2

England Take Two … to Formula Three

I WENT TO England for the first time in 1966, a 19-year-old with my mate, Brian, off to build motor racing careers in the motherland. We went by boat and it stopped in Djibouti on the north-east coast of Africa, opposite Yemen. They speak French and Arabic there, which was news to me. It was a bloody eye-opener and let me know the world outside Australia was a little bit different to what I knew. Or expected. For two well-to-do boys from Melbourne, that place was just something else – and the sort of place I hoped I would never see again. Fortunately we didn’t stay too long before the boat headed off for the Suez Canal and onto Athens before finally dropping us on London.

That was more us … for a start, everyone spoke English. I got a job at Selfridges department store selling fireworks. Brian and I shared an apartment for a while, as young Aussies did. We both wanted to go racing, but we had no idea how to do it. Neither of us had any serious plan, which was pretty much the story of my life. I never really had a plan for anything. Still don’t.

I just figured things would all play out all right; after all they always had. I had a mate with me, and that helped, even if we were naive. It wasn’t like I was on my own and getting lost in the middle of Kangaroo Valley, or Earl’s Court as the locals preferred to call it, with my suitcase on the side of the road.

So we did the London thing for a little while and then we toured the Continent … desert boots, jeans and a Bedford Dormobile – well, a Kombi actually. We slept across the seats in the back, we hadn’t bought the camper version, had we? So sleeping bags and a pillow across each of the back seats. We had a few cooking utensils and we’d go to camps to have a shower. The usual Aussie 60s trip – except our trip was designed around racing tracks and car races trying to get in as many races as we could. We went to some sportscar races at the Nürburgring and also made it to a couple of grands prix and got down to Monza in northern Italy, where I had my first brush with fame and the lifestyle.

We even managed to get hired as extras in the film Grand Prix by John Frankenheimer – but don’t ask me how. Frankenheimer was a big name then – he’d directed The Manchurian Candidate and The Birdman of Alcatraz. James Garner starred in Grand Prix, as did that bloody French actor Yves Montand. He used to stack on the turns … he was so full of himself and a complete wanker. And there were motor racing people everywhere for this movie, with racers acting as consultants and driving cars for scenes.

Bob Bondurant was one of those consultants, an American racer in Europe to race sportscars. He was trying to crack onto some of the girls who were travelling with us, so we got to know him quite well. We were staying in the camping area at Monza and that meant we got to meet and become friendly with other parts of the crew too, including Garner’s hairdresser. I’ll never forget him, even if I can’t remember his name.

We were sitting around one day and he said, ‘Do you want to try this?’ I said, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘It’s some hash.’ I’d never had anything like that, and I took it because I’ll try pretty much anything at least once – well, I wouldn’t try heroin or any other hard drugs, but this seemed OK. I remember getting some apricot juice and thinking, ‘This is the best apricot juice I’ve ever had in my life.’

Extras eat well too. We’d get up in the morning, have our salami bun and coffee and go across to the track and be in the movie.

Naturally I bumped into someone I knew, Buzz Buzaglo, from Balwyn just like me, but a couple of years older. I raced him in the billycarts down Balwyn Road and he had been in Europe for a little while trying to work his way to the top. I probably could have learnt a bit from him if we weren’t having such a good time.

After we were finished with the movie, we stuck with Bondurant for a bit, which got us some access around European racing tracks. We were looking around and trying to work it all out for when we went back to England.

We’d met some important people and made some reconnections, like with Bruce McLaren, who Dad used to race against. Bruce was a Kiwi who finished second in the World Championship to Jack Brabham in 1960 and then third a couple of years later.

I went out to his factory at Colnbrook just near Heathrow Airport, where he was building his very first sandwich construction chassis, which is two thin pieces of aluminium with some stuff in between them … I told you I wasn’t technical-minded. He cut a bit off and gave it to me. After that it was dinner at his apartment, and we ate T-bone steaks, an absolute rarity in England back then. They were so rare you had to pre-order them from the butcher because he wouldn’t carry any in stock.

Bruce drove me back to the station and I took the train home. A fantastic bloke who fired me up even more to get into racing. He was dead only a few years later, killed during testing at the age of 32 – but the team he started still bears his name.

One other person I met in London at the time was a young ‘counties girl’ named Kay, and we’ll talk about her a bit later. Let’s just say for the moment that she got pregnant and I was the father. I was already on my way out of England and I was happy to leave her with my flatmate Joe, who was her new boyfriend. I think it actually worked out better for all of us: she was with Joe for 20-odd years and moved to Tasmania with him and had another couple of kids. At that time I would have been a shit father.

Back in Australia for my resetting, which I needed, I worked for Bob Jane rather than the old man. I was selling Jags and Saabs and I had a Saab to drive as part of the job. It was one of those shocking front-wheel-drive two-stroke things. Brpbrpbrpbrpbrp. Jesus it was bad … but I still sold them.

I worked there for a year before Dad’s business started to struggle and by now I desperately wanted to get back to England. I had to get back to England, it was the Mecca of motorsport, and still is. So I packed the bags and jumped on the boat and eventually made it over for my second take at it … a little bit wiser and way more motivated.

During my short stay back in Australia I had met Beverley, my mother’s hairdresser. Mum organised for me to go to a party that Bev was throwing and I went around to her flat and knocked on the door. She looked at me and said, ‘Yes?’

I said, ‘I’m Alan Jones.’ To which she replied, ‘Yeah, so what?’ I thought, ‘Jesus, nice bitch this is, Mum.’ Anyway, I went into the party and one thing led to another and we started dating. We argued quite a lot and we were in and out of the relationship. She left for England with some friends while we were in an on phase, and I went down to see her ship off at Port Melbourne. When it was time to get off, I didn’t. I stowed away to Sydney. I went into the cinema and sat in a seat there for a while and then just walked around the boat. When we got to Sydney I waited until a family was walking off and I joined them. I had to get back to Melbourne, but that was all a bit of fun.

Bev was waiting for me and when I eventually arrived in London, we carried on like we hadn’t missed a day. Then I hooked up with Brian again and we got a place together at Greenhill Apartments with some other Aussies. It was a bit upmarket for us, given we had no real money and no job – it had a doorman for heaven’s sake – but it was in a great location, so we set up a story. Remember the con?

I was a grazier’s son, our mate Peter Caines-Buchanan was an accountant and Brian was a doctor. We fed them enough bullshit to get the apartment. I’ll never forget the day we moved in. We pulled up in these mini vans with kangaroos on the side – the look on the doorman’s face said it all, ‘Fucking hell, what’s going on here?’

The doorman was right. We used to party all night, sleep until midday, then go down to the pub and continue partying all night. London in the late 60s was everything everyone has ever said about it. I did feel for the poor bugger that used to have to climb the steel staircase out the back of the apartment to collect the rubbish – there were so many empty beer bottles he would have had to make a few trips to get them all.

I had really put on some weight during my year back in Australia, and all this boozing wasn’t helping. I was 16 stone – 100 kilos – and I had to shake that off pretty quick smart. I’ve always been prone to a bit of weight gain. Murray Walker used to call me ‘the big burly Australian’ in his TV commentary – and that was when I weighed in at 76 kilos. James Hunt used to call me ‘Big Al’ when I was in my prime. Christ knows what they’d call me now.

Brian already had a small business selling mini-vans, so I joined him in doing that before we expanded to vans converted for camping that we sold to poor unsuspecting Australian and New Zealand tourists. It was the equivalent of backpacking today, and the young tourists would come over and want a campervan to drive around Europe. We started with the Dormobile with the windows in their sides and the hard wooden seats. We’d put a little Primus stove inside and a couple of rolled-up sleeping bags, then paste the back windows with stickers as though the vans had already been everywhere there was to go. From there we sold the holiday, the beautiful castles of Germany, the history of France, and the romance of Italy – and they wouldn’t look too closely at the vans.

We had these vans parked near a tube station in Earl’s Court and put up a ‘For Sale’ sign with a phone number. Earl’s Court was all that Aussies coming into London knew at that time; to them the rest of London may as well have been Djibouti. By the time we got back to Greenhill from making a sale, the phone would be running hot and we’d have to jump in the car and go back to Earl’s Court.

As they headed off on the big adventure, we’d always ask when they were coming back and then spin a line around my sister coming over around that time and we’d buy the van back for her.

This was all well-constructed too. ‘We know it is a good van and if you look after it we can virtually give you your money back.’ They’d come back OK – usually the day before they were flying out, keeping the van as long as they could because of our ‘deal’ to buy it back. Then we’d spin a line – my sister couldn’t make it over – to make it seem we didn’t need the van anymore. ‘We don’t want it.’

You could see their mouths hit the ground. I know this is shocking car salesman stuff, but we’d do them a favour and buy the car we didn’t need – for about 500 or 600 quid less than what they paid for it. As soon as they were out of sight, hose it over and get it down to Earl’s Court with the For Sale sign back on it, with the 500 or 600 back on it and off we go again. Selling a car once is good – twice is great. Brian and I were generally clearing 500 quid a week each, and some weeks even more than a thousand, which in 1969 was a lot of money.

It was so easy, we thought the business would last forever. Which it might have, if we’d taken it the least little bit seriously.

Both Brian and I were into motor racing. Well into it. All we lacked was a car, and I knew I just had to have a racing car and the opportunity to go out and do my thing. There’s a way to go about getting into racing; it doesn’t depend strictly on yourself. You have to know the trade people, because they supply you and can perhaps sponsor you; you have to know the circuits, because that’s where you’re going to drive; and, above all, you have to drive, because that’s why you exist.

We had to have a car, so we bought a brand new Merlyn Formula Ford and rented a house in Ealing. We also bought a Volkswagen tray back that was designed to carry the car. We headed off to Brands Hatch for some testing and started to get into it all.

As much as we were making, we were spending … and more. I was using one credit card to pay for the other credit card, and if we needed a new set of tyres we bought it and worried about the money next week. Welcome to racing.

We were doing a bit of testing and racing, one week me and the next Brian. To me the Merlyn was very similar to the Cooper of Dad’s I had raced, it seemed to have as much power and it was on skinny little tyres. It was a great little car and I felt very comfortable in it. But Brian wrote it off in a crash, which was a bit of a setback. We didn’t waste it though: we took all the pieces, the engine, the chassis, the wheels, the gearbox and put it all together again just like Humpty-Dumpty – and offloaded it. Not that I had much to do with it given my mechanical skills, but the flat looked like a garage for a while.

Next I bought a two-year-old Lotus 41 that was ready for Formula Libre. I stripped the whole car down and had the chassis sand-blasted and the paintwork enamelled. I made it into a bloody beauty. But beauty doesn’t win races; a car in working order does that. I neglected to check that they’d taken all the sand out after they’d done the face-lift. I had a gorgeous little car, all gassed up and doing nicely, and then I threw six engine bearings in a row.

Finally, we worked out why the bearings were going – bloody sand – and I devised a new scheme. I would make my Lotus fit Australian specifications, take it back home, flog it and come back to go Formula Three racing off the money I’d made. That was the plan, anyway.

One day I was out at Brands Hatch testing. Everything was going sweetly and I was putting in respectable times. Good enough, anyway, since I was new to my car, new to the sport and a relative newcomer to the circuit. It was a Wednesday and Brands Hatch was a muddle. Open practice and the circuit was filled with every kind of car under the sun: Formula Fords and what not all over the track.

The pits were on the left-hand side of the circuit going up into the paddock for this sort of test day, rather than the right. Ahead of me there was this bloke who was a bit slower than me: no problems, pass him nice and easy on the right. Except that he suddenly decided that he would turn into the pits, which for a test day weren’t the same as a race day. I was inexperienced. At the time, I thought the main thing was to miss him: so I went round him – right round him, winding up off the track, in the grass and into a tyre bank. The Lotus was a complete write-off. End of big sale in Australia. End of Formula Three plan. End of AJ’s career?

I was back on with Beverley then and being a good, loyal girl, she’d decided to come out to Brands to see her man taking his car out. She arrived just in time to hear this big bang and see me lying in the grass, swearing my head off about how I was going to kill the bastard that cut across me. It wasn’t just the anger. There was also the sadness. There was my Lotus, all lovely, all resprayed, a mess in the grass, just like me.

That Lotus had a spaceframe chassis and you had to put your feet underneath a bar to use the pedals. When I hit the fence, my feet came back and I had broken the instep on my left foot quite badly.

Finally they got an ambulance to me and took me off to hospital. It was my first shunt and the hospital must have been built in the Boer War. They took me into casualty, and there was this lady doctor standing over me, screaming. ‘You should stop doing this criminal thing,’ she said. I could sympathise; she’d had another driver in the week before and she didn’t want a bloody mess in her clean cubicle after last week. So she went on yelling at me about didn’t I know what would happen to me if I persisted in my fatal course? Finally, I said to her as politely as I could, ‘I’ll tell you what, Madam, you get on with your job and I’ll get on with mine.’ Or words to that effect.

Reluctantly, she took out a pair of scissors and was about to go to work on my brand new Nomex overalls. It was my turn to yell at her: she wasn’t going to snip at my valuable equipment. She desisted, helped me up on to the operating table and said she wouldn’t be long. I lay there with my leg hurting like hell for at least 10 minutes listening to the rattle of tea cups in the next room. Finally, she came back and they put plaster on my leg. The week after, I went to have it checked in Chiswick and they said, as doctors love to say, that they’d done it all wrong the first time.

So they did it again. They cut off the plaster with me grimacing through it all and the doctor told me not to be such a sook … I offered to trade places to see who the bigger sook was. I wasn’t in the best of moods.

He replastered it and put a rubber thing on the heel, and said, ‘You’ll be able to put some pressure on that in a week or so.’ Two or three weeks later I couldn’t put any weight on it at all, the minute it looked like touching the ground, pain shot up my leg. He had got it wrong too.

Today I still walk with a limp from that and it is progressively getting worse too. I should have gone to St Thomas’, which is a special bone hospital, but I didn’t know that at the time. Apparently, I should have had a V cut into it and a bone graft, which I didn’t. So now they want to seize it up to reduce the pain, but I’d rather deal with the pain than limp worse for the rest of my life.

Not daunted by a little broken leg and yet another setback, Brian and I bought a pair of Brabham BT28s – BT28-25 was mine, BT28-16 was Brian’s – and did a deal with Ron Tauranac, who was the ‘T’ in ‘BT’, for kits to turn them into BT35s (and then BT38Cs), which had their fuel tanks on the side, inboard brakes and a few other updates. We got our engines from Vegantune, and the guy that ran that, George Robinson, turned out to be instrumental in my pathway to Formula One. I got on with him really well, and often just rang for a chat at night.

We bought an old furniture truck, painted it orange with black lettering. We called ourselves AIRO – Australian International Racing Organisation – which was rather grandiose and, as it turned out, a bit of a mistake. People thought we were the Australian international racing organisation while we were just a couple of Dormobile salesmen bullshitting our way through it all, but we did OK.

We had some hair-raising experiences in that truck – it would run out of brakes going down a big hill and we’d have to get ready to jump out.

Three big things changed for me just before that season began. Firstly, Dad moved over to stay with me so I could help look after him. He’d had heart attacks and strokes, and he wasn’t the physically commanding man I remembered. His speech was all slurred and he needed a walking stick, which would come in handy given his temper hadn’t changed.

Everyone thought he was pissed all the time, but he wasn’t. He used to go off to the auctions and buy cars for us to re-sell. He used to take it as a personal thing if anyone else was bidding for the car. He’d win the auction and then he’d start on the other bidder … ‘Yeah, fuck you.’ Some things just don’t change.

A couple of times he brought them home and the right-hand side had dents in it because he was on the left-hand side and he never saw them. I’d be the one that’d have to get them all fixed up, advertise them and then sell them for him. I’d be negotiating a deal and go back inside and say, ‘He’s offered such and such.’

‘Tell them fuck off,’ he would say, offended someone would offer so little for something he had no attachment to. I’d said, ‘Dad, it’s a profit, take it.’ ‘No, fuck off.’

It was easier when it got to the point where he couldn’t do any of that.

The second was the opportunity to race in Brazil, which came about through a mate of mine, Brian Kreisky, who operated a management company in Europe called Promoto and was a nephew of former Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky. Brian was a bit of a wheeler and dealer of the time, and made millions out of motorsport video and TV broadcasts. He was close to Bernie Ecclestone, before dying in 2000 in a plane he was flying from Blackbushe.

Brian had been approached by somebody in Brazil to supply drivers and Formula Three cars for a series they were running over the British winter. He was given the job of choosing the drivers. I was in.

It was a three-race series. They gave it a fancy name, given the previous year they had run the South American Tournament at Interlagos, and it was being run to prove to the rest of the world that the Brazilians could conduct an international championship event. They were setting their sights on a Formula One race, and this was the showcase.

It was held mostly at Interlagos starting on 10 January 1971 with a non-championship race in Porto Alegre and the final event at Tarumã at the start of February. It was a quick series, I didn’t win it or anything but I did enough to raise a few eyebrows.

I was about 24 when I hit Brazil and I’d never been anywhere much except England and a bit of continental Europe. I’d tried to forget Djibouti. It seemed somehow miraculous to find myself in a place that was so profoundly different. I’d never even heard of Sao Paulo before. I went there expecting to see mud huts and when we flew in I was staggered. I couldn’t believe the size of it. It’s bigger than New York. All I wanted to do when we landed was hit the town. I’d brought my dad with me and Jim Hardman, my mechanic, and while Dad slept off the trip in our hotel, Jim and I went out for a walk. I think we knew what we were looking for. Fortunately, or unfortunately, our hotel was just up the road from a nightclub, and of course we had to venture in.

No sooner had we sat down at a table and ordered a few beers then there were half-a-dozen birds sitting down all round us, groping us under the table. As long as you drink, the girls are there to keep you happy. The women of Brazil are beautiful. I’d never struck anything like this in my life and I turned to Jim and said, ‘How long’s this been going on? And why have I been missing out?’

It was my very first taste of international glamour and I fell for it. Because I was out enjoying myself too much, I got a really bad dose of sunburn, and that made it hard to get the belts done up properly when I was in the car. It is one of the reasons I avoided pools for the rest of my career.

Before we left for Brazil, I thought to myself that I’d better take the races seriously. I suppose I was evolving, slowly. These were, after all, my first major professional races, and I had travelled halfway across the world for them. I hadn’t quite got the Vegantune deal across the line in time for this, so I bought myself a year-old super engine from a guy called Brendan McInerney. This was going to be my pièce de résistance, but it barely got through the first weekend. I wanted desperately to do the right thing. I wasn’t brilliant in the first two races at Interlagos in Sao Paulo when the screamer let me down. Thankfully I’d taken the old engine down as a spare and it turned out to be better than the screamer anyway.

When we got to Porto Alegre, Jim and I nodded knowingly at each other and said, ‘OK, let’s put the wings on for this one.’ Porto Alegre was not about top speed as much as Interlagos; now we needed grip, so on went the wings.

I was about fifth quickest in practice, and afterwards Dave Walker, a fellow Australian who was about to race in Formula One with Lotus, came up to me in the pits asking me how things were going. I said very nicely thank you; I was quite pleased with myself and, I might add, with the friendly attention of a real big-time racing driver like Dave. ‘Well,’ he said, laconically, ‘I think you could do a whole lot better if you put your wing on the right way, because you’ve got it on back to front!’

With that little bit of exact science under my belt, I managed to get onto the front row with Walker and everybody was tickled to death and running about as if they didn’t know what had happened. I knew, and I think Dave was wise to it as well.

We were all celebrating our triumph when Peter Warr from Lotus came round to our garage and started to examine my wings, because I was as fast as his driver. Peter figured that had to be because my car was bent. He sniffed around, took out his tape measure, announced that I was a centimetre too wide and he was going to protest the grid position. My old man didn’t take kindly to any of this and even though his speech wasn’t all that clear by then, his walking stick made his point perfectly clear.

The old man chased Peter right out of our garage and only narrowly missed cracking his skull. Which wasn’t from lack of effort. I was appalled at the time, but I laugh now. We sawed a centimetre off the wing and I was running sixth in the race when my gearbox gave out.

So we had this great adventure in Brazil. Interlagos was a highlight, a brilliant circuit with a series of great corners and undulations that just gave it that extra challenge, and it was relatively quick too. It still is a great circuit and I loved racing there.

I was probably lonely at the time even with all those stunning Brazilian women nearby, and rang Beverley back in London and asked her to marry me. She said yes, and that started a whirlwind of activity for my return. I never thought this would be the third thing to change, but it was.

We got married in a church in Chiswick on St Patrick’s Day. The old man stood in some dog shit or something and couldn’t stop laughing in the church. I turned around and gave him a dirty look. We had an Aston Martin DB6 wedding car that I had bought for Bob Jane, but we got some use out of it before putting it on a boat for him. Then it was off to Malta for our honeymoon. Then back to the serious work. I had a career to build.

My Brabham had previously been raced by a New Zealander named Allan McCully, who coincidentally joined AIRO with a Lotus 69. We had a trailer on the back of the truck and we went across the Channel, first for the three of us to race at Paul Ricard and then down to Monaco, where there were 70 cars trying for the 20-car grid.

I qualified sixth for my heat, the quickest of the three AIRO cars, and was running well when Tony Brise spun in front of me then backed onto the track to get going again at the Station Hairpin. I had to stop to miss him. I stalled the car and needed a push start – without that little incident I would have made the final easily. Brian didn’t qualify for the heats, while Allan made it into the final where he finished fifth after the heavens opened.

I also got my first taste of corruption that weekend. There was a lot of talk about the Alpine that Patrick Depailler used to win the race, but the scrutineers didn’t want to check it out while they pored all over the Lotus and Ensign cars that finished second and third. Both cars were cleared.

Mo Nunn, who owned Ensign, asked for the Renault engine in the Alpine to be vacuum-tested, but they managed to break the tester. George Robinson offered up his, but then the police got involved and said it would cost the equivalent of £90 to get it tested – which we, as AIRO, paid. Then they did the test in secret with only the Alpine team allowed to witness it. Of course it was cleared. It was very distasteful, but more of this was to come in my career.

I had a pretty good season in that Brabham and tested for March at Silverstone during the year. March had just started in Formula One, but it also had a really good Formula Three team, which had won one of the British Formula Three championships with Roger Williamson in 1971 and then would go on to dominate the class for a few years from 1973. Williamson was killed in only his second Formula One race in 1973 driving a March at Zandvoort. That crash was pretty significant at the time because there was such a shitfight afterwards. Roger was unhurt from the crash but died after the car caught fire and the marshals weren’t able to help because they didn’t have the equipment. David Purley, who I would have a brief brush with early in my own Formula One career, stopped his own car during the race and tried to get Roger out with the marshals watching him – he won a humanitarian award for his actions.

The March was a beautiful, simple, agile little car. The only trouble was I couldn’t afford one. I couldn’t really afford to go out and drive ten-tenths in one either, in case I smashed it up. But, being a heedless bastard, I didn’t think of that and every time I hit the track I gave it my all. One of the tests was a sort of open day to look over the new March cars and I had been invited.

I was surrounded, literally, by rich kids who’d driven up in their brand-new Porsches and who had sponsorship cheques dripping from the back pockets and were whipping around photos of their little pad in Surrey they’d hired at some exorbitant price for ‘the season’. It was enough to make anyone sick, these kids walking in and ordering brand new cars, brand new engines and then saying, ‘Christ! I nearly forgot a transporter! Can you tell me where I can find a new transporter?’

I knew half of them couldn’t drive out of sight on a dark night, and I couldn’t help the anger and the envy. Now I realise that they thought pretty much as I thought: that they were going to go out and race and brain everybody in sight. I don’t think many people go into motor racing knowing they can’t drive and will never make it; some just take longer than others to get that unhappy message. And among them are probably some with huge potential who drop out at the slightest little setback; life hasn’t hardened them up enough as it had me.

I did a couple of races with March but I didn’t get the full-time drive even though I had some good results. In my first drive in the March I qualified fifth and was then caught up in an incident on the first lap that took out the first four cars in the field. The next week I scored a second in one of the British Formula Three Championship races at Mallory Park.

After I missed out on the March drive, George helped me to get a works Formula Three drive for the rest of the 1972 season with GRD, Group Racing Developments, which had formed with a lot of staff from Lotus, who had closed the customer side of its business. I had a brand new chassis and George supplied the Vegantune engines.

It was good for me, I enjoyed it. They allowed me to prepare the car and I did it at home, in my garage – well, Jim Hardiman did really. He was also doing a bit of racing in England in a Hillman Imp. Eventually GRD got their own transporter and started looking after the car and getting it ready.

I was on a £2000 a year retainer as a works driver, which wasn’t enough to live on but all my racing was covered. So I topped up my wage with a few little extras. If someone wanted to buy a new Formula Three car they could have me go down to Snetterton where we tested, and spend the afternoon in it, setting it up for them. This suited me, I was learning while getting miles under my belt – and getting paid.

In all those laps I started to learn how to drive to a time, which is what Otto Stone was trying to teach me in the go-kart. All I had to do was drive fast enough to win. If I was opening a gap without stressing the car, that was all I needed to do. I also tried to be serious by keeping a record of things like gear ratios and the like that we used and what it did for the car.

If I wanted a longer third or a shorter fourth, I knew how to graph it, but it was Jim who would actually change them. If I took the back of the gearbox to pieces, Christ knows what would happen. ‘What’s happened to that other gear?’

I did my first race for GRD in the Formula Three race at the British Grand Prix in July and finished sixth, which was a pretty good place to put on a reasonably good show. There were lots of races for that class in England at the time, so I got in quite a few races between then and the end of the year.

We had some reliability issues, which wasn’t making me easy to be around, especially at Thruxton Park when something broke and sent me into the ditch at Club on the warm-up lap and people were saying I crashed. But when the car ran, we were competitive.

Over the winter I joined the GRD team run by Scottish industrialist Denys Dobbie (DART – Dobbie Automobile Racing Team) and ran the 373 chassis. Every year there’s one or two like him: they have a little surplus money and they think motor racing ought to be fun. Dobbie announced that he was going to sponsor three cars for GRD: a sportscar for John Miles, a Formula Two car for Dave Walker and a Formula Three car for me. My first year was to be in Formula Three, my second in Formula Two and my third in Formula One! I signed the contract and thought, ‘Well, this is it! I’ve done it at last, someone had made a plan for me and all I have to do is my job!’

My first race for DART was at Brands Hatch in March 1973 for the Lombard North British Formula Three Championship, which was one of the three British titles available in Formula Three, but not the most important one. Two weeks later I won at Silverstone, again in that series, and I was off and running. On the Friday of that race weekend, the old man died, just short of his fiftieth birthday.

Dad had been getting progressively worse, and after he had a stroke we had to put him in a nursing home. Beverley did a wonderful job looking after him for many months, but it just kept getting worse. We got to the stage where we had to put plastic up the walls and in his bedroom because he was so incontinent, and to her credit she used to shave him and look after him while I was doing my thing, but it became too much.

I was away when he died. After the news came through, Mike Warner, who owned GRD, said, ‘Alan, if you don’t want to race, we understand.’

But there was no way I was not going to race. The old man wouldn’t have been happy if I pulled out of a race just because he had died. For my win at Silverstone I got a big laurel wreath, which I put in his coffin before it was sent back to Australia.

He was quite unique, my old man, illustrated by the fact that he wanted to be buried in a lead-lined coffin with a phone. The lead lining because he didn’t want to be eaten by worms and the phone was so he could make a call just in case they got it wrong and he wasn’t dead after all. He got his lead-lined coffin, because you couldn’t fly a body on a plane unless the coffin had lining to stop any leakage. But no phone.

Unfortunately I didn’t come back to Australia for the funeral because I couldn’t afford it, but I did my own little farewell to him. He’s buried at Springvale Cemetery in Melbourne, right opposite the Sandown car racing track, which is fitting.

I loved him dearly and I was so lucky to have him with me in England those last couple of years, even if he was hard work. One time he hopped in the car and took off to Belgium because he wanted to ship a car back to Australia and they wouldn’t do it without him present. I got a phone call from the Belgian police who thought he was drunk, because of his slurring. But the mere fact that he got in a car and went over there in that condition, gives you an idea of the bloody pigheadedness of the man.

After that win I felt like it was all starting to come together. There were three different Formula Three Championships in England at the time, the other lesser series was known as Forward Thrust Championship and the main one was the John Player British Formula Three Championship. I started winning in the other two series as well.

I only did six of the 13 rounds in the Forward Thrust series and still finished seventh. I missed a few of the Lombard rounds too and finished fifth there. It could have been better, I got a one-minute penalty at Castle Combe for jumping the start, which I didn’t, and that dropped me from first to 17th.

We focused on the important series, the John Player. The first round was at Silverstone and I had a sticking throttle that took me out of second in my heat, but I still qualified for the final because of my lap times. I fought my way to ninth by the end of the race, and that was a good recovery.

The next week it was wet at Oulton Park – it was England after all – and I got a second there before winning the round a week later at Mallory Park. Now I had wins in all three series and I felt like I was a serious contender.

Strangely, the championship had a round at Zandvoort, a sensational track in Holland. I qualified second quickest to a Japanese driver called Masami Kuwashima, who I was having some great battles with. There’s a big right-hander going on to the front straight, and he told me that he was leaving it in a higher gear, but taking it flat, which made the car a lot more settled. I was in a lower gear and the car was unsettled, so I tried Masami’s tip in the warm-up and I was instantly quicker. I went on to win the race – with Masami in second.

If I was ever in any doubt, I really learned that weekend not to volunteer anything to your enemy. I’d spend the rest of my life bullshitting people at race tracks, I’d never give up anything to anyone, I didn’t spend two days working out all my gear ratios just to hand them over to an opponent. If I was Masami, I would have said I was taking an even lower gear. But he told me something that helped me win that race, at his expense.

More importantly, I returned to England with the championship lead. But by this stage the March 733 was the car to have and Tony Brise had switched from the GRD to that mid-season and started to get the results. A couple more DNFs didn’t help me, but some good results and more wins sent the title down to the wire at Brands Hatch in October, with me heading in with a five-point lead over Jacques Laffite – or Jackie the Foot as I called him. Because it was a double-points race, there were mathematically a few drivers with a chance to win.

I led with 109 points in my GRD and Jackie the Foot (Martini Mk12) was second on 104 and it was then a gap back to Russell Wood (March 733) on 89 points, and if it was a standard points race the last driver with a chance. But it wasn’t, and that meant Tony Brise (March 733) on 83 points and my mate Masami (March 733) on 76 were also in there.

I wasn’t great with playing numbers, but this was perhaps a race to have them in my head. First or second place meant no-one could beat me – even Laffite if he won and I was second – and from there it tumbled down. If Wood won, fourth was enough for me to win on countback. If Brise won, fifth was enough and then if Masami won, seventh would do. If anyone else was winning, they’d have to calculate that in the pits and work out how to let me know … but my plan was to win and that would make it easy.

I went out to practice in the morning, and my engine blew up. That forced us into the situation I hate: a big panic and a change of engine over lunch. Nothing should be done in a hurry in racing, except the drive itself; for everything else, you need calm. They got the engine in, just in time, and I gave it a quick try: the bloody thing wouldn’t fire properly, or was running on one too few cylinders. I knew I was in for a tough race.

Part-way through the race I was fifth, in front of Laffite while Masami had retired and Tony was leading. Fifth, which was enough to win the championship – and as low as I could afford to drop.

Sitting just behind me was Larry Perkins, another Aussie, who wore glasses as thick as Coca-Cola bottle bottoms. As we went down into Hawthorn, Larry tried to pass me on the outside; I moved over to take up my line, and the next thing I know, we rubbed wheels and I see Larry’s Brabham spinning down the straight. I wasted no sympathy on him. I just thought, ‘Thank God for that, I’m still in fifth, I should be OK.’

I expected to come around on the next lap and see ambulances all over the place, but when I came around, the track was clear: not a sign of Larry and I wondered where the hell he’d finished up, because he must have hit something. No such luck! Lo and behold, I looked in my mirror and there was this white Brabham coming back at me. ‘Oh no! Don’t! Please don’t!’ Here I am with a handful of laps to go and a buggered engine, all I had to do was not drop a spot and the championship was mine – but if he passes me, that’s it, no championship.

Well, the engine grew progressively worse, he passed me, and I lost the championship to Tony Brise.

Disappointed is not the word; I was shattered. I headed straight for the bar after the race and there I heard someone say Perkins was going to enter a protest against me for dangerous driving. Larry at that stage was the new boy in Europe and he was writing for the newspapers back home. He said fellow Aussie Tim Schenken was over the hill – but Perkins wasn’t fit to clean Schenken’s boots, in my opinion. He wrote that this was my third year in Formula Three and he didn’t see me progressing much beyond this point. You could say we never struck up a close relationship.

Anyway, when he walked into the bar, I went up to him and said I’d heard he intended to protest me for dangerous driving. In the middle of his answer, he said he hoped he would never have the displeasure of racing against me again. He did have the misfortune to drive against me again too, but he never worried me. He actually made it into Formula One but never got anywhere … not even a single point, which I like to remind him of whenever we see each other.

With Jones’ Law, which you’ll hear of more than once, something like double points was always going to hurt me, and it did. I lost the championship, but I gained valuable experience.

Just as I had spent a lot of time talking with George Robinson, I used to spend time walking around the pits and paddock areas networking and selling Alan Jones, and I was pretty good at saying the right thing. Like when I was testing for March, I’d always say to the designer Robin Herd (who was the H in March), ‘This car is fantastic, if it goes as good as it looks …’ It comes back to me being a salesman – I knew you had to tell people what they wanted to hear to get what you want.

It’s a cruel fact of life. I wasn’t selling mini-vans, I was selling myself and this winter I was going to need to do a pretty good job.