Adam Parr is an Anglo-French barrister and businessman, and former chairman and chief executive of the Williams Formula One team.

Since leaving Formula One, Adam’s main activity has been venture capital, and he has co-founded, invested in and chaired several businesses. These include Oxford Semantic Technologies Limited, an AI spin-out of the University of Oxford and Cheesecake Energy Limited, a spin-out from the University of Nottingham. For seven years he was also a director of Cosworth. In 2020 he founded The Downforce Trust, a UK charity dedicated to accelerating action on climate change. The Trust has helped launch Downforce®, an innovative technology for measuring natural capital, and SRI 2030, an initiative to promote climate-smart rice cultivation, and has worked with UK Parliamentarians on nuclear power and climate security.

Adam is a DPhil candidate and Business Fellow at the Smith School for Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford and Research Associate at the John Porter Diplomacy Centre, Hertford College, Oxford.

Adam is the author of two books about Formula One: The Art of War – Five Years in Formula One; and co-author, with Ross Brawn, of Total Competition – Lessons in Strategy from Formula One. His academic study, The Mandate of Heaven — Strategy, Revolution, and the First European Translation of Sunzi’s Art of War (1772) was published by Brill in 2019.

Adam was born in London in 1965. He holds an MA from Cambridge University and a PhD from UCL University of London. He has lived and worked in Europe, Japan, South Africa and Australia. Today he lives in Oxford with his wife and two children.