Sir Stirling Moss: The stress of top-level racing would be “difficult
for a lady to deal with in a practical fashion”.
“That was a different generation, he’s going to have different views,”
says Claire, although she thinks a lot of what Sir Stirling said was “taken
out of context”. Regardless, she adds: “I would like to think that
women would be ballsy enough to go, ‘actually, I’m going to prove you
wrong’. Look at if from a different perspective, rather than saying, ‘well,
if Stirling Moss says that, we can’t do it’. In this day and age I think
more and more women are coming and saying, ‘I can do this, thanks very much’.”
The 36 year-old adds: “I’m at the top, this proves you can do it, there
aren’t any barriers to entry. It’s about the barriers women, I wouldn’t say
they put it on themselves, but it’s about women changing their mindset.
People ask me, ‘do you come up against any oppositions, how do the men treat
me?’ They don’t treat me any differently because of my gender.”
At least, most of the time, she isn’t treated any differently. When she first
took the promotion at Williams, Claire found herself fighting off regular
questions from people in the industry about settling down and getting
pregnant. “I’m only 36. People keep asking me, ‘are you going to get
pregnant?’ How rude.
“I want to have children one day, but at the moment, I want to sort
Williams out. This is my focus at the moment; if I want children, I want to
give them 100pc of my time. And at the moment I want to give Williams 100pc
of my time; it’s the choice you make in life. I’ve got time [to have
children].”
‘Love and marriage’
Claire admits that when she was a little girl, her outlook on life – and work
– was very different. “When I was younger I didn’t have ‘career
objectives’. I went to an all-catholic boarding school, I either spent my
time praying that an angel wouldn’t come down and tell me I needed to be a
nun, or, I was just going to get married and have children, that’s what was
expected.”
But now, Claire is determined to give F1 and Williams her full, undivided
attention. She is in a serious relationship – and makes no secret of the
fact she wants to get married (when I make a mistake and start a question
with the words, ‘you are married’, she interrupts abruptly and laughs, ‘no
I’m not’) – but children are not yet on the agenda.
In any case, a man who had just been promoted into an equivalent role in
Formula One would never be asked about when he was taking time out to have
kids.
Claire assures me she is 100pc committed to her new job. The more cynical
among us would argue Claire’s path to the top has been easier to navigate
than most, given her father owns the company. But she, more than most at the
family-run business, has had to prove her dedication and skill over the
years.
Sir Frank was famously once opposed to his daughter even joining his company.
When someone in the marketing department offered Claire a job over a decade
ago, after she’d been working in the press office at Silverstone, Sir Frank
put a stop to it, saying “no way”. She was always told that
Williams would never be a career option for her, that she would have to find
her own way in life.
When she was eventually recruited to Williams for her experience and skill,
she would work for another 10 years – “tirelessly” according
to Sir Frank – before getting a sniff at the top job.
“When I first joined I worked super hard proving to people I can do the
job. It’s always at the back of my mind, Frank’s got huge shoes to fill,”
she says. “I’m not going to be the person that lets this team down,
because at the end of the day, I’d be letting my dad down.”
The formal announcement of Claire’s promotion came in March this year. It was
delayed by the recent death of her mother Virginia, Sir Frank’s wife and
confidante of 38 years. She died after a lengthy battle against breast
cancer at the age of 66.
The Williams legacy
Claire is assured that she had talked about her potential promotion with her
mother before she passed away. “When I was asked to take on the deputy
team principal role, I was terrified about asking my mum to get her
permission. I was really nervous, it’s as much about asking her as it is
dad. She’s always been the judge and if she was in any way concerned or
worried, or said, ‘no way, you’re not good enough’, I wouldn’t have done it.
“She said, though, it was great and she wanted me to do it. That’s part
of the legacy. Williams is who we are, it’s our family. It’s important to
carry that on and make sure that the legacy remains into the next generation.”
When Claire took over as deputy team principal, a newly created role, she
almost immediately declared – publicly and on the record – that she wanted
to get
Williams back to the glory days of the 1990s.
She believes Williams is “climbing out of the trough” and while it
is fine to celebrate the past, she is keen to look to the future. “We’ve
won world championships before, I don’t see why we can’t again. I never look
at it as daunting, it’s really exciting. To be able to make a difference, to
do your best, to turn this around: I think we can do it, there’s no reason
why we can’t.”
Williams’s travails are self-evident as they chase their avowed ambition to
win a first world championship since 1997 by 2016. They entered the 2013
season with high expectations but the Renault-powered FW35 is, according to
the official F1 website, a “huge
disappointment” and both Pastor
Maldonado (pictured) and rookie team mate Valtteri
Bottas spent the early season racing outside of the points places.
Still, Claire, a politics graduate from Newcastle university, remains
optimistic and defiant that Williams will be back on top one day. Part of
her turnaround plan includes making sure Williams has the right skills and
people for the future – both on the grid and behind the scenes.
She talks about how important it is for Williams to continue to visit schools
and spread the word about the careers on offer in F1, to attract the
brightest engineering minds to the company. “Rather than just sitting
here and expecting people to come to us, and choose motorsport at the end of
their engineering degree, we’re going out and being proactive, getting to
know university offices, careers fairs. There is a skills shortage, there
always is, in F1 we’re really competitive, we’re always trying to find the
people who are best in their industry.
“We don’t want brain drains to other countries, we want to keep people
with engineering degrees in our country, we don’t want them going elsewhere,
that’s important in F1.”
Part of the solution, as she sees it, is to attract more girls to motorsport.
Not just technicians and behind-the-scenes staff, but drivers, too. There
are no rules saying women cannot compete on a Formula One grid. Susie
Wolff (pictured), a test driver for Williams, has taken the last
step on the ladder before racing in F1 itself – and Claire is confident it
won’t be long before she makes it the whole way.
“Susie is very ambitious. She has a clear objective and that is to one
day line up on an F1 grid. We absolutely will get a woman on the grid,”
she says robustly.
Williams is toying with the idea of creating a training scheme targeted at
girls, such as a female apprenticeship or female technicians scheme, using
Susie as a figurehead. “We don’t want to segregate; it’s about fairness
and talent, rather than gender,” she adds quickly, but says it could be
helpful to have a programme targeted at girls.
Returning to our earlier conversation, I ask her to try and drill down why
more girls don’t currently go into F1. She pauses and says: “There’s
still perceptions around it being a job for the blokes. It is what it is.
Maybe it’s a personal choice – I’m not saying I’ve got the answers, it’s a
big question. But motorsport as a whole has been seen as quite
male-dominated.
“We have a female development driver [Susie Wolff] and girls are working
across different disciplines in the company. We’re keen to get those
messages out – come and work in motorsport, come in, it’s a brilliant
environment.”