Osama Bin Laden was for many years one of the criminals most wanted in the world. After the 9/11 attacks, the leader of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda was pursued by the United States in the Middle East until he was killed in Operation Neptune’s Spear in 2011, after a decade of pursuit.
What fewer people know is that Bin Laden had a very tacit relationship with Formula 1 long before all this happened. Specifically, it was in the late 70s, when Frank Williams went to the Middle East to find money to save his Formula 1 team and returned with the most ignominious sponsorship in history.
Saudi petrodollars saved Williams in the late 70s
All of this happened after the 1977 season. Walter Wolff bought the Williams Formula 1 team to rename it Wolff Racing and create one of those unique Formula 1 stories. In their first race, in Argentina, they won. Jody Scheckter even came close to stealing the title from Niki Lauda. But a year later the team disappeared.
Meanwhile, Wolff fired Frank Williams as head of what had been his team up to then, and the Briton packed his bags to rebuild from scratch his own team, the one we now know as Williams. But he needed solid financial backing so that the house of cards would not collapse.
So Williams decided to search for him in the Middle East. With a Formula 3 driver acting as intermediary, the Brit managed to contact Prince Sultan bin Salman, and in January 1978 invited him to visit his royal palace in Riyadh. There, Williams found salvation for his Formula 1 team.
Legend has it that the first thing Williams noticed in Riyadh was the enormous road from the airport to the palace, lined with trees and gardens in the desert. It had been designed by the company of Mohammed Bin Laden, Osama Bin Laden’s father. And it would not be the last time he would hear about him.
After a long meeting with the prince, Williams managed to secure substantial aid from the Saudi kingdom. Many believe the current era is the only time Formula 1 has been bought with petrodollars, but it already happened in the late 70s. Several Saudi companies wore their logos on the Williams car’s bodywork.
Among them, the Bin Laden company, which is estimated to have contributed about £100,000 to Williams’s cause. Saudi Airlines, Albilad, Dallah Avco and TAG were other Saudi sponsors that pulled Williams back from bankruptcy. But the Bin Laden sticker on the car’s side panel remains in the ignominious history of Formula 1.
It should be noted that at that time Osama Bin Laden was already quite distant from the family, and he would soon join Al Qaeda to participate in the Afghan war. It was his brother Salem Bin Laden who carried out the direct negotiations with Williams, since the father had already passed away.
The sponsorship did not last long, since Williams suspected the Saudis would soon tire of Formula 1, so he began seeking new investors. But for the record, in Williams’s first victory in Formula 1, at Silverstone in 1979, the Bin Laden logo appeared on the car’s side panel.
There is not much to say about the company that sponsored. The Saudi Binladin Group collapsed after a terrible accident in Mecca where one of its cranes fell, killing 111 people and injuring 330 more in 2015. In 2023 justice sent seven people to prison and sentenced the company to 5.3 million, in addition to the state taking control of the company after the 2017 anti-corruption purge led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
