Claire Williams and the case of The Glass Cliff

In March 2013, for the second time ever, a woman took on the mantle of Formula 1 Team Principal. For 7 years, Claire Williams led the Williams Racing Formula 1 team - a team that was both history and family to her - before making the decision to step aside after the 2020 Italian Grand Prix. It led the team away from the William’s family leadership for the first time in it’s history, but while Claire’s role as leader and businesswoman was criticised across the motorsport space, it demonstrates a pattern of attitude and action that is, unfortunately, all too common when women finally break through the glass ceiling. All of a sudden, they find what’s waiting for them on the other side is a glass cliff.

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In the 2024 book, The Glass Cliff, Sophie Williams explores the way women often win leadership roles when risk is highest and the potential for failure looms large. When they fail to remedy existing risks for failure, their gender is then used as the primary reason for it. 

As Sophie notes: “Women were more likely to achieve leadership positions in businesses that were already known to be in a period of difficulty.”, potentially because, when organisations are floundering, boards frequently turn to women; perhaps hoping that soft skills like empathy, communication, and emotional intelligence will rescue what appears to be doomed. Once women step into this role of leadership they are met with a lack of support, a lack of tolerance, and a majority male group of existing leaders waiting for them to fail.

This pattern eerily parallels Claire Williams’ experience in Formula 1. Appointed deputy team principal of Williams Racing in 2013, she stepped into a legacy not at its peak, but deep in decline. Williams Racing, once a titan of the sport, was battling financial pressures, shifting regulations, and the loss of major sponsorship deals. The death of tobacco money in Formula 1 and the rise of hybrid technology placed immense technical and fiscal demands on teams, which Williams struggled to navigate. Claire inherited this struggling institution and was tasked with steering it into a new era, all without ever being made a true team principal, as the title remained her father’s.

The challenge of leading a Formula 1 team is no small thing, and for a brief period, it seemed Claire might defy the odds that small teams faced. Under her stewardship, Williams clinched podiums, even outperforming bigger-budget rivals like Ferrari. But success was fleeting. Beneath the surface, structural issues in the team remained unresolved, and the illusion of revival quickly faded.

By 2018, Williams had plunged to the back of the grid. Internal deadlines were missed, development lagged, and the team’s 2019 car arrived late to winter testing. In Formula 1, the buck stops with someone and that someone is the Team Principal. Neither us nor Claire would dream of trying to excuse the reality of what needed to be done at Williams at the time, but it also doesn’t take much investigation to recognise her hands were not free to work, as they’d been tied behind her back. 

Claire sought to modernise the team despite facing enormous budget constraints. She initiated a restructuring of operations, including hiring a dedicated planning unit and overhauling aerodynamic development. But in Formula 1, modernisation without money is like building a rocket without fuel. “What’s upset me most,” Claire said in a later interview, “is we know what it would have taken to have been successful, but we haven’t had the money.” Her belief in an independent, proudly private Williams Racing ran up against the financial reality of a sport increasingly dominated by manufacturer teams and billion-dollar budgets - before the f1 cost cap came in.

Credit: Carolyn Geason-Beissel MIT SMR / Getty

As Sophie Williams observes in The Glass Cliff, “What we see is internal teams…much less willing to trust her…what we see is those women…not given the time that they need to make change.” That lack of time, trust, and resourcing would define Claire’s tenure.

But there is more in Claire Williams’ legacy as Team Principal. Under her watch, the team’s gender ratio nearly doubled, and she championed STEM pathways for women and minorities. She showed up not just as a team principal, but as a voice of moral clarity in a sport that often lacked one. When one looks at Williams now, it’s easy to wonder if a seed had been planted by Claire.

Unfortunately, a hallmark of the glass cliff is disproportionate blame. Sophie Williams notes: “Women are put in charge of failing…their chances of success are limited before they ever even start.” That was certainly true in Claire’s case. She became a lightning rod for the team’s misfortunes. From former world champion Jacques Villeneuve calling her leadership “a big mistake.”, to murmurings that her pregnancy in 2017 had affected her ability to lead, she was treated with what she would one day call “a disgraceful attitude, and a very 19th-century attitude.”

Ultimately, Claire Williams stepped down in 2020 following the team’s sale to Dorilton Capital. Her departure was quiet, dignified, and characteristically selfless. “Regret is such an easy emotion to get lost in… But all I can ever say to myself is that I did the absolute best I could, with the best intentions in my heart.” If we look at Williams now, in an upward trajectory, perhaps we should reflect on how Claire did for other leaders what was never done for her: she stepped back fully and let them do what needed to be done.

Claire’s story fits all too neatly into Sophie Williams’s framework. Appointed during crisis, given insufficient resources, hyper-scrutinized and ultimately forced to exit before her vision could bear fruit. If, as Sophie urges, we learn to “reframe and reexamine what they’d gone through,” then Claire’s time at Williams isn’t a failure, it’s a case study in the very structural failings The Glass Cliff warns us about.

Her legacy is about more than where the team finished on the grid. Claire Williams’s glass cliff story, like so many women’s, is a reminder: talent alone isn’t enough when the platform beneath you is crumbling. And when that platform is built on the edge of a cliff, the fall should never come as a surprise.