Williams Page #3

he never had an in built limit,

he would just go faster

and faster and faster

and fly off the circuit.

- And who's off there?

- Frank Williams.

Frank Williams trying too hard,

Frank always very fast

but very hairy and he's living up to it.

When I started doing

uh... Formula 3

sometimes I would encounter people

who would say to me

do you know that chap Frank Williams?

Yeah, I know Frank Williams,

oh, he's so fast and he,

and he crashed here

and he overtook here

and he did all kinds of things.

So Frank had this amazing reputation

as someone who was lightning fast,

not always staying on the road.

There were a

lot of races, he would've won,

but he ended up spinning the car

and having accidents,

he just didn't have a limit

and that extended

to his road driving as well.

- Well what was that like?

- Diabolical.

Where did you learn to drive?

In my mother's Morris 1000,

she was very reluctant to lend it to me,

and she was right because in the end

I did roll it on its roof.

But you rolled a few cars in your time.

Not that many, no.

Well it's just

that every time we talk about a car

it seems to be one that you've rolled.

Well I haven't talked about

that many cars though have I?

But didn't you,

what was your first racing car'?

- A35.

- What happened to that?

That got rolled.

He was nothing but competitive,

against himself in a road car,

it was almost at the point,

where he would start a stopwatch to see

if he could beat

his previous time from A to B.

And I think it dawned on him that

pretty soon he was gonna hurt himself,

you can't have that many accidents

on the road and in the, on race tracks,

you know you end up hurting yourself,

especially back then

when the cars were lethal.

What got me into Formula 1

was only the fact

that after two or three years of racing

rather dangerously around the continent

it became apparent

that I might have lots of uh... courage

but nothing like enough skill

to go with it.

At the same time I became very friendly

with a young man called Piers Courage

who was a brilliant driver.

And the opportunity came for Frank

to build a Formula 1 car

and Piers agreed to drive it.

And then Piers and I set off in 1969.

Piers Courage

was an ebullient,

fashionable Formula 1 driver

that captured the imagination

of everybody who loved Formula 1

and Piers was just, Frank's idea of

what a Grand Prix driver should be like.

He was just bouncy,

easily charming,

had a beautiful wife

whom half of London was chasing.

Apart from being a great looking fella,

never had a hair or

a piece of clothes out of place,

he was always the smartest guy,

buttoned down blazer, grey flannels,

Gucci shoes, he looked almost holy.

And I remember him

making a speech,

he had a slight sort of

English public school stammer

and I remember the interviewer

saying So Piers,

"how's your car gonna go

this weekend?"

"And he said, Well I think it'll go

like an absolute b-b-b bomb actually."

Hoping to go one better

than his second placing last year

was Piers Courage

in the very promising.

Frank Williams backed De Tomaso.

I remember last year, my right foot

terrific cramp in, cramp in it

and also the great blisters

on my hands from the gear changing.

Well I kind of adored Piers

in many ways but in those days...

it was "Piers is wonderful,

this is my mate."

I thought the world of him.

Piers and Frank were great together,

they were almost made

for each other I think,

you had Piers who was

really developing as a driver

and Frank was really developing

as a team owner, constructor.

Second place at Monte Carlo,

can you believe that?

Second place the US Grand Prix,

can you believe that?

5th at Silverstone, a great run.

Everybody wanted to be a

racing driver and Piers was on his way,

he'd beaten

Jackie Stewart and Jim Clark

and he was a really, really good driver.

Lark Ascending J'

Vaughan Williams

And suddenly he dies in this horrendous

accident in Frank's car.

I was in the race

and it was a terrible accident

involving us knowing that it was Piers

that had the accident

because his helmet came off.

And when you heard the news,

how did you hear the news?

Well it was, all I will say is that it was

a major shock,

I was very young, you don't

expect a shock like that

and I remembered,

I went to the race organiser,

a man called John Corschmidt

and I said,

John, just tell me is Piers dead?

"Are you sure he's dead?"

And he said I'm sure

and I said tell me that again,

he told me, He is dead Frank",

three times, I said "OK"

and I got up and I had the job of telling

his wife, Piers' wife,

and I'd rather not talk about that.

His wife, Sally,

was in a terrible state.

Wives in motor racing I think have had a

much tougher life than any driver has.

And I remember going

to the funeral and Frank was fantastic,

he stood at the entrance of the church

and welcomed everybody in,

and there were a lot of people,

shook hands with everybody,

thanked them for coming.

And then after the ceremony

we couldn't find him

and I walked back into the church, it was

deserted

and Frank was standing behind a big

stone pillar, absolutely destroyed,

standing

there weeping his heart out

"and I said Come

on love, let's go home."

And it was like

that happy-go-lucky scene we had,

just dissolved like that.

But I know that, you know,

it wasn't really mentioned in,

Piers wasn't mentioned

terribly much at home,

I'm not sure dad ever,

I'm not sure how you would get over

a driver dying in your car.

This ability of Frank to carry on,

for me ifs fairly standard

in motor racing, knowing racing people,

most of them only think of tomorrow,

very rarely do they look back

and very rarely do they allow

emotion to come into their motivation.

There was

a very high mortality rate,

stupidly high

and it was just accepted that

you probably weren't gonna survive,

I personally did not think I would

survive my Formula 1 career

and the odds weren't very good.

On the second lap, disaster strikes,

Von Trips loses control

but the race goes on.

Those cars were effectively death traps,

if you had a head-on in one of those

they folded up

round you like an envelope,

You didn't get out of them.

The cars so readily caught fire,

the fuel systems in a minor impact

nearly always sprung a leak

and the fires were the thing.

We had a series of deaths,

one each weekend for four consecutive

weekends, four of our friends died.

The ethos of Formula 1

was back then, this happens,

ifs appalling but we, you know,

we're going to the next race,

like falling off a horse,

you climb back on again.

So this is an article, gosh,

dad did an interview with

The Times after Ayrton died.

'Formula 1,

one of the most powerful figures

in Formula 1 bares his soul

on his star driver's death

and the revival of his team.'

Dad says, It hasn't all sunk in yet,

you see, the fact of Ayrton's death,

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