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From the Beginning to England

I DIDN’T GO racing for anyone other than myself and, to a lesser degree, my team. I didn’t crave fame – in fact, I worked hard to avoid it, although I did enjoy some of its trappings. In my early years, I made it clear to anyone who employed me that I was there to race and to race hard enough to win. If you couldn’t help in that quest, I was going elsewhere.

I believe I acted throughout my career with honour and stuck to the values I have held since my early years. I have never wanted anything more or anything less than has been agreed. If we do a deal, I expect you to honour your part of the agreement, just as I will mine. My old man also taught me manners come cheap. They cost nothing. Everyone deserves respect: a waiter, a bellboy, a cleaner – say thank you and don’t take those people for granted. I’ve tried to stick by that all my life: not to be arrogant and to treat all people the same way. In many ways, despite my dad’s flaws, I did learn from him … in some ways I am more like him than I ever wanted to admit.

We are all affected by our parents, consciously or subconsciously. I was born in November 1946 and I was only 12 when my parents split up and my father, Stan, went broke a decade later. Those events were big lessons for me, and helped shape who I became, even if I didn’t know it at the time, even if I don’t fully understand it today, 60-odd years later.

My parents’ marriage was volatile. I remember the police coming to the house a few times. The old man was a fantastic bloke. He had a heart as big as Phar Lap: you’d be going along with him and he’d see a homeless person and he’d stop and give him five quid. But he’d rather a fight than a fuck half the time, and was a bit inclined to give Mum a biff, which upset me. She’d call the police and they would come around and then there’d be a full-on blue in the house with him and the police … he wasn’t scared of having a go at them either. In fact, I don’t think anything frightened him, but he was extremely kind to me.

While it upset me, there was nothing I could do, so you just carry on like it wasn’t happening. I don’t think I was ever the sort of kid that would say, ‘Mum, could we sit down and have a talk? I’m a bit worried about the old man hitting you.’ I wasn’t even that person as an adult. It was never discussed.

But I am not my father, just as my son Jack is not me. Jack is totally different to me; he doesn’t care about motorsport for instance. He loves his soccer and he has a beautiful temperament – unlike me. He might turn out to be a real prick, I don’t know, but at the moment, he’s a lovely boy. I worry for him though, because boys like him get into trouble they are not looking for.

Whereas Zara, his twin sister, she contributes to most of the aggro in the house. I brought some sushi home one night and it was the wrong sort. She got stuck into me, so I threw it in the rubbish. To which she sarcastically said, ‘Oh, welcome back.’ She’s not scared of giving it to me. Zara is me and Jack is Amanda, their mother, which makes life interesting.

So I didn’t suck my thumb and curl up in the foetal position upstairs at night, thinking about it; no, I just rolled on. That’s the way it was, that was the kind of man my father was and I couldn’t change it, so I had to wear it. Mum too. I remember him for all his good characteristics, not his bad habits. You might consider that to be denial – I don’t know about that, nor do I care. The one thing I did take away was that I would never hit a woman, and nor would I allow a woman to be hit if I could do anything about it.

Dad was raised by his grandfather in Warrandyte. He was a bastard in the true sense of the word and he was self-made because of that. I’m sure his childhood was tough; everything he had or did, he created himself.

My mum, Alma, was typically Irish, stubborn as a mule and never taking a backward step … something to do with the red hair I suspect. She’d rev Dad up something shocking, call him something and that would be enough for him to give her a whack. It wouldn’t stop her though – if you gave her a backhander she’d just come back for more, mouth off even louder. He was volatile and had a very short temper … it didn’t make for a good mixture.

Mum was one of three girls – Auntie Maude, Auntie Nell, and Mum. There was a brother too, Jack, who got killed driving his truck up at Ballarat. When that crash happened, the old man had a brand-new Jaguar XK120, and he ripped off the governor – the device that limited its speed – and screamed up there. I used to go in the truck with Jack quite a bit, its name was Leaking Lina. He was a lovely guy.

They were a reasonably close family, which was obviously different to Dad’s. When Mum and Dad used to go out for dinner, they’d drop me around to Nanna and Pops. I’d go to the local pictures when I was there, because in those days you could walk down to the picture theatre at night by yourself, even as an eight-year-old. I’d be too scared at my age to do it now.

It’s funny, I look back on my childhood now and can see how abnormal it was, but at the time I had no idea. I thought Dad and his girlfriends was a normal thing. When they got divorced I ended up living with Dad, which was unusual at the time. Still is. Mum was keen for it to work, and if I’d had a choice that is what I would have asked for too, so everyone was happy. The old man pretty much got what he wanted most of the time, and this was just another example. We were living in East Ivanhoe, in Melbourne’s north-east, and he had the Holden dealership in Essendon, over in the north-west, about 20 kilometres away.

Mum went off and married a man called Wally, and then my parents became the best of friends. The old man and I would go around to their place for roast dinners and the like. Most people would say, ‘Christ, what a weird set-up that was.’ I didn’t really see any problem: it worked.

Mum was a very good mother and wife. Without fail, every day when she was with Dad, she’d stop housework at a certain time, have a shower, get fresh clothes on, put the perfume on, and get dinner ready. She always made sure she was well presented and looked good when Dad came home. Unfortunately, half the time he never came home, which was a bit of an issue. She knew he mightn’t, but she got dolled up anyway, come what may.

Mum was fiercely loyal: she would always stick up for me and would do anything for me. She was in charge of choosing the places for my schooling. I started at All Hallows, a Catholic primary school in Balwyn, and then I went to Burke Hall, the junior school for Xavier College … again Catholic. My mum was the Catholic in the family; her father’s name was Paddy O’Brien, which speaks for itself.

I was certainly no scholar. I thought I was far too good and clever to worry about sitting down and learning anything. How the hell, I thought, was Latin going to help me buy and sell cars, or race them? Which of course Latin – and everything else – does, in a roundabout way. But when you’re Mr Smart Arse aged 13, you don’t think about education or getting help from anyone. My objectives as a child were strictly those of the day I was living in; tomorrow didn’t exist.

Dad was the sort of person who really couldn’t give a shit about religion. If Mum had said she wanted me to go to a Jewish school, he would’ve said, ‘Yeah, right-o, whatever. As long as he’s out of my way and being educated and he’s happy.’ She was the one that wanted me to go to Xavier. Burke Hall was in Studley Park Road, which wasn’t too far from where we lived, and then from there I’d go to the big school for the rest of my education … well that was the plan.

I won’t say I was expelled, but I think the school suggested to Dad that it’d be better if I finished my education elsewhere. Then he sent me to Taylors Business College, which was basically a place for kids that had been asked to leave private schools, so that their parents could hold their heads up in their social networks and say, ‘Oh no, he’s going to a business college.’ Which was just bullshit. It was on the sixth floor of a building in the CBD of Melbourne.

I finished off my last year or so of schooling there, but for me it just didn’t matter. I was a shocking student, I wasn’t academic at all. It was a complete waste of time – not that I want my kids to have the same attitude. But I knew what I wanted to do.

I had something other kids didn’t have. Racing was my chosen goal; my father was a racing driver and because Stan Jones was known to be good, I could also be good. I grew up with his mates and his mates’ sons, and every last one of them was going to go racing, too: which they invariably didn’t. But for me, there was this great big billboard in my mind that said, I’ve got to do it. School, in my eyes, was of no value. I wanted to be a racing driver and that was it. All this was just filling in time.

My Catholicism didn’t last. Burke Hall turned me off. They used to strap me for blowing my nose the wrong way. You didn’t have to do much and those pricks would pull out these long straps they kept in shoulder holsters. They were leather with steel in them, and they used to soak them in vinegar just to make the leather a bit crisper. You’d have to hold your hand out and you’d either get two, four or six of the best, depending on how much you flinched.

The trick was to try and pull your hand away, so you took a lot of the sting away. You had to time it perfectly, because if the prick thought you did it too much, he’d go again.

One day during catechism, where we’d be taught religious knowledge, Father Brown belted the shit out of me for not knowing why Jesus was kind and gentle. I thought, ‘Hang on, this prick is his representative on earth, and he’s belting me up for not knowing why Jesus was kind and gentle.’

That’s when I became an agnostic.

There was a lay teacher, Mr Tilley. He hit me with a ruler and cut my eye open once. The old man was so angry he flew up there and dragged him out of the classroom. Mr Tilley was screaming like a sheila. Dad whacked him, which not too many parents at Burke Hall or Xavier would do. But what others would do didn’t ever stop him.

The school didn’t do anything about it because Dad was going to press charges for assault on me if they did. After that Mr Tilley used to shit himself every time he saw me; he wouldn’t come anywhere near me. Good.

I like to take things as they come. I always believe that tomorrow is another day. It doesn’t matter how bad things get today, you go to bed and tomorrow is another day, another opportunity.

It’s like in my racing career – I was always able to sleep well the night before a race because I wasn’t overthinking things. You’d get to the circuit and some drivers would say, ‘I didn’t sleep last night.’ I used to think, ‘Jesus, why tell me that? You’ve just shown me a chink in your armour.’

I used to say, ‘Oh really? I slept like a log. In fact, I slept in,’ which I didn’t. Those mind games are part of the game. I was competitive. I looked for every advantage. I looked for weaknesses in my opponents.

That was something I got from the old man, as was the whole motor racing thing. It was in my blood, if you believe in that concept, which I am not sure I do. You’ll find out why soon. The old man was good enough to be offered drives for Ferrari and BRM, but he had a young son and a business that was going quite well, so he turned them down.

One of the guys he was racing and beating was Jack Brabham, who did take those opportunities, went to Europe and won three world championships. The truth is though, the old man could drive Brabham into the weeds. And he did so. When Brabham was New South Wales champion and Dad was Victorian champion, they had a grudge race at Holden’s home, Fishermans Bend, in Melbourne, just the two of them. When Brabham crossed the finish line, my old man was already out of his car sitting there drinking a Coke. I admire everything Brabham did, but I reckon my old man was as good or better as a driver.

Dad took his regret for not taking those opportunities to his grave, especially after his business went broke and he was left with nothing. I didn’t want to die with regret. I didn’t want to live under a question mark of ‘what if?’ My old man died wondering whether he should have gone to Europe or not; there was going to be no question mark over me. I decided I’d go over, give it a good go and if I turned out a failure, I could still look at myself in the shaving mirror and say I’d given it a go, had some fun and had some stories to live on. But the old man died with the question hanging there.

As I said, I lived with Dad when my parents split, but I really just spent a lot of time with housekeepers and nannies, because Dad used to go off to work and never got home until late. More often than not he was in at Mario’s in Exhibition Street having dinner with his girlfriend or something, and he used to leave me to my own devices. The housekeeper was supposed to make me do my homework, which I didn’t. I used to lock myself in the bedroom – she thought I was doing homework, but I used to climb out the window and go down the street. But I conned them into thinking I’d spent the last two hours in my room studying. They’d swallow it and tell my old man what a good boy I’d been, and he’d be pleased and say, ‘Good boy, Alan.’ I learnt the world was a con; it never bothered me to abuse their confidence.

I was learning some important life lessons. Firstly I was becoming independent, which made moving to Europe, and doing what I needed to do at the age of 19, a lot easier. The second was about the con and the sale. I was good at that.

I started driving cars when I was 15. No, that was not legal. I used to drive myself into Melbourne for Taylors College, park up in Collins Street, and then walk down to school. Eight times out of 10, I never made it to school; I used to drive somewhere else.

Racing was there very early in my life. I started out in billy-cart racing when I was seven or eight. To race a billy-cart the first thing you need is a great big hill. You sit in your billy-cart at the top and race others to the bottom. Yongala Street in Balwyn, where we lived then, was perfect, as was Balwyn Road. They even used to have a soap-box derby there, which was great. You couldn’t do it these days with the amount of traffic, but back then it was different. Cottee’s, loved by kids throughout the land for their cordial, had a special billy-cart with all the jazzy wheels and bodywork, and the old man bought it for me. I raced it and took home my fair share of wins.

I was born into an environment where my father was racing cars and I would go to as many races as I could with him. We went to the 1954 New Zealand Grand Prix at Ardmore, flying TEAL Airways in a Douglas DC-6B with four propellers on it. I always remember Ardmore because the train went through the middle of the town. It’s funny how things stick in your mind. There was a big pool there where I went swimming. I had a Saint Christopher medal around my neck – the patron saint of travellers – and a Maori girl came up and ripped it off me. I also went to an outhouse there and there was this huge spider, the biggest I had ever seen in my life.

Ardmore certainly left an impression on me, especially when Dad won the race. That was a big deal, the biggest win of his career at the time. He beat some big names in some pretty special cars – Brabham in a Cooper, Ken Wharton in a BRM, along with a pile of Alfas, Ferraris and Maseratis. Dad was in the Maybach Special, an interesting Australian car, certainly not in the same league as those others. It had its fair share of dramas on the weekend, but came through in the race.

We always had racing people calling around to our house. People like Bib Stillwell and Bill Patterson came around for pleasant Sunday mornings and they’d all have a few drinks. I think the modern thing now would be brunch, but I don’t think there was too much food involved.

I grew up in an environment with car-racing people, and that’s all I ever wanted to be – a driver. A winner. A champion. I didn’t go racing to hang around the pool or play golf. I was there to win. When I did go to Europe, I made a conscious decision to forego a lot of things. I couldn’t go around to Mum’s and have a roast dinner on a Sunday for instance. No-one was going to get in my way. I was going to do what I wanted to do, and that was it.

So I think what I got was an attitude. People say, ‘It’s in the blood.’ And OK, it may be, but I don’t think you inherit it.

Christian, my first son, is adopted, and he’s a bloody good driver. It’s not in the genes. You look at most Formula One drivers – they don’t have racing fathers. So you don’t need it and you don’t inherit it.

Dad more or less did his own thing when I was growing up. On several occasions, he made the fatal mistake of leaving the car keys lying about. One such car was the ex-Dan Gurney two-door Galaxie that was raced in England. I used to pinch it and scream around the neighbourhood.

I came home from school one day and one of the neighbours said, ‘Alan, can I see you for a minute? Tell your father to stop testing that Ford race car because the coppers are onto him and they’re going to lie in wait.’ I said, ‘Oh, thank you very much, that’s great. Thank you.’ That was a lucky escape.

Dad didn’t want me to start racing too early. I think I was 13 when he bought me an Azusa kart from America. We had quite a bit of success with that one. Because he had no idea what he was doing, he also bought me another go-kart, which had twin 125cc engines. Little did he know that the maximum capacity allowed was 200cc – and this had 250. It went like a bloody rocket ship, and although it couldn’t race it was fun. It also meant that when I got into the 100cc one, it felt like I could get out and walk faster.

Most of the tracks were converted drive-in theatres, full of undulations. There was one out in Broadmeadows, at Melbourne’s northern tip, and a really good one at the Puckapunyal army camp up the Hume Highway that hosted the Victorian titles.

Dad would send me off with one of the mechanics from his dealership to look after me. One of his secretaries, Elsie Pretty, had a go-kart she used to race. One day when I broke mine she lent me hers and I won the Victorian title in it. It was a Rainey kart, built by a guy called Maurie Rainey, who was a dwarf. His daughter used to race as well. Good little go-karts, actually.

Dad never really used to help me as such. Although he did buy me the go-karts. He also let me drive his Cooper Climax and bought me my first competitive car, a little Mini 850 I raced at the Geelong Sprints in my first ever competitive outing in a car. But that was it.

No sage words of advice, just the brutal truth on what I did wrong. He used to abuse me if I didn’t win, or if I did something wrong. He never really praised me if I did anything good. I don’t know whether he helped me or not.

It wasn’t a nurturing, ‘Listen to me, son, I can teach you something’ type of relationship; he just wasn’t that sort of a person. He’d rather get his mechanic to come and help me. It’s a bit like when we used to go to the Melbourne Show; well I say we, but it wasn’t really. He got his secretary to take me and he’d give them a handful of money and tell them to buy me some bags and make sure I was happy. He would no more think about taking me himself than flying to the moon.

That’s just the way he was and to a certain degree, I’m a bit like that. You learn things at an early age that just aren’t that easy to unlearn.

I’m not big into the parent-teacher interviews or going to the father’s days at the school and all those sort of things. I’m just not into it. Sometimes I think I should be, but it’s not me. Thank God I’ve got a wife that does do all that – it means I don’t have to.

I developed into who I was at an early age, and that is pretty much it. I was a shit of a kid, I used to fight all the other kids. Exactly the sort of kid I don’t want any of mine to be.

Dad’s business was going quite well and he was going all over Australia to race, with me in tow. But running a car dealership in Australia in the 1960s is not like what it is now. You couldn’t hold more than one franchise at a time: if you were a Holden dealer, that was it; you couldn’t do Alfa or Fiat as well. You also couldn’t own more than one Holden dealership. When he was racing on the Gold Coast once, he bought another Holden dealership off a guy called Jack Moran, and then he bought Tweed Motors a little later. General Motors got in touch with him and said, ‘Hey, you can only have one. Pick which one you want to keep.’

Unfortunately he kept the Essendon one.

It’s a funny old world, I’ll tell you. Dad raced the Maybach on the Gold Coast, at a race track in Ashmore – and years later, I bought an industrial complex at 73 Ashmore Road, not knowing it was exactly where the pits were for the race track. He had a big shunt there too. He was going over a bridge in the Maybach 2, which had its fuel tank behind the rear axle. As the fuel load dropped, the back got light and he went over the bridge and off she went into the trees. The Maybach was cut in half. All Dad got was a cut chin – and maybe concussion, because he was still sitting there with the steering wheel in his hands, saying, ‘How am I going?’

Then he went back to Moran Motors and they all got into the grog and tore crabs apart and that is when he bought that dealership.

These days I live on the Gold Coast, which is where I used to go just about every school holidays. I’d bring the dog up, we’d go down the beach. It wasn’t very developed then: there was the old ski gardens with the go-kart track out in the middle of the cane fields, which I went to as often as I could. The weather was good, and that was what I remembered most, which is why I moved here.

I was quick in karts and starting to win other races as well as that Victorian title. Karts were great for someone like me, who wasn’t very technical: if I take something to pieces, you can absolutely guarantee there’ll be something left over when I put it back together. If I change a light bulb, I think I’ve done a major job.

You couldn’t change gear ratios or anything serious on karts. You could change sprockets, make it go a little bit harder down the straight or a bit more out of the corner, and you could play around with tyre pressures, but that was it. What you were doing was honing your race craft. You’re lining up people, you’re going deep, going in under brakes and all that sort of stuff. Whether you know that or not, you’re learning that for the next level of racing. It was all stuff that I took with me.

Feel, perception and judgement are the biggest assets that a driver can have – and a nice big set of balls helps too. You need to be willing to take a bit of a risk – and you do have to take a risk every now and again. If you don’t, you’re not going to get anywhere.

I was very happy to take risks in the kart. I used to ride over people and I wasn’t scared of banging wheels. I would do whatever was necessary to win. If it meant having somebody off, I’d do it. That sounds bad, but so be it.

Back then in karts, as it was for a long time here, it was ‘Stan’s son’ that was going OK. For the last 30 years or so it’s been the other way around: he’s ‘Alan’s dad’.

Even with the Jones name and even with the wins, it wasn’t easy and I don’t think it ever is in car racing, especially if you want to drive Formula One. There were hundreds of thousands of young drivers around the world chasing one of 20 drives, and I was just one of them. A bag full of cash – which I didn’t have – makes it easier, but you still have to be good.

Fortunately, I was one of those people that was often in the right place at the right time, and used the equipment I was given to show my ability. With that I was able to keep getting into the right cars.

Some of the guys Dad got to help me were pretty handy too. I’ll never forget the day the old man sent Otto Stone to help me in a race up here on the Gold Coast, when Dad was racing a Maserati. Otto was the chief mechanic on the Maserati, but there he was looking after young Alan. I took my karting as seriously as he did the Maserati.

That day I jumped into the lead early and was half a lap in front of the field. Otto was leaning over the fence going, ‘Slow down, don’t win by too much. Slow down.’

I go around the bloody track and who should be hanging over the fence but the old man saying, ‘Speed up, you little …’ There was a lady next to him saying, ‘Look at that little smart arse, he’s slowing down.’ To the old man, that was a red rag to a bull; to him, that was embarrassing.

So he’s there saying speed up, Otto’s saying slow down.

In the end, I slowed down, and then I copped another lesson in life: the kid behind me screamed past and won. Then I got abused by the old man, and I said, ‘Otto was here, you told me to take notice of him.’ I would have won by a lap had they left me alone. But I learnt my lesson: the only bloke who knows what’s happening is the driver, and that’s me. Even to this day, when people say this, that and the other thing about what is going on in a race car, the only bloke that really knows is the driver.

I learnt that your attitude must be to win at all costs. Nice guys don’t win, I’m afraid. By the time I was leaving the house for a race, I was starting to turn into a nasty and aggressive person. It didn’t matter whether I was on the plane or in a hire car, I was going somewhere to win, not make friends.

I’m a bad loser, simple as that. I’m very, very competitive – and not just at car racing. When I was driving for Williams I’d go up to Frank Williams’ place and play tennis – and I used to smash my racquet and carry on. I’d get very upset. Same with golf; I used to throw my clubs and have little dummy spits … my wife refuses to play with me. It wasn’t because I was being beaten, it was because I couldn’t manage the shot that I wanted. I didn’t know why I wasn’t able to hit that ball like Greg Norman. If he can do it, why can’t I?

I was hard on myself, which is one reason I retired early. If I didn’t qualify in the top four, you couldn’t talk to me. I used to go back to the motel in a shocking mood.

I was also superstitious, although I wasn’t developing too many little quirks in karts. If I had parked in a certain spot in the car park and I got on pole, I’d try to get that spot the next day or the next time I was at that track. I happened to have a red pair of underpants on one day and I thought, ‘These are quick,’ so from that time on, I always used to race with red underpants. I always used to hop in and out of the car from the left-hand side. Just stupid little things.

Don’t ask me why, but I always liked it when I saw an ambulance. I would say ‘ambulance’ under my helmet. Fortunately I didn’t need the ambulance much in my career or life.

The closest a car ever came to killing me had nothing to do with racing. I was playing tag with my cousins on the median strip in Hoddle Street – Melbourne’s main north-south road, would you believe. I was rolling around on the ground, and I rolled off the median strip onto the road. A car’s tyre went past my head so close I felt it brush my hair. I could have been squashed or killed easily.

I’m not a religious person, probably not game enough to be an atheist, so I’m an agnostic, and I’m sitting on the bench until He comes and tells me otherwise. I am a believer in destiny, and I think that just wasn’t my day to be squashed under a wheel.

I loved every part of my racing back then. I spent quite a bit of time with people who worked for Dad, like Otto. It is funny looking back about the ones I remember and why … it wasn’t always about what I learned from them, it was often just something that was different. Like Otto’s wife always used to give us toasted sardine sandwiches – and I’ve never forgotten Otto’s K3 MG, which was a beautiful maroony coloured car, stunning. Then there was John Sawyer, who had a moustache and always wore the flat hat like the English wore back then.

Dad was a hero to me at the time and he was fuelling my desire to get to Europe. I do remember him saying to me, ‘Get over there and give it a go. Australia will always be here, it’s not going anywhere. You can always come back.’

I didn’t get much fatherly advice from him, but that was the best advice he ever gave me.

I watched Dad racing a lot and thought he was the best. When he won the Australian Grand Prix at Longford, in 1959 in the Maserati, I did the lap of honour with him sitting on the back above the fuel tank.

This was all amazing, and it just kept the dream growing, which made Mum a bit nervous. She used to get nervous when Dad raced, but she didn’t make it to many of my races. There was one race with Dad where they all took off and they were rubbing wheels and smoke was coming off the tyres and she just screamed. Motor racing was really dangerous back then, many drivers died, but she never tried to stop me, even though she probably didn’t want me to do it. She knew trying to get me to study was a lost cause, so she just let me be.

As I got older I started taking on some paid work. One summer I worked with a racing driver and car builder named Ernie Seeliger at his workshop in Richmond – and very quickly discovered I didn’t like working on dirty engines, or anything that was dirty. Which is why I never really liked rallying, because it was too much mud and dirt everywhere. When my son Christian was doing his go-karting, all the bloody grease and chains and sprockets, I hated it. When he went into Formula Ford, I thought, ‘How good is this?’

Then I started working for the old man selling cars. That was more me, I thought it was better to bullshit than to clean. It was less strenuous and I sweat too easily. It suited me. For example, cars used to come in many shades of grey. If we were out of the one grey and the customer wanted it, I’d say something like ‘That’s good because it is popular with the undertakers’ – and they’d happily take the other one which amazingly we had in stock. It was good to be earning my own money and having some financial independence.

This was all before I could even get a licence in Victoria. I went to Adelaide to get my licence at 16. I used 18 Kitchener Avenue, Dulwich as my address, where a mate of the old man’s who was also a car dealer lived. He let me use the address – but as I said, I was driving before I even had that licence. The old man gave me a Morris Minor convertible, painted it iridescent green and put in a gold interior and gold wheels. You’d swear he was bloody Greek or something. I was horrified, but what could you do? He gave me a car, and I wasn’t arguing.

When I turned 17, I got a licence in New South Wales. A guy called Laurie O’Neill organised that out at Five Dock. Then when I was 18, I finally got my Victorian licence – and then I got pulled up for the first time. Go and figure that one out.

I had a 300 Healey, a Triumph TR6 then a little Austin-Healey Sprite. On Saturday afternoon we used to get a big bag of chips and a Coke and then we’d all get in a courtyard somewhere, jack the cars up, take the wheels and tyres off, clean under the guards, nugget the tyres and the soft tops and get them just absolutely immaculate. Then we’d go out that night and get pissed and start doing figure eights on the local oval and get covered in shit. On Sunday morning, the cars were dirtier than before we started cleaning them on Saturday.

There was quite a gang of us. John Lyall was one, Brian McGuire was another. Brian’s father was Dad’s spare-parts manager, and we ended up going to Europe together the first time; the second time I went back with John.

I remember parts of that second trip vividly. Olivia Newton-John was there with fellow singer Pat Carroll and a model named Frankie Lightfoot and that was fun. Olivia was going out with Ian Turpie, who was a TV celebrity, but I knew him because he also used to race a little Mini with me. So there was a bit of a crowd of us on the ship, and when we got over there, I hooked up with Brian again and we got an apartment. That starts a whole new story, which we’ll get to soon.

I had finished with karting now and was moving into cars.

We bought this repossessed Mini that had the engine and gearbox sitting in the boot. Dad gave it to Brian Sampson at Motor Improvements and said, ‘Do this up, because we’ll race it.’ I think he thought, Morris 850, it’s not going to cost much. I know he shit himself when he got the bill, but Brian did a great job. We resprayed it silver-grey and put black wheels on it. It was a lot better to look at than the green Morris, that’s for sure.

I entered that car in the Geelong Sprints, which was my first ever competitive outing in a car. It wasn’t a complex race, a standing half mile race with a big curve – you don’t have to be too clever to go fast like that. I won my first outing.

Then I started racing it whenever I could. Calder Park was easy because it was close, but Winton and Hume Weir took some effort. The old man had done all of that when he was younger, car on a trailer and travelling the countryside. He did warn me about the drive to Hume Weir: ‘Watch those bridges on the way home, because if it’s wet, those wooden bridges get very slippery.’ And he was right, I lost the car on one of them and was spinning down the road with the trailer and the Mini on the back. Never touched a thing and ended up pointing the right way. I thought then, maybe there was a God, as I escaped another near miss.

I was doing OK on the track though and was winning races. But I was hungry for more.

The old man had the Cooper Climax in the garage and I managed to persuade him to let me use it for a picnic meeting at Calder Park. It was a nice friendly scene, those meets. The oil companies like BP, Shell and Castrol had their tents up and every driver had a contract, even if it’s only worth ten quid and some oil; but that made us contracted drivers and that’s a step up from the bottom. All you had to do was put a badge on your overalls and on the car, then after the race pick up a steak sandwich and a beer from them.

In the mornings there would be sprints, and road races in the afternoon. I entered the Cooper in everything and the little Mini in a lot too. I blew everybody into the weeds in the Cooper: there weren’t that many kids at the meeting with a Cooper Climax.

The racing was serious; at least I took it seriously, going up the night before and staying in a real motel! I felt I was on the way up; also I was living up to what was expected of me – I was Stan Jones’ boy and I was expected to win. But when I look back on those days, I’m amazed. I didn’t have any proper driving goggles, so I wore sunglasses. If you’d got a stone through those glasses, you’d be history, but you just don’t think like that when you’re young.

I loved that Cooper Climax. It was powerful and an open-wheeler. I thought, ‘This is me, this is what I’ve got to do.’

The karts put me in fairly good stead when it came to this sort of car. Being an open-wheeler, I could see the wheels and tyres and that didn’t affect me all that much. The gear stick was on the right-hand side, which was unusual for me, but it was quick. I’d probably think it’s a piece of shit now, but in those days I thought it was the ant’s pants.

I did about two or three race meetings in it. For me it was just check the tyre pressures and race; it was somebody else’s job to make sure it was tracked up with everything pointing in the right direction. People can’t believe that I’m not mechanically minded, but I am seriously lacking in that area, which is why I love my Lexus – you get in and it goes. As to how to make it work – no idea.

Then the old man’s dealership went broke.

He had literally hundreds of cars on the lot; his money came from turnover. Which is fine when things are going well. Then came the great credit squeeze of the early 60s: the cars were on the lot, but he couldn’t pay for them. Selling cars back in those days was like stocking shirts in a haberdashers: you had to have what the customer wanted on your lot. When the Major with his RAAF whiskers drives up and says he wants pink upholstery with green stripes, he wants that car right away, in time for a drink at sundown. If you don’t have it, he moves along and buys it from someone else.

Dad went under, like thousands of others. I found his fate instructive: the smart man doesn’t put all his eggs in one basket.

In hindsight, the warning signs were there. Elsie Pretty, the secretary, once said to me, ‘Alan, have you thought about doing something else for work, because your father might not always be here.’ After I understood everything that was going on, I thought, shit, she was trying to give me a message. Of course, I was too young and stupid to pick it up.

Until that point I’d been terribly spoiled; now I learned life wasn’t all a bed of roses. If Dad hadn’t gone broke, I would certainly be a bigger bastard and probably wouldn’t have been much of a racing driver. I was an obnoxious little bastard as a kid, a big-headed little shit. When Dad was in the money, I was going to a private school, driving a sportscar at 16, living in a nice house, going to Surfers Paradise for my holidays and the son of a famous man. A prescription for disaster. Next minute, no MG, no Surfers Paradise and three-quarters of the old man’s friends have vanished, owing him money. Now I’ve seen both sides of the coin.

His going broke dragged me down to earth. It taught me things can go wrong as well as right; and to be kind to people on the way up because you may meet them on the way down. Mainly, it taught me not to worry about what other people are doing or thinking: my job is to look after me and mine.

Dad lived every day as if he wasn’t going broke. I don’t think he could help himself. He drank a bottle of scotch a day. Then it was three-hour lunches and back at work for an hour and knock off for dinner.

If there was racing at Southport, he took his mechanics up there, he took their wives and girlfriends and pretty much anyone else he could find, paying for everyone and everything. They still call him the Last of the Big Spenders – he handled money as though it were going out of fashion. He was a player, a player as wide as he was tall. He was colourful and strange; he was a character. Dad didn’t cope very well and he went from bad to worse. He started a Chrysler dealership, but that didn’t work. Then he ran a consignment business where he didn’t have to buy the stuff, he just sold other people’s cars. Between you and me, I think there might’ve been the odd time where he forgot to pay them for the car.

So Dad was broke, which was bloody inconvenient for me. That’s when I went overseas. I think he thought to get me out of the joint to save us all the embarrassment. He was going to send me some money for me to continue on my merry way. After the first couple of slightly delayed payments the money was always coming, like a cheque in the mail.

I stopped at Madrid on the way to England and the money wasn’t there. I had $50 to my name and I had to book into a hotel where they supplied bed and breakfast, because that’s the only way I was going to eat. When I booked in and stayed the night, I got up the next morning and had my continental breakfast and that was it for the day. There was no lunch, no dinner, nothing. I couldn’t check out because I didn’t have enough money to pay the bill, so I had to keep staying there.

I used to walk down to American Express to check if the money had come through. I was there four or five days and to this day I know Madrid like the back of my hand. I didn’t eat. I stopped having the breakfast because I’d try and sleep in as much as possible so it would make the day shorter. Hard to believe, but true. Eventually, I got the money.

But Dad never really recovered. He had lived on a diet of daily excitement that eventually did him in early, with strokes, heart attacks and dreadful blood pressure. He was about to turn 50.