But Chapman and Lotus led the way – albeit in an entirely unpremeditated, spontaneous fashion. As it happened, there was a vague rumour going around the Lotus offices, early in ’68, that the John Player Tobacco Company was interested in using motor racing as a new, promotional tool. Inconveniently enough, Esso and BP had just dropped out of F1 sponsorship – each having spent up to £500,000 a year on the sport – so money was definitely on teams’ minds. Andrew Ferguson, a Lotus exec, went to the Player’s HQ in Nottingham for an exploratory talk. To everyone’s astonishment, he emerged two hours later, clutching a deal.
After that, things moved fast. The first major European outing for the new-look fag-packet Lotus 49 was at the Race of Champions, Brands Hatch, in March 1968. Hill was the only Lotus driver who made it to the starting grid and went on to have an uninspired race, retiring with a broken drive-shaft. The organisers, on the other hand, were sent into mild hysteria by the lurid object on the racetrack. They made Lotus cover up the Player’s sailor boy logo with tape, even black-flagging one of the team’s two cars during practice for going out with the tape missing. Later on, the sailor boy was replaced by an unexceptionable Union Jack – but, even so, the BBC and ITV sports departments started grumbling that they might not be able to show motor races of any kind if the cars were covered in ads.
The Spanish organisers were similarly queasy about the Gold Leaf sponsorship and likewise had parts of it covered over. But by then, there were bigger things on everyone’s mind. There Hill was, driving the sole Team Lotus car, with Clark dead, the grief-stricken Chapman vanished, the team disorientated. Black sticky tape was neither here nor there. From Hill’s point of view, about the only good news was that the worryingly fast Jackie Stewart, now driving for Ken Tyrrell and his Matra-Cosworth team, was out of the race with a fractured wrist.
On the other hand, McLaren had just put down their marker for the future by producing their first Grand Prix car, the McLaren-Cosworth M7A. Everyone who saw it agreed that it was an extremely thorough, competent design, very smart-looking (bright orange!), and beautifully built. It also had Bruce McLaren himself to drive it, along with Denny Hulme, the reigning world champion. And it had won at the Race of Champions, a few weeks earlier. McLaren then spoiled the glamorous visual effect of the car somewhat by lumping on a couple of side-pannier fuel tanks, and sawing off the nose to reduce the chance of collisions round the squiggles of the Jarama track, but you knew that they meant business.
Practice worked out badly for Hill. He ended up sixth on the grid, with Chris Amon taking pole for Ferrari, and with both the McLarens ahead of him. But this was one of those times when sheer grit – the thing that Hill possessed more of, probably, than anyone else on the track – was the thing to have.
The race started. Various people took the lead, including Jean-Pierre Beltoise in the Matra-Ford, and Mexican daredevil Pedro Rodriguez in a BRM. One by one, however, they succumbed to mechanical collapse, or, in Rodriguez’s case, to accident. Not only did Rodriguez fly off the track after hitting a patch of oil and crash into some safety netting – he then had to watch as a mob of happy spectators ‘descended on the car like vultures and … stripped off the mirrors, seat, windscreen and nose cowling before the mechanics arrived.’
Hill, meanwhile, didn’t hit anything, go off the track, or break down. With admirable calm, he waited out the war of attrition going on around him and when Amon’s Ferrari 312 packed up on the fifty-eighth lap, he moved seamlessly into the lead, held on to it and won.
After the race, he was understandably ecstatic. ‘I had absolutely no trouble at all – the car went perfectly.’ Ever the compulsive note-taker, he calculated that he had changed gear 1,350 times and then admitted, ‘We badly needed this win just now.’ Lotus badly needed the win, he badly needed the win: his last GP victory had been two and half years earlier, at Watkins Glen, and he was now thirty-nine years old. But he had kept his nerve, done what was needed and, indeed, set himself on the way to his second World Championship. ‘After practice,’ said Bob Sparshott, with sincere admiration, ‘Graham took the entire team to dinner at a top restaurant in Madrid. Next day, Graham won the race.’
Maybe Hill never had a clutch of exquisite wins under his belt and the reverence of the racing cognoscenti. But for leadership, grace under pressure and, most important, delivering the goods, you’d have to say that the ’68 Spanish Grand Prix showed him at his absolute best. In answer to an earlier question: this was, in fact, his beautiful race.
12
THAT LITTLE SCOTSMAN: STEWART AND THE PROBLEM OF DEATH
With Jim Clark gone, there was clearly a vacancy for the position of Best Driver In The World. How surprising was it that the spot should be filled by another Scotsman? Clark grew up in Duns, just west of Berwick-upon-Tweed; Jackie Stewart grew up in Dumbarton, to the north-west of Glasgow, about 100 miles from Clark’s home. Like Clark, Stewart’s background was respectable Scottish middle-class, with a family who (again, like Clark’s) disapproved of motor racing. Stewart, though, suffered from none of Clark’s internal schisms. Once he took to motor sport, he moved with typical consistency through sports cars and Formula 3, before (having turned down Lotus for F1 purposes) signing up for BRM, with Graham Hill as team leader and unofficial older brother.
As Stewart’s career evolved, Clark – three years older than Stewart – could not help but notice the lively, garrulous young man who was starting to make such an impact. Indeed, at the time of his death, even he was starting to fret at the challenge Stewart represented. ‘If I had to say which Scot was the best,’ Jack Brabham later mused, ‘I would have to say that, although they were both top drivers, Jackie had a better knowledge and feel for the car than Jimmy.’ This sounds almost sacrilegious. But Brabham’s reasoning was this: ‘Jimmy was very reliant on Colin Chapman, and as Jimmy drove when the Lotus was the top car with the works engines from Coventry Climax and Cosworth, that also became an unbeatable combination.’ Stewart had some good cars, in other words, but no Mephistophelean genius at his shoulder: for him, it was more a question of working effectively with what he was given.
He picked off his first Championship win at Monza in ’65, and ended the year – his rookie season – in third place in the drivers’ table. John Surtees had taken the Championship for Ferrari in 1964 – Scuderia Ferrari wouldn’t see the title again until the mid-1970s – and Clark won it for Lotus in ’65. Nevertheless, Stewart was optimistic about the ’66 season. It wasn’t so long since Hill had taken the Championship for BRM; the team was in reasonable spirits; they had a neat chassis to work with, and the promise of a new, wonderfully powerful 3-litre H16 engine – all ready for the latest engine capacity about-face in the Formula regulations.
Unfortunately, the H16 turned out to be an echo of the old V16 of 1951. It was an insanely complex solution to a given problem, could not be manufactured to the correct tolerances, and was unreliable and unbelievably heavy. It took six mechanics to lift it, and Stewart was believed to have compared it unfavourably to a ship’s anchor. It was also late in development, so the team had to use a bored-out version of the old 1½-litre V8 in the interim. In fact, Stewart won at Monaco, Moss-style: the first race of the calendar and another portent of the young Scot’s future triumphs. It was, though, very nearly, his last ever win.
The next race was the Belgian GP at Spa. It rained, hard, as hard as it possibly could. Visibility was non-existent. Having qualified his P261 an impressive-enough third on the grid, Stewart took off into the weather and never finished the first lap. At something over 150 mph, he went off the track at the Masta Kink, crashed down a ravine and wrapped the car round the buttress of a stone barn. The steering wheel crushed him in his seat, the fuel tanks ruptured, and he sat in a bath of petrol, waiting for the whole lot to go up in one enormous fireball, frying him where he lay.
His great good fortune was this: Graham Hill lost it at the same spot, collected the spin before he hit anything, ground to a halt at the side of the
track, looked around him, ‘and as I looked down, I said, bugger me, that looks like Jackie down there, in a car!’ Hill at once forgot about trying to get his BRM going again. ‘I thought, good God, he doesn’t look so good, he looks a bit second-hand! I could see he was in some sort of trouble, so I jumped out of the car, and of course he was trapped.’ Stewart was stuck there for twenty-five minutes, while Hill and Bob Bondurant – another BRM driver – ‘got me out’, as Stewart recalled, ‘using spanners from a spectator’s toolkit’. There were no marshals, no rescue team, no ambulance service. At last, he was taken to a makeshift medical facility, where he was laid out on a concrete floor, littered with fag ends. An ambulance arrived with a police escort, took him off in the direction of Liège, lost the police escort, and finally lost its way to the hospital. In the end, an agonised Stewart was plucked out of Belgium altogether and flown to England in the air ambulance. Back in London, he recovered from broken ribs, a broken collarbone and fuel burns. No wonder he held Hill in such high regard: the bloke saved his life.
And the race itself? Seven drivers, out of a field of fifteen starters, crashed out on the first lap. Only five finished, with John Surtees taking a brave win in his Ferrari.
Other drivers than Stewart might have allowed themselves to be patched up, thanked the gods for letting them live again and simply gone back to the track. But Stewart has always been a great thinker, as well as doer. There he had been, at Spa, 12 June 1966, lying in a shattered car full of petrol, helplessly waiting for somebody to do something before he joined Harry Schell, Chris Bristow, Alan Stacey, Giulio Cabianca, Taffy von Trips, Ricardo Rodriguez, Gary Hocking and Carel de Beaufort – all of whom had died in Formula One accidents since the start of the decade. Two months later, John Taylor was burned to death in the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring. The following year, Lorenzo Bandini was burned to death at Monaco. It all affected him, permanently. He brooded on it. ‘If this was the best we had,’ Stewart said, ‘there was something sadly wrong: things wrong with the racetrack, the cars, the medical side, the fire-fighting, and the emergency crews.’ Time would not mollify him, and the ’66 crash would become a defining event in his life, every bit as much as his first Grand Prix win, or his first Championship.
He also had plenty of time in the following year, 1967, to ponder the meaning of life, given the incredible unreliability of the BRM (or British Racing Misery as it was now known) P83: he only managed to finish two out of the eleven Grands Prix that season. A bold move to Ken Tyrrell’s Matra-Ford hybrid was the only way out for 1968 – which started slightly haphazardly with a ‘Mule’ version of the car in a snot-green undercoat at South Africa, followed by a serious injury to his wrist in a crash in the Formula Two race at Jarama, which forced him out of both the Spanish GP and Monaco.
His wrist healed, slowly and imperfectly, allowing him to take some points at Spa. By the time he arrived at Zandvoort for the Dutch GP, he was sporting a plastic brace round his forearm, was in great pain and had been told by his doctor on no account to compete. So he went out and won the race, in heavy rain. The next two Grandes Épreuves saw him in the points again and then, at Nürburgring, he had one of those drives: a life-defining, career-defining race, in catastrophic conditions of torrential rain and zero visibility, just like Spa in ’66. And with his wrist still not properly healed. ‘I couldn’t see my braking distance marks,’ he observed. ‘I couldn’t see the car in front; it was just a great wall of spray.’ Or, to put it another way, the track was so narrow, so bumpy and so twisty, that even on a good day it was impossible to remember what came next, ‘but in fog and ceaseless spray you just have no idea at all.’ And yet, by virtue of (a) some cunning wet-weather tyres from Dunlop, (b) astonishing natural talent and amazing toughness, he came home first, a shattering four minutes ahead of a drenched and disbelieving Graham Hill. The great drivers can master rain; and they could master the Nürburgring. Stewart did both, compellingly.
The contradiction, though, is this: Stewart’s nerve and commitment to racing – as seen, first at Zandvoort, then at the Nürburgring, cannot be doubted. He didn’t like the conditions he had to race in but he dealt with them as convincingly as any driver could ever hope to. And, like Moss, like Fangio, he lived for the sheer charge of driving, of being able to take it right to the edge – revealing in ’68, that ‘because it’s dangerous, this gives the extra thrill. This is where money doesn’t exist.’
Yet the thing people are apt to remember him for is not so much his genius behind the wheel as his endless crusade to get the tracks rendered even half-safe – as if this somehow diminishes his bravery and daring on the track. At the time, men in rally jackets, who would go to their graves without ever competing in a motor race of any kind, nonetheless felt entitled to disparage Stewart and his safety campaign as if the whole point of the sport was to stand a good chance of dying an unnecessary and painful death. In their world, the ethos of motor racing entailed, not a love of living on the edge, but a deathwish, and any attempts to lower the risk were somehow contrary to the sport’s fundamentals. And Stewart was a coward for even daring to raise the issue.
This was further muddled by the historical stridency of the times, in which collectively motivated interest groups were always mouthing off, one way or another, and of which Stewart appeared to be yet another exemplar. Spa, 1969, to take a case in point, saw the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association successfully boycott the race: the track was just too dangerous. It was a near-unanimous decision by the drivers, especially significant (according to Stewart) considering the complete immovability of the organisers, ‘who would not make any safety concessions at all.’ And who boldly went to the authorities on behalf of the GPDA, thus attracting all the opprobrium? Jackie Stewart.
People outside the sport understood: ‘The only people who have been critical of us,’ Stewart noted tartly, ‘have often been those closely connected with motor racing.’ But within motor sport, there were claims that earlier generations of drivers had indebted themselves to the racing community by facing death, voluntarily: to seek, now, to reduce the probability of dying, was to try to escape that debt, to renege on the sacrifices made in the past, and, at the very least, to prove oneself a sissy. But this gladiatorial pose makes little sense in the modern world, and it made little sense to other Grand Prix drivers at the time. Chris Amon (whose gift to history is to be known as the Unluckiest Driver Ever, having been a shoo-in for several victories for an underperforming Ferrari team, but having always been denied a win at the last minute) took his hat off to Stewart, because his attitude to safety ‘was never ambivalent. He worked hard for circuit changes, and he drove hard.’
Stewart cunningly noted, meanwhile, that improving safety measures for drivers improved safety measures for spectators, which improved prospects for promoters. At the 1969 Spanish GP, Hill and Jochen Rindt crashed heavily into some newly erected barriers. Not only did the two drivers get away relatively unscathed, so did the spectators a few feet away (although, let’s be clear, one man lost an eye; another got a broken arm through flying debris). But it could have been a lot, lot, worse, and the relative usefulness of a length of Armco allowed Stewart to argue that plenty of places would want to put on motor races so long as they could be promoted as a fairly classy attraction rather than something most people would avoid in droves ‘for fear of being mown down by a racing car’.
Safety issues aside, this same ’69 Spanish GP was won by Stewart, who had already won at Kyalami, the South African GP, and was thus signalling his clear intention to go for the title. He had come close to taking it in ’68; and in ’69, he would not be denied. He won six out of the eleven Championship races, and also gave the multicultural Matra-Ford MS80 (French chassis, Ford Cosworth V8, British team under Ken Tyrrell) the distinction of being the first French-built car to win the Constructors’ Championship.
Method was everything. The Matra-Fords were meticulously prepared, as was Stewart himself, who was exacting in his own pre-race pr
eparations. Long before the flag fell, he would go into a process of self-hypnosis, thinking of himself as a gradually deflating (but not completely collapsing) rubber ball, getting magisterially calmer until all emotion had drained away, imagining the man with the starting flag raising it, lowering it, and Stewart himself driving away in a state of Zen tranquillity. Come the race itself, he would find himself tackling the first, chaotic, corner ‘with no more excitement or drama than I would if it were the fiftieth lap of the race.’ Naturally enough, he deeply admired Fangio, for his strategic cunning, his impeccable driving technique, and his charismatic self-possession. You could always tell when Fangio was around, according to Stewart, ‘because he gets more attention than Graham and Jochen and Ickx and everyone else put together’, which was entirely as it should be, ‘because Fangio is the Grand Master of our business and everyone in Motor Racing knows it.’ Mental clarity, a stable environment and the measured approach were always desirables in Stewart’s world.
Which made Jochen Rindt’s death, in 1970, all the more insupportable. It wasn’t just that Rindt died, or that Stewart and Rindt were colleagues in the mad world of motor racing – such that Stewart paid Rindt the compliment of calling him ‘as good a racing driver as I ever raced against during my career’, while at the same time acknowledging the Austrian’s tendency to get his car radically sideways much of the time. They were also mates; they were close neigh-bours in Switzerland; their kids played together; glamorous Nina Rindt and glamorous Helen Stewart made a compelling duo in the pits. Rindt was, in short, part of Stewart’s mental and emotional furniture.
He was also a wizard at Formula Two, but was taking some time to make his mark in Formula One. He had done his apprenticeship with the fading Cooper team, drawing this comment from Ron Dennis (yes, the Ron Dennis), who had been his mechanic at the time: ‘He was arrogant and didn’t really treat people properly. Especially the mechanics.’ He then spent a year at Brabham, where designer Ron Tauranac, by way of contrast, claimed that ‘We really got on famously.’ Money was tight, so ‘We used to share a room together for much of the year. He was a good bloke.’
Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One Page 9
