by Alan Jones
Bev was waiting for me and when I eventually arrived in London, we carried on like we hadn’t missed a day. Then I hooked up with Brian again and we got a place together at Greenhill Apartments with some other Aussies. It was a bit upmarket for us, given we had no real money and no job – it had a doorman for heaven’s sake – but it was in a great location, so we set up a story. Remember the con?
I was a grazier’s son, our mate Peter Caines-Buchanan was an accountant and Brian was a doctor. We fed them enough bullshit to get the apartment. I’ll never forget the day we moved in. We pulled up in these mini vans with kangaroos on the side – the look on the doorman’s face said it all, ‘Fucking hell, what’s going on here?’
The doorman was right. We used to party all night, sleep until midday, then go down to the pub and continue partying all night. London in the late 60s was everything everyone has ever said about it. I did feel for the poor bugger that used to have to climb the steel staircase out the back of the apartment to collect the rubbish – there were so many empty beer bottles he would have had to make a few trips to get them all.
I had really put on some weight during my year back in Australia, and all this boozing wasn’t helping. I was 16 stone – 100 kilos – and I had to shake that off pretty quick smart. I’ve always been prone to a bit of weight gain. Murray Walker used to call me ‘the big burly Australian’ in his TV commentary – and that was when I weighed in at 76 kilos. James Hunt used to call me ‘Big Al’ when I was in my prime. Christ knows what they’d call me now.
Brian already had a small business selling mini-vans, so I joined him in doing that before we expanded to vans converted for camping that we sold to poor unsuspecting Australian and New Zealand tourists. It was the equivalent of backpacking today, and the young tourists would come over and want a campervan to drive around Europe. We started with the Dormobile with the windows in their sides and the hard wooden seats. We’d put a little Primus stove inside and a couple of rolled-up sleeping bags, then paste the back windows with stickers as though the vans had already been everywhere there was to go. From there we sold the holiday, the beautiful castles of Germany, the history of France, and the romance of Italy – and they wouldn’t look too closely at the vans.
We had these vans parked near a tube station in Earl’s Court and put up a ‘For Sale’ sign with a phone number. Earl’s Court was all that Aussies coming into London knew at that time; to them the rest of London may as well have been Djibouti. By the time we got back to Greenhill from making a sale, the phone would be running hot and we’d have to jump in the car and go back to Earl’s Court.
As they headed off on the big adventure, we’d always ask when they were coming back and then spin a line around my sister coming over around that time and we’d buy the van back for her.
This was all well-constructed too. ‘We know it is a good van and if you look after it we can virtually give you your money back.’ They’d come back OK – usually the day before they were flying out, keeping the van as long as they could because of our ‘deal’ to buy it back. Then we’d spin a line – my sister couldn’t make it over – to make it seem we didn’t need the van anymore. ‘We don’t want it.’
You could see their mouths hit the ground. I know this is shocking car salesman stuff, but we’d do them a favour and buy the car we didn’t need – for about 500 or 600 quid less than what they paid for it. As soon as they were out of sight, hose it over and get it down to Earl’s Court with the For Sale sign back on it, with the 500 or 600 back on it and off we go again. Selling a car once is good – twice is great. Brian and I were generally clearing 500 quid a week each, and some weeks even more than a thousand, which in 1969 was a lot of money.
It was so easy, we thought the business would last forever. Which it might have, if we’d taken it the least little bit seriously.
Both Brian and I were into motor racing. Well into it. All we lacked was a car, and I knew I just had to have a racing car and the opportunity to go out and do my thing. There’s a way to go about getting into racing; it doesn’t depend strictly on yourself. You have to know the trade people, because they supply you and can perhaps sponsor you; you have to know the circuits, because that’s where you’re going to drive; and, above all, you have to drive, because that’s why you exist.
We had to have a car, so we bought a brand new Merlyn Formula Ford and rented a house in Ealing. We also bought a Volkswagen tray back that was designed to carry the car. We headed off to Brands Hatch for some testing and started to get into it all.
As much as we were making, we were spending … and more. I was using one credit card to pay for the other credit card, and if we needed a new set of tyres we bought it and worried about the money next week. Welcome to racing.
We were doing a bit of testing and racing, one week me and the next Brian. To me the Merlyn was very similar to the Cooper of Dad’s I had raced, it seemed to have as much power and it was on skinny little tyres. It was a great little car and I felt very comfortable in it. But Brian wrote it off in a crash, which was a bit of a setback. We didn’t waste it though: we took all the pieces, the engine, the chassis, the wheels, the gearbox and put it all together again just like Humpty-Dumpty – and offloaded it. Not that I had much to do with it given my mechanical skills, but the flat looked like a garage for a while.
Next I bought a two-year-old Lotus 41 that was ready for Formula Libre. I stripped the whole car down and had the chassis sand-blasted and the paintwork enamelled. I made it into a bloody beauty. But beauty doesn’t win races; a car in working order does that. I neglected to check that they’d taken all the sand out after they’d done the face-lift. I had a gorgeous little car, all gassed up and doing nicely, and then I threw six engine bearings in a row.
Finally, we worked out why the bearings were going – bloody sand – and I devised a new scheme. I would make my Lotus fit Australian specifications, take it back home, flog it and come back to go Formula Three racing off the money I’d made. That was the plan, anyway.
One day I was out at Brands Hatch testing. Everything was going sweetly and I was putting in respectable times. Good enough, anyway, since I was new to my car, new to the sport and a relative newcomer to the circuit. It was a Wednesday and Brands Hatch was a muddle. Open practice and the circuit was filled with every kind of car under the sun: Formula Fords and what not all over the track.
The pits were on the left-hand side of the circuit going up into the paddock for this sort of test day, rather than the right. Ahead of me there was this bloke who was a bit slower than me: no problems, pass him nice and easy on the right. Except that he suddenly decided that he would turn into the pits, which for a test day weren’t the same as a race day. I was inexperienced. At the time, I thought the main thing was to miss him: so I went round him – right round him, winding up off the track, in the grass and into a tyre bank. The Lotus was a complete write-off. End of big sale in Australia. End of Formula Three plan. End of AJ’s career?
I was back on with Beverley then and being a good, loyal girl, she’d decided to come out to Brands to see her man taking his car out. She arrived just in time to hear this big bang and see me lying in the grass, swearing my head off about how I was going to kill the bastard that cut across me. It wasn’t just the anger. There was also the sadness. There was my Lotus, all lovely, all resprayed, a mess in the grass, just like me.
That Lotus had a spaceframe chassis and you had to put your feet underneath a bar to use the pedals. When I hit the fence, my feet came back and I had broken the instep on my left foot quite badly.
Finally they got an ambulance to me and took me off to hospital. It was my first shunt and the hospital must have been built in the Boer War. They took me into casualty, and there was this lady doctor standing over me, screaming. ‘You should stop doing this criminal thing,’ she said. I could sympathise; she’d had another driver in the week before and she didn’t want a bloody mess in her clean cubicle after last week. So she went on yelling
at me about didn’t I know what would happen to me if I persisted in my fatal course? Finally, I said to her as politely as I could, ‘I’ll tell you what, Madam, you get on with your job and I’ll get on with mine.’ Or words to that effect.
Reluctantly, she took out a pair of scissors and was about to go to work on my brand new Nomex overalls. It was my turn to yell at her: she wasn’t going to snip at my valuable equipment. She desisted, helped me up on to the operating table and said she wouldn’t be long. I lay there with my leg hurting like hell for at least 10 minutes listening to the rattle of tea cups in the next room. Finally, she came back and they put plaster on my leg. The week after, I went to have it checked in Chiswick and they said, as doctors love to say, that they’d done it all wrong the first time.
So they did it again. They cut off the plaster with me grimacing through it all and the doctor told me not to be such a sook … I offered to trade places to see who the bigger sook was. I wasn’t in the best of moods.
He replastered it and put a rubber thing on the heel, and said, ‘You’ll be able to put some pressure on that in a week or so.’ Two or three weeks later I couldn’t put any weight on it at all, the minute it looked like touching the ground, pain shot up my leg. He had got it wrong too.
Today I still walk with a limp from that and it is progressively getting worse too. I should have gone to St Thomas’, which is a special bone hospital, but I didn’t know that at the time. Apparently, I should have had a V cut into it and a bone graft, which I didn’t. So now they want to seize it up to reduce the pain, but I’d rather deal with the pain than limp worse for the rest of my life.
Not daunted by a little broken leg and yet another setback, Brian and I bought a pair of Brabham BT28s – BT28-25 was mine, BT28-16 was Brian’s – and did a deal with Ron Tauranac, who was the ‘T’ in ‘BT’, for kits to turn them into BT35s (and then BT38Cs), which had their fuel tanks on the side, inboard brakes and a few other updates. We got our engines from Vegantune, and the guy that ran that, George Robinson, turned out to be instrumental in my pathway to Formula One. I got on with him really well, and often just rang for a chat at night.
We bought an old furniture truck, painted it orange with black lettering. We called ourselves AIRO – Australian International Racing Organisation – which was rather grandiose and, as it turned out, a bit of a mistake. People thought we were the Australian international racing organisation while we were just a couple of Dormobile salesmen bullshitting our way through it all, but we did OK.
We had some hair-raising experiences in that truck – it would run out of brakes going down a big hill and we’d have to get ready to jump out.
Three big things changed for me just before that season began. Firstly, Dad moved over to stay with me so I could help look after him. He’d had heart attacks and strokes, and he wasn’t the physically commanding man I remembered. His speech was all slurred and he needed a walking stick, which would come in handy given his temper hadn’t changed.
Everyone thought he was pissed all the time, but he wasn’t. He used to go off to the auctions and buy cars for us to re-sell. He used to take it as a personal thing if anyone else was bidding for the car. He’d win the auction and then he’d start on the other bidder … ‘Yeah, fuck you.’ Some things just don’t change.
A couple of times he brought them home and the right-hand side had dents in it because he was on the left-hand side and he never saw them. I’d be the one that’d have to get them all fixed up, advertise them and then sell them for him. I’d be negotiating a deal and go back inside and say, ‘He’s offered such and such.’
‘Tell them fuck off,’ he would say, offended someone would offer so little for something he had no attachment to. I’d said, ‘Dad, it’s a profit, take it.’ ‘No, fuck off.’
It was easier when it got to the point where he couldn’t do any of that.
The second was the opportunity to race in Brazil, which came about through a mate of mine, Brian Kreisky, who operated a management company in Europe called Promoto and was a nephew of former Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky. Brian was a bit of a wheeler and dealer of the time, and made millions out of motorsport video and TV broadcasts. He was close to Bernie Ecclestone, before dying in 2000 in a plane he was flying from Blackbushe.
Brian had been approached by somebody in Brazil to supply drivers and Formula Three cars for a series they were running over the British winter. He was given the job of choosing the drivers. I was in.
It was a three-race series. They gave it a fancy name, given the previous year they had run the South American Tournament at Interlagos, and it was being run to prove to the rest of the world that the Brazilians could conduct an international championship event. They were setting their sights on a Formula One race, and this was the showcase.
It was held mostly at Interlagos starting on 10 January 1971 with a non-championship race in Porto Alegre and the final event at Tarumã at the start of February. It was a quick series, I didn’t win it or anything but I did enough to raise a few eyebrows.
I was about 24 when I hit Brazil and I’d never been anywhere much except England and a bit of continental Europe. I’d tried to forget Djibouti. It seemed somehow miraculous to find myself in a place that was so profoundly different. I’d never even heard of Sao Paulo before. I went there expecting to see mud huts and when we flew in I was staggered. I couldn’t believe the size of it. It’s bigger than New York. All I wanted to do when we landed was hit the town. I’d brought my dad with me and Jim Hardman, my mechanic, and while Dad slept off the trip in our hotel, Jim and I went out for a walk. I think we knew what we were looking for. Fortunately, or unfortunately, our hotel was just up the road from a nightclub, and of course we had to venture in.
No sooner had we sat down at a table and ordered a few beers then there were half-a-dozen birds sitting down all round us, groping us under the table. As long as you drink, the girls are there to keep you happy. The women of Brazil are beautiful. I’d never struck anything like this in my life and I turned to Jim and said, ‘How long’s this been going on? And why have I been missing out?’
It was my very first taste of international glamour and I fell for it. Because I was out enjoying myself too much, I got a really bad dose of sunburn, and that made it hard to get the belts done up properly when I was in the car. It is one of the reasons I avoided pools for the rest of my career.
Before we left for Brazil, I thought to myself that I’d better take the races seriously. I suppose I was evolving, slowly. These were, after all, my first major professional races, and I had travelled halfway across the world for them. I hadn’t quite got the Vegantune deal across the line in time for this, so I bought myself a year-old super engine from a guy called Brendan McInerney. This was going to be my pièce de résistance, but it barely got through the first weekend. I wanted desperately to do the right thing. I wasn’t brilliant in the first two races at Interlagos in Sao Paulo when the screamer let me down. Thankfully I’d taken the old engine down as a spare and it turned out to be better than the screamer anyway.
When we got to Porto Alegre, Jim and I nodded knowingly at each other and said, ‘OK, let’s put the wings on for this one.’ Porto Alegre was not about top speed as much as Interlagos; now we needed grip, so on went the wings.
I was about fifth quickest in practice, and afterwards Dave Walker, a fellow Australian who was about to race in Formula One with Lotus, came up to me in the pits asking me how things were going. I said very nicely thank you; I was quite pleased with myself and, I might add, with the friendly attention of a real big-time racing driver like Dave. ‘Well,’ he said, laconically, ‘I think you could do a whole lot better if you put your wing on the right way, because you’ve got it on back to front!’
With that little bit of exact science under my belt, I managed to get onto the front row with Walker and everybody was tickled to death and running about as if they didn’t know what had happened. I knew, and I think Dave was wise to it a
s well.
We were all celebrating our triumph when Peter Warr from Lotus came round to our garage and started to examine my wings, because I was as fast as his driver. Peter figured that had to be because my car was bent. He sniffed around, took out his tape measure, announced that I was a centimetre too wide and he was going to protest the grid position. My old man didn’t take kindly to any of this and even though his speech wasn’t all that clear by then, his walking stick made his point perfectly clear.
The old man chased Peter right out of our garage and only narrowly missed cracking his skull. Which wasn’t from lack of effort. I was appalled at the time, but I laugh now. We sawed a centimetre off the wing and I was running sixth in the race when my gearbox gave out.
So we had this great adventure in Brazil. Interlagos was a highlight, a brilliant circuit with a series of great corners and undulations that just gave it that extra challenge, and it was relatively quick too. It still is a great circuit and I loved racing there.
I was probably lonely at the time even with all those stunning Brazilian women nearby, and rang Beverley back in London and asked her to marry me. She said yes, and that started a whirlwind of activity for my return. I never thought this would be the third thing to change, but it was.
We got married in a church in Chiswick on St Patrick’s Day. The old man stood in some dog shit or something and couldn’t stop laughing in the church. I turned around and gave him a dirty look. We had an Aston Martin DB6 wedding car that I had bought for Bob Jane, but we got some use out of it before putting it on a boat for him. Then it was off to Malta for our honeymoon. Then back to the serious work. I had a career to build.
