Williams is a sleeping giant because of the success they’ve had historically” Wilson said.
“For an investment company, it will look at an organization like Williams as relatively good value for the proposition it is offering because of its chances of breaking into the second tier of F1, if you exclude the dominance of Mercedes, Ferrari and, to a certain extent, Red Bull,” he said.
Wilson added that Dorilton’s investment will need to be “for the long haul. It’s not a short-term investment return that anybody is going to get.”
Williams was a powerhouse team in the 1980s and 1990s, winning nine constructors’ and seven drivers’ championships. But it has won just one grand prix in the past 16 seasons and is set to finish last in the constructors’ championship for a third consecutive year.
Williams said she believed that Dorilton could provide the investment to push the team forward.
“They’ve got deep pockets,” Williams said. “I was fed up with the team, and all the people in it, scrabbling around not being able to do their job properly because we didn’t have the money to allow them to do it.
“For many years, I always found that quite deeply frustrating and upsetting. I knew Dorliton were willing to put money into the team in order to take the team back to the front of the grid. I could sense a real passion to do that, very similar to our family’s passion.”
Williams has not said what she will do next. Her departure from the sport leaves Formula 1 without a woman at the head of a team.
“I think there are a lot of female role models in Formula 1; there always have been,” she said. “They just probably need more exposure. We just don’t see them enough because the picture is dominated by men.
“But I don’t think that Formula 1 and the diversity piece around female empowerment will suddenly take a nosedive because of the fact I’m not there. I think there are great women in Formula 1 doing great things.”
The Williamses are gone, but Dorilton decided to keep the name for the team. Claire Williams said at the time of the sale that retaining the name was not important because it would have felt “like a clean sheet, and we were done.”
She is now grateful. “They had a huge amount of respect for the heritage and the legacy of Williams, a huge respect for what my dad’s achieved, and they didn’t want to rip that up,” Williams said.
“They wanted to build around that, and why they wanted to keep the name is important to me. I just felt that they were the right fit for Williams and for the people.”
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