AJ

by Alan Jones

  I knew my next step in Formula One had to be a serious one. I had to pick right. I couldn’t afford to drive for another lunatic, but also, I couldn’t be too fussy.

  While in Australia I ran in a thing called the Rothmans International Series in a Formula 5000 car under the Theodore Racing banner for Teddy Yip. The series ran on four weekends in February, starting with the Australian Grand Prix at Oran Park, which I won but was pushed back to fourth when they said I jumped the start. The glory days of the sport in Australia were well over – there were no superstars coming down for the races like when Dad was running, so I had to battle a bunch of locals and a few Aussies who were doing well overseas, but not in Formula One, since that season had begun, as I was all too aware.

  Surfers Paradise, which was a great little track not far from where I now live, was no better for me and I finished fifth. At Sandown only five cars finished, and I wasn’t one of them. Which brought us to the Adelaide International – and let me tell you there wasn’t much that was international about that joint.

  But everything clicked that weekend and I won the race from pole in an older Lola T332 that the team had. I lapped the field, which was satisfying, but on 27 February that series was done and I had nothing lined up.

  Into March, it all changed. Lady luck played a shocking hand to one driver – and she was being very kind to me.

  Tom Pryce was a driver in a similar place to me. A Welshman, he was also working his way up and had done OK in winning the 1975 Brands Hatch Race of Champions, and in 1977 was driving for Shadow. The first two races of the season were nothing for him, or his teammate Renzo Zorzi, who was responsible for some of the money coming in the door for the team.

  The third race of the season was at Kyalami. Zorzi had fuel problems and pulled over. Two marshals ran across the track. One made it. The next one, a teenager carrying a fire extinguisher, didn’t. Just as he was crossing, teammate Tom Pryce came over the hill at 270km/h. He clipped the marshal – he was thrown in the air like a rag doll and his injuries were so bad he could not be properly identified. His fire extinguisher hit Pryce in the helmet. He was virtually decapitated and died instantaneously. It was gruesome.

  I got a phone call from Jackie Oliver, who was running the team, and he asked if I wanted to take Tom’s place in the team. Silly question. It was a pretty good car, or so it seemed on the outside. Renzo, who made Brett look like a superstar, had picked up points in the new DN8. The only problem was Surtees and that bloody option on my contract that he wanted to exercise.

  But what many in the paddock knew, and I didn’t, was that while John fancied himself as a lawyer, he was no more than a bush lawyer. Jackie said he’d handle it, and lo and behold the contract had enough holes for Jackie to drive two DN8s through. He got me out of the contract and into the Shadow team.

  There was a break before the next round. I flew from Melbourne to Heathrow, where we met up. I signed a contract with them, went up to Northampton, where the factory was, for a seat-fitting. Then we got ready for the United States Grand Prix West at Long Beach. I had a half day’s testing in the car at a track called Willow Springs, a hundred miles or so out of Los Angeles, and then it was on to the streets of Long Beach.

  This felt right. When I raced for Graham Hill or John Surtees, I felt I was just doing a job. I was glad when I’d finished my daily chores, whether it was practising, testing or racing. At Shadow it felt different, and in hindsight it was clearly a turning point for my career.

  Joining Shadow was a revelation. They didn’t have quite enough money, but they had a racer’s edge. Don Nichols owned the team. Now he was an odd, shadowy figure; a strange, lanky, bearded American who’d spent years in Asia in the 50s and 60s doing none of us knew what. His job in military intelligence inspired the team’s name and logo, a spy-like figure lurking in the shadows.

  Alan Rees, the team manager, was one of the best in the business and, as a team, Shadow was very professional. Having a good team manager can change your whole outlook on racing. He breaks down the isolation you feel out there, alone in your car; he makes you feel that you belong to something bigger than yourself. Every good team manager is a man who can read a driver’s mind – and respond with sympathy. He understands his driver’s needs, he senses dissatisfaction, he is aware of the whole man, not just the employee who sits in the car and drives it.

  He is also as fiercely competitive as the man he is managing. If he gets a whisper that somewhere there’s a good set of wet tyres hidden away, he gets his hands on them before anyone else has wind of it. A team manager is a facilitator. His job is to extract the best from the material – human and mechanical – at hand. Often, that isn’t a matter of spending money, it’s a question of having brains, judgement and organisation. Fundamentally, he needs to be a good shrink.

  Alan Rees brought me out of the endless dissatisfaction I’d felt working with Hill and Surtees. The one word that describes 1975 and 1976 is frustration – let’s make it two words, frustration and anger. There’s nothing pleasant in knowing that you’re driving among the wankers who would have difficulty getting a Formula One drive if they weren’t bringing in money. I don’t like having the finger pointed at me and people saying, ‘Oh, he doesn’t count for much; he only qualified 15th.’

  My year with Shadow was much less frustrating. Mostly because I knew there wasn’t much we could do short of a new car. The one we had was overweight and very slow in a straight line and nowhere near as competitive as I thought. Nichols and his team were in deep financial trouble and I considered myself lucky, at that stage, to have a good, steady drive. To drive a consistent loser is in some ways better than driving a potentially quick car being ruined by mismanagement, which was what I had at Surtees.

  And there was a process of constant improvement too within the financial constraints. During the season Tony Southgate came to the team, and altered the bodywork on the car. He made it a lot thinner and a bit more streamlined. It started out the year as quite a bulky old thing, and ended the year nice and trim – a bit like me actually.

  A season with Shadow kept me in play. Either at the end of the year Shadow would get a new competitive car or somebody would spot me and ask me to drive for a better team. Around the business, people know when it’s your car that’s at fault and not you. I think I was rated at Shadow by what I could do within the limitations of the machinery at my disposal. ‘Look at old Jonesie,’ someone would say, ‘he’s doing well in that old shitbox of his, isn’t he!’ After all, there’s always next year, so my task was to wring what I could out of it and get noticed.

  There’s no shortage of drivers, but if you’re good, you’ll be spotted. Motor racing doesn’t have the equivalent of the great poet dying starving in a garret because no one knows he’s great.

  So I went from sitting in Australia and pondering what the hell I was going to do, to joining a team where I was finally happy.

  We stayed on the Queen Mary for that race at Long Beach. We could walk to the track from the ship and I liked that. For many years the team was UOP Shadow, which stood for United Oil Products, but my car was sponsored by Villiger cigars – and Henry Villiger was a very nice guy.

  As I said, it was a much happier atmosphere and I was pleased I backed away from the Surtees deal for 1977. If I asked for a change to a car, they just did it, as opposed to questioning you. I was now able to qualify mid-field rather than the back of the grid, which was amazing given the Surtees was so much a better car.

  Long Beach was a pretty sombre affair in many ways. To make matters worse, Tom Pryce’s death had been followed by a plane crash that took the life of Brazilian driver Carlos Pace.

  I qualified in 14th but failed to finish the race, getting to half distance before the gearbox let go. Mario Andretti won – which the Americans loved – in the Lotus 78 wing car, which was the first win for a ground-effects car and the start of an era that would agree with me.

  Spain was a month later, which gave us a bit of tim
e to get ready for the European summer. Not that we got too far with it: we qualified in the same spot again and I crashed out during the race. Renzo was the slowest driver in the field and was the first car lapped by Mario on the way to another win for Lotus, and at the next round Renzo was somehow replaced by Riccardo Patrese.

  Monaco, as I have said, is both a place I love and hate. You know when you have done well there that you are at the top of your game. It is a tough little track. Our speed was comparatively a little better, and we were knocking on the door of the top 10 in qualifying, and then in the race the cards fell nicely and I ended up in sixth, my first points for Shadow.

  I’ve now got the right horse, well a semi-right horse, and I knew this was just the start of it. I was always very much one race at a time, so it was only when Monaco was done that I turned my attention to the next, the Belgian Grand Prix at Zolder.

  I only qualified 17th, but the race started wet and that was good for us. It dried out during the race and we had to change to slicks, but we made good ground and claimed fifth spot. Plenty of people fell off the track that day, and I have always prided myself on my wet-weather driving. I stayed out of trouble and kept it running and was faster than most. The Shadow was also good in the wet; anything that caused the others to slow was going to help when we weren’t dropping at the same rate.

  I didn’t socialise much at the track so I didn’t know if people were talking about me, I hoped they were, but I had no idea. I thought with that car, that we as a team were doing really well, and I was driving as well as I ever had.

  The Swede Gunnar Nilsson won his only ever grand prix in Belgium driving the second Lotus 78, and that made the future of the sport clear to me: ground effects. Lotus with Mario would win a lot of races in 1977, but with a shocking run of reliability they didn’t win the title. Niki did that with consistency.

  The big straights of Anderstorp just didn’t suit our car, and the grunt of the Matra engine in the Ligier driven by my old mate Jackie the Foot won the race when Mario had engine trouble. In some ways I was envious about the position of the French, not that I ever wanted to be French mind you, but they backed their own, like Ligier backed Laffite. I was beating him in the smaller classes, but Australian businesses just wouldn’t get behind me, so I had to do it the hard way.

  His win, I believe, was the first time a French driver had won a grand prix in a French car with a French engine and a French sponsor. That’s a lot of frog’s legs. Early in the race, I was running with him, but our little Shadow just wasn’t in the same league as the Ligier in a straight line, and he picked off the cars at the end in a way we just couldn’t have done. At least they didn’t have the French national anthem to play, not having expected he would win …

  They did have it ready at Dijon in eastern France, not that they needed it. Jacques finished two laps off the leaders with Andretti winning again. I lost another gearbox.

  Silverstone was a real power, top-speed circuit back then and I dropped a couple of spots from my regular 10th in qualifying. The race was nothing special except that I finished seventh, one spot off some extra points. James won that race, which made for a great atmosphere with the British fans.

  There was no respite from the top-speed tracks with the German Grand Prix moving to Hockenheim. You needed a good chassis to conquer the stadium section, but the rest of the track was essentially a drag strip. Seventeenth was a shocking qualifying effort and I crashed out on the opening lap.

  Thankfully Austria was a little twistier and wet. They had slowed the track down a lot since the death of Mark Donohue there a couple of years before, but it was a tough few laps at the start regardless. I qualified 14th and sat next to Vittorio Brambilla on the grid on slick tyres.

  It was damp at the start of the race and the old girl was pretty good in the wet, being reasonably softly sprung and heavy. It was just a bit more forgiving than a lot of cars in those conditions. Andretti in the Lotus was great up the front with that ground-effects car. After a few laps I passed Niki to get into the top 10, and some of the cars that started on wet-weather tyres had to stop, so I moved up a few more spots.

  Mario’s car broke down and James was leading and then I was in fourth. I felt like I could do so much with the car that day, I picked off Hans Stuck and then Jody Scheckter pretty easily which put me into second. The track was damp, so if you went off line it was pretty treacherous, but we seemed to have so much grip.

  With 12 laps to run, I passed James sitting by the side of the road with a blown engine. The next lap around, the pitboard said P1: I was leading my first grand prix and the track was now pretty much bone dry. I was just waiting for someone to catch me, but I was able to extend the lead by a little bit each lap. In those conditions you have to do just enough. I went back to my early days testing for GRD at Snetterton: if you’re doing a certain time in those conditions and you’re increasing your lead, even if it’s only a fraction of a second, you don’t need to try any harder. Don’t try any less. Just drive it to that pace and you’ll win. And that’s what I did.

  I started hearing noises, I started to feel everything in those 12 laps leading. I’d had late-race failures in that car before, so it was a very nervous time. I was able to run away from them all to win by more than 20 seconds from Niki at his home grand prix. It wasn’t a popular win, since Niki had never won at home, and like Jackie the Foot a few weeks before it was so unexpected they didn’t have the Australian national anthem to play.

  Some drunk in the crowd with a trumpet played ‘Happy Birthday’ and I couldn’t have cared less. I’d just won my first grand prix from 14th on the grid, one of the lowest qualifying positions ever for a race winner. The emotions after that win were strange – mainly an overriding sense of relief. You’ve spent all those years in shitheaps and with poor management and now you’re in a semi-shitheap with some good people, and you’ve won Shadow’s first – and as it turned out only – grand prix. And they’ve had some bloody good drivers.

  The whole team was over the moon. We had a big night after that – the Shadow boys really lived it up. All those mechanics work their guts out, they’re unsung heroes and the win meant as much to them as it did to me.

  Beverley was with me at that race, which was unusual. We’d just picked up a new Mercedes in Stuttgart and driven it to Zeltweg for the race, and I remember saying to her after the race that it didn’t matter what happened from there, I had just won a grand prix.

  Then, of course, two days or so later when the alcohol wears off, the hunger kicks in and you want more. If I can win one, I can win two … and so on. In my mind, I had proven a point. That car wasn’t good enough to win a race, but in really tough conditions that is exactly what I did.

  I used to go reasonably hard after every grand prix, because I used to abstain from alcohol in the lead-up to a race. I wasn’t a big drinker, I used to allow myself a pint of beer every night when I was at home when I’d go to my local. During the race weekend I wouldn’t drink at all, but then on Sunday night I had to replenish my lost fluids from the race. That was my excuse.

  I got to the stage where the people who were running the motorhome used to put the cans of Foster’s in the fridge or the freezer at the right time, even allowing for me to go onto the podium, so it was just the right temperature. By the time I got back to the motorhome I was so dehydrated that it virtually hurt going down – and it meant that I was pissed on one small can.

  It was great. I wish I could simulate that all the time.

  I was staying at a pensione because there were no real hotels near that circuit, and had the obligatory Wiener schnitzel and copious amounts of white wine.

  About that Mercedes. At that stage in my career, I was earning about 100 grand a year, which was enough for me to buy a £50,000 house in England and also the Merc. A guy named Gerd Kramer was in charge of VIP deliveries for Mercedes-Benz and we got on really well. I had to order my car through him. As ever, I had my own name for him, which was Dirty G
erdy … I’m not sure the Germans understood, but I got away with it.

  The deal was you could order a new Mercedes and they would give you 20 per cent discount off the factory price – not the retail price – less stamp duty and sales tax. When you bought the car, you drove it to the border, handed in this form and then about a week later you got your sales tax and duty back. It worked out a bloody cheap car.

  The only stipulation was you weren’t allowed to sell them within 10 months, which I found out about because I sold one pretty much straight away one time, and I got into a bit of trouble over it. So normally you’d keep them for 10 months and then offload it in the UK or bring it back to Australia.

  The German Grand Prix was also near the Mercedes factory and Sindelfingen, where Hugo Boss clothing is made, was also close by. So I’d fly into Stuttgart, pick up my new car, drive up to the Boss factory, load up with a full boot of shirts and sports coats and trousers and Christ knows what else, go back and stay at Gerd’s place that night and then drive up to Hockenheim for the German Grand Prix, and then after that drive back to England and have all the pants altered and everything. Beautiful.

  At the Boss factory for the first time, I met Jochen Holy, who owned Boss. I picked out a few clothes because I thought I was paying for it and didn’t want too big of a bill. Boss was and still is expensive, so I was being very cautious. When I got up to Jochen’s office he said, ‘No, that’s compliments of us.’ I thought, ‘Shit. Thank you. Any chance of going back in the factory?’

  So I got Gerd to get me some Boss stickers for my helmet and I think I got a patch for my race suit as well. When Jochen walked down the grid at the start of the grand prix he saw me with the Boss stickers on, and from that time on I didn’t have to pay for Boss gear while he was there. He was that rapt that I didn’t just take the clothes, that I went to the trouble of sourcing some badges and putting them on. He eventually sold the business – and that arrangement was ruined. Jones’ Law.