Williams Racing appoints Jost Capito as Chief Executive Officer

Published by

Nicky Godding

Leading Oxfordshire F1 team Williams Racing has appointed Jost Capito as its new Chief Executive Officer, with him set to join the team on 1 February 2021.

Jost's career has spanned more than four decades in the automotive and motorsport industries and he will help strengthen the leadership team at Williams as the company embarks on a new era. Reporting into Matthew Savage, Williams Chairman, he will take full responsibility for the day-to-day running of the company.

Simon Roberts will officially take on the role of Team Principal, reporting to Jost.

The news follows the sale, earlier this year, of the historic Wantage-based F1 team to USA Investment company Dorilton Capital. After the sale, Deputy Team Principal, Claire Williams stepped down.

Jost began his motorsport career in the mid-1970s, racing motorbikes and ending up winning the truck category of the Paris-Dakar Rally in 1985 with his father in a Mercedes Unimog. After five years at BMW M GmbH, in 1989 he joined Porsche to manage racing programs before moving to Sauber Petronas Engineering in 1996 as part of their executive committee. He subsequently joined Ford in 2001, where he spent an extensive amount of time as Ford Europe’s Motorsport Director working in various categories from Formula Ford up to F1 with the Jordan Team and the World Rally Championship for the American manufacturer. Jost enjoyed great success in this role having won the WRC manufacturers’ titles in both 2006 and 2007.

In 2012 Jost joined Volkswagen as Motorsport Director and led the marque to a period of dominance culminating in consecutive Drivers’ and Constructors’ World Rally Championship titles over four years. After a brief stint at McLaren, in 2016 Jost was chosen to lead Volkswagen R GmbH, the department in charge of the company’s performance cars, but will now return to Formula One with Williams.

Jost Capito said: “It’s a great honour for me to join Williams Racing during these exciting and demanding times for both the team and for Formula One. It is an honour to be a part of the future of this storied team, and one that carries such a poignant name in the sport, so I approach this challenge with great respect and with a huge amount of relish.”

Matthew Savage, Chairman of Dorilton Capital, commented: “We are excited to welcome Jost Capito as the new CEO of Williams Racing. He is an experienced and competitive individual, who has built winning teams and is a winner in his own right. He understands the Williams heritage and will work well with the team in pursuit of our objective to return to the front of the grid.”

Nicky Godding

Nicky Godding is editor of The Business Magazine. Before her journalism career, she worked mainly in public relations moving into writing when she was invited to launch Retail Watch, a publication covering retail and real estate across Europe. After some years of constant travelling, she tucked away her passport and concentrated on business writing, co-founding a successful regional business magazine. She has interviewed some of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs who have built multi-million-pound businesses and reported on many science and technology firsts. She reports on the region’s thriving business economy from start-ups, family businesses and multi-million-pound corporations, to the professionals that support their growth and the institutions that educate the next generation of business leaders.