Williams is the daughter of Sir Frank Williams, founder of the Williams F1 team, and Lady Virginia Williams. She graduated from Newcastle University in 1999 with a degree in politics. Her entry into motorsport began not with Williams F1 but with the Silverstone racing circuit, where she worked as a press officer following graduation.
Williams joined the Williams F1 team in 2002 as a Communications Officer, rising to Head of Communications by 2010. In 2011, when the team transitioned from private to public ownership through a listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, she took on the additional role of Head of Investor Relations and played a central part in that process. The following year she became Director of Marketing and Communications. When Frank Williams stepped back from the board in 2012, Claire became the Williams family's representative in his place.
In March 2013 she was appointed deputy team principal, a role that in practice made her the day-to-day team boss, responsible for the full operation of the racing programme. She inherited a team that had endured several very difficult seasons and set about restructuring it at multiple levels: replacing the driver lineup, signing Felipe Massa alongside Valtteri Bottas, rebuilding the engineering department, and negotiating a switch to Mercedes power units at a pivotal moment in the sport's technical history. The 2014 regulation changes, which introduced hybrid power, suited the new Mercedes-Williams partnership; the team finished third in the Constructors' Championship in both 2014 and 2015, and fifth in 2016 and 2017, results that represented a substantial recovery.
She also grew the team's commercial base through corporate sponsorship agreements and oversaw expansion of WAE Technologies, an advanced engineering off-shoot of the team, which later became a standalone company.
Williams was a committed advocate for increasing the representation of women in motorsport and engineering. She appointed Susie Wolff and Jamie Chadwick to development driver roles, launched a female ambassador programme in schools, supported the UK government's Women in Innovation scheme, and created targeted workplace opportunities for minority groups. Under her leadership, women made up 17.6 percent of the Williams workforce, the highest proportion in the Formula One paddock at the time.
She was a patron of F1 in Schools, an ambassador for the Dare to Be Different initiative, and the team actively supported its official charity, the Spinal Injuries Association.
The global pandemic of 2020, combined with commercial structures within Formula One that increasingly favoured the larger teams, put Williams under severe financial pressure. Facing the prospect of the team failing to continue as a going concern, Claire Williams made the decision to sell the company. In August 2020, Dorilton Capital, a private investment firm, acquired the team.
On 3 September 2020, following the completion of the sale, Williams announced her resignation as deputy team principal, effective after the Italian Grand Prix. At the Williams motorhome before the race, she was presented with the front wing from a Williams FW36 as a memento of her tenure. George Russell, who made his Formula One debut with Williams in 2019, publicly credited her with giving him his break in the sport.
In 2023, Williams became a brand ambassador for WAE Technologies, maintaining a connection to the organisation she had helped develop during her time at the racing team.
Claire Williams holds a significant place in Formula One history as one of the very few women to have led an F1 team in a senior executive capacity. Her tenure was defined by the challenge of managing a historic but struggling constructor through a period of radical technical change, achieving genuine results through the Mercedes partnership years, while also pushing the sport towards greater diversity and inclusion. The decision to sell the team, while personally difficult, preserved Williams F1 as a competing entity and allowed the team to continue racing under the family name.