AJ

by Alan Jones

  After the race I went back to the hotel. When I got up the next morning Frank said, ‘Alan, I’ve got some bad news for you. Ronnie died last night.’ I couldn’t believe it. Because we just thought that he’d screwed his legs. Under no circumstances did we think he’d sustained injuries that would be fatal. Apparently he’d damaged his leg so badly, seven fractures in one and three in the other, that some of the fat from his legs got into his bloodstream and made it into his heart and kidneys. That’s what killed him. I felt numb.

  It is a strange thing. You never relate it back to yourself. I mean, I was on the grid beside him. I don’t know whether it was just my self-protection mechanism, but I shrugged it off. I felt sorry for Barbara, his wife, and young daughter Nina, and I felt sorry for Ronnie, obviously, but as to me – I shrugged it off. The reality for me and all the other drivers was that three weeks later we would be racing again in Watkins Glen. You couldn’t sit around and dwell on stuff like that.

  At Watkins Glen Mario’s Lotus was again really fast in qualifying and we thought he would be tough to beat, but on the Sunday he struggled a little and it was the Ferraris with that magnificent flat 12 engine that had the speed. The Ferraris of Carlos and Gilles were running away with it when I passed Mario, the new World Champion, for third, which became second when Gilles’ car failed.

  That weekend, our adopted son Christian was born – on 27 September 1978 – in London and he was given to Beverley within seconds of the birth. We had our first child. I was probably mortified by the carry-on back at the motel with all the baby stuff, but it didn’t take long for me to appreciate life as a father.

  Frank had now decided to be a two-car team for 1979 and he signed Clay Regazzoni, although he almost asked my permission to do so. I told him I had no problem with him signing anyone. ‘Sign whoever you like. We’ve got to race against him anyway so go ahead and sign Superman if you want.’

  From my side of it, I’d signed a one-year deal which had an option that Frank was exercising and I had negotiated a pay rise. I was happy with both parts of that. I felt like we were really getting somewhere. I liked Frank and Patrick and we worked really well together. With plans for a ground-effects car next year I knew we could win races. We just had to work out the little niggles.

  The season ended with unfulfilled promise in Canada. We had good speed and I was heading Gilles for most of the race when a slow puncture started to affect my lap times. I was running second to Jean-Pierre Jarier in a Lotus and we were running a quarter of a lap behind him when I let Gilles past for what would become the lead when Jarier pulled out. It was Gilles’ first win and it was in my Ferrari!

  Strangely though, I was happy with where I had ended up. I was a Williams driver, and for me that was better than being a driver for Ferrari.

  Sid Watkins

  Sid Watkins, the travelling F1 doctor, was a lovely man, a true gentleman and so caring for us drivers. I think you’d have to be a very strange person not to get on well with Sid. I’d hate to think where driver safety would be without him.

  I remember being in Spain and Beverley had a fit and I went down to Sid’s room at something like one in the morning – no dramas he just jumped up, came up to our room, sorted out Bev and headed back to his room as if it was nothing.

  Fortunately he never had to look after my broken body, since I never really hurt myself in a Formula One car. At one stage I did have a doctor at the tracks that I shared with Emerson Fittipaldi and a couple of other drivers. I always remember saying to this doc, what happens if we have a big shunt and three of your drivers are involved, who are you going to go to first?

  He was Portuguese and he charged like a wounded bull to come to each grand prix. He had a nice little life. He’d come to the grand prix and he’d always have the right passes and he just swanned around. Then I realised, Sid’s here, why am I paying him, so I stopped. Sid was better than him too, and he was great at working out who was in greatest need and he dealt with drivers on a risk basis.

  Sid’s job was really to suss out where the hospitals were, which particular hospital was good for what particular injury. He would make a decision on the spot and he’d send you to the nearest appropriate hospital.

  Belgian Cyclepaths

  I was leaving Zolder one night and we had to go through a checkpoint to get out. There was a bike rider in the middle of the road holding up the cars, rather than moving to the side a little and letting us all pass … so I gave him a little beep on the horn that said, ‘Can you move over?’ And he gave me the bird. I was still in race mode, so I’ve rammed him up the arse and he ended up on the bonnet of the car.

  My old mate Charlie was with me and he said, ‘Fuck, champ, careful.’ And I’m saying, ‘No, fuck him, Charlie.’ I kept going and drove back to the motel with him on the bonnet. Which he wasn’t impressed with. I could hear him screaming and carrying on and his bike was back there all mangled. He wouldn’t get out of the way and he’s taking up a whole queue for one bicycle, so when he gave me the finger I thought that was clearly an indication that he wanted to be on the bonnet.

  Anyway, the coppers came and they let me off. I think they saw the funny side of it but of course couldn’t admit it. I was all contrite and concerned while they were interviewing me, but seriously I couldn’t give a fuck about the bird-flipping bicyclist.

  There was an advantage to being an Aussie in Europe back then. You could plead ignorance – or stupidity – and they would believe you.

  9

  Macau

  FOR MANY YEARS I went home to Australia for the European winter via the Macau Grand Prix. Macau is a bit like Monaco, in that it is a stupid place for a car race. It was challenging, that’s for sure. When you have a hairpin bend that is so tight and narrow you nearly have to do a three-point turn you know it is getting silly.

  But the big difference was the cars and the people. This grand prix, I think, has pretty much always been run in the slower and smaller Formula Pacific and then Formula Three cars that I essentially cut my teeth on in the UK. It was run by Teddy Yip, a sensational bloke and a multi-squillionaire from Hong Kong, and he was the one who had me racing there.

  So he started paying for my flights home as long as I would run the race, which I did for many years. I never won it, but I did get pole a couple of times and was leading when the car died on me.

  I think it was in 1978 when Bob Harper, a big Ford dealer in Macau and China, had three Chevrons in his team for Keke Rosberg, Derek Daly and Riccardo Patrese. The cars were all lined up in the pits and there was a row of new tyres on the wall behind them. When I saw the cars lined up and those tyres, it shifted my mindset. I wasn’t sure we had any new tyres and I was pretty certain we didn’t have any qualifying tyres.

  So I asked Sid Taylor, who was looking after the team, if we had any. He said, ‘My word, we have,’ and showed me a set or two of purple-tinged tyres. When tyres have been used, they get that look, so I knew straight away.

  ‘Sid, they’ve been used.’ He said, ‘They’re fucking good these. Don’t worry about them. They were on pole last year.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  I went and grabbed Teddy. ‘Teddy, come here a second. I want to show you something. These are my qualifiers.’ Then we jumped in the car and went to look at Bob’s, and because Bob Harper was his nemesis I knew where this was going. I showed him the three brand new Chevrons all lined up and all the brand new tyres.

  Of course, being Asian, for Teddy that was a major loss of face and Sid was in a bit of trouble. He went, ‘I’ll kill you. I’ll fucking cut your balls out. I’ll have you floating in the harbour.’ Teddy, settle down. Then he got his head into what we needed. ‘Right. I want nine sets of qualifiers …’ I said, ‘Teddy, we only really need one or two.’ ‘No, no, we need six.’

  In the end, we had a wall of tyres flown in overnight from England. We used to prepare the cars in Teddy’s garage, which was on the track but not near the pits. If we didn’t get the equipm
ent out each day before they put the Armco up in front of the garage, we had some issues.

  Down in the pits I looked up the next morning and there was an army of blokes headed our way, each carrying a tyre. There must have been about 50 of them, so I’ve gone from one set of purple qualifiers to about 600 tyres overnight. What am I going to do now? Thank Christ, I put it on pole after that. I led the first lap, but a combination of a fuel cut-out and concrete dust in the track ended my day early.

  We had a bit of a party in my room at the hotel that night. We all used to stay at the Hotel Lisboa and we all got a bit carried away, as you do when you’re that age. It was loud. There was a bang on the wall from next door. It made no difference; we abused them and kept going.

  Then Jones’ Law came into it. At the very moment I stepped out of my room, the bloke that was banging on the wall stepped out of his room. It was Dan Gurney, who’d tried to get me to drive his cars in the States. Oops. ‘Hi, Mr Gurney. I’m sorry if Keke made all those noises last night.’ Dan, by the way, is responsible for drivers spraying champagne on the podium – he did it after winning Le Mans in 1967, and everyone has done it since. Well, I was an exception, which I’ll come to later.

  I loved racing in Macau for all the reasons I hated Monaco. To this day, I still love Hong Kong and pretty much everywhere in Asia. I like the food and I like the people and the frenetic atmosphere and pace. You get the hydrofoil over to Macau from Hong Kong, which Teddy owned in partnership with Stanley Ho, who you know is not exactly a pauper.

  Then you’d check into the Hotel Lisboa, which I think Teddy half owned as well, so you got a fantastic room. We’d go downstairs and there’d be this pretty ordinary dining room with Formica tables and everything, but the food was just absolutely exquisite. You know, you’d just have a ball.

  Teddy used to have a garden party on the Thursday night. He had a sentry post outside his house with a guard in it, to keep the riff raff out. He was mad, but he was just an absolute character. It was just a great weekend. Then on Sunday night, every year there’d be a major party going on somewhere, often in my room. That’s when I think Beverley made the mistake of flying straight to Australia and not coming to Macau. She shouldn’t have left me by myself in Macau; she’s got no one to blame but herself.

  On the Monday, you’d inevitably get up with a shocking hangover and I’d start winding my way back to Australia, where I’d stay for as long as I could … maybe three or four weeks.

  Frank eventually asked me to stop running in Macau, so 1978 was my last one. Frank figured he was investing a lot of money in me and he didn’t want me taking unnecessary risks. So over time, all the extras disappeared from my schedule.

  I respected Frank for his approach – and it worked both ways. After a major crash in testing in 1980, we worked together on getting a test driver rather than risk me. I was, of course, more interested in spending time watching Christian grow up, while Frank was totally focused on me as an investment. Now I’m not saying the other bloke was expendable, but why pay a bloke a million dollars and send him out to test something? Better him than me.

  10

  Can-Am / Cruise and Collect

  I MAY NOT have liked oval-track racing, but I did love racing in the States. I had success there in Formula One, which obviously helped, but there was more to it than that. The tracks I loved to race on were long and fast, with sweeping corners, and there were plenty of those throughout North America. When they built a road course, they built a real race track.

  The Americans were also friendly, cooperative and open – and they had proper hamburgers and cold beer. The English used to boil meat and put it between two stale buns and call it a hamburger. Or you’d ask for a cold Coke and they’d just pull it straight off the shelf, and you’d say, ‘No, I want a cold one,’ and he’d say, ‘It is cold, guv.’

  The Yanks did things more like the Aussie way – they had ice and the beer was cold. I felt a lot more at home there than I did in England. I liked racing there – and the weather was better too.

  In 1977 I did those two Can-Am races for Shadow and I really liked the cars. They weren’t the knuckle-dragging beasts from the early 1970s, but rather they were essentially Formula 5000 cars with sportscar bodies. With 5-litre engines they weren’t lacking in the grunt department, and they were a lot of fun to drive and really quick. My 1978 season with Carl Haas Racing really started at the final round of the ’77 season when I qualified in the new Shadow beside Patrick Tambay (who was winning the championship for Haas) on the front row of the grid. I led the race until the car broke, but it was enough to make sure that Carl knew I was the man to have when Patrick had to give up Can-Am for his Formula One drive with McLaren.

  I signed up for 1978 with Haas before I had anything locked away in Formula One, so when I signed with Williams obviously Formula One was my main priority, but I still wanted to honour my contract with Carl. I did all the races bar one, where there was a clash with a grand prix, and it made for a busy year. I rarely had my bum out of a car, and that was perfect. You don’t get better watching, you only get better from doing … and I was doing.

  But the travel was draining; jetting across the Atlantic so often was not as easy or as glamorous as it sounds. Although it did get a bit easier as the year went on when the boss of First National City (now Citibank), who sponsored both the car and the championship, put me on the Concorde for the flights. It wasn’t just quicker, it was better.

  The food in the Concorde lounges was pretty special, and at Heathrow they had free international phone calls, so I’d camp outside the door waiting for it to open like it was a Harrods sale so I could get all my phone calls done for nix. Still lurking inside this jet-setting Formula One driver was the struggling hustler who’d cooked breakfast for his tenants in the Ealing boarding house.

  The Carl A. Haas Racing Team Lola was designated as a T333CS and there were plenty of that model lining up for the season, along with the 332 from the previous season and a few other types of car like Shadow, Spyder, Prophet, Chevron and even an Elfin from Australia. Given my Lola was based on the Formula 5000 car, it had a central driving position which I quite liked, and with all the extra bodywork and that huge rear wing it had tremendous downforce. It was quite enjoyable to drive. Carl was the US importer for Lola, and the kit to turn a car from a standard T333C – or a T332C for that matter – into a CS was designed by his team and sold to all the other teams: it was the only way to race a Lola in the series.

  For those that love to talk about racing car chassis, the Prophet and the Spyder were modified Lola 332CS cars, so I suppose they thought the best way to beat the ‘factory’ team was to make the old car better than the new and rebadge it. The T333CS evolved during the season as well, because these guys were throwing out a pretty serious challenge and Carl was as competitive as me and didn’t want to lose to them.

  The tracks we raced on were so good for those cars. Road America, Watkins Glen, Mid-Ohio and Mont-Tremblant were all bloody interesting tracks. Most of the tracks were in really nice parts of the world too, and even though Mid-Ohio was in the middle of nowhere, it was a really nice middle of nowhere.

  At that time in America, public toilets didn’t have doors, which I found really hard to deal with. I was dying for a crap at Mid-Ohio once, and I didn’t want to go to one of those toilets. I had an hour or so before a practice session, so I jumped in the hire car and headed off to the motel to do my business in private. I was screaming down the motorway and I could see the cop car coming the other way, and then I saw him put his lights on and do a U-turn and chase me down. The first thing he notices are my overalls, then my accent, which usually got me mistaken for a Limey.

  He said, ‘You were speeding,’ and I said, ‘I didn’t mean to, officer, but your crappers over here don’t have any doors and I can’t go without a door, so I’m going back to the motel to have a crap.’

  God only knows what he thought, but he said, ‘I’m on my way to an accident, you
get going.’ No warning, nothing, just that. I felt like saying, ‘If you’re on your way to an accident, why did you turn around?’ But I think he just wanted to get back to the police station to tell the rest of them about this crazy Aussie racing driver he caught rushing to the toilet.

  Anyway, the season began at Road Atlanta in May, a few months after we had started back in Formula One. I had tested there with the team before signing on to drive, so I kind of knew the track. We had a really good but small team and we lacked for nothing. This series was big time in the States, and there were some other really good teams there too, like VDS, Hogan Racing and Newman-Freeman Racing, which was Paul Newman’s entrée into motor racing.

  I was comfortably on pole from fellow Aussie Warwick – or War Wick – Brown in the VDS Lola and Elliott Forbes-Robinson in the Newman-Freeman Spyder. The race went smoothly and I went on to win, setting up an amazing season for me. It was clear we had a great car. I knew that both Warwick and Elliott would be tough competition, as would Al Holbert, who finished second in the first race.

  Charlotte was up next, and they had this road-course track slapped in the middle of the oval with some of the banking also being used. The car was sensational here, and again I started from pole. But on lap six I had to pit with a flat tyre and that put me right down the back of the field. Elliott was way out in front and I had to try and chase him down in 40-odd laps. In the end, he had too much of a gap, but I climbed from essentially last place to finish 30 seconds behind him in second place.

  If I didn’t know before, I knew my one-liner about ‘cruise and collect’ was far from accurate. You can never take anything for granted in motorsport – there are so many mechanical items on a car and so many other drivers on the track that anything could happen. At least these races weren’t on ovals, where the lottery came into play, but we were taking the races seriously, that’s for sure.