Sir Frank Williams obituary: A Formula 1 icon & one of greatest team owners

At the end of that year, Williams lost their Honda engines, the dominant force in F1, and many feared for the future of a team without a factory engine supply and with a man in a wheelchair at the helm.

In fact, Williams were about to embark on their period of greatest success.

Williams replaced Honda with Renault, forging a partnership that set new standards for F1, dominating the 1992 and 1993 seasons with cars bristling with technology such as active suspension, allowing first Mansell and then new signing Alain Prost to crush the opposition.

This success illustrated another aspect of Williams’s achievements. The titles they won with famous drivers such as Jones, Rosberg, Piquet, Mansell, Prost and Damon Hill came thanks to the team’s investment in world-class engineering.

Williams have provided the platform for some of the sport’s most brilliant engineers to make their names.

Among them was Adrian Newey, who was Williams’ chief designer from 1991-1996, joined McLaren until 2005 and then masterminded the rise of Red Bull to four consecutive world titles from 2010-14.

And Ross Brawn, who started his F1 career at Williams and went on to win two world titles with Benetton before moving to Ferrari and running their technical department in their dominant period with Michael Schumacher, and is now managing director of F1.

Among Williams’ greatest regrets, though, was that his time working with Ayrton Senna was so short.

Williams was the first team to give the great Brazilian a trial in F1, back in the summer 1983, but decided against signing him. They finally joined forces 10 years later, only for Senna to be killed in a crash at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix just three races into his Williams career.

“I felt that we had been given a great responsibility providing him with a car, and we let him down,” said Williams.

Senna’s death led to a lengthy legal process in Italy in which Williams, Head and Newey all faced manslaughter charges, but were ultimately acquitted.

The Renault partnership came to an end in 1997, after consecutive titles for Hill and Jacques Villeneuve, and there was another brief hiatus with customer engines before a new partnership with BMW started in 2000.

There were great hopes for an alliance of such powerhouses, but the relationship fell short and in 2005 BMW, disappointed with Williams’s performance, pulled out and set up its own team.

It was the death knell for Williams as a front-running team. There was an eight-year gap between Juan Pablo Montoya’s victory in a Williams-BMW in the 2004 Brazilian Grand Prix and the shock win for Pastor Maldonado in Spain in 2012, which was the last time a Williams took the chequered flag.

Since then, there was a brief upturn in form in 2014 and 2015, when the strength of Mercedes engines at the start of F1’s hybrid engine era gave Williams a leg up, but then a slow decline, and the team have finished last in the championship for the past three years.

The new owners Dorilton Capital have bought into the value of the family name and intend to keep it on.

It underlines the value and significance of the achievements of a man who stamped his character on a team that seems to epitomise the racing spirit required for success in the highest form of motorsport.

Williams is survived by his three children, Jonathan, Jamie and Claire.