Patrick Head

Sir Patrick Michael Head (born 5 June 1946) is a British motorsport executive who is the co-founder and former Engineering Director of the Williams Formula One team.

Patrick Head was born into motor sport, his father Michael racing Jaguar sportscars in the 1950s, and was privately educated at Wellington College.

After leaving school, Head joined the Royal Navy but soon realised that a career in the military was not how he wanted to spend his life and so left to attend university, first in Birmingham and later, after failing his first year exams, at UCL.

In 1977 the team raced a customer March chassis, but in 1978, with backing from Saudi Airlines and having signed Australian driver Alan Jones, the Head-designed FW06 made its first appearance.

The same year saw a Head-designed car take the first of over one-hundred race wins when Swiss driver Clay Regazzoni won the British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

With Williams securing both the drivers and constructors titles in 1996, McLaren managed to lure Newey away, although he was forced to take gardening leave for the 1997 season.

During the dominant Ferrari/Schumacher period from 2000–2004, Williams managed to finish runner-up in the constructors championship in 2002 and 2003, and 2003 was the closest that one of their drivers, Juan Pablo Montoya, got to the world title.

[5] In April 2007, the Italian newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport reported that a court in Bologna had concluded that a technical failure was responsible for Ayrton Senna's fatal accident at the San Marino Grand Prix in 1994.

Under Italian law, the responsibility for such an accident has to be proved but no action was taken against Head or Williams' Chief Designer Adrian Newey, neither of whom attended the court hearing.