by Alan Jones
I flew home and they had the big banner outside the house, which was made by my helmet designer John Lyall. I wasn’t feeling too well at this stage but I had to pretend that I was OK and had to have a few beers again and just relax and soak it all in.
It was unreal, surreal even, and things just changed. There’s no use pretending they didn’t.
That’s when I got the Citron because apparently to the French, I didn’t make myself as available as I did the year before. There was a good reason for that: I simply couldn’t. Obviously to most of those journos I would love to have just said I don’t want to talk to you because you are dicks, but I couldn’t and didn’t. I made myself as available as I could given the increasing sponsor commitments and the like … and I still had to have the headspace to race well and win races. Talking to idiots was never going to help that.
While things changed for me, I don’t think I changed. I was still going to be the same nasty race track prick as before, I was still the same bloke at home.
It is just that the world around me changed.
Nelson Piquet
Nelson and I really never saw eye-to-eye. I think he was rude, and I think he was unnecessarily undiplomatic. Calling Nigel Mansell’s wife ugly publicly, I think, was unnecessary and unchivalrous. It’s not like Nelson was that good looking, even if he thinks he was.
We didn’t get on. I didn’t like him. And to make things worse, he was my biggest rival in 1980. Invariably we’d always end up on the front row of the grid or within one or two cars of one another.
I think he showed his colours a bit when he jumped out of the car and tried to kick Eliseo Salazar in the balls at the chicane at Hockenheim. The fight continued when a van driver came to collect the pair, but it was Nelson who eventually drove off in the van to the pits, leaving the van driver and Salazar beside the track.
He didn’t mind coming into our pits for a fight either.
Nelson and I raced hard, and when it didn’t go his way and there was contact he always had something to say about me or whoever was driving the other car. But he didn’t make mistakes himself apparently. Like at Montreal in 1980. I didn’t care what he thought then and I don’t care what he thinks today. I had the racing line, and it was his job to pass me safely. That crash was his fault and he has to live with it.
There was another one at Zolder, I screamed down the inside of him because the door was open. We rubbed wheels and he went off. He came back and walked through the pits and he said to Frank, ‘I am going to break his arm.’
Frank just turned around and said, ‘Well, I’m thinking you’ll have one chance at him, mate. Make sure you’re good at it.’ That fucked him. He went, ‘Um-um-um,’ and just walked off.
The very next meeting was Monaco. He was leading and I was running second, and I could see him looking in the rear-view mirrors all the time. He had eyes like saucepans, and then he ran into the barrier. I thought, well, there’s karma for you. That made me very happy.
I played mind games with him all the time, because I thought he was mentally weak. I once tried to check the ballast he was supposed to add to his car, and made sure he knew what I was doing. He went nuts.
He was quick, but his best skill was getting himself into the best cars. He was in the right place at the right time and he got three world championships. I thought he was a tool as a person, but he was a bloody good driver.
16
Australian Grand Prix
NOT LONG AFTER winning the World Championship I came home for the Australian Grand Prix at Calder Park.
As the season was progressing, my old boss Bob Jane was on the phone to get me to bring the Williams down for the Australian Grand Prix, which he was hosting at Calder Park, which he owned. My winning the championship had generated plenty of interest in Formula One in Australia and Bob was working on a plan to get Calder Park onto the World Championship schedule.
One would hope he had plans to change the track. Australia is a funny place with car racing: there is all the land in the world and then they – or we – build these dinky little tracks that are just not fun to drive. Calder Park was one of those. It was very Mickey Mouse and not complex – it claims to have 11 corners, but there are only three with three chicanes.
Just before I left London to come home, Bob said the media wanted a press conference and we could do it at his place if I wanted. So we did, and it was well branded for the Bob Jane Corporation. During the conference, he stood up and said, ‘I’ve got a really successful Bob Jane T-Mart in my outlet, I’ll give it to you for a dollar.’ Then he proceeded to put a great big picture of myself with the laurel wreath around my neck on the wall at the centre in Melbourne, at that big busy round about at the top of Elizabeth Street, at the CBD’s north-west edge.
So I got that for a buck, and let me tell you he got much more of a return out of it than I did. He ran his businesses as franchises, and now that Alan Jones had become a franchisee, Bob Jane had a great promotional tool, which he rolled out at every opportunity. I didn’t see a penny out of ‘my’ Bob Jane T-Mart though, then he sold it, and I got even less. I felt completely screwed.
Anyway, the idea of racing in and even winning the Australian Grand Prix held a bit of romance for me, and if you’ve been paying attention you’ll know there’s not much that does. This was my home race, my father had won it and no other father-son combination had ever won the Australian Grand Prix. If I could win, it would mean a great deal to me.
I would imagine Bob had to pay a significant fee to Frank to get the championship-winning car. We brought that down with Wayne Eckersley and my other mechanic John Jackson – Skinny John – who used to put up with Wayne, which was amazing.
The only other Formula One car Bob could get was an Alfa for Giacomelli, but he had a brand new ground-effects Elfin F5000 car lined up for Didier Pironi. As it turned out the brand new car wasn’t ready and he had to drive an older car alongside his teammate, John Bowe.
The weekend was big. Channel Nine was covering it with Jackie Stewart leading the commentary team with Ken Sparkes, who I would eventually get to know really well when I started with Nine. He was a really nice bloke.
I got on pole a fraction ahead of Bruno, which is probably all you would ever get with a 36-second lap, and we were nearly two seconds clear of Alfie Costanzo, who was the fastest of the Formula 5000 cars. There were 15 Formula 5000 cars in the field, the slowest of which was six seconds behind me, and then a couple of Formula Pacific cars with little 1.6 litre engines that were 6.5 and 7.4 seconds off the qualifying pace. With a 95-lap race scheduled, there was going to be a lot of lapping cars. I donated my pole position money to a local charity, which I did because it felt right not because of the publicity it could get, but it went down well.
The temperature on race day climbed above 40 degrees Celsius – that’s bloody hot anywhere, let alone in the cockpit – but the crowd was huge. I don’t reckon they could have fitted another person in the place.
Off the start Bruno and I had a good battle, then going down the back straight we rubbed wheels and fell off the track together. He got back on before me and led the race, but I wasn’t going to let that little Italian win the Australian Grand Prix in front of me. He didn’t hold the lead for long and once I cleared him I sprinted away. No-one was going to beat me that day. Eventually I even lapped him too, so I won the race by more than a lap and had my own little way to honour my father.
It was also a final stamp on my championship year too.
We had a big party up at the farm to round out the year and get ready for a bit of downtime before the title defence. For years I enjoyed anonymity in Australia; this was no longer the case. There was a lot more attention now on Formula One, and while Bob’s push for a World Championship was unsuccessful, there was a really good bid coming from Adelaide, about 700 kilometres west of Melbourne, that would succeed in getting a race for the 1985 season.
I had a few corporate things to do while in Melbourne, and I
had to start managing my commercial interests and sponsors in general. I was part of the Marlboro World Championship team and that paid well, as did Akai, even if I didn’t understand the slogan … ‘Akai’s Okay, OK!’
There was AGV helmets, the good old Italians. I was wearing a Bell helmet with an AGV sticker on it because I preferred the Bell, who then got dirty with me because they didn’t want an AGV sticker on one of their helmets. They could have paid, so bugger them. But AGV was bloody hopeless, they took forever to pay. One time they said, ‘The exchange rate’s not right.’ I said, ‘For you or for me?’
Just pay me what you owe me. As I’ve said, I don’t want any more and I don’t want any less than what we agreed to. I just want the deal. The deal is the deal. If you weren’t happy with it then don’t do the deal in the first place.
Even with their slow payments, I wasn’t short of dough though, that’s for sure.
Opportunities were popping up everywhere. The old Aussie wasn’t bad at coming out of the woodwork when you’re a winner; it was just the opposite when I was trying to climb the ranks. I had all these would-be entrepreneurs wanting me to go into business with them or endorse things.
I reckon sixty per cent of them were probably shonky. When you’re in a semi-protected commercial environment, living in England, then you get home to all these people giving you these weird and wonderful ideas and solutions, you think, ‘Oh, maybe I should have a go at that,’ or ‘Maybe this looks interesting,’ such as Bob Jane with the T-Mart.
Getting a T-Mart for a dollar, I thought, ‘That can’t be bad.’ The old adage, nothing for nothing. I’ve learned the hard way. I’m still learning.
At least I was OK when negotiating with Frank. I had signed a two-year deal with Williams covering 1980 and ’81 and Frank thought that I already agreed a drive for 1981 for £600,000, but I didn’t think I had. It became a psychological thing, I wanted to earn more than any other Formula One driver because of the competitiveness of it all, and I felt like I was the best.
There were plenty of people sniffing around, and while I didn’t want to go anywhere else, I would have. Renault and Alfa were keen, but joining the loyalists would have been interesting. Renault even sent a lawyer to Montreal to do a deal with me. I made sure Frank knew about that. I knew I could make more than US$1.2 million at other teams, and that is what Jody Scheckter was getting, so I told Frank that was my price.
He said it was nearly the same on exchange rates anyway, but I dug in. Eventually we signed just after Montreal, Frank begrudgingly and me happily. I got what I wanted. Keeping the number 1 for his car was a good carrot too, because that went with the driver. Imagine a Renault with the number 1 – great marketing.
After I won at Watkins Glen, I went up to Frank and said, ‘Well, there you go. The money hasn’t slowed me down.’ He just said, ‘Piss off.’
So by the time I made it to Australia everything was sorted, and let me tell you now, that 1.2 mil is probably the same as 18 or 20 now. It was a lot of money. Unfortunately for me, plenty of people knew that too.
17
My First Final Year
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.