AJ

by Alan Jones

  I’d seen my old man in his disappointments. He said he’d made his decision not to race in Europe and he didn’t regret it. Most of the time, I believed him. But sometimes I think that when my father stood there and said he wished he’d done Europe, which he said as often as he said he didn’t regret not having done it, in his heart of hearts he knew he didn’t really have the hunger.

  My old man was distracted because he wanted to be distracted. He was distracted because he never had to answer to a boss or a sponsor; he was his own boss, he was his own sponsor. That makes it all different. If I were a trillionaire and had my own Formula One team, I too would have been answerable to nobody and I probably wouldn’t have got anywhere either. As it was, I had to make the best of everything that came my way.

  I recognise that I’m an egotist’s son and that I’m an egotist myself and that everyone I know in motor racing is no less of an egotist than I am. I raced for my own satisfaction. I enjoyed the accolades, but that’s not what it was about for me. So when it wasn’t happening, I imagine I was unbearable.

  When I began in Formula Three and I had my first works drive and the transporters rolled up, the motorhome and all the gear, I thought, ‘Christ! All this is here for me!’ I was more worried about that than I was about the race. I thought, ‘If I don’t win, all this effort’s going to have been wasted!’ I had to change my thinking. Yes it was there for me, but I was there for a reason. If I gave it my all and we didn’t win, there was nothing more I could do. I had to keep my focus, put the shit to the side and do my job. The old man was distracted. I wasn’t going to be.

  To help with the finances a bit, Bev and I started running a bed and breakfast to supplement my income. We rented a four- or five-bedroom house, and people would ask, ‘Why do you want four or five bedrooms?’ My answer was something along the lines of ‘I’m from a very big pastoral company and twice a year the whole family comes over and we’d like them to have their own bedrooms.’

  As soon as we got the house we went down to the military disposal shop, got some bunk beds and put them in the rooms and opened up for business. We’d head down to Earl’s Court to try and get some guests and we’d charge something like five quid a day. It wasn’t a lot of money. But when there is about six in each room it adds up.

  My job was to get up in the morning and cook breakfast – the full British thing with baked beans, bacon and eggs. It worked well for us: Bev was in charge of housekeeping and I was the breakfast cook and done by nine, which meant my day was free. If I wanted to go to Silverstone or if I wanted to go visit March, or whatever I had to do for my racing career, I had the time. We did that for a year or so and did quite well out of it.

  After I’d been running around and trying to get drives and talking to people, I’d come home and we had our own little room away from the guests where we could have time to ourselves. Bev was as invested in the process as me; at least that’s what she said in the divorce papers.

  She didn’t like coming to the races much, so even when I was earning good money in Formula One she often stayed home. She didn’t like the hustle and bustle and the running around getting on and off planes. Screaming down to a track somewhere in the middle of nowhere, parking the car outside the circuit and straight out after the race, rushing through the crowd to get to the parked car just to get to the airport.

  When 1974 was starting, I had nothing going for me and I was getting desperate. I went up to a race meeting at Silverstone and ran into Bev Bond, who I had briefly raced against in 1971. He told me of a man named Mike Sullivan he knew down Cirencester way, who had a Formula Atlantic and was looking for someone to drive it. ‘It’s a March and it’s got a Ryan Faulkner body on it. He’s got a transporter.’

  I wasted no time at all and called him up right away.

  He was one of those men who come on strong right away over the blower, very straightforward and assured. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I want you to know we’re not mucking about here, we’re going to do this properly!’ He’d barely hung up before I was down there.

  The trouble is, you meet all sorts in this game. I pulled up in his street and there was this Nestle chocolate van outside his place. Something that looked like an open-wheeler was poking out the back of it. I knew I’d been put deep in it right away. The Nestle van was his transporter and that car inside like a slab of beef was his great new challenger in the 1974 Atlantic series.

  I weighed up the alternative, which was nothing, wasted no time over it, and said, ‘All right, I’ll drive for you, but first I’ve got to go and do a test drive at Snetterton.’ He agreed, looking as though he were doing me a favour. When we got down to the circuit we pulled the car out, set it down on the ground and it was plain to see there wasn’t one wheel pointing in the right direction. I tried to look very cool and business-like and I said the wheels being all awry was no problem; we could get that fixed. I would drive for him in the Martini International at Silverstone if he’d get his car fixed by March.

  He took the car to March and they answered back quick-smart: the sensible thing for us to do was throw that car away like a used Kleenex and buy a new one, because we weren’t going to get that one fixed up for less than five grand. So I talked to Robin Herd myself and I told him to forget the rest, just to get the wheels on straight and I’d have a go. I think that shows just how bad that winter was.

  Meanwhile, Mr Nestle Van was giving me a hard time about how I was test mad and asking for too much. I suppose he’d been brought up in the old school or flown Spitfires put together with chewing gum. It wasn’t looking good. I remembered meeting Baron Beck at Brands the year before, and he’d offered to sponsor me in Formula Two. I called him again this time looking for that little bit extra to get us on the grid properly, well as properly as we could given the circumstances, and he agreed.

  I took the car to Silverstone and qualified sixth quickest, with Bev Bond on pole. When the race started, Bev flew off at the first corner, Tony Brise blew an engine, Dave Morgan went wide and damaged his nose cone, while I hung in there and won the race. Fantastic! I gave Mr Nestle Van a job-list of what I wanted done before the next race at Oulton Park, but when I got up there, the car was still in the transporter and what was more, it had never been out of the transporter; absolutely nothing had been done – it hadn’t even been washed.

  They had put it in the van after the race and probably celebrated down the pub for the two weeks between races.

  ‘Do we do this right?’ I asked him. ‘Because if you don’t get this car right, I’m not going to race for you. If you don’t give this a hundred per cent as I am, I’m not going to drive it. You’ve got to show me you’re as keen as I am.’

  I wasn’t asking him to spend a whole lot of money; it was mostly minor, mechanical things. But there are lots of fly-by-nighters at that level of racing; they don’t really have the cash or the guts to do a job properly. I knew we’d been lucky to win that race at Silverstone. I’d made a great impression in a car that was a shitbox. If I went on driving that car, things could only get worse; people would forget Silverstone and my name would be mud. From which I concluded that I should get out while the going was good. And I did.

  I went round to all the people who had good cars at Silverstone and told them why I was withdrawing from the race: because my owner had done nothing to the car, and I was in racing to get results and not just to ponce about. I’m professional, and if they are not going to be professional, I don’t want to drive for them.

  I hopped in my car and I drove back to London. Sure enough, I got a phone call about four or five days later from Harry Stiller, who was running Bev Bond in the Formula Atlantic. The car was the latest March with a good engine and had all the support needed to do well.

  ‘Alan, would you like to come up to Silverstone and give us a hand?’ he asked. ‘Bev just can’t seem to get his head around the car and he complains of terminal understeer all the time.’

  Even before I had said yes I was formulatin
g a plan. I immediately jumped on the phone to Robin Herd and called on the favours earned from my testing work with March.

  ‘Robin can you do me a favour?’ Bicester, where they made Marches, was only half an hour from Silverstone. ‘Harry Stiller has asked me to come and drive Bev’s March. Could you give me an hour of your time, come up and help me sort it out, please?’ He said, ‘Yeah, no worries.’

  We spent most of the morning burning up a set of front tyres trying to dial out the understeer, and between the two of us we sorted it and I went a second under the lap record. Before the day was done I’d taken another half a second off it too.

  Old Harry was over the moon about it and waving contracts all over the place. Bev Bond was to be team manager, I was to drive for Harry the rest of the year and Mr Nestle Van and his unpaid bills was to be left to his own devices. And serve him right. I’d found not only a real man and a proper team, but a friend.

  Mallory Park was a couple of weeks later and I debuted for Custom Made/Harry Stiller Racing and finished third. That was round 8 of a 14-round championship and all I had to my name was the one lucky win. My relationship with Harry and that team just clicked, and I was away.

  I scored pole and won the curtain-raiser to the British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch, as good a time and place as any to perform like that. My qualifying time would have put me on the back row of the grid for the grand prix, which was pretty good for a little Formula Atlantic car with its 1.6 litre engine. And I won the race by the length of the straight.

  Harry was jumping up and down with that win. Our main sponsor was Custom Made, who made double-glazed windows, and we had support from one of Harry’s business partners named Rob Walker, who also used to sponsor Stirling Moss. I got to know Rob quite well through that period. He was a lovely old man and his wife used to always bake chocolate brownies – good brownies too.

  Every race we did in that March we broke a record; it was just a bloody quick car. It had big tyres, wings and a BDA engine with I don’t know how many horsepower, but it was a great car. I loved driving it.

  I did only seven races with the team in that car and we had two wins, a second, a third and a fourth, along with a couple of retirements. The retirements were probably a result of Bev being overworked. He was doubling as chief mechanic and team manager, and our reliability left something to be desired. That was demonstrated by my gearstick coming out in my hand three races in a row.

  My other win in that series was at Oulton Park in the wet. The paddock area was quite literally a paddock. There is a picture of us getting ready to go out onto the track with me sitting on slicks behind Toby Brise on wets – my biggest challenge was just getting out of the bog. I dominated the race on a drying track before it rained again near the end, which made the final laps a bit hairy, but it worked OK in the end.

  While the car was going, it was the quickest thing on the circuit, bar none. We may not have won the championship – New Zealander John Nicholson did that with consistency and a full season – but we’d impressed all the right people. I also did a few rounds of the Southern Organs Formula Atlantic Championship, and while I was running I was the leading competitor. I lost that series by two points to Jim Crawford, who had 10 points up when I started.

  We’d also pretty much raced everywhere in Britain and Ireland with that car, so I was continuing to build my bank of knowledge on the tracks I would need in the future, as well as a couple that were just plain old interesting. Phoenix Park in Ireland was one of those. It was located in the middle of Dublin in what I am told is the largest enclosed urban park in Europe, and a typical old hay-bales type of track that was a lot of fun.

  Fun was what Harry had planned for 1975 too – as well as being serious. We were going Formula 5000 and finally I could have a relaxing winter and Christmas. I had a drive for the next season, I had a wage from my racing and we were earning quite well from the boarding house. Everything was looking rosy.

  We’d run a couple of Formula 5000 races at the end of the season and I really enjoyed those cars. My old mate Brian McGuire was racing them, so it was good to spend some time with him again, because our racing paths were taking us in different directions.

  Then quite a bit after the season had finished and we were bunkered down for winter, Harry rang and said, ‘I’m going to America, the English tax guys are after me.’ I went, ‘Fuck, here we go again.’ He was a bit of a wheeler dealer, which I could appreciate; he was a car dealer and he owned an amusement park in one of the seaside resorts in England. He was a bit of a character and he used to race himself in the 1960s. I got on extraordinarily well with him, but it seems the tax man didn’t.

  So there I was again going through another winter of discontent.

  About three weeks later I got another phone call from Harry … ‘Fuck it, I’m staying and we’re going to go Formula One.’

  4

  Formula One Debut

  THAT PHONE CALL from Harry had me both shocked and surprised, and my up-and-down winter continued its ride. Only this time I was on the up part.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m as tired of pissing about as you are, so I’ve done a deal with Hesketh. You’re going to race a Formula One Hesketh.’ I couldn’t believe it. A few months ago I was going to race a very good semi-works Formula 5000 car, then for two months I’d been unemployed and wondering if I would ever race again, and now I’d got a drive in a bloody Formula One car. Miraculous!

  The Hesketh was the original 308 updated to the same spec as the car James Hunt was going to run in the 1975 championship – the 308B. James had finished the 1974 season quite strongly in the car, starting the US Grand Prix at the end of the season from the front row and finishing on the podium. It was state of the art, designed by Harvey Postlethwaite – the designer who first used the anhedral high-nose design in the 1990s that is now commonplace – and built in a factory at the back of Lord Alexander Hesketh’s family home … and when I say home, I mean mansion.

  Easton Neston it was called, and I’ll never forget driving up to it the first time – it was an impressive place, centuries old. When I drove up to the Hesketh headquarters and went up this huge driveway and into the workshop, it was like going into another world.

  Strangely, I didn’t actually penetrate the great house until 1979, when I was driving for Williams and Bev and I stayed there during the British Grand Prix. We arrived at about eight o’clock, parked the car and went in to see where everyone was. They were all sitting at this fifty-foot long dining table with servants lurking about and Alexander ebullient as ever. I sat down and, after about twenty minutes of chat, I said I’d better go out to the car and bring in my gear. When I got out there, the car had been stripped. I thought someone had stolen all my stuff. But when we were shown to our room, there it was, all unpacked and laid out on the bed, the toilet stuff in the bathroom. Every evening we dressed for dinner, while eight or ten miles down the road were the fumes and the screaming noise of Silverstone. It was a little weird.

  Everything in the garage was in its place; the factory was immaculate like a scrubbed surgery. It was another world from the grotty garages I had previously worked in. It sure didn’t look the way it did in Rush, where it looked as if they had just kicked the horses out. Now this was much more me. My car was up on blocks, all the tools and the floor were spotless, and they even had a little box for me to stand on to climb into the car. When I was being fitted into the car, if I wanted a quarter-inch off here or the steering wheel lifted a bit, it was all, ‘Yes Alan, no problem.’ My first Formula One seat-fitting – I’d died and gone to heaven.

  The mantle of the superstar was falling on me, with everyone very attentive and highly professional. It’s all very well for people outside to look down on Lord Hesketh and call him a buffoon who just stumbled into motor racing; from the inside, when it came down to the nitty-gritty of the business, they were very professional. Bubbles Horsley was running the team – a former driver, who was capable of getting the very bes
t out of James Hunt. In that respect it was a very good team. And I always got on well with Alexander. He treated me fairly and everyone made me feel very welcome.

  The whole scene was an eye-opener. I had no idea whether all Formula One teams were like Alexander’s or whether I’d landed up in some extraordinarily exotic outfit. But it’s not in my nature to be thrown by externals: I didn’t bother with the social scene; I just did my job. Alexander lived the life of the lord he was, all champagne and pheasants. Helicopters in and out of the track, fabulous parties and lots of fun. It would have been easy to be distracted by the lifestyle that was opening up to me, and sometimes I was, but I was pretty focused.

  For me, this was the other extreme of life. I had been scratching to earn a living while pursuing my dream, whereas if I had just stayed in Australia selling cars I would have been doing quite well. Trying to build a racing career in England was not so easy, but here I was.

  James Hunt – or Master James as Alexander referred to him – lived the lifestyle of the rebellious public schoolboy that he was. His wife, Susie, was beautiful and just added to the glamour. She ended up leaving him for Richard Burton. At the track he was focused, but away from it he was something else. He was quick and aggressive. Some thought he was dangerous and he had a lot of crashes to his name – the drivers referred to him as Hunt the Shunt.

  We weren’t ready for the start of the season, which is hardly surprising given it started in January in Argentina and Harry had only just worked out how to pacify the tax man. The next two races were also out of Europe, in Brazil and South Africa, so we targeted the 1975 BRDC International Trophy at Silverstone for my Formula One debut.

  James was now in his third season of Formula One and he was making a name for himself in addition to his dangerous reputation. I got to know him quite well during that first half of 1975 and he was a great bloke. He put his Hesketh on pole and I qualified in eighth, which meant I was sitting next to John Watson on the grid and ahead of Mario Andretti.