THANKFULLY IN 1981 they moved the start of the season to March instead of January, which gave us a really long break after Watkins Glen in October the previous year. They did try to start the season in South Africa in February, but that bloody FISA-FOCA thing jumped up and killed the race as a part of the Championship.
There were big changes happening to the cars. The sliding skirts on the side of the cars that hugged the ground had been banned for the 1981 season in their old form and that meant the cars were going to be horrible to drive. In South Africa, we raced with them for the last time.
At least this time we went to the race knowing it was not going to count for the title, rather than having it stripped during the weekend like in Spain. The FOCA teams supported the race, which was won by my teammate Carlos, and ironically I was sidelined with a skirt problem after qualifying third behind Nelson and Carlos.
Without the teams from Renault, Ferrari and Alfa Romeo it was hard to tell where we all stood, and with the side skirts still in place there was still the possibility for some false readings, but it looked like Williams and Brabham had the cars to beat in 1981.
I returned to the fold for that race with my typical off-season weight gain. I’d try to get myself back to Europe three weeks or so before the first race so I could focus on stripping that weight off, as well as just getting back into the routine.
Patrick Head would always get stuck into me. ‘You bastard, I’ve just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to shave off a couple of pounds, and you’ve put on about four.’ For the first couple of times you’d hop in the seat, which was custom-made and without adjustable belts, and there’d be grunts from both me and the mechanics as they tried to strap me in. After a little while of getting back to the not drinking, not eating so much, and exercising, it didn’t take long to get back to my old fighting weight.
Paul Ricard was my first serious test without the skirts. And that was an eye-opener. Carlos had already tested a week before, but then we turned up with different tyres, which meant we really couldn’t do a back-to-back test, which I thought was a bit silly.
The BBC came down and made a documentary called Gentle men Lift Your Skirts (which makes good viewing on YouTube). We tried a few things on the car, but it was clear we would have to try something quite different that day. And so it was: Patrick took the springs out and he wanted to see what I thought. The theory was that we needed to maintain and control the gap between the side of the pods and the ground, and also that a constant angle of attack under acceleration and brakes would be good. Without springs we could do that.
Patrick was always into this concept – and the concept was proved when he had traction control, ABS and active suspension, which let him create his perfect world in a car that was driveable. That was when Nigel Mansell was dominating, and that is the car that Ayrton Senna thought he was getting when he went to Williams. But like this change to the skirts, they changed the rules without enough planning and altered the cars dramatically and quickly. But we weren’t so badly off.
I wasn’t against change; so long as we all had the same thing I didn’t care, and the cornering speeds were pretty high. Although I was worried about ill-thought-out knee-jerk reactions born out of stupidity.
This was a case of one or two unqualified people in Paris jumping the gate and just banning skirts before they knew enough about what they were doing. After my first few laps in the car without skirts, I felt the car was a lot less safe than it was with them. It was slower, but if it was more dangerous had we taken a step forward? If the change was made to try and help the loyalists, then this was going to be interesting – they may have had better engine builders, but we in the garages had better aerodynamicists, so I felt we’d get our heads around this quicker than them.
And that led us to try no springs. I went around and the car was so rough and vibrating so much I couldn’t see properly; the gearbox was bumping on the ground and the tyres were carrying all the suspension work. It was awful.
We were having a chat while I was still in the car and I was telling Frank and my mechanic how I couldn’t see because of the vibrations, and I suggested maybe putting some suspension in the seat and then we’d know if there was some potential, which I felt there was. Frank said, ‘That’s actually a sensible suggestion,’ and he paused before adding, ‘You could sit on your wallet, Alan.’
I said, ‘Why don’t you give me something to put in it?’ This was all on TV and that shut him up.
We ended up using springs: there is no point having a fast car that is undriveable. I felt we left that test with a good solution. There were other cars there that day and we were quicker, so I thought the FW07C was definitely OK.
At the end of the day, it wouldn’t matter if the cars had ball bearings, as long as everybody else had ball bearings, because from there I’d back myself and I trusted Patrick to give me the right equipment. The only thing that a driver doesn’t like is when someone’s got something you haven’t got. Mario Andretti had the drop on everybody with the first ground-effects cars in 1978. Now, had that been today, with social media everyone would be saying they were killing Formula One, like the talk about Mercedes recently.
Colin Chapman came out with an idea – ground effects that increased downforce – that blitzed everybody. Mercedes mastered hybrid power better than any other team and they blew everybody away too. Getting a jump on your competitors is the goal – that’s always going to happen in Formula One. People say, ‘Don’t you think it’s spoiling Formula One?’ Did Michael Schumacher spoil Formula One when he was winning everything in a Ferrari? It happens, and it never lasts forever.
That’s what it’s all about. It’s meant to be the top echelon of motorsport, and that means innovative solutions and ground-breaking ideas. No question about it though, if someone comes up with a new idea, the rest will catch them; it is just a matter of how long.
Our solution for 1981 left us with a really stiff car, they were really uncomfortable to drive … although less so when you were winning. There were all these little tricks for that season. One was having the car hydraulically lowered and lifted during the sessions and races, which Brabham pioneered early in the season. To see how well it worked just have a look at the Argentine Grand Prix – Piquet won easily and that was the first time the system was raced.
The cars needed to maintain a six-centimetre minimum ride height, but we could see the Brabhams lower at speeds. As a driver, I could see it. Despite a lot of talk, they were allowed to get away with it, so we all followed. But you had to be careful, because at the end of the session you had to have the minimum ride height when you were measured. We had a bloke stationed somewhere around the track with binoculars to check the ride height before we came in. If it wasn’t right we’d have to spin the car into the gravel or Armco fencing to avoid the scrutineering.
Eventually we were all doing it. It was legal – much more so than Piquet’s fragile qualifying engine the season before – but it was very borderline.
FOCA and FISA found some sort of common ground and signed what was known as the Concorde Agreement, which gave us four years of rule stability under FISA guidance, while FOCA retained control of the finances of the sport. The beauty of that deal was that it ushered in a period of unprecedented growth for the sport. If it was big before, it was now about to become massive – the biggest sporting show in the world bar none.
With all the testing done and my weight stripped off, the season started in Long Beach in the best way possible. We all turned up with newish cars with bigger wings and visible changes to the sidepods. We also had to adjust to Michelin tyres. Goodyear pulled out of the sport with immediate effect early in 1981 and we had to suddenly change to the new tyres.
We may have had the Concorde Agreement in place, but it didn’t stop the politics. Colin Chapman at Lotus must have been listening in to my conversation with Frank at Paul Ricard – he turned up with a twin-chassis car. The car itself was incredibly stiffly sprung, but there was a separate chassis for the driver, in effect an internal suspension for the driver. It was clever, too clever for some, who protested. No-one really knew what rule it was breaking, but it was banned.
I had a great qualifying session with Riccardo Patrese in an Arrows which had clearly found something over the winter. We traded the top of the time sheet a number of times during qualifying, and eventually he ended up with the pole and I was second, less than one hundredth of a second behind him. It was the sort of intense battle I loved, and I grazed the wall at one stage when the back stepped out coming out of the last corner, and Patrick got stuck into me over that, but I was giving it everything I had and that sort of thing happens on a street track.
At the start of the race, Gilles did a typical Gilles thing and made a wild dive for the lead from nowhere. He went off and we had to avoid him, and in that mess Carlos passed me for second and we stayed that way for the first half of the race, miles in front of everyone else. Didier Pironi was now driving for Ferrari and he was fourth, dropping away from me and holding everyone up. Perfect.
Patrese eventually retired and that left us with a Williams one-two, and with that I started to charge at Carlos. I had looked after my car in the early part and I had plenty up my sleeve, half a second a lap in fact. The three-second gap was soon nothing, and Carlos ran wide while trying to pass Marc Surer and I jumped through into the lead and sprinted away for a nine-second win, even after I eased off.
Brazil in the rain for the next race was a little more interesting, but not necessarily for the racing. Frank had drafted a new agreement for Carlos for the season, which had all these clauses in it and what I thought was a pretty improbable scenario; if we were more than twenty seconds in front of whoever was third, and we were less than three or four seconds apart, I was to win. It wasn’t just that I was the old boy at the school – which I was – but he didn’t want to transport two cars to the other side of the world, have them comfortably winning a grand prix, and have them take each other off while they fought for the lead.
So in other words, if the race was dead in terms of anyone challenging us, I was to win. Frank drew up the agreement and Carlos, with his eyes wide open, signed it. If he didn’t like it, he should have said something. I am a firm believer in living by the agreements you make, whatever they are and whether or not they become less palatable over time. Carlos, as it turned out, did not see things that way.
We were back at Jacarepaguá, since it was felt Interlagos was unsafe and that the slums of Sao Paulo that surrounded it were not in keeping with the image that was required of the sport. So Rio it was, on a much less interesting track. It was pissing with rain on race day and I started third behind Nelson and Carlos. We quickly cleared Nelson and I spent most of the race right on Carlos’ backside.
We were nearly a minute in front of Patrese with a handful of laps to go when the team hung out a board, ‘Jones-Reut’. I’d also won the first grand prix, so by letting me win, that would have consolidated my championship lead. Then there was the matter of what our contracts said. We did another lap, we did another lap, we did another lap, and I thought, ‘I know what he’s going to do. He’s going to wait until the last corner, make the big magnanimous buddy hand, like, OK you go through, and then tell all the journalists that he could have won, but team orders dictated that I win.’
Anyway, on the last lap it became clear he wasn’t going to honour the terms of his agreement. I thought, ‘This prick’s not going to do it.’ Sure enough, he didn’t. He kept going. I was furious, I could have challenged him many times. If it wasn’t for the agreement I would have. I was faster and felt I could easily have won, and Frank knows too well that without the agreement I would have slipped it down the inside, or I would have had a go somewhere. That could have ended in tears, so I didn’t have a go, because it was wet, which makes it a lot easier to lock your wheels up. And we had the agreement.
I thought, ‘No, I know what the team orders are, I know he signed the deal, so I’ll just consolidate another nine points.’ That would have given me 18 in the championship for the first two races. He would have had second in both, that would have given him 12. Everything’s hunky-dory.
The agreement was there to stop us taking risks with each other. Carlos didn’t abide by the rules of the agreement that he signed. That’s the thing that upset me.
Now, purely circumstantial, it was still pissing with rain, and I pulled up in the designated zone and climbed out of the car and no-one was there, in true Brazilian fashion. There was no-one in sight. I thought, ‘Screw this, I’m not hanging around in the rain, I’m going back to the garage.’ Now, of course, that was interpreted as me having the screaming shits. It wasn’t, it was because I didn’t want to stand around in the rain with no bugger there.
I didn’t talk to Carlos after the race. I just said to Frank, ‘All bets are off.’ Frank only paid him for finishing second that day as a sort of fine, but if Carlos expected me to give him any help in the Championship, that just went out the window. I’m a bad loser anyway. Carlos was good enough to drive elsewhere, it was not like Williams was his only option.
Of course, even to this day the whole aftermath of the race is reported as a dummy spit by me and that gave the next race, Carlos’ home grand prix in Argentina, a great build-up. Although it wasn’t good for me.
I needed armed guards for the most of the weekend and I had a police escort from the airport to the hotel. Taxi-drivers were pulling up and giving me the finger. The first time I practised the marshals were into me as well. I thought, ‘This would be bloody nice, if I have a shunt or something, they’ll just let me burn.’
The front row of the grid was dominated by Nelson with his new ‘illegal’ suspension and Alain Prost, who was now at Renault, then it was the two of us with me in third and Carlos fourth. Good luck, I thought. He was off my Christmas card list. In my eyes we just weren’t teammates. It was every man for himself. Hopefully we’d make it past the first corner.
Brabham had come up with a clever solution to the side-skirt problem and dominated the race – so good even Hector Rebaque was able to run second until his car broke. There was nothing we could do about them. I had an uninspiring race and finished fourth and Carlos got onto the podium to take the Championship lead.
For some reason I was a little down on my qualifying speed at Imola for the next race, which was now called the San Marino Grand Prix. San Marino is a little principality maybe 100 kilometres from the Imola track, entirely encased by Italy. The rules were that only countries could host a grand prix, and countries could host only one, except the USA, which was a market Formula One was keen to crack. The Italian Grand Prix was back at Monza, so San Marino was the answer for Imola, which wanted to keep hosting its grand prix. So the San Marino Grand Prix was not run in San Marino.
Starting the race eighth in the rain, I was quickly into it. By the end of the first lap I was challenging Carlos for third, while the two Ferraris used their turbo power to sprint away. Carlos didn’t like me challenging him and we hit – one of the race reports at the time said he had ‘driven into’ me, so you can read into that what you like. My front wing was damaged and I had to pit.
I finished two laps down and out of the points while the two people I thought were my biggest challengers for the title were on the podium and pulling away in the points. Carlos led on 25 points from Nelson on 22 and me on 18. It should have been both of them on 22 and me on 21, and who knows what else if Carlos hadn’t hit me.
Zolder was up next and it was a bit of a shitfight, and it needed to be. The pit lane there is narrow and there were so many people allowed in the pits you could sometimes not even find your own pit when you came in. There were no speed limits in pit lane then, and it was dangerous. During practice, one of the mechanics from Osella stumbled on the pit wall and fell in front of Carlos, who hit him. The mechanic died in hospital and we drivers decided we needed to take a stand, so we organised a protest on the grid, which really just created confusion.
The start was all over the place. I was starting sixth and Carlos was on pole, Nelson was late making the grid and while he was taking his place Riccardo Patrese’s Arrows stopped. A Formula One car is great at many things; sitting stationary with the engine running is not one of those things. As he was waving his arms to stop the start sequences, one of his mechanics jumped the fence to start his car. The race started while the mechanic was still on the track behind Riccardo and right in front of me. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I managed to clear both the mechanic and the car, but as ever with a start you jump at gaps you see appearing. Siegfried Stohr in the second Arrows saw a gap and went for it only to plough straight into the back of the stranded car, cleaning up the mechanic at the same time.
When the field came around for the end of the first lap we could see the carnage, then on the second lap they were still clearing it up. Nelson in the lead didn’t slow one little bit, and then the rest of us decided to stop. This was bloody dangerous, so we in effect did our own red flag while Nelson kept racing until he came around the next time to find us all stopped. The mechanic, Dave Luckett, survived with just a few broken bones, but it could have been so much worse – and it didn’t need to happen at all.
When the race restarted I was really strong and I worked my way into the lead battle with Pironi and Piquet. Pironi’s Ferrari was so fast in a straight line he could keep a gap, but both Nelson and I were faster than him over the whole lap. We just had to fight him. I put a move on Nelson on the 10th lap and we had contact, which sent him off the track and into the catch-fencing and out of the race. He came in after the race for a fight, but if that is what he wanted he picked the wrong bloke. I simply didn’t give a fuck if he was upset.
Once he was out of the way, Didier was no problem for me, and I was leading by the end of lap 12. I was in a great rhythm and started to pull a gap before settling down the pace a little. Seven laps later, after running through the fast right at the same speed in the same gear and with the same line, the side skirt on the car got stuck and I lost all downforce. I had no grip and went off the track and into a wall, ever so gently but with just enough force to cause damage. The radiator burst and scalded my thigh, but I was more pissed at losing the race, which I felt I really needed to win at that stage of the season. To make it worse, I had given Carlos, who won the race, nine points that should have been mine.
This race in Belgium combined with the Monaco Grand Prix, up next, turned out to be critical events in my title defence. Both races should have and could have been wins, 18 points in total; instead, all I got was six points from a second place at Monaco.
Firstly, I really needed to get on top of my qualifying pace. Seventh was just not good enough when the car had speed, but I was still trying to work out the single lap on Michelin tyres. It was purely me, Carlos was out-qualifying me and I didn’t like that at all. In the races though, I had speed and race craft to help me out. I always felt I was a better racer than qualifier, but I was making my life hard here.
And seventh on the grid at Monaco was much worse than it sounds; it was a tough place to pass people. But we did. I picked off a couple, including Gilles in the cumbersome but quick Ferrari, and then took second when Carlos retired with gearbox dramas. I closed in on Nelson and put the pressure on, and then he cracked and spun when he couldn’t lap the slower cars easily enough. No contact from me, Nelson, but same result for you.
Then I was walking away with the race despite the discomfort of my burns from Zolder. This was probably the worst place to have an injury like that, you’re turning left, right, left, right and putting pressure on it constantly. I nearly had to have a skin graft on the burns, but they put all this oily gauzy stuff on it and wrapped it up and I just got into the car and made myself as tight as I possibly could to stop the movement and it was working well in the race.
I had a 20-second lead over Gilles when fuel vaporisation problems started to affect my lap times. It was inconsistent and hard to drive, but we held on for many laps. It only got worse and eventually Gilles passed me like I was standing still on the pit straight. I watched the highlights later and Murray Walker was shouting, ‘What a fantastic overtaking manoeuvre!’ He passed me down the bloody straight, for Christ’s sake. It’s not like he went past me sideways down the inside into Mirabeau.
Then I thought I was running low on fuel and a top-up would help, so I pitted and got back on the track still in second, which is where I finished. That was my best-ever finish in the most prestigious race on the calendar, and typically under Jones’ Law this was the only podium on the calendar where only the winner was present.
So straight back to the garage, this time without the shitfight in the media. Not only did I not win, but I didn’t have a chance to go up onto the podium and have a look at Princess Grace, who was alive and kicking in those days. That was Monaco. As much as I didn’t like Monaco, I really wanted to win there.
We went to Jarama in Spain for the last time three weeks after Monaco. Quite funny really – it was felt Jarama was too narrow with the speed of a modern Formula One car, but Monaco was OK. There was a sense of Spain being the sacrificial lamb. After the disaster of the 1980 race being removed from the calendar, the crowd was tiny, but at least the politics were kept to a minimum.
I finally had some qualifying form back and put it on the front row beside Jacques Laffite. In the race I got away best and was leading by more than ten seconds over Gilles Villeneuve when I fell off the track. It only took a fraction of a second of not driving at 100 per cent for it to happen. I lost a heap of time and had to pit for some minor repairs. I stayed on the lead lap but I missed out on being in a great battle for the lead of the race.
Gilles was in the turbo Ferrari, which looked like a dog to drive but it had so much power it was hard to pass. His lap times weren’t that great, but he was leading and one by one the challengers lined up. In the end, the first five cars finished within 1.24 seconds of him. I finished seventh, so no points again … three races in a row which all could have been wins.
Carlos finished fourth and pulled out a 13-point lead over me. The pressure was mounting now, and this was going to be interesting. There is no way I was going to let him take my title that easily.
The Renaults were again great in France, and that is about all I’d like to say about that race. Only a few laps into the race I was in the pits with several issues, the worst was overheating. I lost four laps and was the last car home in a rain-interrupted race.
If I thought my season was tough so far, there was more to come, and my enjoyment of the sport was fast waning. At Silverstone I got caught in a Villeneuve incident when I couldn’t avoid his spinning Ferrari, so that was another retirement for me. John Watson won the race in the first carbon-fibre car, which McLaren had released earlier in the year.
My qualifying form was now OK, but the turbos were just dominating that part of a weekend. They’d turn the wick up and get another 50 horsepower and take pole, second, third and whatever else was available. If we could get onto the first or second row that was a great achievement. In qualifying the rest of us were fighting over the scraps knowing they’d come back to us in race trim.
When we got to Germany I wasn’t in the best of moods; when I left it was worse. Carlos and I managed to qualify on the second row behind the Renaults. I got a good start and ran third for the opening laps, Nelson hit Arnoux on the opening lap and the Renault had to pit to replace a punctured tyre. So that made it Prost in his Renault from Carlos, me and Nelson.
Carlos was relatively easy to pass, Prost not so. I was all over him in any corner – Hockenheim doesn’t have many – and then he’d blast away in the straights – of which Hockenheim has plenty. Lap after lap I ducked and weaved in the stadium section, only to watch him pull away when we got out of it. I tried a couple of moves at the end of the back straight. I had to go so late on the brakes the car would twitch and buck as I went in, but I just couldn’t get through cleanly.
Around 20 laps into the race we were coming up to lap Arnoux in the second Renault, and I figured he’d let Alain through easily and then hoped he would get out of my way. As it turned out, we caught him at the stadium section, and while Prost was being cautious I dived between the two of them at Sachs Curve.
It was real balls-in-the-mouth stuff, but with my mood that weekend I was going into that gap. I pulled it off and then walked away from Prost, who dropped a spot to Piquet when it started to rain. With around 10 laps to go my car started to misfire and I started to drop heaps of time. When I was passed by Piquet and Prost I headed to the pits with steam coming out of my ears. I finished a lap down and with another win handed to someone else. This could have been my fifth win in a row, I was leading all of them except for Silverstone, when some mechanical gremlin cruelled my day.
There was always this myth about no-one could ever do back-to-back championships. No-one had done it since Jack Brabham in 1959-60. No-one really knew why. Frank and Patrick said I drove better in 1981 than I did in ’80, but it was all these stupid little things that were hurting me. I was now in fourth in the Championship and 19 points behind Carlos.
As luck would have it, the car held together in Austria, where we just didn’t have enough speed to challenge for the win. Jones’ Law. I was in a great battle for third place for many laps with Didier, Nelson, Jackie the Foot and eventually Carlos. It was a familiar story, Didier’s turbo Ferrari would pull away on the straights and we’d close in on the corners. Nelson and Jacques were swapping spots in front of me as each tried to pass the Ferrari. As they did that I kept inching closer.
Jacques Laffite was the first to clear Didier and he went on to win the race. The rest of us cleared the Ferrari too, but the extra lap or two allowed a huge gap to appear and that was it. Both the Renaults out in front had issues, Prost’s suspension failed and Arnoux killed his tyres, but they had enough of a gap for Nelson and me not to catch up and I finished fourth. It was nice to finally finish and get some points, my first since Monaco.
Zandvoort was next and even from my early days I had a good record there. I qualified in the second row and jumped Nelson off the start to follow those bloody Renaults again. Arnoux was easy pickings, but Prost was hard. I followed him for lap after lap looking for gaps, trying to make gaps where they weren’t. I was all over him, but it was hard work for both me and the tyres, and eventually the tyres went off.
I tried to settle for second, but Nelson, who hadn’t been in any battles, still had good tyres and by the end of the race he rounded me up and took second. Third for me.
I was starting to get very frustrated with racing. I was driving my heart out and getting no real reward. It was either mechanical dramas, other people’s problems or just having to work things too hard to battle shitboxes with great engines.
Monza was more of the same, only this time it was second place. John Watson had a huge shunt in the McLaren, which a season or two earlier would have killed him. The car was destroyed and left debris everywhere, but being a carbon fibre monocoque he walked away with bruises. That was impressive.
It looked like no-one really wanted to put a mark of authority on the 1981 Championship. Carlos and Nelson had been out in front for most of the season but weren’t putting up enough wins and points to take control. In Italy, Carlos joined me on the podium. It was only his second podium since his win in Belgium eight races ago. Nelson was collecting points, but not in an emphatic way … and that left the door open ever so slightly for Alain Prost, Jacques Laffite and myself, who were within two wins and striking distance of the title.
Despite this, my enthusiasm wasn’t lifting any and it was pissing down with rain in the Canadian Grand Prix and I banged wheels with Carlos into turn 1 – remember, no favours from this boy – and led the early laps. The car was a pig to drive in those conditions and I spun out of the lead and then retired. If I was having little fun before, now I was having none at all.
I was out there risking my life every lap of every race, giving my all and getting nothing back. I thought, ‘Fuck, all these mechanical failures I’ve had, I haven’t got any chance of winning the championship, I’m not going to stick my neck out. Screw it, I’m going home.’ I made the decision to quit from Formula One. It was that easy and that sudden. In hindsight, the urge to walk away had been growing, I just couldn’t see it.
We had been looking at getting residency in Switzerland when I made the decision, and Bernard Cahier, who was a very well-known photojournalist who had been around forever, was helping me out with that and to find a house on Lake Geneva. We went there with him for a look one weekend, and he was good mates with Peter Ustinov, who also lived there, and we ended up all having lunch together. We had this fish they said was only found in Lake Geneva. Well, that’s what they said.
The house Bernard had found for us had its own little acre or so beside it with its own vineyard where the guy would come in and make wine and you could keep a certain number of the bottles and he took the rest. It was all terrific.
I was paying for an advocat – Swiss lawyer – to go back to Bern and get the OK from the mayor of the Canton de Vaud, which was where the house was located. They had the VD designation on their number plates, which always amused me. We were still looking at adopting another child, so when I said, ‘Fuck it. I’m going back to Australia,’ that knocked both Switzerland and the other child on the head.
In hindsight I should have stayed and at least got my residency, which I would never have lost, and that’s always a handy thing to have. But, anyway, it was typical of one of the impetuous and stupid moves that I make all too frequently. This was perhaps the one snap decision of mine that Bev didn’t mind – she was happy to pack our bags and move back to Australia.
The next week I went home to do Bathurst, in a Holden with the upside-down suspension for Warren Cullen. He had some special suspension which he thought was going to help him win the race, but it wasn’t that good. I remember Kevin Bartlett and people like that coming up and saying, ‘What are you driving that piece of shit for? There’s better cars to drive.’ I got $50,000 to do Bathurst. That was more than the bloke that won it. You couldn’t turn around to the likes of him and say, ‘Yeah, is that right? I’m just doing it because I love it, mate.’ I got my airfare paid back to Australia, 50 grand, and then back to Vegas. Thank you.
Honestly, I couldn’t have given a rat’s arse about Bathurst, still couldn’t really. I had my eye on the brown paper bag, and that was what it was all about, which is in essence all touring car racing ever was to me.
Then we had my final grand prix. It was meant to be at Watkins Glen, but the people who ran the race there went belly-up during the year, so we lined up in the car park at Caesars Palace hotel in Las Vegas. This was a funny little track. It ran counter-clockwise, so that was hard on the drivers, but the surface was really smooth and the track with all its little straights and hairpin-like bends had plenty of places to overtake.
I was out of title contention, but Carlos led into the final round. I didn’t need to remind him I was not there to help him; I think the whole world knew that at the time.
Frank took four cars to this race, one each for qualifying and one each for the race. That was to give Carlos his best chance to win the championship, but Frank didn’t want to be seen to be giving favouritism to either of us, so we both had two cars. I’d bent a valve in the engine of my qualifying car, so I took over my race car to qualify, and it felt fantastic. I qualified second, not that far behind Carlos, who had pole.
I thought I’d play with him. ‘Have you seen where pole is? It’s just a disgrace, there’s shit everywhere, I don’t know how you’re going to get off the line.’ It worked. Carlos said to Frank during a debrief or something that this was a big problem for him. I said, ‘Well, you know the man who gets on pole can claim whichever side of the track he wants to start,’ and I just left it at that.
Sure enough, he’s gone up to the organisers, ‘I want to start on that side.’ I got on pole thanks to my mouth.
It was only about 50 metres down to the first corner. You could have done the worst start known to man, and you still probably would have led into the first corner if you started on the inside line, which I now had. In the morning warm-up, I ran down the inside all the time, shit flying everywhere, but I was cleaning it all up. Frank knew exactly what I was up to.
Of course, I out-dragged him into the first corner, as did Villeneuve, Prost and Giacomelli. He was fucked from there on in and he went backwards. I lapped him. They had a jumbo full of Argentinian journalists that flew in to see him win the world championship. Piquet, the man he was battling for the Championship, was rooted, feeling ill. He was spewing and carrying on. All Carlos had to do was finish in front of a sick Piquet and he would have been World Champion – because I was going to win, and that ruled everyone else out.
In the end, I did win. Easily. I lapped Carlos and probably laughed when I did so. Prost and Giacomelli finished on the podium with me and that was a very satisfying way to end my Formula One career. I hadn’t just won, I dominated and let the whole world see that I may not have had the Championship, but I was still the best.
Nelson finished fifth, which moved him one point in front of Carlos who missed the points altogether, and won the Championship.
After the race, in all the interviews, I was asked time and time again about Carlos missing the title. My favourite quote was: ‘I don’t see how I could help him. I would not care for holding up people, as I’m a member of the British Commonwealth, Australia specifically, and I would consider that unsporting.’
But he didn’t deserve to win. There was a doco made about that season, and it had a very funny bit in it. ‘And down at the pits, we’ve got blah, and in the meantime, here’s Carlos!’ And there was footage of Carlos laying by the pool. ‘Now we’re down at the Renault pits, and you can see Alain Prost going through his telemetry with his team, and here’s Carlos!’ Down by the pool again. It took the piss out of him like you wouldn’t believe.
I finished my career finally satisfied with a race that year. It would have been a shame for it to end any other way. We had a major party in my room, and Frank was still trying to talk me out of it. I just wanted to go home, I was essentially one flight away from Australia and I had no desire to go anywhere else. ‘Alan,’ Frank said, ‘come back and drive the six-wheeler.’ That was the new car he was getting ready for 1982. I debated with him as best you could after a few Foster’s, and he ended up winning. Fuck!
I went back to England, and it was freezing cold. I stayed in a motel near Donington. I had a Jaguar, which in those days didn’t have central locking, you still had to put a key in it. I had to boil the kettle to pour hot water over the lock so I could unlock the car, that’s how cold it was. We went out to the circuit, got in the transporter and all the metal was cold to touch. When the sun eventually came out and the circuit dried up, we did some laps. It didn’t really feel all that much different. It wasn’t blindingly quick, and certainly wasn’t good enough to impress me.
I said, ‘Right, we finished?’ With an affirmative response, I jumped in my car and went down to Heathrow, boarded a Qantas jet, went up through the clouds, overcast and dull, and into bright sunshine. I had an ice cold Foster’s, and I thought, ‘I’m on my way home.’ Although for me I was always sort of home already on a Qantas flight. I hated the weather in England, and that alone played a big part in my decision to quit.
Whether the six-wheeler had potential or not we’ll never know – they banned it before it even raced, so that put Williams back a little for 1982. I was sure I’d made the right decision and I felt I had done so honourably – as soon as I knew I told Frank. Frank still says I didn’t give him enough notice, but at least I did it near the end of the season and not part way, like Reutemann did to him in 1982.
My decision was quick. I was over the weather and living in England. I’d tried commuting from the US, where I liked the weather, and that didn’t work. I could maybe have done something from down south in Europe, but again I would have been flying a lot and I was missing Christian as it was.
I was over it. Over the weather. Over the travel, over going to countries where they didn’t speak any English and you could not talk to anyone. We had no mobile phones or computers back then, so you couldn’t easily talk to home. The TV was crap and invariably I couldn’t understand it. I didn’t socialise because that wasn’t good for my racing. So aside from the occasional enthusiast of the female kind, I was pretty much alone.
It all bubbled up inside me on one weekend and I decided that was it.
Frank Williams & Patrick Head
If I hadn’t had such a great working and personal relationship with Frank Williams and Patrick Head I’m not sure I would have had the F1 career I had.
Even when I was with Shadow I got on reasonably well with Frank because he’s a very personable bloke, but I didn’t really meet Patrick until I went to the factory to have a look at the car. I had about half an hour with Patrick, and found him very down to earth, very matter of fact, and that was enough to convince me about what I should do.
You could see he was aggressive, competitive and single-minded about what he wanted and where he wanted to be. That feeling was only confirmed the more I got to know him. There was a standing joke at the workshop, Frank would be up in his office and you’d hear Patrick stamping up the stairs. A part wouldn’t have arrived or something else had gone wrong and he’d come storming up the stairs to vent at Frank.
There was this great mutual respect between them. It just all worked out. I joined the team, we’re all similar age, and it gelled. It was a really good place to be.
I had missed out on Ferrari – but I think Ferrari would have been quite different and ultimately wouldn’t have suited me as much. Yes, I would have had the equipment to do the job, but something would have gone missing for me in the memos telling me where to be and what to do. I still would have driven at Ferrari though, because as a driver you hunt for the best car you can find – friendship disappears fast when you are at the back of the grid.
I reckon I could have even driven for people like Colin Chapman and Ken Tyrrell if needed. Colin seemed not to take his drivers into his confidence and he was rude and aggressive, which is not behaviour I like … but he was very clever. Ken was a very dominant figure in his teams, I’m not sure he listened to his drivers enough and simply wanted them to do it his way. They would have been hard work for me, but if it meant winning I would have found a way to cope. I mean, I survived both Graham Hill and John Surtees and we weren’t winning. But I was at Williams – and I was happy about that.
Patrick and I shared a dry sense of humour, and he too did not like to lose. At Long Beach once, I went wide in qualifying and I scraped the wall. He let me know in no uncertain terms, ‘Why the fuck did you do that?’
‘Well, Patrick, I thought I’d just put it in the wall just for a bit of fun.’ We used to have our words, but we all had the same goals. That meant everything that was ever said or done was for a reason.
I got to the stage with Patrick where he understood exactly what I needed by what I was saying. I could do a warm-up lap on the morning of the race and think I needed a bit more grip at the front, or the back; he’d make a change and nine times out of ten it’d be right.
He always used to say to me, ‘Don’t tell me what to do,’ which suited me because I had no idea what I wanted to do anyway, ‘just tell me what it’s doing that you don’t want it to do and what it’s not doing that you do want it to do.’ That I could do, and then I trusted him to get it right and bang, it’d be brand new.
You look back now at the people that have come through in Formula One under Patrick, people like Adrian Newey, Rob Smedley, Neil Oatley and Ross Brawn, who is now the Director of Motorsport for Formula One. He’s had some brilliant engineers that have later gone on to become leading designers in their own right. He’s had some really good guys come through. Patrick is a brilliant engineer. His strength is his ability to be able to simplify things and use parts for more than one job.
Formula One is enormous now, but even in my day it was big business. It was and still is equal parts sport and business, and as such is at the mercy of all – and requiring different talents for each. The variables make it so complex. There is the personality of the driver to mollycoddle; there are sixteen mechanics each with different skills and different problems; there are the factory staff who build and repair the cars, each of them a technician and a specialist. In the 1970s there were few enough for you to know them all, yet too many to spend all your time getting to know their individual psyches. There is sponsor-chasing, there is the logistics of carrying cars and people all around the world; there is negotiation with the tyre people, and suppliers of engines, gear-boxes, spark plugs, any one of an inventory of thousands – all that has to be kept in your head, alongside the main business of getting out on the track and winning.
And Frank is exceedingly good at it. Anyone who can run a Formula One team successfully can run any other business there is.
Frank was the commercial bloke, the one with the vision. I think the fact that he’s still going to grands prix in a wheelchair after all this time shows a bit about his determination and drive. I couldn’t do it, there’s no way I could go to that many grands prix as an able-bodied person.
I liked Frank even before I worked for him, even if he didn’t really know me. He was jovial and polite, and I put a high value on politeness.
Civility is very important. Being civil doesn’t detract from your inner combativeness or your interior strength. You don’t have to be arrogant or rude to be a good fighter. The popular notion of the driver as arrogant, rude, macho and boorish, derives from the Teutonic, aggressive Lauda and Jochen Rindt – the 1970 world champion, awarded posthumously after he died in practice, his throat cut by his seat belt. They set a style: if you weren’t rude and arrogant then you hadn’t the balls to be a top racing driver. Not true of course – James Hunt wasn’t like that.
I was somewhere in between, and I knew what was required of me on the track and what I had to do to achieve that. But even in my most focused times, I never dropped my values. A waiter is not a pig for spilling the soup. The world is full of my equals. I’d like to think I was the best in my sport and I would do anything to keep myself on top. But the rest of the world remains my equal.
Frank’s politeness doesn’t get in the way of his competitiveness. As we got closer to a race, he got more wound up inside – but I never saw him be impolite. The truth is that, like myself, he’s a very controlled man. And also extremely determined, competitive and intelligent. He’s by far the best man I’ve driven for. But then I’ve had some lesser ones, haven’t I?
Frank is a racer, an absolute racer, no doubt about it. He lives and bloody breathes it. He used to share a house just near Heathrow and they used to get up to all sorts of things. At that stage Frank used to operate out of a phone box, that was his office. He’d leave the number and he’d wait outside the phone box and answer the phone. No one would be any the wiser.
When he was trying to lock down the Saudi deal, and even after that make it work, he’d go down to Saudi Arabia and he would sit in one of the sheikh’s waiting rooms for eight or nine hours. Of course, those bastards knew that you were there. Half the time, I think, they just did it for a bit of sport, but he wouldn’t leave, he’d stay there until he saw them, very determined.
He never drank or smoked, so I did have some doubts about him. He used to run about eight miles a day with his mate Dave Brodie, who raced touring cars. Frank always got this magazine with different running shoes and cross-trainers and he and Dave would look at it the same way I’d look at watches. But I’ve never known two people to have so many colds. They reckoned if you’re really super-super-fit you’re more inclined to pick up colds and things.
He would leave Didcot and call into my place in Kew. He’d get changed into his tracksuit and have a ‘fix’ as I’d call it, going for his little run. Then he’d come back, go into London, have his hair cut, which he did once a week, same barber, always wore a navy blue pullover, and then when he had his hair cut he’d go back to Didcot, which was a little more than an hour away. I think he was just a bit OCD.
His wife, Ginny, died in 2013. She was a lovely woman and together they were pretty powerful. He was as tough as she was nice. When they started getting a few bob, they’d buy a house, and she’d decorate it and do it all up and sell it and make a few bob. The boys used to call her the Duchess of Didcot, because she had a very posh accent. So does Frank, but it wasn’t like Ginny’s.
Bev, Christian and I used to go to their place and play tennis on Sunday and stay for lunch. There are very few people I worked for that I socialised with like that; I really enjoyed going up there. Nine times out of ten Patrick would be up there as well and we’d all end up having a game of tennis. It was really pleasurable, and it just meant that when we went to the races it was almost like a continuation of being at Frank’s place playing tennis.
Driving for Frank and Patrick was absolutely the best team I have ever driven for. It was happy and comfortable. Frank was able to get the very best out of me, not through threats, not through promises of rewards; he just knew how to get me giving my best. I think that’s a bit of a bloody thing in itself, an art.
My time there has also ensured that Australia has a soft spot for Williams, and Frank feels the same about Australia. He always had a lot of Aussies working for him too. My chief mechanic was a guy called Wayne Eckersley, who unfortunately passed away a couple of years ago. Then there was Sam Michael, who has come home and joined Triple Eight Race Engineering in Brisbane. Wayne was good value and fitted into Williams very well, but he was hard work. He was a bloody good mechanic. He would not leave that circuit until he was absolutely satisfied everything was 101 per cent – that always gave me faith in the car.
So not only did I get on well with Frank, but he chose good people to work with us. And he trusted me as a driver. There was one time when I had no speed and I said to Frank I felt the engine was down on power. Rather than doing a Graham Hill or John Surtees and questioning anything other than the engine, he just changed it. Didn’t question it, he just said, ‘Well, if you think it’s down on power we’ll change it.’ Then I was quickest in the warm-up, went off in the first corner and climbed from 14th to win.
He gave me confidence in the team and I wanted to do the best I possibly could to reward him for doing it. He was very clever. And a good bloke, a really good bloke.
I am not surprised in the slightest about the empire and legacy that he has built. He always poured a lot of money back into the team, while others were pocketing the cash. Eddie Jordan might have a big yacht that he travels around the world in courtesy of his little stint in Formula One, but the Jordan team no longer exists. Whereas Frank was always putting it back into the team to improve it, buying machinery, improving the factory.
His daughter Claire now essentially runs the team and she will take up more and more of the backroom duties over time as well. She is very much like Frank and they’ve got enough good people around them to be successful again. People like Rob Smedley are very smart.
Williams has now outgrown Didcot and the team is up in Grove, at an amazing centre. Now they’ve got a museum and a lot of the old cars there, and a convention centre. There is a bar named after me, which shows Frank’s sense of humour.
Alain Prost
Prost I liked. Once again, a tough little bugger and he has this nickname of The Professor. He was good at working the system, you see. He was one of those guys that when he came into Formula One you knew that he was going to be a show. Even when he was in the McLaren, before he went to Renault, I knew he was going to grow as a threat.
He was more of a thinker than many – hence the nickname – certainly more than someone like me or Ayrton. Senna was more entertaining to watch, he used to get the car and strangle it a bit more than Alain. I think Alain would spend a lot more time setting the car up to do what he wanted it to do, whereas Senna would just jump in it and do it.
They were very different people and very different drivers, and that is what made them so interesting to watch.
Ayrton Senna
I raced against Senna in Formula One in my Beatrice days, which meant I really didn’t race him as such. I had breakfast with him a couple of times during 1986 – and he was such a nice guy. He’s the only race driver that’s ever sent me a Christmas card. Now, whether that was just a bit of process for him or whether he was just generally nice and said, ‘Let’s send Alan a Christmas card,’ I don’t know. I also don’t know how many others he sent them to, but it was something I will always remember.
He was always very respectful. I remember I bumped into him at Adelaide one year and he was with his girlfriend and he said, ‘This is Alan Jones, he’s an ex-world champion,’ which meant you need to treat him right. He liked the sport and its history, and he understood what you had done and what it took. He was very quiet and I liked him a hell of a lot.
He got a bad run from the English press because he wasn’t English and he was keeping Poms out of the seat they expected for their people.
But here was another guy that would do anything to win a race, and he was very focused. It was all about winning. He grew horns when he hopped in the car, except it wasn’t the devil’s horns, because he was a devout Christian.
The thing that used to astound me with Senna is that time after time after time he would wait with literally two laps left and just jump in and go whoosh, and whack it on pole, and by a lot. That takes an unbelievable amount of confidence in your ability, because anything can happen. Someone could blow up an engine, oil could be dropped, the session could be red-flagged … He just seemed to get away with it all the time.
My work on TV had me watching him a lot, analysing what he was doing, which was normally something more than everyone else. There was one particular instance I remember in the wet at Donington, and I thought his brakes had failed, but they hadn’t. I don’t know how, but he passed a pile of cars like they were parked. He just went that deep under brakes it was amazing, staggering car control.
Every now and again a genius comes along, someone that’s blessed with an innate natural ability, and he was certainly one of those.
His death when driving for Williams was a great tragedy, a freak outcome from a seemingly light crash. He went through that left-hander and I suspect the tyres hadn’t built up their proper pressures, because they had been under a safety car, driving at a much lower speed. Then there is a bump there and I think he’s hit that and he’s gone into the fence.
It was absolute nonsense to think a modern Formula One team would start hacksawing a bloody steering rod in the pits, as some alleged. The carry-on from the Italians was embarrassing. A lot of people think it was the steering rod that went through his helmet, but it was a piece of carbon fibre. He lost so much blood that he died, otherwise he wasn’t all that badly knocked about at all. I know that crash affected Sid Watkins too; he was very fond of Ayrton.
Carlos Reutemann
Carlos Reutemann lost me when he dishonoured his agreement with Frank. The reality is, I did not care who my teammate was and I never asked for any agreement. It is unlikely I would ever have agreed to any terms in my contract where I had to give wins to people – but he did and he should have stuck to his agreement. He had every opportunity to take it to his solicitor, he had every opportunity to go and sleep on it, he had every opportunity to say to Frank, no, I don’t like it, but he signed it and as far as I was concerned that was that. I could have passed him in Brazil before he was asked to let me past, but I knew he would be asked to, so I didn’t have a go. I waited for him to do what he should have done.
They showed him the Jones-Reut sign for a few laps but he ignored it. I kept expecting him to do it, I would have honoured an agreement if I had signed it and I expected the same from him. He didn’t and that was it for me. In hindsight, I wish I’d had a go at him and just passed him.
I told Frank from that point on to forget about me helping him, and perhaps the mind games I played with him at the final race that year helped him to cough up the title to Nelson. It must have broken his little heart too, and then Keke Rosberg, who in effect replaced me in the team, went on to win the title in 1982 when Carlos walked away.
It was kind of appropriate he became a politician, where his dishonesty could work for him.
Gilles Villeneuve
We used to call him Jiles Vile-Enough. I used to come up with names for lots of people, or just say them in different ways. Patrick Tambay was Patrick Tampax and because he was French he never knew what was going on. Gilles was Jiles.
He was not a bad little bloke, a complete lunatic though. I once said, he was never going to die in bed, and he didn’t. Even when he used to fly his helicopter from Monaco up to Fiorano he’d get there with about one pint of fuel left in it. He was a risk-taker.
I think that’s why the Italians and Ferrari loved him, because he personified what they’d like to be, brave and fearless, and he never left anything on the table. If you passed Gilles you had to earn it. He’d never leave the door open, and even if you were right beside him you’d be rubbing wheels and he’d still try to slam the door on you. I remember we raced at Montreal and Frank said, ‘Wait until your fuel load gets down a bit before you start really hopping into it.’
Gilles did a better start than me and I followed him for what seemed like a long time right up his gearbox and he just left the door open a little bit too much into the hairpin and I dived down the inside, and he came over on me and we rubbed wheels, which in hindsight was a bit silly because it could’ve ended his race and mine right there. As it turned out, it didn’t.
As soon as I got in front of him, I thought I’d get away because he was holding me up, but I didn’t. The little bugger stuck right up my arse until the end of the race. He was a very tenacious little fighter, and you had to earn everything.
At Zolder in 1982 his new teammate Pironi was giving him a bit of a touch-up and ignored team orders at the previous race – hello Carlos. Gilles was keen to prove a point and was going to out-qualify him no matter what. He came over the brow of the hill to go down through a big left-hander at Zolder. I think he may have double-guessed Jochen Mass and he clipped the back of his car and it flew into the air and started to disintegrate as it tumbled down the road and he was killed.
He let Pironi get to him – he was furious and I think he made a poor decision. He had qualifying tyres on, it was near the end of the session and he should have been smarter. Jochen did nothing wrong, he stuck to his line and Gilles just got it wrong when he should have slowed and cursed him for ruining his lap.
The anchor points of the seat came out, ripped through the bloody floor, and he was thrown across the track and into the catch fencing. Not that seeing any big crash is good, but this was shocking. You can ask whether the anchor points should have come out, but he should never have made that mistake.
If you have a look at the amount of shunts that he had he may have been lucky to make it that far. He had a complete disregard for anyone and everyone on the track. There’s quite a few things he did I thought were ridiculous. Too much bravado and all the shit that the Italians loved – Forza Gilles.
He was fast, but reckless.