LIFE WAS PRETTY strange back at the end of 1979. My run in the second half of the season had put me firmly in the spotlight, which was both good and bad. It meant I was earning a lot of money and I certainly felt some of the pressure and expectation that was coming my way, but I was dealing with it.
Because the weather in California was so good, I stayed there for the break between seasons. Back in Australia I still wasn’t really on the radar, so there wasn’t much to do there for me, but we had a nice home in a place we liked. The Australian version of 60 Minutes did a program on me around that time, entitled ‘Alan Who?’
They flew over to California and did the interviews with me while I was learning to fly out of Torrance Airport. One of them very stupidly came up on the plane with me, a little Cessna 180. We went for a burn around LA, came back and landed. Relatively safely. I eventually decided that fixed wing was a bit boring, so I got into helicopters and I really enjoyed them.
Anyway, the whole show was about how no-one back home knew who I was. In Europe it was a different story, and the US was somewhere in between. But the 60 Minutes show also proved that things were changing back home; my winning streak was having an impact. Channel Nine – which ran 60 Minutes – was starting to get into Formula One and people were paying attention.
I had a new turbo Porsche with California plates ‘AJ Turbo’, so there was a little bit of wanker in me, but it was still under control I thought. I had a boat that I kept at Marina Del Rey. I don’t know why, because on the coast of California, particularly down around that area, there was nowhere to go. The only place to go was Catalina; the boat wasn’t big enough to get to Mexico.
I started up a business with an old friend of mine who used to live in Melbourne and was now in Los Angeles, and we called it Grand Prix Sunroofs. We had a bunch of Mexicans working for us installing – as you may have guessed – sunroofs.
Kent was my mate’s name, and he was fucking mad. Mad, mad, mad. Had an apartment on the footpath in Manhattan Beach, half an hour from Palos Verdes, and all the sheilas used to skate by. He’d get them up in the apartment pretty easily – it was as if he had a fishing rod. He was a complete lunatic. He’s dead now. But, yeah, funny days.
After all those winters of discontent, I was now finally enjoying my time off. Life was good. Christian was still really a baby and Bev and I were enjoying that too.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was not really enjoying aspects of the travel that came with my life and success. Over winter, we’d go testing at Paul Ricard and it was bloody cold. You couldn’t go onto the track until about ten in the morning, because we had to wait until it dried. Then it used to get dark about four.
You’d then go back to the hotel, and they wouldn’t serve dinner until eight. There would be no cable TV, so it would only be TV in a foreign language. I’m not all that clever, so I don’t speak another language. I never used to read all that much either, so it was not like I cuddled up with a good book. I used to go for a walk. It was all very boring.
But the urge to not travel was starting to grow in me.