WHEN YOU GO motor racing, you’re there to win. Which means you must think you can win. There is no point getting out of bed in the morning and going to the track if you think otherwise.
If you don’t think you are the best, or as good as the best, there is no point pursuing the career of a racing car driver. There is no point if you don’t think, given equal equipment, that you can beat the others. You must go to the circuit with that philosophy. Except if you are getting fifty thousand in a brown paper bag and you are just going for that. That is still a win, just a different sort of win.
My philosophy was always to dot the I’s and cross the T’s at the beginning of each season. I was chasing the best equipment I could get. I was making sure all the insurance and other protection I needed were in place. I needed to know before I went onto the track that Beverley, and later Christian, would be okay no matter what happened to me.
Then get on with it.
You knew that you would have two or three good frights a year. I liked to get mine over and done with early. Just go out and go hard. It’s as simple as that. When I sat my bum in the car I always gave ten-tenths, except for that one time I drove it off the track at Portugal. I’ll give 110 per cent if I know the team is giving 100 per cent. If they are not, the tendency is not to drive your heart out. It was a psychological thing for me: I always needed to know it was as important to them to win as it was to me.
If the team was with me, I was going to be a very hard man to pass; anyone who wanted my spot was going to have to work hard for it. If anyone was in front of me, the slightest opening was seen as a gap. I would push people, let them know I was there … hello, here I am in this mirror, and now I am in this one.
It doesn’t mean you are a pain in the arse just for the sake of being a pain in the arse. If you are being lapped, don’t do anything silly or unexpected, and let the other driver through as easily as you can. You move out of the way, just as you do when you’ve done your qualifying lap and others are still going for it. For those guys that were unaware or just too ignorant to get out of your way … they were complete wankers. They were always given a bit of a talking-to afterwards, especially given some of them would be the same ones who’d whinge when it happened to them.
I always knew who was in front of me and knew what liberties I could take with each them. Like, with Gilles Villeneuve, you had to take into account that it was Villeneuve and that you had to be well and truly past him before you did anything. He’d hit you before he’d blink his eyes. There were others that if you stuck your nose in they would move over.
In terms of where you raced, you tried not to have favourite tracks and least favourites, because that would just be asking for trouble. It’s hard though: I liked Silverstone and the Österreichring before they were altered; big, fast, sweeping curves that were a challenge to the driver and required balls. I tried like hell not to think about how much I disliked Monaco because I wanted to go well there too. It was all in the head.
Regardless, I used to just treat them as they came. I didn’t get excited about a circuit I liked or flat about a track I didn’t. Like or dislike, it was a venue where I had to race. I always used to say, ‘The circuits I like the best are the ones closest to a hotel and an airport.’
Above all else, I was a driver. I didn’t break down my driving style and analyse my speed in corners, check my pulse and then see if my cheeks had colour. Frank Williams used to say the only training I ever did was by lifting my arm at the local pub. In reality I did more than that, but relaxation to me was important for my mental state on a race weekend.
Today I would have hated debriefs … hours of looking at computer screens and talking about why I did what I did there because the data said my left eye twitched on my first qualifying run and it was the right eye on the next run. Once I’d raced, I just wanted to get out of the track as quickly as I could. I would debrief with Patrick Head, tell him everything I could remember and then let him do what he did best. Frank was always a bit of a character. He’d sit there with his clipboard and at the appropriate time he would say, ‘Driver comfort?’ That was Frank’s input. I always used to say, ‘Yeah, good! No dramas.’ One day I said, ‘No, I think the steering wheel’s off-centre a bit.’ He looked satisfied – he had something to write down.
One of the guys at the factory said I was hard on the gearbox, but I had very few mechanical failures that were my fault. I had very few non-finishes due to riding the car too hard. And I probably saved a few engines by having a very good feel for vibration and noise. I couldn’t say what it was or why it came about or what to do about it, but I could come in and say, ‘This has got a vibration.’ And it did.
Touring cars were slightly different in terms of tolerance, but again I didn’t break many because I was ham-fisted or changing gears too hard. One of my philosophies is that when you hop in a car, you drive 100 per cent (unless you are so far in front you don’t need to). You change gears as quickly as you can, you brake as late as you can and you jump over curbs if you can. If they haven’t built a car to take that, well tough.
Today I feel a little sorry for the drivers. The cars are so good there is little room for a driver to have the same impact we did. Our braking distances were longer, so there was more room to get on the brakes later. Today, there’s no such thing as ‘out-braking’. The cars are so similar, and the performance of the brakes is so good, you just put yourself in a position where you spoil a bloke. If that means running into a corner side by side, he’ll have to relent. In the old days you would go desperately late and hope it was going to slow enough. Which is what we saw Senna do so brilliantly at Donington in that wet race, his car control that day – and most days – was just phenomenal.
It was like the day at Hockenheim 1981 when I out-braked Alain Prost at Sachs Curve and slipped between him and René Arnoux. That was a big opportunistic move. I knew Prost was cautious and we caught his teammate at just the right spot, and wham. There I was. It looks spectacular on the TV, and it felt great in the car. That was the sort of feeling I went racing for.
I’m not saying the drivers aren’t important today, but I think in terms of pure race craft we had more of an impact. But no matter what happens with rules and cars, the cream always still rises to the top, and that is what tells you the driver still has real value.
I used to go back to the hotel every night and think about how I could improve my lap. I used to think, ‘Maybe in turn 4 I could try this,’ but that was about the extent of it. It was just a corner that had to be taken and you took it. If you could work at a better, slightly quicker way, then you do that. You may even do it by paying attention to others, but I was a race driver more than a thinker.
Today I enjoy my role as a race steward when I get to it. I think it is important to have ex-drivers in the decision-making process, and we have such amazing technology at hand. We have three or four big screens. We have the ability to replay an incident from many angles, we can call up their radio and listen to what they had to say. We can access their telemetry, so we know everything they know in the pits. We can see if they lifted under yellows or not, which is important.
It is also important that more than one person is involved in the process. Charlie Whiting is the Formula One racing director, and he sits in race control, where he might spot something and then refer it to us. We might already be on it though, and we’ll make a decision on whether it was stupidity or bad luck or intentional. If it is stupidity, we determine what penalty we’ll give him, based on what the manual tells us we can do. There’s a bloody book for everything these days. Sometimes we do it afterwards and talk to the drivers, which gets in the way of me leaving the track quickly. I do it for the honour of doing it – they meet our expenses, but that is it.
For me though, it keeps me involved and I love that. I love car racing, and I love that I can still be involved now that I am in my 70s.