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NEXT weekend, Sir Frank Williams will be sitting in his normal place on the pit wall during the Malaysian Grand Prix. He will stare at the trackside monitor for over two hours in a cocoon of concentration while being fed a mountain of information about the cars and their drivers travelling at preposterous speeds around the track. He is a kind of Thin Controller.

He is wheelchair-bound and in need of 24-hour care, the result of a car accident 15 years ago while returning from testing at the Paul Ricard circuit near Nice.

It was, by his own admission, self-inflicted. He was driving too fast and lost control of a family saloon hire car on an innocuous left-hand bend in the mountains. The car flipped, landed on the roof and the rest, as they say, is history.

It was a journey he had undertaken many times before, he knew the fastest time on the route and was simply trying to beat it. You see, you can take the man out of the competition but never the competition out of the man.

I was slinging running spikes into a kit bag, about to leave the house for my second training session of the day, when I heard the news of Williams's accident on the radio. He had been taken to hospital for 'emergency surgery' was all the report could confirm.

My mind was taken back to just a few months earlier, when I had been a guest of Williams at the Nurburgring to watch the German Grand Prix towards the end of the 1985 season. It had been a frustrating day for him - Keke Rosberg, Williams's lead driver, had stopped with only a few laps completed, and team interest had ended not much further into the race.

Williams returned to his guests and, to the thinly-disguised irritation of team sponsors, apologised for the nature of motor racing, explained that he needed a debrief from Rosberg, whose helicopter blades were already whirring, and after a brief conversation focused on the next task at hand.

His other obsession was running. Williams was more than a weekend jogger. Within hours of the finish of the grand prix, he was taking me on a 10-mile run.

I wouldn't have minded so much had he not just driven me around the old Nurburgring track at ludicrous speeds, pointing out with glee where household names in the history of motor racing had come to grief and disarmingly asking me at the end of the 14 or so miles whether I had spotted at which corner he had "nearly lost it". It had all seemed a blur to me, or at least it had for those parts of the course where I had my eyes open.

A few miles into the run, Williams was pushing the pace, even daring to test me on the hills and maintaining, for no little show, a lucid conversation.

During the 1980s, he was a familiar face track-side at athletics meets, watching the non-mechanical thoroughbreds shifting through the gears, and that is where our paths first crossed.

Williams, 58, recalled of those days: "If I couldn't watch a Grand Prix I'd watch top-class 800 or 1500 metre racing.

"I started to run at school but let it drift through my driving years and took it up seriously again in 1971, which marked my third year in Formula One. It was the concentration, mental discipline and futile attempts to repulse old age that appealed.

"I wanted to run a marathon but had to run under three hours and knew I'd never be able to find the time to do that so I didn't try."

A half-marathon best of 1hr 18min 32sec to the man obsessed with times had to suffice. "I would have run quicker the following season after trying some speed endurance sessions." Why didn't he? "I broke my neck," he said, with his well-known emotional detachment.

Williams neither dismisses the impact the injury has had on his life nor dwells more than fleetingly on the subject.

I witnessed first-hand the early months of his recovery, both mental and physical, as he lay for much of that time on a life-support machine. My first visit to his hospital bed in London after his return from Nice was as insightful as it was shocking. He had already come to terms with life as a quadriplegic, telling me how he would be physically dependent on others before quizzing me for the next few hours about my own preparations for the European track championship later that season.

He says now: "My accident was inevitable, regrettable and stupid - I've never suffered any emotional disturbance from it. I just thought about its implications for a bit and moved onto the next problem."

Problems for Williams have only ever been viewed as navigable obstacles. Nine constructors' titles makes Williams the most successful team in the sport's modern era.

The memory of Courage's death in the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort in 1970 allows a brief show of emotion but the mask is soon safely back in place. "I would love to have driven as well as Piers, but I was never good enough." Why not? I asked. "I lacked judgement, that's why I'm in a wheelchair."

The early days of team ownership "were hard but great fun". After another raid from the bailiffs, Williams was forced to operate for a time from a telephone box on a Reading trading estate but in 1977 he joined forces with the engineer Patrick Head and Williams Grand Prix Engineering were founded.

Head, now technical director of the team, is the "cleverest person" Williams knows. "I also grudgingly accept he's one of the few people who can keep me in line. He is an engineer and I just have so much respect for him."

The admiration is mutual. "Frank has amazing focus and involvement considering his injury level," Head said. "I really don't take much notice of his condition now but he runs himself with military discipline to ensure that it has minimum effect on his working life."

It is this discipline which some of his drivers have found hard to accept. His love of all things military is never far from the surface. He was rejected by Sandhurst in 1961, which remains one of his few regrets. Was it the esprit de corps that appealed? "No, I can't say it was," answered Williams. "I just wanted to fight. I know I shouldn't say it and war is the most terrible thing but I would have liked to have been a part of one. I just love to fight."

He is not without a sense of humour, as BMW executives found out when they were subjected to a fly-past of Britain's few remaining Second World War planes and a barrel-roll from a Spitfire seconds after completing their engine deal with him.

Williams has had the best drivers working for him - Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost and Jacques Villeneuve won world titles with him, while another champion, Damon Hill, was replaced for his efforts.

Ayrton Senna, Prost's replacement, was "sadly with us for too short a time but he was probably the most talented of them all. His death shook me and the whole team - it was stupendously sad but life goes on, you just have to readjust."

Does Williams ever envisage life without motor racing?

"Not for a long time. My day-to-day involvement with the team will diminish. There'll be better people to take the team on. We haven't won a race for four years, so I've got to bloody well hang on."

The last word rests with Ken Tyrrell, whose own team won the drivers' championship three times in the 1970s.

"How the hell he's done what he's done since his accident is unbelievable. He's just there all the time.

"When he started out he once told me he wanted to be like us. I would have loved Tyrrell to have been like him."