A second attempt that became the team.

Williams Racing was not Frank Williams’s opening Formula One venture. English Wikipedia says his earlier operation, Frank Williams Racing Cars, was renamed Wolf–Williams Racing in 1976 after the Canadian businessman Walter Wolf took a controlling interest. Williams then left, moved to Didcot in Oxfordshire, and set up a new company, Williams Grand Prix Engineering, recruiting the engineer Patrick Head. Wikipedia lists the pair as the team’s founders and dates its formation to 1977.

The new team began modestly. Wikipedia says it entered its opening race, the 1977 Spanish Grand Prix, with a customer car built by March Engineering, and started building its own chassis the following year. Its chassis carry the FW prefix, and the team is now based at Grove, in Oxfordshire, on a site Wikipedia measures at about 60 acres.

For more than four decades the team stayed in the Williams family. That ended in 2020. Goodwood Road & Racing, in a report by Ben Miles dated 21 August 2020, said the team had been sold to Dorilton Capital, a US investment firm, and that the sale had been agreed by all shareholders including Sir Frank Williams. The report said Williams had announced earlier in the season, after the end of its sponsorship deal with Rokit, that it was looking at selling all or part of the company. It also said the team would keep racing under the Williams name, keep the FW chassis convention and stay at Grove. Wikipedia adds that Frank Williams and his daughter Claire Williams stepped down from the team’s management after the takeover.

Sir Frank Williams died on 28 November 2021, City A.M. reported that day, quoting a statement from the team’s chief executive, Jost Capito.

Blue through the sponsor years, red for one season.

Williams has rarely owned its own colours outright. For long stretches the livery was set by the main backer. Wikipedia lists the Saudi airline Saudia among the team’s supporters into the mid-1980s and says 1985 began a nine-season relationship with Canon. It describes the team’s colours since 1985 as some shade of blue, including a violet-blue in the Canon years and a lighter navy after Rothmans became the primary backer in 1994. In 1998, Wikipedia says, Rothmans used the cars to promote its Winfield cigarette brand, and they were painted red and white for that season.

Title sponsors then put their names in front of the team’s. BlackBook Motorsport, in a report by Cian Brittle dated 11 February 2025, listed earlier title deals with BMW from 2000 to 2005, AT&T from 2007 to 2011 and Martini from 2014 to 2018, followed by Rokit in 2019. Wikipedia illustrates the Martini period with the Williams Martini Racing logo, used from 2014 to 2018.

The colour scheme was reset after the sale. The Race, in a report by Matt Beer dated 5 March 2021, said the team had revised its 2020 livery before the delayed season start that July, dropping the red from its colour scheme after splitting with Rokit and switching to a simple white and navy blue livery. The 2021 car, the FW43B, kept white and blue as base colours but added a more extravagant design at the rear and flecks of yellow. The magazine reported that Williams described this as a new look for the Dorilton era and a reference to its blue, white and yellow cars of the 1980s and 1990s. The report said the new chief executive, Jost Capito, a former McLaren executive appointed late in 2020, presented the livery as a nod to the team’s past that also looked ahead. Its planned augmented-reality launch was called off after the app was hacked and images leaked.

Design and documentation.

A racing team’s identity has to work at speed and at a distance. The livery is the main canvas: a base colour chosen to read on a television screen, a handful of accent tones, and large flat areas where partner marks sit. Because the cars change shape from season to season, a livery is redrawn every year, and teams tend to keep the colour logic constant while the graphics move around the bodywork.

Sponsor placement follows the camera. The engine cover, the sidepods, the front and rear wings and the driver’s helmet are the spots often seen in broadcast and photographs, so title partners usually occupy them, while smaller marks fill the nose, mirrors and endplates. The same hierarchy carries over to race overalls, team kit and caps, where chest, sleeve and collar positions are allotted to partners in a similar order.

The team wordmark then ties the system together. It appears on the car, on garage back walls, pit boards, motorhome hospitality units, transporter trucks and merchandise, and it often has to accommodate a title sponsor’s name that may change with each new contract. In the garage, colour-matched panels, tool chests and floor graphics turn a working space into a branded set for the cameras.

A family name that outlived the family’s ownership.

The constant in the Williams identity is the name itself. Dorilton could have renamed the team when it bought it in 2020; instead, Goodwood Road & Racing reported, the new owner committed to keeping the Williams name, the FW chassis designation and the Grove base. Each of those is a brand asset: the surname links the team to its founders, the FW code ties each new car to the ones before it, and Grove fixes the team to a place.

The latest title partner sits on top of that. BlackBook Motorsport reported on 11 February 2025 that the Australian software company Atlassian had signed a long-term title partnership and would also be the team’s official technology and collaboration-software partner, and that the team would officially be known as Atlassian Williams Racing. The report said the partnership was meant to help modernise the team’s working processes, a priority since James Vowles became team principal in 2023. English Wikipedia currently gives the entry’s long name as Atlassian Williams F1 Team and lists Dorilton Capital as owner, with Matthew Savage as chairman. The cars use Mercedes power units, so the constructor appears as Williams-Mercedes.

Small marks on the car have carried meaning too. Wikipedia says a Senna “S” was carried on every Williams car from the mid-1990s, in support of the Instituto Ayrton Senna, until it was removed from 2022, with chief executive Jost Capito saying it was time to move on.

For a design guide, Williams Racing shows how a team can let backers change its colours for decades and still keep its identity in a surname, a two-letter chassis code and a home town. Compare it with Atlassian, its current title partner, the Formula 1 series identity, and the Mercedes-AMG Petronas and Red Bull Racing teams. For this guide we use Grove navy, racing blue and fleck yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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