AJ

by Alan Jones

  It soon became obvious that AJ would be a frontrunner and that we’d got more than we bargained for. Being the good businessman he is, AJ realised that too: at the end of the season, he put his price up. I won’t say I didn’t mind paying more, but I will say he’s been worth every penny.

  As the team has matured, so has AJ; he’s always been a stable driver but he has become quicker and better; it isn’t merely that he has more experience, it’s also that his mental attitude is much more suited to the task at hand and his intelligence begins to prevail over his instincts. There isn’t time in running a team, raising its money, overseeing a manufacturing force and maintaining contact with our sponsors, for AJ and I to socialise that much. I enjoy seeing him and he’s always good for laughs. Being in America a while improved his one-liners and he’s a funny man anyway; but also a private one, which is perhaps why he hasn’t yet hit the public consciousness the way James Hunt did.

  I soon enough found out I had the best driver in the world, the most complete, the most competitive and the most meticulous. He also has this natural force when it comes to driving: he’s on the mark from the start, he’s single-minded about being best. He doesn’t waste our time and I think our job is not to waste his.

  Frank Williams, 1981

  8

  1977 Williams Grand Prix Engineering

  IN 1977, FRANK was still one of the game’s all-time least successful constructors. Everyone told me I was crazy and taking a big step backwards. I brushed them aside – there’s no point in asking yourself, ‘Have I made the right decision?’ You make the decision and then do everything you can to make sure it’s the right one.

  Frank knew what he had planned. He knew he could not afford a Niki or Jody, so he had to look for an emerging driver that could grow with the team. I am so happy he felt I was that driver.

  Frank’s track record wasn’t fantastic, but I thought, new car, new team, lots of money from the Saudis – which they didn’t actually have yet – and this could be really good. It was a one-car team, so all the attention would be on me. There weren’t many other options anyway. Fate brought us together.

  My mate Charlie Crichton-Stuart was involved with the team as well – he was the one with the initial link to the Saudi royal family that Frank had to convince to put up the money. They had plenty of it, but it wasn’t an easy task, and he decided to take a gamble … not that I knew that at the time. I still think to this day that we ran the first two races of the season on Frank’s credit cards.

  The good thing for me was that I was now, for the first time, in a very good place. Williams suited me, and I think I suited it. I liked Frank, and I had complete confidence in Patrick Head as a designer. Both designer and driver have to have faith in each other. Patrick had to have faith in the information I gave him, and I knew that when Patrick designed a car, he designed one that was both very quick and as safe as he could make it. He didn’t skimp on my life. If he could make a car stronger, even if it added a little weight, he’d do so. If he built a new car and I went out testing in it, I knew it wasn’t going to break on me.

  One of the good things about staying some time with the same team is that you have time to build up that sort of faith. Even from the start though, I could tell Patrick what he needed to know in the fewest possible words, and all he wanted to know was what it was doing – not what I thought it needed. If I spoke of a mid-corner understeer on turn 10, he’d have an idea. If I told him I wanted the X springs in it, he’d have no idea. He was the engineer and I was the driver; we knew our roles and we suited each other.

  1978 started for us with a lot of promise. I felt confident with the car and the direction we were headed. Of course, I knew nothing of budget constraints and I had no idea things were so tight. Frank didn’t even come to the first race in Argentina, where we had overheating problems, and I retired. In Brazil we qualified well at the flat but bumpy Jacarepaguá circuit, and that started a little battle between us and the other non-Goodyear contracted teams.

  Goodyear had an extra set of tyres it gave to the best qualifying non-contracted team. The big teams like Lotus and McLaren were sorted, because they were contracted and got free tyres, but for Williams, Arrows, Shadow and the like, this was a big thing. Goodyear had dominated the tyre war for years, but this year Michelin joined the sport, so the battle to be the dominant tyre manufacturer was on – and this was one of Goodyear’s tricks to try to stay in front.

  In Brazil we qualified eighth, but Emerson Fittipaldi just beat me for the tyres. We had a few dramas in the race and made it home five laps off the leaders, with valuable lessons learnt. Then we had a month off; well, a month off racing at any rate.

  A lot of teams didn’t have their new cars ready for the South American races in January, as was the case most years, so South Africa in March was often the place for change. Ferrari and Brabham had new cars, and like us they had not yet moved into ground-effects. Brabham would try a fan later in the year to suck the car down onto the track, while Ferrari was more concerned with trying to get the car to work with Michelin tyres.

  So some people went to South Africa filled with hope; I went there with a cold and felt lousy. I qualified poorly but I got a good start and then it was head down and bum up. I finished fourth, which gave Frank three points. It was the team’s first points, so everyone was super happy.

  Frank had been around a while, but this was his first season with his own car. Up until 1978 he’d been playing with cars from companies like De Tomaso and Iso, who made road cars, and March, who made racing cars. Deep down he knew that playing with others’ cars was just a starting point; the plan had always been to create Williams Grand Prix Engineering. That is, to do what we were doing in 1978.

  Lotus was winning everything with its ground-effects cars, and Patrick was already planning his first car of that type, but we weren’t going to see it in 1978. But the FW06 was a great little car to drive. We should have won a race in that car, but we didn’t because reliability was the issue. At last Frank finally tied up the Saudi deal and we then had enough money to fix our issues.

  After South Africa it was Long Beach, and that track just suited me. It was a street circuit, technically in Los Angeles, but another world away in personality to the streets of Monaco. I qualified eighth – good enough to get those extra tyres. I got a good start and was sitting sixth by the end of the first lap. As the race progressed people did silly things – Gilles was in the lead and hit a slower car while trying to put a lap on him in a twisty part of the track. I got to second and challenged Carlos Reutemann for the lead. I was having a big dice with him and we were to-ing and fro-ing when my front wing collapsed – it was scraping on the ground. Everyone thought that that was the reason I dropped back from Reutemann – they didn’t know I had an electrical problem as well, which was intermittently cutting the fuel supply to the engine. Inevitably I dropped back, and ended up seventh. Carlos had a spin late in the race – without those reliability problems I could have won that.

  It was a bitter pill to swallow, but it was also spirit-lifting. Remember, we were battling for the lead when the problem hit. We knew we had a good car, we just had to get it to hold together. I got the fastest lap of the race, which proved our speed.

  The night after that race I ended up by buying a house next to Bill Simpson in Palos Verdes, down Long Beach way. I got to the stage where I wanted to get out of England because of the weather – it was getting me down. I had to be one flight away in case I got a phone call saying, ‘We want you to come over next Wednesday and test,’ so that put Australia out of the equation, but this I could do.

  It should have been on the east coast of America, Miami maybe, which would have been more practical, but I liked Palos Verdes. I used to stay with Bill at his house, and you’d get up for breakfast and he’d say, ‘See that house down there? I could have bought it for X amount, and it just sold for Y amount.’ I told him to give me a bell the next time one came up nearby.

&nb
sp; It just happened that I was there at the time, and he said if I didn’t buy it, he would. So I did, and we even shared a driveway. The night after the grand prix at Long Beach we decided to have a party at Bill’s, and he invited all the Toyota people back, and I invited a lot of the young Arabs that were at the race, the young princes who were doing their schooling in California. They used to have briefcases where they could pick up the phone and ring Mum and Dad in Saudi Arabia. In 1978 that was very cool.

  I invited Frank, but he didn’t want to come – until he found out the princes were going to be there. Ever the businessman, he was in. He wasn’t good in those environments, he never drank and never smoked. So he was sitting on the couch twiddling his thumbs, and looking at his watch and hopping up and down, and he was just about to leave when all the limos started pulling up with the princes.

  Frank sat back down on the couch at a thousand miles an hour. At that party one of the Saudis said to me, ‘Alan, could I see you somewhere private?’ I thought, ‘Fuck, what’s this?’ Anyway, I took him into the garage. He handed me an envelope and he said, ‘This is just a small token of our appreciation for the way you drove today showing Saudi technology.’ I don’t know how my driving showed Saudi technology, but he was happy and I wasn’t going to spoil the moment.

  I said, ‘There’s no need for that,’ but the envelope went straight in my pocket and I went to the bedroom to open it up. Ten grand US, cash, which in 1978 wasn’t bad. He became my very new best friend.

  That wasn’t the last time something like that happened; the Saudis were very generous people. There was one time that Charlie Crichton-Stuart called me and said we needed to go and meet the crown prince of whoever, at some hotel in Monaco where they had the whole floor booked. At three every day they’d sit down and smoke those bloody pipes.

  So at this one I was sitting there with them and the guy sitting next to me had a really nice Chopard watch that had an Albilad logo sticker on the face, one of our sponsors. Because I am a bit of a watch perv, I said, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ He took it off and handed it to me.

  When I went to hand it back to him, the crown prince saw and said, ‘No, no. No, no. This is yours now.’ I said, ‘No, I just want to get a look at it.’

  ‘No, this is the Saudi way. This is yours. Don’t worry. He gets a better one now.’

  And then lo and behold on top of that, the envelope comes out again. I’m thinking, I really like these guys. I ended up with a Chopard watch and 10 grand in an envelope for being away from home for a day or two. It was a pretty good way to earn a living. It almost made me like Monaco.

  Frank was good with all this, I’m sure he was getting some big envelopes at the same time. He had to work a bit harder for it though. He’d fly down to Riyadh and he’d sit in a waiting room in an office six or seven hours until he got to see the bloke that he went there for. Generous yes, but they didn’t mind making you wait. That way you’d know who’s boss. Frank would just sit there until he got to see who he’d come to see. As I said, he was very determined.

  Frank deserves everything he’s got. He was the best bloke I ever drove for; a really nice guy. We very rarely had cross words, a couple of things, but nothing really terrible. He knew how to get the best out of me without threats or whatever. He just knew how to press my buttons. Then Charlie was there to back up and press the other button. Charlie was, ‘Come on, Champ, we can do this …’

  Charlie was a nephew to the Earl of Dumfries and cousin to Johnny Dumfries, who later raced for Lotus. Johnny was my gopher. We used to go, ‘Johnny, go and get me a Coke, will you?’ Which was pretty funny when you realise his full name is John Colum Crichton-Stuart, 7th Marquess of Bute.

  When Charlie died they buried him in the family plot on the Isle of Bute, and we went over to the family house and it was all marble on marble on marble. They took old Charlie down the road with the hearse with the bagpipes. That’s a funeral.

  Charlie used to tell me stories about how he’d go over there and just leave his clothes outside the bedroom and the next morning they’d all be pressed and ironed. It was real Upstairs Downstairs stuff. Johnny was a sensational bloke, you would never pick him for what he was. He had no airs or graces, just a pair of ripped jeans and a T-shirt.

  Anyway, we were now at the stage where the Saudi money was coming on and our expectations were rising. Monaco, as I’ve said, is not a track I really liked, but again we had enough speed to qualify inside the top 10, then an oil leak one-third into the race got me an early Foster’s. The next eight races were really hard. We showed some speed, but we were just unreliable. We finished in Belgium and Spain and I got points in France, and the rest were retirements.

  We were learning lessons with each one though, and Patrick was fixing them as we went. I had to remember, it was a small fledgling team and we had to grow together. We quickly learned that prevention’s better than cure, and we then became one of the most reliable cars, because they were very strict with their crack testing. Hell, we even got to the point where they used to change steering wheels if they thought they had too many laps on them, which is why the allegations over Senna’s crash – about changes to the steering column made before the accident that killed him when driving for Williams in 1994 – were just ridiculous.

  Sometimes the car was poor in qualifying, like 18th in Spain, and then it would hold together in the race. If I qualified well, like ninth in Sweden or sixth at Brands Hatch, the car would fail in racing. Jones’ Law.

  So from Monaco we went to Zolder for a 10th place, then Jarama for eighth, which could have been so much better if I had qualified well. I had a seized front wheelbearing in Sweden, which resulted in a retirement after some off-track adventures. In the race we were miles off the pace being set by Andretti’s Lotus and Lauda’s Brabham, but were running fourth for most of it and that could have been a podium when Mario retired.

  That was the one and only race for the Brabham fan car, and I must say it worked well. The fan was at the back of the car and it sucked the air out from under it to create similar downforce to the ground-effects Lotus cars. It raced under protest in Sweden and the fan was eventually rated as a moving aerodynamic device – not the cooling device it was claimed to be – which meant it was banned. But gee, it had some grip. I think everyone knew they were going to have to master ground effects if they were going to beat Lotus.

  The French Grand Prix was nothing special except for the points. I qualified 14th and raced well for fifth. I qualified sixth for the British Grand Prix and was running second when a drive-shaft broke and gave me another one of those what-if moments. I was trailing Jody at the time and he retired a few laps later as well, so again …

  At Hockenheim we were going pretty well, sixth again on the grid and did enough in the race for Niki to come up to Frank and say, ‘Your car’s really going well today.’ He’d never pay a compliment, so that was a pretty big thing for us. In the race I had a good battle with him and passed him around the outside into the first chicane – I think that made him stand up and pay attention. We DNFed again though, this time with fuel vaporisation problems.

  I crashed out in the changing conditions that were experienced in Austria, which turned out to be Ronnie Peterson’s last win. In Holland it was a throttle problem that sidelined me, so at least we were finding new things to fix.

  Monza was up next and I qualified sixth again, which put me on the grid beside Ronnie, who was one of the few guys I got on reasonably well with. He was a lovely guy, unbelievably quick. He didn’t know why he was quick, it was just natural talent, fantastic car control.

  We took off from the third row and I got a better start and got in front of him, but the cars on the back of the grid had not yet gridded up when they started the race, and they got great starts which made for a lot of congestion into turn 1. Riccardo Patrese wasn’t quite at the back, but he got a great run nonetheless and had to go off the track to try and clear some cars, coming back onto the track he hit James who
then took out Ronnie. Not that I knew much of this because I never looked in my mirrors except to find a way to block someone.

  By the time we came around the Parabolica for the next lap there was a plume of black smoke and red flags. That was never a good sign. Even today red flags from startline crashes are never a good thing, in those days it was even worse. Fire was something we all feared – and we feared little.

  It wasn’t just the fire, those aluminium cars didn’t have the protection they’ve got today. Ronnie’s car was torn in two as it exploded in flames and he had shattered his legs. The race was stopped, and Frank just came up and said, ‘Ronnie’s had a reasonable shunt and it’ll be about 15 or 20 minutes until they clear all the debris and get going again.’ I just said, ‘Right, no worries.’ We eventually got going after another red flag for an incident on the warm-up laps and to this day I can’t even remember where I finished. I now know it was 13th, but it was a big blur to me.

  Amazingly, despite the fire, Ronnie wasn’t even burned, the only injury he had was the broken leg. Neurosurgeon Professor Sid Watkins was now travelling to every race, as he pretty much did for the next three decades, and he was more worried about Vittorio Brambilla, who had been hit on the head by a wheel when he slammed into the side of the Lotus, than Ronnie. I think in many ways that crash was the turning point in Formula One safety. Watching some of the footage now, it seems almost farcical to see the drivers like James climbing into the flames to pull Ronnie out of his car.

  There were other drivers arguing with people at the scene because there were 11 cars involved and plenty of drivers near it all. The crowd was out on the track and the police were holding them back, Clay Regazzoni was shouting at Sid and Bernie Ecclestone and whoever else he could see who was in some position of power.

  With the Armco crumbling from the impact of a lost wheel on the next warm-up lap, perhaps things did need to change.