I TURNED UP for work for the start of the 1980 season confident but nervous. We were the team all the others had to catch, but that didn’t mean it was going to be easy. The bookies had Gilles Villeneuve favourite for the championship in the Ferrari, but we felt we had the upper hand for a number of reasons.
Patrick Head wasn’t going to let the others catch us though; he was as competitive as me. We had the Ford Cosworth engine, which was good and solid, but more than half the field was using it and it was clearly not as powerful as the Ferrari flat 12 or the Renault turbo, although they did have their own issues.
Ferrari, the reigning champ, had a new car, the 312T5, to race against our FW07B. There were stories going around that the engine was so bulky it made it hard to get the ground effects to work as well as those of us with physically smaller engines. Good.
We also had to pay attention to what was coming from Ligier – remember how fast they were at the start of 1979 – Renault, Brabham, McLaren and, of course, Lotus. There were lots of other changes up and down the field: Alain Prost was starting his grand prix career with McLaren and Carlos Reutemann had joined me at Williams. Carlos was bloody quick – he had won races at both Ferrari and Brabham and spent a year at Lotus before we lured him across.
Instead of going to Paul Ricard, we tested in mid-December in Argentina with the 1979 car updated to FW07B spec. Most of the main teams were there with us and we came away fastest, which meant to our eyes no-one had found a demon tweak yet. I flew back to the US with Mario Andretti, who was on his way back to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, while I went across to Los Angeles, California, and home. When the season started I was again based out of London, but I wasn’t going to stay there until I absolutely had to.
‘Shit, I hate to think what you’re going to do in the new car,’ Mario said – and it stuck in my mind. So Lotus was worried. He knew the FW07B was coming, and while it wasn’t new it had some major improvements.
Testing in a place like Argentina for three or four days is a costly exercise – there is nothing cheap about sending a car, a driver, spares and mechanics 10,000 kilometres by air – but it proved valuable. We were able to dial the car into the circuit and do some very profitable work with Goodyear, who provided our tyres, and thus, when January and the race came along, we could just roll the car out of the trailer and assert our superiority over the rest of the field.
Or so the thinking went. We turned up in Argentina to start the season in the middle of January with a brand new car and it never turned a wheel in anger. The Buenos Aires circuit had quite a long straight after you exit a beautiful right-hander, and the new car was porpoising down the straight, which meant it was just not pointing right. Patrick had moved the centre of gravity of the car back and it didn’t work.
Luckily we left the car that I tested down there as a spare, rather than ship it back to England. So after the first practice session I just said, ‘Hey, give me last year’s car. I’ll race that.’ That was the best thing we ever did. My new teammate Reutemann was Argentinian, so there was a lot of attention on him that weekend, meaning I could avoid the spotlight and do what I wanted and needed to do.
The drivers were now becoming an even more vocal body – and we were all upset at the state of the track. Some were talking of boycotting the race, but that never entered my mind. I was a race driver; I was there to race, not play politics. I could control my own risk. My job was to race cars; it was Frank’s job to deal with that stuff.
Sometimes, though, I got some enjoyment out of the politics, precisely because I simply didn’t give a shit. I’d sit in the meetings and not say a word, then I’d throw a hand grenade into the argument and walk away.
Politics and sport don’t mix. The Frenchman Jean-Marie Balestre had a few manufacturers from Europe on his side, and he was trying to wrest control of the sport from the Formula One Constructors Association – FOCA – which was largely being driven out of the UK by people like Bernie Ecclestone and my old mate Brian Kreisky.
I didn’t know it at the time, but politics and other bullshit was going to leave a bitter taste in my mouth during 1980.
For me, I had one job, to win races. Sitting in meetings talking about bellybuttons was just not me. Fortunately there were enough like me who figured we’d come a long way, the crowd had paid their money and the track was the same for all of us, we just had to use our brains and get on with it.
So race we did. I qualified on pole and led away from the start. The track was breaking up as expected and with all the cars in racing mode they were tearing it up quite a lot. I got some paper in my radiator duct and had to pit to get it removed – the temperature was going off the dial and that wasn’t going to end well. We didn’t have telemetry or radio back then, so I had to make the decision for myself, and with a lot of pointing the crew knew exactly what was needed when I pitted.
In those days to make a pit stop for anything other than tyres meant you were pretty well rooted. I made a decision. We now had a system where the radiators could be repressured easily if they’d lost any water, and we did that and I got going again back in fourth. I managed to pass Laffite and then Villeneuve spun off because he just couldn’t slow himself down for the conditions and I won the race from Nelson Piquet and Keke Rosberg – now there was a podium that told a story of the future.
It was a very rewarding race to win – I had made the decision to make the pit stop to clear the radiator, which I thought had buggered me, and we came back out and dominated. Pole, fastest lap and win … I liked the sound of that.
Mansour Ojjeh, who was running his family business, TAG, was sinking money into Williams at the time. TAG was an interesting business – they had an aviation arm, which distributed planes through the Middle East, as well as a few other technology-based businesses, and later they bought Heuer Watches and rebranded them as TAG Heuer. His younger brother Aziz was in Argentina and was staying with us until after the next round in Brazil. I flew into Brazil with him in his BAC One-Eleven and I was not in a good state. I was a little ill from the night before – read hungover – and I was lying down not thinking about anything, not able to think about anything. We had a really bumpy landing and I thought we were still at 20,000 feet and I shit myself. I thought I was going to die.
We had two weeks to kill. Charlie Crichton-Stuart and I went to a coffee plantation for a bit of a look and we sat there for three days drinking caipirinhas, the national drink, and going into the local villages.
I think maybe I was too relaxed, or that those days had an impact on me, but I wasn’t myself when the race weekend started. I qualified 10th and then was equally as shit in the race, although I did finish third. After the race, the team said I had more fuel in the car than I should have had, so I wasn’t using the accelerator enough. I wasn’t being aggressive enough. They didn’t have telemetry, but the buggers knew, and in their eyes I wasn’t trying hard enough. Frank dubbed it the Mobil Economy Run!
I can’t remember much about my mindset from that weekend, but I do know I was stung by that feeling. It wasn’t going to happen again.
There was more of a shitfight in Brazil from the drivers. Jody Scheckter wanted to boycott the race well before we even got there. The Interlagos track was bumpy and the safety facilities were certainly below par. As it turned out, this was the last time I would ever race there. In terms of layout, it is one of the finest circuits there is, yet it is far from my favourite track. Getting there through city traffic is hell and, once you’re there, the organisation leaves something to be desired, which is a polite way of saying it’s chaotic.
But that’s not all. It is also fiercely punishing physically, as Interlagos is one of the very few circuits around the world that runs counter-clockwise. This makes it very hard on the neck, because we are used to taking the g-forces the other way. There are a lot of fast corners, which puts the strain on the body, and after about fifteen minutes out on the track you become acutely conscious of it. It is the only circuit, for instance, at which I need a masseur; if he wasn’t there to attack me for twenty minutes after each session, my neck would stiffen up completely and I’d be useless. The neck muscles, hugely built up to race clockwise, were simply not up to the strain.
South Africa’s Kyalami, with its thatched-hut ranch and insufferably slow service, its icy pool in which only the bravest swim, its tennis courts where the Formula One family play, is high on everyone’s list of favourite circuits, and it was up next.
I liked going to South Africa. It was a good place to relax – and you could order your meals in English. The circuit is interesting, challenging and fast, and at more than 1500 metres above sea level it was perfect for the turbo-engines. Renault was comfortably on pole – as they were at Interlagos, 800 metres above sea level, a month earlier.
The secret to the track was to get the car going as fast as you could down the long straight. I can remember the days when you had to get your car set up just right to take the approach corner, Leeukop, flat out after clearing The Esses. With the 1980 car that task was a lot easier, but it had plenty of other challenges too. Fast tracks carry danger, as Prost and Marc Surer found out in separate crashes in practice – both broke bones and missed races.
I qualified eighth and got a tremendous start and was actually leading the two Renault turbos down the straight as far as the bridge, and then they passed me. I was third and then Laffite passed me and that is where I stayed for 30 laps until the gearbox bearings gave way and that was that for me.
I was not in the best of moods, disappointed at not finishing. I wanted to get out of the track fast and told Frank as much. But he wanted me to go and shake hands, smile and sign autographs at the Leyland hospitality tent. Reluctantly I agreed; after all it was part of what I was paid to do.
Anyway, I went down to the tent and it was surrounded by barbed wire, cyclone fences and probably machine-gun nests as well. The guy on the gate said, ‘You can’t come in here.’
So I turned on my heels to go when someone inside noticed me and ushered me in. I wasn’t in the frame of mind to be doing hospitality. It wasn’t going to end well when a drunk car dealer came up and ‘Hey, boy, you blew your car up, eh?’ After a few more words and a stumble here and there, I just whacked him a couple of times and he hit the deck. Guards appeared from everywhere, and I left. When I woke the next day I was pretty worried about the fall-out, but when I picked up the paper my worry was over – ‘Drunk Attacks Sportsman In Hospitality Tent.’ It wasn’t quite that way, but it saved us all embarrassment.
Renault’s René Arnoux now had two wins in a row and led the championship, but I figured the two high-altitude tracks would be the Renault’s best tracks. The next race was at Long Beach, just near my home, a track I really enjoyed. This weekend wasn’t going to be one of them.
It remains for me a race marred by the serious accident which paralysed my old friend and teammate Clay Regazzoni. His brakes failed when doing 180 mph. For some reason, too, neither my car nor Carlos’s seemed properly set up for Long Beach. Nelson Piquet in his Brabham was the man to watch; he was on pole and a second and a half faster than me. I had qualified fifth, Carlos seventh.
It was a race marked by numerous retirements and crashes. Some ten laps in, I was lying third, with Piquet in front and Depailler behind him. After a prolonged duel, I managed to overtake Patrick, but I seemed unable to do anything to catch up with Nelson, and two-thirds of the way through the race while lapping Bruno Giacomelli, he went into the side of my car and put me out of the race. It was after this race that I began to sense the threat posed to us by Piquet, who now led the championship alongside Arnoux. I also decided to have a few words with the new boy Jack O’Malley, as we used to call Bruno.
Not to worry though, because a month later the European season was about to start with the Belgian Grand Prix. This was my favourite time of the year. It was just more organised, and easier on everybody. There aren’t those long flights; you get to the track on a Thursday and you have some chance of getting home by Sunday night; you get a rhythm going in your life and feel you have a base of sorts. I’m one of those people who always feels better if I know where I’m going to be and when.
After South Africa, we did a lot of testing for Goodyear. In fact, during the season, we tested at nearly every circuit, sometimes months before its grand prix. And, as we tested for Goodyear, we were able to sort our car out, too. All of it was a help.
Our testing duties were split though. Carlos did the Zolder test with the team and I went to Paul Ricard. When I got to Zolder for the race, the cars didn’t have any front wings, because the Ligier didn’t have front wings, and they were pretty good cars. Carlos thought that because they were winged cars, the front wings were offsetting the air going into the actual wing part of the car. He overthought things. He tested without the front wings and he was happy. But of course when he was testing, he was working on new tyres all the time, so when the tyres were worn a little it was a different story.
Zolder is on everyone’s list of disliked circuits. Sandy, wet, inhospitable, it is many miles away from civilisation. At the time of the Belgian Grand Prix, the great battle between the warring authorities of FISA and FOCA was out in the open. Everyone’s mood was sour, and few will forget the belligerent press conference Balestre held on race day: the sport would bend to his will, he implied, or he would force it to do so.
Though we were all watching the quarrel looming, my mind was only on the race and getting a result after two failures. During qualifying, however, I seemed to be unable to do much better than third or fourth in my race car, and finally, not far from the end, it simply broke down. I raced back to the pits to get into the spare car, only to find that Carlos was out in it. I admit to being pissed off at this, but Frank waited until Carlos had made the best use of his fresh tyres; then he put on another new set for me, put five gallons into the tank and off I went: to pole position! Satisfying, that!
But we had had serious problems with understeering throughout practice and I thought the race wasn’t going to be kind to us. Didier Pironi had been just behind us in his Ligier all through qualifying and when it came to the race, he got a superb start and walked away with it. I couldn’t get near him, I had to battle ever-increasing understeer to save second spot … which I did. As Carlos took third, the result was good for Williams, and I have no complaints about the six points I picked up for myself.
But I was pretty annoyed. Without the front wings, we had no way to control the understeer that appeared as the tyres were wearing out. I thought the front wings were really good for the balance; you can’t just change the dynamics of a car that massively. If it was designed with wings, it needed wings and just because others weren’t using them didn’t mean you shouldn’t. It’s the bloody purple-pole syndrome. We did run some races later in the year without wings, but we understood it by then and had tested it properly.
Monaco was next, and I did not like it any more than before. It’s not just the poseurs and their yachts, though they’re bad enough; it’s not just the aggro getting to and from the pits; it’s the race itself, which is just a bloody procession.
I qualified third, made a good start and got into second place as I went up the hill, missing the shambles taking place behind me. I was surprised how slowly Pironi was going, and how he was holding me up. I was sitting there just waiting for him to make a mistake. Unfortunately for me, before he had a chance to make one, my gearbox blew up and I had to coast into the pits.
It was another disappointment, because I felt certain I could have won that race. Despite my dislike of Monaco, I would dearly have loved to have won there. Every point was going to count in the championship and here we were in three of the last four races watching the race’s end from the pits.
I had 19 points up and trailed Nelson by three and René by two. The scoring system, of course, was 9-6-4-3-2-1 points for the first six in each race.
According to the history books, we didn’t go to Spain for the next grand prix. We didn’t race there because one particular Frenchman decided we wouldn’t. We raced and I won – but there were no points on offer. The bitter taste lingers to this day.
There were warning signals flying from every flagpole at Jarama and the battle for the control of the sport was about to get real. Jean-Marie Balestre was not a nice man; he was a megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur, and as far as I was concerned the less I had to do with him, the better.
In one corner we had Balestre and FISA, the body that governed the sport. There were three teams in that camp, all vehicle manufacturers with Formula One teams – Ferrari, Renault and Alfa Romeo. That left 12 out of 15 teams affiliated with the Formula One Constructors Association (FOCA), headed by Bernie Ecclestone, who owned Brabham, in the other corner.
Balestre had announced a compulsory drivers briefing, but the lawyers for our FOCA teams said it wasn’t in the rule book and we didn’t need to go. So we didn’t from Belgium onwards. For that we were all given a $2000 fine, which we refused to pay. On the day before practice was meant to begin, Balestre decided to suspend the racing licences for 15 of us, me included.
There was a bit of argy-bargy going on between all the parties, including the race organisers, who had the paying public and even bigger paying sponsors to appease. On the Friday morning Balestre declared the race would not be sanctioned – but would go ahead.
It was a heated day of practice, that’s for sure. First, there were some teams who were going to go out and practise and some who weren’t – in the first session only Renault, Ferrari and Alfa Romeo practised. Then when all the FISA officials were escorted from the track, we practised and they sat out – along with Osella, in its first F1 season, which was worried about other repercussions. The ones who refused to race were known as the ‘loyalists’ and the rest of us were branded as ‘rebels’. Sounded like something out of Star Wars.
It was a stupid quarrel that came close to wrecking the sport and took more than a year to sort out.
Come race day, Osella had found a way to circumvent possible FISA sanctions and lined up, but the FISA loyalists were there with their cars watching. Not racing. We were there to race, and race we did.
For me, it was a lucky victory. I had three cars in front of me from the start, but all of them either broke down or crashed, and I ultimately won the race. To this day, I still can see no way in which the Spanish Grand Prix was not valid for the championship and, from a driver’s point of view, I know that just as much effort, preparation and risk went into that race as any other.
To not get the nine points was a bitter, disheartening blow, confirming my low opinion of politics in the sport and my even lower opinion of Balestre.
As far as I was concerned, I went there on the Thursday, I went there and practised on the Friday, I qualified on the Saturday. I got on to the grid. I did the start. I won the race. I was presented with a trophy by King Carlos, and I went home with the Spanish Grand Prix trophy. But Balestre made it null and void, because of this bloody fight between FOCA and FIA that no-one understood.
And who knows why he chose Spain? They probably didn’t have a seat for his wife or something.
Balestre was heavily backing the factory teams and perhaps it was because he knew that those of us with the Ford engines were winning the races and that his beloved Renaults were dropping off the pace. He used to call Lotus, Williams or anybody that didn’t have a manufacturer behind them, garagists. They were just little garagists, operating out of a little garage somewhere. Whereas the other boys were big manufacturers. The garagists were essentially FOCA and aligned with Bernie Ecclestone, and to that mad Frenchman we needed to be defeated.
Bernie has got an ego, but is no fool. Balestre had a bigger ego, but he was an absolute fool. Up until this point in my career, he’d just been a bombastic tool opening his mouth at drivers’ briefings and proving how little he knew about car racing. Now he was a major embarrassment for the sport and for the life of me I couldn’t work out why the Europeans would align themselves with such a man.
Knowing that Renault had backed Balestre over Spain and that the French had combined with the Italians to put the season, and my title, into jeopardy, I went to France in a fighting mood. I not only wanted badly to win that race; I wanted my win to be a personal gesture of defiance. The Ligiers were far superior in qualifying, with Laffite and Pironi (always a dangerous rival) first and third on the grid; I was fourth.
I made a good start, raced against Arnoux and Pironi in the early stages and got past them. I settled down into second place and started to haul in Laffite. Eventually Laffite’s front tyres began to go off and I managed to pass him and win. It was one of my most satisfying races ever – there was the emotional pleasure of beating the French on their own ground, but also, I think I drove one of my best ever races.
I had great delight in getting the Union Jack from one of the team as I was pulling up – and there it was flying high above the crowd that swamped me. Then I got to the podium and Balestre was there. I told the organisers I was not going on the podium as long as he was there. Because of the TV coverage they couldn’t afford a long argument, so they kicked him off so I could get my trophy. I knew there would be consequences, but I didn’t care. I didn’t like him and I wanted to make a statement.
There was also a comical scene when they brought a horse up to the winner’s podium at the end of the race – which I felt looked a bit like Balestre. There I was with this wreath around my neck and the usual celebrations going on and I thought, ‘That’s funny, bringing a horse to the podium.’ Then they asked me if I would sit on it, and I said, ‘Not on your life. I don’t want to sit on a bloody horse.’ What I didn’t know was that I’d won the horse! Well, after my lap of honour, I was having a beer or two in the motorhome, winding down, when this man came back and said, ‘Mr Jones, where would you like me to tie your horse up?’ I thought the man was joking, so I said, ‘Just tie it up to the bumper!’
Ten minutes later, I emerged from the motorhome and there was this horse tied up to the bumper as instructed! Eventually, I had to ship it from Marseilles to Holland, then from Holland to London and then eventually back to Australia; it did a few kilometres, that horse! But I reckon it won the lottery. If Jody Scheckter had won it, it would be pasturing in a Monaco penthouse, and, if a Frog had won it, it would have wound up on a plate! Instead, it made it to Australia as a thoroughbred’s companion on the plane.
We all know that what’s good for the goose … The British Grand Prix was next, and what we’d done to the French at Ricard they could do to us at Brands Hatch. When the two Ligiers qualified first and second, we thought it possible the French would indeed take their revenge.
Luckily for us, the Ligiers turned out to have a problem with their wheels. Pironi started well and was leading handsomely when his tyre started coming off the rim. That left Laffite in the lead, and I think he made a tactical error. He knew his tyre was going down – he could have stopped and changed it, but he opted to soldier on. The inevitable happened: coming into Hawthorn, the tyre came completely off the rim and he went off the track. Caution is part of the driver’s stock of skills.
I spent most of the race with Piquet on my tail, and he kept me honest in a very good race. You come out of a corner, look in the mirror, and you think, ‘Oh, I’ve gained a bit,’ or ‘I’ve lost a bit.’ That’s getting back to what I said about there being no replacement for laps under your belt: because when you see the other bloke has lost ground on where he was the lap before, you know that all you’ve got to do is what you did the lap before. Then you should be right.
After Laffite had dropped out, I kept the lead handsomely and won the grand prix I most wanted to win. England had become a second home for me; at home you like to prove you’re a winner. I now had a six-point lead in the championship too over my fellow garagist, the rebel Nelson Piquet.
At this stage of the season things were settling down and we knew who our challengers were … not that I was thinking about anything other than just winning the next race. Nelson was going to be my biggest challenger: he was fast and consistent and was banking points. The Ligiers and Renaults were fast, but they weren’t finishing consistently and that was hurting them. No-one else was a chance.
But there was always the looming spectre of Jean Mary, as I called Balestre. There was talk about Watkins Glen getting cancelled. Would I need that race? This is why I never did anything other than worry about each race as it came.
Germany and the Hockenheimring was a bit disappointing for me. It was worse for Patrick Depailler – he was killed there while testing in the lead-up to the race when he went off at the Ostkurve after the suspension failed in his Alfa Romeo. It was not long after this that they changed that corner to slow it down, which altered the nature of the track quite a lot. I felt danger was part of why we were there, so I never cried at a death on the track, I just got on with it. I mean, if you start to worry about that you shouldn’t be there.
Drivers sometimes joke about death and people might think we are cold bastards. Patrick bought it last week. What does that mean? He bought it. We knew what it means. We seemed callous, but it was our way of dealing with his death. Or, potentially, our own.
Neither Patrick nor any other driver I’ve known who died haunts me. They are not ghosts. Nor are they forgotten. But when I went to Hockenheim after Patrick’s death, I had a good look at the corner where he crashed. I analysed it. I knew I would be coming up against the same corner and I wanted to know where and how he lost it. And I decided if they didn’t put some catch-fencing up there, I wasn’t racing. The least we can do is learn from what went wrong for another driver.
It’s only right that death in racing should be talked about, if only because more deaths could be avoided – by stronger cars, safer circuits, quicker medical attention, better marshalling. The cars do get safer and safer, but death is part of our job and you can’t pretend it does not exist.
As a driver, you need to have confidence and even a misplaced sense of belief that it can’t happen to you – but it can’t be a blind confidence. As for fear – if it gets to that stage, it is time to pack up your gear and head back to the farm.
In 1980 Hockenheim was still a difficult track to get the set-up right; there was plenty of high-speed stuff to master and the tight and twisty stadium section, which was critical because of the passing opportunities. I quite enjoyed the track, and I liked it even more when I got pole position right at the very end of practice. In the race we just couldn’t match the straight-line speed and acceleration of the Renaults and I spent 26 laps watching Jabouille run away from me in a straight line only for me to close in under brakes and through the chicanes.
Then his engine blew and the lead was mine. But what the gods give, they also take away, and I suffered a puncture with only ten laps to go. But this was one of many places where the discipline and spirit of the Williams crew showed to advantage: they did a lightning tyre change in the pits, I was able to come back onto the track in third place and I kept that to the end, and the four points that came with it. But the disappointment remained. Victory had been in the bag. Another proof of the old adage that you have not won until you see the chequered flag.
I finished one spot in front of Nelson, which extended my championship lead ever so slightly, and now Williams was well out in front in the constructors’ title. People always think Frank would have been happy with that, and I am sure he was, but if we were doing well there we were also doing well in the drivers’ championship, and that is from where prize money and start money is allocated.
I had won the two previous Austrian grands prix, so I was quite looking forward to heading back to Osterreichring. The truth is though that while I find the circuit very beautiful, it is also one of the most dangerous, and, while the circuit is very quick, it is also subject to unpredictable weather. So I didn’t really like it all that much, despite my success.
As you might expect for a track up in the Styrian mountains, the Renaults were very quick and beat me to the front row, but again I was the best of the non-turbo cars. I made a very good start and led for the first two laps, but the Renault turbos just hauled me in and passed me on the straight as though I were parked. Eventually, Arnoux’s tyres went off, but Jabouille still had an excellent lead.
And here I think we made a mistake. The pits didn’t really keep me well-enough informed of the progress I was making against Jabouille. I was catching up – not spectacularly, but slowly – and eventually, he beat me to the finish by less than a second. If I’d been told a bit earlier, I might have launched an attack and quite possibly won. As it was, another six points helped consolidate my position – Piquet could do no better than fifth, while the Ligiers were now virtually out of the championship.
The Dutch Grand Prix was a complete disaster for me. I was a bit twitchy because everyone was going round saying, ‘Hello champ!’ There was only 11 points in it with four races left, and that wasn’t a big enough margin to have any confidence.
I was highly annoyed at everyone’s presumption. Goodyear wanted me to sit on a pile of tyres with my thumbs up, getting their advertisements ready for the next year. I kept on telling them they were being ridiculous. ‘If I don’t finish the race and Piquet wins,’ I said, ‘that’s going to make the title very, very tight.’ And so it transpired. Perhaps because I was thinking of the possibility, because it was making me nervy. I could see all the Goodyear people tearing up their photos and their copy and replacing me with Nelson Piquet.
In this game, as long as anyone is in with a mathematical chance, nothing is really over. So many things can go wrong. I knew I wasn’t champ, but the rest of the world didn’t seem to want to recognise that fact. So when people came up and called me champ, I’d glare at them. They weren’t thinking; they didn’t realise they were putting extra pressure on me. If I didn’t become champion, the same people would be saying, ‘Oh, old AJ really blew that one, didn’t he!’
A driver creates his own pressure. But he is the best judge of what is weighing on him and how to cope with it. That doesn’t prevent many drivers from making something out of nothing and making additional pressure for themselves – and I was not immune to that. We come in different types. There are philosophical drivers who take things as they come; there are others who will hit the roof at the drop of a hat. Even the calmest driver will have a day when things upset him that normally wouldn’t at all. The strain is in trying to be the same person every time you’re on the track.
The sort of person I am on the track, however, is totally different from my other personality. On the farm for instance, any resemblance between myself and a racing driver was pure coincidence. I was relaxed and couldn’t care about anything in the world. But when I got up and had to race that day, I was a driver again. I approached my whole day differently. I was a different being and, as I have said, not necessarily a nice one.
As if to prove me right and the rest wrong, I had a thoroughly nasty shunt in practice when my throttle stuck coming into the Hanzerug.
Come the race I was fourth on the grid and made a tremendous start, passing the Renault on the outside going into the first right-hander. At the end of the first lap I was two seconds clear in the lead. But then, coming back to the Hanzerug, I let the car drift a bit too wide and went off. When I came off I hit a rut, the car sank down and damaged the side skirts. These skirts were ceramic devices attached to the side pods of the car to maintain the vacuum. They had little springs that allowed them to move up and down to compensate for body roll. When you break one, you lose a lot of downforce and the car is very unpleasant to drive. They were one of Patrick’s innovations. I pitted for some skirts, but my race and my points were gone. And, as I’d feared, Piquet won the race and was now only two points behind me with three races to go.
Imola, which came next, was definitely not one of my favourite circuits and that weekend it was high on my list of places to hate. The Brabham was going very well indeed and I only qualified fifth, but was ahead of Nelson on the grid, although I just couldn’t match him for race pace. Gilles had a huge crash in the new turbo-charged Ferrari. Jody had crashed in practice and announced he was retiring, but Gilles, who I always said was never going to die in bed, kept charging on and raced the old 12-cylinder car. He had a tyre failure at Tosa and went head first into the Armco, tearing his car to pieces but somehow walking away. It was a bad season for Ferrari – they did not get one podium finish, after starting the season as favourites.
I had an ordinary start and dropped back to seventh, but Carlos led the field away until his clutch started giving him trouble. As people struck tyre issues and other problems, Nelson eventually walked into the lead and I had to fight my way to second nearly 30 seconds behind him.
So now, for all the ‘champ’ talk, we headed to North America with two races to round out the season trailing Nelson by one point. Bloody wished I’d studied harder at school sometimes, because now people were throwing maths around about the race to the title. Here is essentially how it was going to work.
We could count our best five finishes from the first seven rounds – should have been eight but for Spain – and that meant I had 28 (instead of the 37 I should have had) there to Nelson on 25, and we both had two retirements so we had no points to drop from the first half. Then we could count our best five finishes from the final seven races. Heading into Canada, I only had one retirement for the second half and Nelson had none, so we were both looking at dropping the points from one or two races to win the title.
So I had my retirement in Holland and the third place at Germany as my worst two races – so potentially I could drop four points. Nelson had a fourth and fifth to drop if he was going OK, so five points in total. Effectively, in my eyes, we were equal and that meant my task was simple – just win the bloody races.
So first of all, finish. Drive on instinct, go for the gaps when they appear and don’t second-guess yourself. Don’t take unnecessary risks, just do what comes naturally. I was calm and in control and I went to Montreal in a marvellous and serene mood, absolutely full of confidence. I was quickest on the first day, quickest on the second morning, and then – out of the blue, literally – Piquet found an extra second and a half! That surprised everybody, to put it mildly.
In those days, you could run a couple of chassis at a race meeting and swap between them as you needed. Nelson’s car for that qualifying session was bent, no doubt. We think it had a trick with the combustion and they had to use a special fuel to stop it detonating. I wasn’t too concerned because I knew he’d have to race in a car that was significantly slower.
So we lined up for the race alongside each other, the two title contenders on the front row. I always used to stop on the grid after the formation lap and do a couple of burnouts to leave a bit of rubber on the road, then when I came around to take the start, I’d make sure my rear tyres were on that rubber. I lined it up well and got a pretty good start – if you find the footage you can see I was spot on and Nelson wasn’t. He got wheelspin when he changed into second, and I was away.
In Montreal, after the start, you have a series of corners and, if you want to go through those corners flat, as you should, you have to take exactly the right line. The start at Montreal will always be questioned by some people, but here’s my version – and it’s the truth. I out-dragged Piquet and, as far as I was concerned, I was in the lead and had the right to choose my line. If you get even half a wheel in front of someone else, you have a right to take your own line; it’s up to the man behind to look out for you. If I’m behind someone – it could be the slowest driver on the circuit or the fastest – and I try to out-brake him and he cuts me off, that’s his right and it’s up to me to back off. (If you look at a restart of Montreal, you’ll see that Piquet did exactly the same thing to Pironi, only Pironi had the brains to back off. He knew there were another 75 laps to go and that nobody wins a grand prix on the first lap.)
So in Montreal, turn 1, lap 1, I was in the lead and I couldn’t see Nelson alongside me, so I took the line I needed to get through those corners as fast as possible. This wasn’t a bluff; I could not see him. He didn’t back off and we touched, which surprised me. It bounced him around a bit and kicked off a spectacular multi-car shunt. I had my rear engine cover, I think, come off, but apart from that, I was happy to continue. I opened up a lead only to be confronted by a red flag at the end of the lap. Bugger.
I’d never had what was essentially a start-line shunt at that point. If it’s a gamble, bugger it, let the other man through: there’s always time left to have a go at him. If you’re in the last five laps, that’s different; then you have to have a big, aggressive go at him. But early on, you have to say to yourself, ‘Frank didn’t fly the car and all those mechanics all the way to Canada for you to wipe the car out on the first corner.’
Aggression is necessary, but uncontrolled aggression won’t help anyone win grands prix. Yet despite the fact that every driver knows this, there are still some drivers who seem prone to accidents. Look at Jean-Pierre Jarier in Interlagos the previous year: he had a five-hour lead and still went off. If all the cars had spun off where he did, that would have been different. But he was the only one that did – and someone else won that race.
If my lead is big enough, or if I have any doubts of any kind, I back off. I’ll have put a lot of effort into building that lead, and I know if I need to, I can always build it up again. To win a race by two seconds is as good as winning it by forty. There were many races in 1980 where I backed off and did slow gear changes; I knew that whoever was lying second could get close to me, but the car had enough to rebuild the time I was losing. I concentrated instead on conserving the car, not over-revving it, not wearing out my brakes or tyres.
The smart driver plays each lap as it comes, and the really good ones win races in the slowest times, not the quickest. Unfortunately, I dearly loved having a go. Nothing pleased me more. Psychologically, I didn’t like being on pole. Inside me, I think I preferred being on the second row so I could work someone over. It was a justification for driving that little bit harder.
Necessarily, you have occasional run-ins with other drivers. I never actually whacked one, but I had been mightily tempted to do so. I had that set-to with Bruno Giacomelli at Long Beach. He knew he was being lapped and he should have made it easier for me to pass. Bruno knew Piquet was leading the race, because Piquet had just gone past him: he could either screw me or make the whole thing neutral by moving over. I tried to outbrake him, and he just turned into me – which should not have happened since I was lapping him, he should have just let me pass. I had a go at him after that and brought it up at a drivers’ meeting later.
Or there was the other side of the boot when I left my braking too late once and had to scream off up the escape road, which happened to be the entrance to the pits, and ruined a lap for Elio De Angelis. Afterwards, I apologised. It was my fault. When I said I was sorry, he questioned my motives. He said, ‘Are you sure that’s what happened – you just left your braking too late?’ That was like a red rag to a bull. If I had the decency to apologise, he ought not to have questioned it.
So now we have to do the start again. For a driver, the sensation at the start is very different. He is concentrating, he is composing his mind. I had a process. I walked to my car and climbed in, knowing that I would not be getting out until my race was over. Once in the car, my effort was to try to relax, so that when the five-minute board is shown, I am completely at ease. The greater the tension, the greater the need for calm. At Montreal, fighting for the World Championship with the only man who could beat me sitting beside me, that was tension.
I used to play a game with myself. When the five-minute sign came up, I would say ‘cinque minuti’ and start counting down, or just counting, in all sorts of languages. It was a deliberate form of distraction from what is going on around me. I was no longer looking around at what was going on, I was getting my mind into that first corner.
The start of a race is neither joyful nor frightening. It is a commitment. I was there because I chose to be there. I do not sit in my car wondering what I’m doing there or wishing to get out; nor do I think, ‘Gee, this is great, I’m really enjoying this.’ I simply go through whatever is necessary to get the best result. And that means going through a drill with myself.
For instance, I tried to leave the car in neutral for as long as I could, because if a driver puts it into first too soon and keeps blipping his accelerator, the clutch will burn out. By going through a drill, I am actually starting the race before the light turns green.
Mentally, I am thinking all the time, ‘What might give me an advantage?’ At the re-start of the race in Montreal in 1980, all I was focused on was getting my car to sit exactly on the tyre marks I’d left from my practice and my first starts. Piquet drove up and put his wheels between his tracks and I got the better start … again.
As the outsider might gather, the start puts a terrible strain on both car and driver, and it’s my job to keep that strain to the minimum. I leave the car in neutral until the red light comes on; at that point I still have ten seconds to get into first gear. If you don’t get excited or flustered, that’s plenty of time. The five minutes of waiting for that first positive act – getting into gear – feels like a month. Like everyone else, I tend to think I’ve left getting into first too late. The truth is, it’s a fine line between over-revving, which will wreck your clutch, and under-revving and stalling. By the time you’ve thought through all the variables, there’s little time to have butterflies.
I used to spend that long five minutes, for instance, taking careful note of where the other cars were and guessing what each driver was likely to do. My aim was to outguess them. I think, behind me is so-and-so, he’s going to try to scream up between myself and the wall; so I move the car fractionally closer to the wall to close up the gap.
I didn’t check the drivers in front of me before the start. I simply concentrated on the lights. It’s like keeping your eye on the golf ball: you’re not supposed to be looking where you’re aiming, but at what you’re hitting. Of course, as soon as you line up your car, you take note of where you’d like to go. In every start, there’s an ideal position to be in. And, as soon as the lights change, my eyes come right off them and I go as fast as I can into the position I have decided to take up. If I feel I’ve done a good start, but I’m aware that someone behind me has done an even better one, well that’s his bad luck: I put my car where it’s going to make him wait, because that is my right.
But a start is forever fluid – there are many factors outside of your control that change what you had planned. You need to be able to think quickly, rely on reflexes and make judgements on the value of a risk or an opportunity. You will not win a race on the start or the first lap, but you sure can lose one.
Knowing what you can and can’t do is instinct. A good start simply means one in which you’ve got into the position you chose. If you are heading for a gap between the two cars ahead of you, you must actually be there already, so that they can see you out of the corners of their eyes and can no longer shut you off. The tyres are wide, the cars are quick: to pass someone or sneak through a gap is not a matter of speed, but of spoiling your opponent’s manoeuvre. You have to position your car in such a way that he is the one who has to yield. When he backs off, you automatically get that little extra bit of speed that enables you to overtake him. You’ve taken away his line and established yours.
From the outside, a start may look like an almighty scramble. From the inside – at least in my day, when we were lined up two abreast – it was not so different from being on a motorway. The track is about three lanes wide and nothing obstructs your vision. What is more difficult is making the instant decisions that someone else’s move may force on you. I’ve gone for lots of gaps that have closed up, and I’ve also been blocked and seen a gap open up before me. Suddenly there’s this great big space in front of you and you can drive right through it! Afterwards, people say what a great start you made, but in fact it was just easy.
A driver has just enough peripheral vision to make this sort of decision. I worked on the theory that if I can’t actually see them alongside me, then they were not there. If they were a quarter way into me, they didn’t exist; if they’re alongside me and I could see them, they were there. Even at the speeds we were going and with all the confusion of a start, you can always sense another car alongside your cockpit.
Just their presence, however, doesn’t mean that I was going to give way. I could still try a bit of bluff and pretend I’m going to take my own line regardless. It quite often worked. The bloke thinks, ‘Christ! He hasn’t seen me,’ and it’s he who backs off. But the good drivers stick to their guns and if you see another car alongside you, you are the one who is going to come off second best if you touch.
After the shunt, Nelson along with a few others ran back to the pits to jump into their spare cars, which were now being warmed up as the debris was being cleared. The only problem for Nelson was that he now had to race his qualifying car and that was going to be interesting. In the race, they couldn’t get away with using the ‘special’ fuel, but we didn’t know if they’d changed the engine or not.
On the second start it was the same again, only this time there was no contact between Nelson and me, but he almost hit Didier Pironi in the same corner. I led the opening two laps from Didier and Nelson … but then that qualifying car came into its own. The next lap he was second, and then he was first, he passed me like he was driving a turbo-car … they hadn’t changed the engine!
On the twenty-third lap, his engine blew. Then I knew for sure that, as long as I conserved the car, the championship was mine if I won, which I was pretty sure I could do when they put up a board telling me Pironi had been penalised for jumping the start. Me winning and Nelson not taking a point was the only scenario where the title would be settled in that race.
This was the only time in my Formula One career I can remember going into a fully conservative mode. I didn’t need to race Didier, so when he challenged I let him through and all I had to do was keep Carlos behind me and finish within 60 seconds of Didier, which I did.
I was pretty sure Carlos wouldn’t pass me, but as I learnt next season that was the kind of assumption I shouldn’t make, but I did make sure I kept him far enough behind so as not to be any sort of threat.
Didier did finish first, but with his penalty he dropped back to third and I won both the race and, as the calculator told me, the championship.
I hadn’t gone into the weekend thinking about anything other than winning the race; if I did that the other stuff could sort itself out and I didn’t have to worry about calculators. When I saw Nelson as a steaming mess beside the road with his fragile qualifying car and I was told about Didier’s penalty, I knew what I had to do. Just keep it on the island.
As a racer, it is not easy to drop back from 100 per cent and conserve. I wasn’t an endurance racer and I didn’t race compromised touring cars; I was in the most highly tuned racing car in the world. And when I was in it, we were at our best when we were going for it, not playing lap times. It wasn’t easy.
I’d never been in that situation before. I’d never had to play the numbers to win a World Championship. It was a bit pointless saying, ‘I’m a racer. I’m getting on with it.’ I didn’t need to win by a minute. I just needed to win.
In the modern era, they just push a few buttons and the car looks after it all. The engine’s computer changes everything to conserve the engine and the gear changes are all made in safety mode. In 1980, that computer was my brain. When you’ve been taking the same lines, braking at the same spot, accelerating at the same spot for many laps in both practice and the race, and then you consciously ease off a little bit, you’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to get into a new groove, a new mark, a new reference point. I didn’t back off all that much. I still kept doing reasonable lap times. I might have short-shifted a little and pulled the brake marker back in my head a metre or two. I just had to make sure everything was OK.
When I saw the chequered flag I was quite emotional. I would dearly have loved for my father to be there to experience that with me. Mum was living in Melbourne, but it wasn’t the same without Dad. This was the culmination of something I had been working on since I was 13. I started crying in my helmet on the cool-down lap. I remember thinking, ‘Jesus, pull yourself together. You cannot go back with tears.’
The feeling was and still is indescribable. There is an emotional release that only comes when the chequered flag waves. You know a few laps from home that you’ve got it. But you also know that motorsport is a cruel mistress and she can take it all away very quickly. The chequered flag mostly means that mistress is under control, and with no intervention from Balestre this weekend, no-one was taking this away.
Back in the pits the team was into it already. Remember, this team was really only three years old and we had conquered the world.
That weekend I did what now seems a silly thing. I had raced in Simpson overalls all year as I had pretty much done for a while – remember I shared a driveway with Bill Simpson. On the Saturday Yves Morizot, who ran Stand 21, which makes equipment for drivers, had brought over two pairs of green overalls, all badged up for me. Because they were green to match the car, I tried them on and used them in a session and I was quickest on the Saturday. I thought, ‘Geez, these overalls are quick,’ and I decided to race with them.
It was absolute stupidity, not thinking that poor Bill had supplied me with overalls for a long time, and then, I won the World Championship in someone else’s gear. Here I am on the podium with photographs all over the world wearing Stand 21 overalls. You can imagine how that went over with Bill. No more free Simpson overalls.
I went back to the hotel, and I remember dancing in the shower and singing the Queen song We Are the Champions but with a little tweak to the lyrics: ‘I am the champion. I am the champion …’ Then we all met down in the ballroom which Mansour had organised. His family owned most of Canadair that made the Challenger private jet, so this was a big weekend for him even without the championship win.
In that space of time, he had the walls covered in photographs, framed with non-reflective glass. How many people it would have taken and how much money it would have cost to do that in the space of a couple of hours, I don’t know. But it was very impressive. The next morning I woke up with a very sore head and Mansour offered us one of his jets, ‘Take the jet. Go wherever you want.’ Charlie and I looked at it and then tried to work out where to go.
At that stage, I was seeing Dominique, a Penthouse pet of the year, who came to most races, but she was married to a New York copper, so I had to be a little bit careful. Beverley was back in our London home with Christian, but I wasn’t going there with Miss Penthouse.
First step was to drop Dominique home, so New York. We had cucumber sandwiches and some champagne on the plane and flew to New York. I think we must have taxied to the wrong spot after we landed. This big New York copper came up and started abusing people in the plane.
It was a shemozzle on the plane, but Miss Penthouse got off and then Charlie and I looked at each other and said, ‘Where do we go now?’ In hindsight, we should have just gone down to Miami for a couple of days or something. Anyway, we couldn’t make up our minds, so we flew to Elmira, where the next race was going to be at Watkins Glen. It’s a nice part of the world and our motel overlooked one of the big lakes up there and we had a game of golf or two, but what a complete waste of a jet. It was just sitting in Elmira Airport while we stayed at the Ptomaine Palace, as we used to call it because you could get ptomaine poisoning.
I was determined to finish off the season as I had started it, absolutely competitively: if for no other reason than to prove that champions do still try! During the first days of practice, however, my engine was down on power and the best I could qualify was fifth. Frank and I had a discussion about it and when I told him I thought it was down on power, he just changed it. Come race day it was like night and day. I was quickest in the warm-up and thus pretty confident for the race.
I like the Glen. It wasn’t the best place to get in and out of, but we solved that by getting a helicopter from the tennis court at the Palace up the circuit – no crowds and no traffic. It’s a true driver’s circuit and, when the old green light came on, I did a fantastic start, jumping into second place behind Giacomelli at the first corner. That bloody Alfa had so much power, it was his first pole and the first time he had led a grand prix, so this was going to be interesting.
The Americans have got this bad habit of spreading cement if anyone’s had an oil leak. Someone in one of the support races obviously had a major oil leak down into turn 1, and there was about nine tonnes of cement everywhere. I was the first to slip off the track on it, but a few others followed me off too.
I thought I’d thrown it away, that I had damaged the skirts and my dreams of finishing the season with a win were gone. But when I got back onto the circuit and tried the car out on a couple of corners I found it was functioning all right. From there it became the most enjoyable race of the year for me. I came back on in 14th or thereabouts and, except for Giacomelli, who broke down, and Nelson, who cracked under pressure from Carlos and spun into the catch fencing, I literally passed one car after another to win the race.
I passed Carlos around the outside at the end of the main straight into this big, right-hand sweeper. He backed off a bit and I swung around the outside to take second. A lap or two later Bruno stopped and I had the lead and Carlos came home second for another Williams one-two.
It was a great finish to a great season for the team, and especially for me.
Mansour was back to help me celebrate and he lined up the jet to fly us to Kennedy Airport the next day for a Concorde trip home. Charlie was enjoying it, ‘Champ, this is a bit of us.’ He could call me Champ now. When we landed at Kennedy we actually taxied up beside the Concorde, jumped out of the private jet and straight onto it. ‘Who are these people?’
I flew home and they had the big banner outside the house, which was made by my helmet designer John Lyall. I wasn’t feeling too well at this stage but I had to pretend that I was OK and had to have a few beers again and just relax and soak it all in.
It was unreal, surreal even, and things just changed. There’s no use pretending they didn’t.
That’s when I got the Citron because apparently to the French, I didn’t make myself as available as I did the year before. There was a good reason for that: I simply couldn’t. Obviously to most of those journos I would love to have just said I don’t want to talk to you because you are dicks, but I couldn’t and didn’t. I made myself as available as I could given the increasing sponsor commitments and the like … and I still had to have the headspace to race well and win races. Talking to idiots was never going to help that.
While things changed for me, I don’t think I changed. I was still going to be the same nasty race track prick as before, I was still the same bloke at home.
It is just that the world around me changed.
Nelson Piquet
Nelson and I really never saw eye-to-eye. I think he was rude, and I think he was unnecessarily undiplomatic. Calling Nigel Mansell’s wife ugly publicly, I think, was unnecessary and unchivalrous. It’s not like Nelson was that good looking, even if he thinks he was.
We didn’t get on. I didn’t like him. And to make things worse, he was my biggest rival in 1980. Invariably we’d always end up on the front row of the grid or within one or two cars of one another.
I think he showed his colours a bit when he jumped out of the car and tried to kick Eliseo Salazar in the balls at the chicane at Hockenheim. The fight continued when a van driver came to collect the pair, but it was Nelson who eventually drove off in the van to the pits, leaving the van driver and Salazar beside the track.
He didn’t mind coming into our pits for a fight either.
Nelson and I raced hard, and when it didn’t go his way and there was contact he always had something to say about me or whoever was driving the other car. But he didn’t make mistakes himself apparently. Like at Montreal in 1980. I didn’t care what he thought then and I don’t care what he thinks today. I had the racing line, and it was his job to pass me safely. That crash was his fault and he has to live with it.
There was another one at Zolder, I screamed down the inside of him because the door was open. We rubbed wheels and he went off. He came back and walked through the pits and he said to Frank, ‘I am going to break his arm.’
Frank just turned around and said, ‘Well, I’m thinking you’ll have one chance at him, mate. Make sure you’re good at it.’ That fucked him. He went, ‘Um-um-um,’ and just walked off.
The very next meeting was Monaco. He was leading and I was running second, and I could see him looking in the rear-view mirrors all the time. He had eyes like saucepans, and then he ran into the barrier. I thought, well, there’s karma for you. That made me very happy.
I played mind games with him all the time, because I thought he was mentally weak. I once tried to check the ballast he was supposed to add to his car, and made sure he knew what I was doing. He went nuts.
He was quick, but his best skill was getting himself into the best cars. He was in the right place at the right time and he got three world championships. I thought he was a tool as a person, but he was a bloody good driver.