by Alan Jones
Dad was a hero to me at the time and he was fuelling my desire to get to Europe. I do remember him saying to me, ‘Get over there and give it a go. Australia will always be here, it’s not going anywhere. You can always come back.’
I didn’t get much fatherly advice from him, but that was the best advice he ever gave me.
I watched Dad racing a lot and thought he was the best. When he won the Australian Grand Prix at Longford, in 1959 in the Maserati, I did the lap of honour with him sitting on the back above the fuel tank.
This was all amazing, and it just kept the dream growing, which made Mum a bit nervous. She used to get nervous when Dad raced, but she didn’t make it to many of my races. There was one race with Dad where they all took off and they were rubbing wheels and smoke was coming off the tyres and she just screamed. Motor racing was really dangerous back then, many drivers died, but she never tried to stop me, even though she probably didn’t want me to do it. She knew trying to get me to study was a lost cause, so she just let me be.
As I got older I started taking on some paid work. One summer I worked with a racing driver and car builder named Ernie Seeliger at his workshop in Richmond – and very quickly discovered I didn’t like working on dirty engines, or anything that was dirty. Which is why I never really liked rallying, because it was too much mud and dirt everywhere. When my son Christian was doing his go-karting, all the bloody grease and chains and sprockets, I hated it. When he went into Formula Ford, I thought, ‘How good is this?’
Then I started working for the old man selling cars. That was more me, I thought it was better to bullshit than to clean. It was less strenuous and I sweat too easily. It suited me. For example, cars used to come in many shades of grey. If we were out of the one grey and the customer wanted it, I’d say something like ‘That’s good because it is popular with the undertakers’ – and they’d happily take the other one which amazingly we had in stock. It was good to be earning my own money and having some financial independence.
This was all before I could even get a licence in Victoria. I went to Adelaide to get my licence at 16. I used 18 Kitchener Avenue, Dulwich as my address, where a mate of the old man’s who was also a car dealer lived. He let me use the address – but as I said, I was driving before I even had that licence. The old man gave me a Morris Minor convertible, painted it iridescent green and put in a gold interior and gold wheels. You’d swear he was bloody Greek or something. I was horrified, but what could you do? He gave me a car, and I wasn’t arguing.
When I turned 17, I got a licence in New South Wales. A guy called Laurie O’Neill organised that out at Five Dock. Then when I was 18, I finally got my Victorian licence – and then I got pulled up for the first time. Go and figure that one out.
I had a 300 Healey, a Triumph TR6 then a little Austin-Healey Sprite. On Saturday afternoon we used to get a big bag of chips and a Coke and then we’d all get in a courtyard somewhere, jack the cars up, take the wheels and tyres off, clean under the guards, nugget the tyres and the soft tops and get them just absolutely immaculate. Then we’d go out that night and get pissed and start doing figure eights on the local oval and get covered in shit. On Sunday morning, the cars were dirtier than before we started cleaning them on Saturday.
There was quite a gang of us. John Lyall was one, Brian McGuire was another. Brian’s father was Dad’s spare-parts manager, and we ended up going to Europe together the first time; the second time I went back with John.
I remember parts of that second trip vividly. Olivia Newton-John was there with fellow singer Pat Carroll and a model named Frankie Lightfoot and that was fun. Olivia was going out with Ian Turpie, who was a TV celebrity, but I knew him because he also used to race a little Mini with me. So there was a bit of a crowd of us on the ship, and when we got over there, I hooked up with Brian again and we got an apartment. That starts a whole new story, which we’ll get to soon.
I had finished with karting now and was moving into cars.
We bought this repossessed Mini that had the engine and gearbox sitting in the boot. Dad gave it to Brian Sampson at Motor Improvements and said, ‘Do this up, because we’ll race it.’ I think he thought, Morris 850, it’s not going to cost much. I know he shit himself when he got the bill, but Brian did a great job. We resprayed it silver-grey and put black wheels on it. It was a lot better to look at than the green Morris, that’s for sure.
I entered that car in the Geelong Sprints, which was my first ever competitive outing in a car. It wasn’t a complex race, a standing half mile race with a big curve – you don’t have to be too clever to go fast like that. I won my first outing.
Then I started racing it whenever I could. Calder Park was easy because it was close, but Winton and Hume Weir took some effort. The old man had done all of that when he was younger, car on a trailer and travelling the countryside. He did warn me about the drive to Hume Weir: ‘Watch those bridges on the way home, because if it’s wet, those wooden bridges get very slippery.’ And he was right, I lost the car on one of them and was spinning down the road with the trailer and the Mini on the back. Never touched a thing and ended up pointing the right way. I thought then, maybe there was a God, as I escaped another near miss.
I was doing OK on the track though and was winning races. But I was hungry for more.
The old man had the Cooper Climax in the garage and I managed to persuade him to let me use it for a picnic meeting at Calder Park. It was a nice friendly scene, those meets. The oil companies like BP, Shell and Castrol had their tents up and every driver had a contract, even if it’s only worth ten quid and some oil; but that made us contracted drivers and that’s a step up from the bottom. All you had to do was put a badge on your overalls and on the car, then after the race pick up a steak sandwich and a beer from them.
In the mornings there would be sprints, and road races in the afternoon. I entered the Cooper in everything and the little Mini in a lot too. I blew everybody into the weeds in the Cooper: there weren’t that many kids at the meeting with a Cooper Climax.
The racing was serious; at least I took it seriously, going up the night before and staying in a real motel! I felt I was on the way up; also I was living up to what was expected of me – I was Stan Jones’ boy and I was expected to win. But when I look back on those days, I’m amazed. I didn’t have any proper driving goggles, so I wore sunglasses. If you’d got a stone through those glasses, you’d be history, but you just don’t think like that when you’re young.
I loved that Cooper Climax. It was powerful and an open-wheeler. I thought, ‘This is me, this is what I’ve got to do.’
The karts put me in fairly good stead when it came to this sort of car. Being an open-wheeler, I could see the wheels and tyres and that didn’t affect me all that much. The gear stick was on the right-hand side, which was unusual for me, but it was quick. I’d probably think it’s a piece of shit now, but in those days I thought it was the ant’s pants.
I did about two or three race meetings in it. For me it was just check the tyre pressures and race; it was somebody else’s job to make sure it was tracked up with everything pointing in the right direction. People can’t believe that I’m not mechanically minded, but I am seriously lacking in that area, which is why I love my Lexus – you get in and it goes. As to how to make it work – no idea.
Then the old man’s dealership went broke.
He had literally hundreds of cars on the lot; his money came from turnover. Which is fine when things are going well. Then came the great credit squeeze of the early 60s: the cars were on the lot, but he couldn’t pay for them. Selling cars back in those days was like stocking shirts in a haberdashers: you had to have what the customer wanted on your lot. When the Major with his RAAF whiskers drives up and says he wants pink upholstery with green stripes, he wants that car right away, in time for a drink at sundown. If you don’t have it, he moves along and buys it from someone else.
Dad went under, like thousands of others. I found his
fate instructive: the smart man doesn’t put all his eggs in one basket.
In hindsight, the warning signs were there. Elsie Pretty, the secretary, once said to me, ‘Alan, have you thought about doing something else for work, because your father might not always be here.’ After I understood everything that was going on, I thought, shit, she was trying to give me a message. Of course, I was too young and stupid to pick it up.
Until that point I’d been terribly spoiled; now I learned life wasn’t all a bed of roses. If Dad hadn’t gone broke, I would certainly be a bigger bastard and probably wouldn’t have been much of a racing driver. I was an obnoxious little bastard as a kid, a big-headed little shit. When Dad was in the money, I was going to a private school, driving a sportscar at 16, living in a nice house, going to Surfers Paradise for my holidays and the son of a famous man. A prescription for disaster. Next minute, no MG, no Surfers Paradise and three-quarters of the old man’s friends have vanished, owing him money. Now I’ve seen both sides of the coin.
His going broke dragged me down to earth. It taught me things can go wrong as well as right; and to be kind to people on the way up because you may meet them on the way down. Mainly, it taught me not to worry about what other people are doing or thinking: my job is to look after me and mine.
Dad lived every day as if he wasn’t going broke. I don’t think he could help himself. He drank a bottle of scotch a day. Then it was three-hour lunches and back at work for an hour and knock off for dinner.
If there was racing at Southport, he took his mechanics up there, he took their wives and girlfriends and pretty much anyone else he could find, paying for everyone and everything. They still call him the Last of the Big Spenders – he handled money as though it were going out of fashion. He was a player, a player as wide as he was tall. He was colourful and strange; he was a character. Dad didn’t cope very well and he went from bad to worse. He started a Chrysler dealership, but that didn’t work. Then he ran a consignment business where he didn’t have to buy the stuff, he just sold other people’s cars. Between you and me, I think there might’ve been the odd time where he forgot to pay them for the car.
So Dad was broke, which was bloody inconvenient for me. That’s when I went overseas. I think he thought to get me out of the joint to save us all the embarrassment. He was going to send me some money for me to continue on my merry way. After the first couple of slightly delayed payments the money was always coming, like a cheque in the mail.
I stopped at Madrid on the way to England and the money wasn’t there. I had $50 to my name and I had to book into a hotel where they supplied bed and breakfast, because that’s the only way I was going to eat. When I booked in and stayed the night, I got up the next morning and had my continental breakfast and that was it for the day. There was no lunch, no dinner, nothing. I couldn’t check out because I didn’t have enough money to pay the bill, so I had to keep staying there.
I used to walk down to American Express to check if the money had come through. I was there four or five days and to this day I know Madrid like the back of my hand. I didn’t eat. I stopped having the breakfast because I’d try and sleep in as much as possible so it would make the day shorter. Hard to believe, but true. Eventually, I got the money.
But Dad never really recovered. He had lived on a diet of daily excitement that eventually did him in early, with strokes, heart attacks and dreadful blood pressure. He was about to turn 50.
2
England Take Two … to Formula Three
I WENT TO England for the first time in 1966, a 19-year-old with my mate, Brian, off to build motor racing careers in the motherland. We went by boat and it stopped in Djibouti on the north-east coast of Africa, opposite Yemen. They speak French and Arabic there, which was news to me. It was a bloody eye-opener and let me know the world outside Australia was a little bit different to what I knew. Or expected. For two well-to-do boys from Melbourne, that place was just something else – and the sort of place I hoped I would never see again. Fortunately we didn’t stay too long before the boat headed off for the Suez Canal and onto Athens before finally dropping us on London.
That was more us … for a start, everyone spoke English. I got a job at Selfridges department store selling fireworks. Brian and I shared an apartment for a while, as young Aussies did. We both wanted to go racing, but we had no idea how to do it. Neither of us had any serious plan, which was pretty much the story of my life. I never really had a plan for anything. Still don’t.
I just figured things would all play out all right; after all they always had. I had a mate with me, and that helped, even if we were naive. It wasn’t like I was on my own and getting lost in the middle of Kangaroo Valley, or Earl’s Court as the locals preferred to call it, with my suitcase on the side of the road.
So we did the London thing for a little while and then we toured the Continent … desert boots, jeans and a Bedford Dormobile – well, a Kombi actually. We slept across the seats in the back, we hadn’t bought the camper version, had we? So sleeping bags and a pillow across each of the back seats. We had a few cooking utensils and we’d go to camps to have a shower. The usual Aussie 60s trip – except our trip was designed around racing tracks and car races trying to get in as many races as we could. We went to some sportscar races at the Nürburgring and also made it to a couple of grands prix and got down to Monza in northern Italy, where I had my first brush with fame and the lifestyle.
We even managed to get hired as extras in the film Grand Prix by John Frankenheimer – but don’t ask me how. Frankenheimer was a big name then – he’d directed The Manchurian Candidate and The Birdman of Alcatraz. James Garner starred in Grand Prix, as did that bloody French actor Yves Montand. He used to stack on the turns … he was so full of himself and a complete wanker. And there were motor racing people everywhere for this movie, with racers acting as consultants and driving cars for scenes.
Bob Bondurant was one of those consultants, an American racer in Europe to race sportscars. He was trying to crack onto some of the girls who were travelling with us, so we got to know him quite well. We were staying in the camping area at Monza and that meant we got to meet and become friendly with other parts of the crew too, including Garner’s hairdresser. I’ll never forget him, even if I can’t remember his name.
We were sitting around one day and he said, ‘Do you want to try this?’ I said, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘It’s some hash.’ I’d never had anything like that, and I took it because I’ll try pretty much anything at least once – well, I wouldn’t try heroin or any other hard drugs, but this seemed OK. I remember getting some apricot juice and thinking, ‘This is the best apricot juice I’ve ever had in my life.’
Extras eat well too. We’d get up in the morning, have our salami bun and coffee and go across to the track and be in the movie.
Naturally I bumped into someone I knew, Buzz Buzaglo, from Balwyn just like me, but a couple of years older. I raced him in the billycarts down Balwyn Road and he had been in Europe for a little while trying to work his way to the top. I probably could have learnt a bit from him if we weren’t having such a good time.
After we were finished with the movie, we stuck with Bondurant for a bit, which got us some access around European racing tracks. We were looking around and trying to work it all out for when we went back to England.
We’d met some important people and made some reconnections, like with Bruce McLaren, who Dad used to race against. Bruce was a Kiwi who finished second in the World Championship to Jack Brabham in 1960 and then third a couple of years later.
I went out to his factory at Colnbrook just near Heathrow Airport, where he was building his very first sandwich construction chassis, which is two thin pieces of aluminium with some stuff in between them … I told you I wasn’t technical-minded. He cut a bit off and gave it to me. After that it was dinner at his apartment, and we ate T-bone steaks, an absolute rarity in England back then. They were so rare you had to pre-order them from the
butcher because he wouldn’t carry any in stock.
Bruce drove me back to the station and I took the train home. A fantastic bloke who fired me up even more to get into racing. He was dead only a few years later, killed during testing at the age of 32 – but the team he started still bears his name.
One other person I met in London at the time was a young ‘counties girl’ named Kay, and we’ll talk about her a bit later. Let’s just say for the moment that she got pregnant and I was the father. I was already on my way out of England and I was happy to leave her with my flatmate Joe, who was her new boyfriend. I think it actually worked out better for all of us: she was with Joe for 20-odd years and moved to Tasmania with him and had another couple of kids. At that time I would have been a shit father.
Back in Australia for my resetting, which I needed, I worked for Bob Jane rather than the old man. I was selling Jags and Saabs and I had a Saab to drive as part of the job. It was one of those shocking front-wheel-drive two-stroke things. Brpbrpbrpbrpbrp. Jesus it was bad … but I still sold them.
I worked there for a year before Dad’s business started to struggle and by now I desperately wanted to get back to England. I had to get back to England, it was the Mecca of motorsport, and still is. So I packed the bags and jumped on the boat and eventually made it over for my second take at it … a little bit wiser and way more motivated.
During my short stay back in Australia I had met Beverley, my mother’s hairdresser. Mum organised for me to go to a party that Bev was throwing and I went around to her flat and knocked on the door. She looked at me and said, ‘Yes?’
I said, ‘I’m Alan Jones.’ To which she replied, ‘Yeah, so what?’ I thought, ‘Jesus, nice bitch this is, Mum.’ Anyway, I went into the party and one thing led to another and we started dating. We argued quite a lot and we were in and out of the relationship. She left for England with some friends while we were in an on phase, and I went down to see her ship off at Port Melbourne. When it was time to get off, I didn’t. I stowed away to Sydney. I went into the cinema and sat in a seat there for a while and then just walked around the boat. When we got to Sydney I waited until a family was walking off and I joined them. I had to get back to Melbourne, but that was all a bit of fun.
