WE KNEW WHAT we had to do in 1979, and it all revolved around the FW07 that Patrick Head was working on. This car was a big undertaking for what was then a small team. I had full faith in Patrick and his crew … we just had to get it finished and on the track.
I was happy with 1978, but now I wanted more. I had plans to defend my Can-Am Championship and a few other opportunities were coming up too, but I let most of them go.
I knew I was making a name too. I had been invited to run in the so-called ‘International Race of Champions’ in the States, which was a quirky little series with lots of money up for grabs. All the drivers were kitted out with supposedly identical Chevrolet Camaro Stock Cars. After my experience in the McLaren in 1976, I thought those big old Chevies, with the big roll-cages across them, were safe enough.
Anyway, they invited people from USAC Champ Car, NASCAR and Road Racing and I was there with Mario, Emerson and Niki – which wasn’t bad company – as part of the road-racing team. It was being run by a guy called Les Richter, who was a hell of a nice guy, and he was the one who rang me to see if I wanted to do it. When they told me how much it paid, I was in.
So, the first race for the road racers was at California’s Riverside Raceway in October and I got fourth, which qualified me to go on to North Carolina. I’ll never forget the first time I drove out of the pits, I let the steering wheel go for a second just to tighten up my safety belts and the thing turned sharp left. I thought, ‘Shit, there’s something wrong with this.’ The suspension’s broken or something.
‘Oh, no, it’s jacked,’ they said, ‘Well, can you un-jack it?’
By jack they mean they put stiffer springs on one side of the car than the other to compensate for the banking because the G force pushes the car down, and the strongest springs on the outside stop that. On a road track, it also gives it a terrible bias to the left.
I came straight back in and got a lesson. First of all, there was a little bit of white tape on the top of the steering wheel, which I like to call a rudder indicator, and they said that was to let me know when the wheels were straight. I thought, ‘Fuck, if you don’t know that, there’s something wrong.’ But it was all done so that when driving on the banks your hands were at nine and three on the wheel.
Anyway, I worked my way through that car and the oddities of US racing to get fourth in both the qualifying race and the final with the NASCAR and CART racers added in to the field. Niki didn’t even get a lap done and there are rumours about him blowing up the car so he didn’t have to go back for the finals. He didn’t want to get paid for the racing, he just wanted them to cover the costs of flying his Learjet to the States to get some new instruments done … that took precisely one weekend and he was back on the jet and home. If the rumours were right, I could see the logic behind his decision.
Silly me took it seriously and I ended up going down to race the final in March of 1979 – a few races into the Formula One season – on a banked oval at Atlanta. Before I went there for the final I had some warts on my dick surgically removed. If only I’d used the products of my former sponsor.
Anyway they wrapped the old fella in gauze and put a little knot on it and I thought it was all good. So I got down there and I hop in this car and the good old boys, which were the Allison brothers, took me under their wing because driving those things on an oval is a bit of a black art. I didn’t realise that the guy behind you can make you understeer or oversteer depending on where he puts his car. There’s various little tricks like that. I think it was Bobby who said, ‘Come on boy. Come around with us and you can follow me around.’
I was getting the hang of it now and had set the second quickest time. Sportscar racer Peter Gregg, who was known as Peter Perfect, decided he’d join in the fun. On the track there were two cars behind me, the second car being Peter’s. Suddenly Peter with a double tow pulled out from behind the car that was on my tail and went past both of us as we went into turn three. Which was where Peter lost it. He went broadside right along the middle of the track. The driver behind me chose to go below Peter; I tried to get above him, between Peter and the wall. If you lose it in oval racing, what you’re meant to do is turn into the slide and spin your car into the infield, but Peter, being a road-racer like myself, did what I would have done in the same conditions to correct the slide: he corrected it and shot straight up into the wall.
I was doing about 170mph when I T-boned him, I went from his car into the wall and from the wall back into him, completely demolishing the Camaro. At first I thought I’d really hurt myself badly: I hit him so hard the Coke I’d drunk earlier exploded out of my body and soaked my race suit. Because I was strapped in and had my helmet on, I couldn’t look down and all I could feel was wet against my body.
I’m thinking, ‘Oh, shit. It’s blood. Oh, fuck. This must be a big one.’ Of course the marshals have come running up and then they take a step back. I thought, ‘Oh, Christ. This must be bad, my guts are hanging out or something.’ Then the major trauma unit came – because you know in America you can’t call it an ambulance, that’s not dramatic enough – and they finally extracted me from the car, and said, ‘We’ll take you down to the medical centre.’
So I’ve gone down to the medical centre, and all the good old boys have come down to see how I was, which in reality was pretty good – even the bow tied around my dick stayed in place.
I think in a big one like that, a driver always thinks the worst. After I’d hit him I went straight into the concrete wall and pushed the engine right up through the body of the car. I was completely winded; I couldn’t breathe. Luckily, all I had was a very bad case of bruising, but for a few seconds I had a clear picture of myself being dragged out of the car and raced to hospital.
When I hit Peter, it was as though I’d come right out of my seat and been suspended against my safety belts. Later on it was as if someone had taken a tar brush and painted stripes on my body where the seat belts had been. I could barely move. But I thought, hold on here, if this happened in a big safe old Chevy Camaro, think what that shunt would have been like in a little fragile USAC car like I’d tried in 1976. It didn’t take much to convince me, after that, that there was no way in the world I would go USAC racing on an oval again. Ever.
Even when a shunt seems inevitable, you fight it right up to the end: until it really is. When that moment comes, everything is happening so quickly that a driver doesn’t really have much time to do anything, nor even think very much. I go into a state that is not really a daze so much as an acceptance of the inevitable. My thought is: ‘It’s going to happen; I’ve got to make sure I get out of this alive.’
At the moment of impact, everything is happening so quickly that you are simultaneously aware of its happening and of its inevitability. The G-forces throw a driver’s hands all over the place. It’s not as though he could react calmly and throw the car into neutral or shut off the master switch: not while he’s banging into the wall. At that stage he is just being knocked about. He is a dead weight, a human dummy. His next reaction is when he finally comes to rest. His first thought is probably to check his body out in all its particulars: is it all there? Is anything radically wrong? Almost simultaneously he will turn off the master switch – because fire is what every driver dreads most – and the next thing he’ll do, if he’s not winded or unconscious or unable, is jump out of the car and get away from it as quickly as possible. The worst things occur when you stay in too long; and that only happens when you can’t get out.
In that shunt with Peter, I was badly winded, I was confused, I didn’t know what this liquid was and I really couldn’t move. I could see the car was steaming and I was thinking, ‘Let’s hope this bleeder doesn’t catch fire, because if it does, I don’t know how quickly I can move.’ And as I thought that, I was also hoping and praying the marshals would get to me quickly and get me out.
There are really three stages to a crash. In the first, you’re still fighting for control, still trying to prevent the crash, even when you know your chances are minimal. That stage continues until you know it is going to happen and there’s nothing at all you can do about it. At the impact, you don’t think at all. Your mind is a blank. From that point until you come to a standstill is stage two: it happens so quickly and so violently there is time neither to think nor to do – you’re in the lap of the gods. There are huge, loud noises, there are wrenches and twists, lurches, bangs, forces twisting you every which way: it’s like being set upon by a gang of thugs in an alley. When you come to a stop finally, which is the third stage, you realise that you’re still alive and functioning – and if you’re not, you don’t – and then your mind can start working again on what to do next.
I don’t think there’s a gap between conscious and unconscious thought during a shunt. It’s largely a question of whether I have time to do any thinking of any kind at all, conscious or unconscious. Even your reflexes dry up. Once you accept that there’s nothing your mind can do, that there are no longer any effective orders it can give, you ride it out.
Perhaps it’s not that you lack the time to think. It may be that you don’t want to think. Perhaps what a driver feels is resignation, or a refusal to acknowledge what is happening to him, or even outrage that it is. I do not sit there helplessly and think about anything outside the car. I’m not looking at my past life or thinking of my family or bills I’ve forgotten to pay. I know something is happening, but I don’t actually think about anything. The body isn’t paralysed; it isn’t that you can’t move or twitch. It’s a form of knowing that nothing your body can do will help.
Meanwhile, however, you observe everything that is going on. Very acutely and almost abstractly. It is happening, and it is happening to you. When I T-boned Peter Gregg, I knew I was going to a split second before I actually did. I kept my eyes wide open and, after I hit him, I saw very clearly that my car was bouncing off him and heading straight for the wall. You don’t think: you register a fact. The fact is in the form of a thought: ‘Oh Christ! I’m going to have a big one, I’m going to hit the bloody wall!’ I hit the wall and registered coming away from the wall and sliding down the embankment and into him again. At that point I knew that, as far as crunching into things went, the crash was finished. I’d been through the worst.
I was lucky that it happened during a practice session and that there were only three cars on the track. During a race, I would have sat there just as helplessly, but I would have registered another fact: that I was going to be hit; someone was going to whack into me. And then likely it would happen again.
What you do when you face a potential crash depends very much on its nature. I had a big one at Donington in 1980. I was testing some new radial tyres and the tread flew off one; one moment I was barrelling down the straight as fast as I could go, the next the car was turning left into the Armco and I went bouncing off it all the way down the straight. It was as if I was glued to the Armco, and I couldn’t get the car to steer at all; it kept pulling into the wall. I knew the car was badly damaged, but I concentrated on riding it out, taking my hands off the wheel so that if it wrenched very quickly, it wouldn’t break my fingers.
It seemed a huge distance down the straight when the tread flew off, but by the time I’d decided what I would try to do, there wasn’t any straight left. I had no brakes because my left wheel was down in front and my right wheel up in back. I was still going fast and coming up to the escape road. Great, I thought, I’ll just slide up the escape road and come to a stop. Unfortunately, there was also a little ditch and then a succession of eight-foot tall concrete posts. It hit me that when I came to the end of the Armco, I was going to turn left and start mowing down the concrete posts.
I put my head down and mowed into the first three or four and the fifth one actually flipped up; it flicked the top of my dashboard and flew straight over my head. From the dashboard down on my car it’s all skin and no open space, but for sure, if I hadn’t ducked, that cement post would have taken my head off. When I got out of the car, the whole of its left side was ripped right off and the front had a huge dent where the post had end-over-ended and gone right over my cockpit. I was just lucky that day. And sometimes a simple reflex will save your life. I didn’t think, ‘Here’s that post coming, now I’d better duck’; I just ducked.
To me, the worst shunts of all are when a throttle gets stuck open. Because when that happens, the shunt is almost bound to be a big one. You know what you have to do: you’ve got to declutch and blow your engine up – anything to get some of the speed off. If you can de-clutch, that stops your back wheels spinning. And if you’ve got time to do that, maybe you have time to flick the kill switch, too. But jamming on the brakes, which is what most of us would do instinctively, is of no use at all. The moment you brake, you lose your steering, and then you inevitably go head first into whatever you’re trying to steer away from.
It happened to me at Zandvoort, in Holland, also in 1980. I was on a really quick lap and had just come out of the right-hander before the Hanserug, which I usually go into a little bit sideways, keeping my foot deep into it, braking at the last possible moment and then steering left to go up the hill. The trouble with corners like that, in which a driver will commit himself very deep, is that if anything goes wrong there is no time or space for him to either get around the corner or do anything to avoid a crash. That day, it was getting towards the close of practice and I went in very deep indeed. When I took my foot off the accelerator, it made no difference at all. The throttle was jammed wide open. What was the point of thinking about avoidance? I was in the fence before I could even consider evasive action. I gave that fence a proper whack.
But the strange thing is, the moment the car came to a rest, I didn’t think what a lucky escape I’d had; I just thought, here it was, the last few minutes of practice and I’d messed up a good lap! My instinct was to jump out of the car and run back to the pits so I could go out in my spare.
Later, you might sit down and think about it. Then you say to yourself, what the hell am I doing running back to my car when I should be running away from it! But I get so worked up and so obsessively concerned with a result, with being well up on the grid, that I’ll brush by people and ignore the danger and do absolutely anything to get that result. It’s a form of blindness, and as long as a driver can keep his mind working that way, with only his place on the grid or in the race counting, he’s all right. It’s when he starts to sit down afterwards and think, ‘Christ! I might have been killed!’ that he ought to start thinking about giving the game up.
The worst crash I ever had was not on a racetrack. My friend Brian McGuire had bought a Ford Thunderbird and we were going to a party in Earl’s Court. The T-Bird is just about as poor-handling a car as you can buy, so Brian should not have tried to out-corner a Lotus Elan. But he did and we just went straight into a brick wall, and from the brick wall, just as straight, into a tree. I took the door handle off with my ribs and went through the windscreen, busting my nose and shoulder.
All right, that time I knew I was seriously hurt. And if you’ve actually injured yourself, in a way that’s easier. You know there’s nothing you can do for yourself; you’re totally in the hands of other people. So in Atlanta I just lay back and let them get on with it. I was in a sort of day-dreamy daze. They put needles in you, cut you out of the metal, and twist your body free from the wreckage. You just go along with whatever they’re doing. You’re a good boy, because it’s their business to look after you now.
So it felt good to walk away from the medical centre. All the drivers had come to see if I was OK, and Les Richter turned up with the good news … they had a spare car for me to keep using. I think I audibly said ‘Oh, fuck,’ which is not good with the good old boys. These things were piles of shit even though the NASCAR boys were saying, ‘Oh, aren’t they honeys? They’re so agile.’ I’m thinking, ‘If they call these things agile, their things must be like Kenworths to race.’
I really didn’t want to do it again.
Then they said, ‘Right, first of all we’ll get you down the local gym. They’ve got a beautiful spa down there, and you can have a nice big spa.’ Not with my dick wrapped in cotton wool and a bow on it, that would get them talking. So I managed to talk my way out of that and headed back to the hotel.
‘Oh you Aussies are so tough.’ If only they knew.
Back in the hotel I’ve got into bed and it looked like someone had had a paint brush and literally painted black stripes on me where the belts were. So that was all right, they were just bruises. Then the phone rings … ‘How are you, Alan? I met you at Long Beach, and I hear you’ve just had a big wreck.’ I could barely get a word in, to Cathy, or Mary, or whoever it was. I uttered acknowledgement of that and she said, ‘Let me come up and look after you.’
Jones’ Law kicked in, because even after I said I was OK and declined as politely as I could she had raced upstairs and knocked on the door. I thought it was someone from the hotel, so I opened the door and there she was. I rushed back and sort of jumped into bed, with the blankets up around my neck. She was giving me the big come on and I’m saying, ‘No. Look, I’m happily married, I’m a Catholic …’ The old fella stayed in his wrapping that night.
Anyway, I survived the night and went out to race on Sunday. They’re all bloody banging door handles and carrying on, but mentally I was out of there. I stayed out of that fight and finished the race down in eighth, way out of danger.
That was my IROC experience and the last time I was ever going to race on an oval. Aside from a couple of Can-Am races in 1979 (for one win and a crash) and a one-off CART race at Road America in 1985, that was pretty much it for me in terms of American racing.
I loved racing in America, I loved the fans, but I hated the ovals. I valued all my limbs and my life too much to race there full-time.