I MAY NOT have liked oval-track racing, but I did love racing in the States. I had success there in Formula One, which obviously helped, but there was more to it than that. The tracks I loved to race on were long and fast, with sweeping corners, and there were plenty of those throughout North America. When they built a road course, they built a real race track.
The Americans were also friendly, cooperative and open – and they had proper hamburgers and cold beer. The English used to boil meat and put it between two stale buns and call it a hamburger. Or you’d ask for a cold Coke and they’d just pull it straight off the shelf, and you’d say, ‘No, I want a cold one,’ and he’d say, ‘It is cold, guv.’
The Yanks did things more like the Aussie way – they had ice and the beer was cold. I felt a lot more at home there than I did in England. I liked racing there – and the weather was better too.
In 1977 I did those two Can-Am races for Shadow and I really liked the cars. They weren’t the knuckle-dragging beasts from the early 1970s, but rather they were essentially Formula 5000 cars with sportscar bodies. With 5-litre engines they weren’t lacking in the grunt department, and they were a lot of fun to drive and really quick. My 1978 season with Carl Haas Racing really started at the final round of the ’77 season when I qualified in the new Shadow beside Patrick Tambay (who was winning the championship for Haas) on the front row of the grid. I led the race until the car broke, but it was enough to make sure that Carl knew I was the man to have when Patrick had to give up Can-Am for his Formula One drive with McLaren.
I signed up for 1978 with Haas before I had anything locked away in Formula One, so when I signed with Williams obviously Formula One was my main priority, but I still wanted to honour my contract with Carl. I did all the races bar one, where there was a clash with a grand prix, and it made for a busy year. I rarely had my bum out of a car, and that was perfect. You don’t get better watching, you only get better from doing … and I was doing.
But the travel was draining; jetting across the Atlantic so often was not as easy or as glamorous as it sounds. Although it did get a bit easier as the year went on when the boss of First National City (now Citibank), who sponsored both the car and the championship, put me on the Concorde for the flights. It wasn’t just quicker, it was better.
The food in the Concorde lounges was pretty special, and at Heathrow they had free international phone calls, so I’d camp outside the door waiting for it to open like it was a Harrods sale so I could get all my phone calls done for nix. Still lurking inside this jet-setting Formula One driver was the struggling hustler who’d cooked breakfast for his tenants in the Ealing boarding house.
The Carl A. Haas Racing Team Lola was designated as a T333CS and there were plenty of that model lining up for the season, along with the 332 from the previous season and a few other types of car like Shadow, Spyder, Prophet, Chevron and even an Elfin from Australia. Given my Lola was based on the Formula 5000 car, it had a central driving position which I quite liked, and with all the extra bodywork and that huge rear wing it had tremendous downforce. It was quite enjoyable to drive. Carl was the US importer for Lola, and the kit to turn a car from a standard T333C – or a T332C for that matter – into a CS was designed by his team and sold to all the other teams: it was the only way to race a Lola in the series.
For those that love to talk about racing car chassis, the Prophet and the Spyder were modified Lola 332CS cars, so I suppose they thought the best way to beat the ‘factory’ team was to make the old car better than the new and rebadge it. The T333CS evolved during the season as well, because these guys were throwing out a pretty serious challenge and Carl was as competitive as me and didn’t want to lose to them.
The tracks we raced on were so good for those cars. Road America, Watkins Glen, Mid-Ohio and Mont-Tremblant were all bloody interesting tracks. Most of the tracks were in really nice parts of the world too, and even though Mid-Ohio was in the middle of nowhere, it was a really nice middle of nowhere.
At that time in America, public toilets didn’t have doors, which I found really hard to deal with. I was dying for a crap at Mid-Ohio once, and I didn’t want to go to one of those toilets. I had an hour or so before a practice session, so I jumped in the hire car and headed off to the motel to do my business in private. I was screaming down the motorway and I could see the cop car coming the other way, and then I saw him put his lights on and do a U-turn and chase me down. The first thing he notices are my overalls, then my accent, which usually got me mistaken for a Limey.
He said, ‘You were speeding,’ and I said, ‘I didn’t mean to, officer, but your crappers over here don’t have any doors and I can’t go without a door, so I’m going back to the motel to have a crap.’
God only knows what he thought, but he said, ‘I’m on my way to an accident, you get going.’ No warning, nothing, just that. I felt like saying, ‘If you’re on your way to an accident, why did you turn around?’ But I think he just wanted to get back to the police station to tell the rest of them about this crazy Aussie racing driver he caught rushing to the toilet.
Anyway, the season began at Road Atlanta in May, a few months after we had started back in Formula One. I had tested there with the team before signing on to drive, so I kind of knew the track. We had a really good but small team and we lacked for nothing. This series was big time in the States, and there were some other really good teams there too, like VDS, Hogan Racing and Newman-Freeman Racing, which was Paul Newman’s entrée into motor racing.
I was comfortably on pole from fellow Aussie Warwick – or War Wick – Brown in the VDS Lola and Elliott Forbes-Robinson in the Newman-Freeman Spyder. The race went smoothly and I went on to win, setting up an amazing season for me. It was clear we had a great car. I knew that both Warwick and Elliott would be tough competition, as would Al Holbert, who finished second in the first race.
Charlotte was up next, and they had this road-course track slapped in the middle of the oval with some of the banking also being used. The car was sensational here, and again I started from pole. But on lap six I had to pit with a flat tyre and that put me right down the back of the field. Elliott was way out in front and I had to try and chase him down in 40-odd laps. In the end, he had too much of a gap, but I climbed from essentially last place to finish 30 seconds behind him in second place.
If I didn’t know before, I knew my one-liner about ‘cruise and collect’ was far from accurate. You can never take anything for granted in motorsport – there are so many mechanical items on a car and so many other drivers on the track that anything could happen. At least these races weren’t on ovals, where the lottery came into play, but we were taking the races seriously, that’s for sure.
Mid-Ohio was the third round, and after fine-tuning my toilet run, I had a trouble-free weekend and what turned out to be an easy win when all my main rivals had some sort of trouble. The 1972 champ George Follmer was second in a Prophet.
In the middle of the Canadian summer, we were up at the Mont-Tremblant track outside St Jovite which is now owned by Lawrence Stroll, the father of Lance Stroll, who debuted for Williams in 2017. This great track was tucked away high in a valley in the mountains and it hosted the first few Canadian grands prix. I started from pole but got tangled up with someone in the chicane and managed only 13th. Follmer won his only race for the season there.
Watkins Glen was another that didn’t go to plan. Again I qualified on pole and led the opening laps before dropping 10 laps during the race. This was the halfway point of the season, I had pole and the fastest lap at each race and a combination of poor luck, mechanical issues and some of my own impatience was costing me.
There was only two weeks from there to Road America, which was essentially the home race for Haas, in Chicago. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t in the best of moods when I turned up, I had just lost the British Grand Prix because of a gearbox problem when I had the race under control. I wasn’t that quick on Friday practice and then the weather was shit for Saturday, so everyone thought Warwick would be on pole because of his Friday time. But I was in no mood for mucking around: head down and arse up, I went for it. I took a few risks and ended up by whacking it on pole by more than a second.
I won the race by a handful of seconds – but I felt like I was in full control. I carried that momentum through to Mosport Park in Canada for pole again by more than a second and won by half a lap. Warwick was second again to me, and he was just nipping away at me in the championship despite the fact that I was winning more races than him. I knew I was going to have to miss the Laguna Seca round because of a Formula One clash, so I needed a bank of points to play with.
Warwick’s VDS Racing was owned by the van der Straten family, which essentially owned Stella Artois, and versions of the team are still running to this day, including the MotoGP team that Australian Jack Miller rides for. As a family, they love motorsport. The Count, as he was called, used to come along to all the races with his wife, who looked a bit like the old lady out of Something About Mary. They bought the test track that Jim Hall had built at Midland, Texas, drove the rattle snakes out and built a big house there … so she could sunbake and smoke while they all went motor racing.
VDS had run Warwick in the Rothmans International Series earlier that year in Australia and won every race. It was a Formula 5000 Lola. They really did know what they were doing and they were keeping us on our toes.
The two wins in a row moved the title back into my control, but we knew Warwick and VDS would capitalise if we mucked up. It was important to finish well up the points at Grand Prix de Trois-Rivières in Quebec, a street circuit with all the risks of a street circuit. I had raced there before a few years earlier in a Formula Atlanta car, which was the first time I ever raced against Gilles Villeneuve. I raced for a guy called Fred Opert in a Chevron, and James Hunt was Gilles’ teammate. It was James going back to Europe raving about Gilles that gave the little Canadian his break, but I nearly had a fight with James that weekend. He was in front of me at the start, but I got away better and I slipped in front of him at the first corner with a pretty aggressive move, which he didn’t like. He spent the rest of the race behind me, and he had a go at me afterwards. ‘AJ, you fucking cut me off,’ or some bullshit and I said, ‘No, I passed you.’ I left it at that. But I learned about that track then, and like a lot of street circuits it was hard to pass anyone.
So with that in mind, I really wanted pole, and during qualifying one of the mechanics hung out a sign with 0.2 on it. I took that as being 0.2 of a second behind. So I got on it, put the eyes on just like I did at Road America and got pole by more than a second. They were a bit grumpy when I came back in. ‘Fucking hell. We told you you were 0.2 of a second in front.’ We had a laugh when we all twigged.
I got third in the race, which was enough I thought with Laguna Seca next. Even if Warwick won at Laguna Seca, which he didn’t, I’d still have a good lead heading off to Riverside for the final. I’d seen a couple of titles slip out of my hands already and I was determined not to let that happen again. At Riverside I dominated qualifying and had pole again, so every race I started in that series I did from pole, which was satisfying. Then in the race I opened up a lead early and then just kept out of trouble to win by 30-odd seconds.
That gave me my first championship, which was a bloody good feeling. To win a substantial championship, an international one really with a quality field of drivers, meant a great deal to me. We had good equipment, but no more so than anyone else. We all pretty much had the same Chev engines with the same horsepower – we just did a better job overall, winning half the races in the series.
I think what I learned in the run to that championship helped me with Formula One, especially in 1980. When you’re leading the title, you think to yourself, ‘Well hang on, don’t panic, you can do it.’ And deep down you know you can, but you have to bury doubt. Until mathematically you can no longer be beaten, you can still lose, so you cannot ease up at all.
I didn’t defend the championship in 1979 because Frank didn’t want me to run in it any longer. I filled in for Jacky Ickx at Mid-Ohio when he had a clash with Le Mans and I managed another win, and then I ran the final race of that season only to crash out. But that was it for Can-Am, and I walked away from it with a championship, some great memories and friends and a love of America.
The Lifestyle
Life has always been pretty good for Formula One drivers, but there is a cost. We only did 16 races a year, instead of the 20 they do now, but even then you’d get sick of airports and hotels. And bloody Heathrow Airport – you could wait an hour for your luggage.
During the season at home, I used to allow myself a pint of English beer every night, that was it. On a Sunday night after a grand prix, I used to get on it a bit. Which didn’t take much because I was dehydrated from the driving. I was probably pissed out of my brain on about two cans.
There were plenty of other opportunities for fun, and if you’ve watched the Rush movie, I was not into anything as outrageous as James Hunt. But I had my fun. You would meet the odd person, I suppose, that was fairly interested in the fact that you were a Formula One driver. Occasionally I’d share my knowledge with them … up in my room.
But even before that time in my life there were plenty of distractions. Carnaby Street when I first went to London was a pretty good place to be. You’d make a beeline down there wearing your horrible checked dacks and a striped shirt, which just screamed at each other. There were parties everywhere both down that way and at Earl’s Court, where we lived. The Rhodesian Club was pretty good, but we quickly learned which clubs and pubs had the girls and that is where you’d find us.
When I started travelling for the races, Beverley often stayed back at ‘headquarters’ and left me to my own devices. I always figured she knew, so I felt no guilt spreading my knowledge. At the end of the day if something’s presented to you on a plate there’s no aggro. Takes a strong bloke to knock it back, but I never went out hunting.
I wasn’t that bad though, it wasn’t like I rooted my way around the world. Because I didn’t, it was only half the world … no, I didn’t really. I mean there was the odd indiscretion, but most guys were doing it. Bev was more than welcome to come to all the races. At no point did I say no I don’t want you there. She chose to stay at home.
I was a mutt compared to James. He was up to no good every grand prix.