by Alan Jones
I ended the race in seventh, which was a great result to start the next phase of my career.
Before joining Hesketh, Harvey Postlethwaite – or Doc as he was called – had worked for March. The Hesketh 308 from 1974 was a fairly conventional racing car derived from the March 731, which the team initially raced. Doc didn’t have full control at March, but he did at Hesketh, so he worked on what he saw as the weaknesses of the 731 and eventually the 308 was the quicker car.
For 1975, the Hesketh 308B was developed with rubber front suspension. Doc wanted to make the front suspension lighter, so he started working on the idea of rubber springs based on the concepts used for supporting buildings in earthquake zones. He started playing with the design in 1974 and had it ready for the 1975 season. There was a bit more to the 308B than just the suspension, and all the little tweaks made it a good race car … not that I cared that much at the time. It was a Formula One car and it had my name on it.
Two weeks later we were in Spain at the Montjuïc street circuit in the hilly area of Barcelona just off the main strip, for my Formula One championship debut. It was a great track for a street circuit, flowing and picturesque with nice undulations. Not that I was taking much of it in; I was there to race and it copped my full focus. My first race there would be the track’s last, thanks to the disaster that awaited.
But before I got to race, there was politics. I tried to stay away from the argument that was happening between the drivers and the race organisers. I remember the drama clearly: all of us sitting in the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association trailer arguing about safety. What was this? A debating club? It’s extraordinary the heat that can be generated at those meetings, and let me tell you now, the politics of the sport was right up there. There were always people at both extremes, and only a few in the middle. If anything, I sympathised with the get-on-with-the-race group. I knew I wasn’t in Barcelona for the Spanish Grand Prix to sit in a motor-home and argue about Armco and fencing. Now I might be a bit more conscious of that, but back then I was thinking only about my own little world.
I was staying at one of hotels with most of the drivers, it was square with a huge air vent down the middle of it that all the windows opened onto. Mario Andretti and his wife were staying either directly above or right below me, and I was lying in bed one night and all I could hear was a broad American accent, ‘Mario, Mario, I’ve got diarrhoea.’ If I could hear, so could others, and I felt like shouting out, ‘Shhh, everyone can hear you.’ But I was the new boy, so I just laughed to myself.
I qualified right down the back of the field and completed only three laps, taking some consolation that they were three really good laps. Emerson Fittipaldi had a dummy spit and pulled out of the race after completing the required three laps in qualifying, which showed the politics hadn’t stopped. The race started with a crash in the first corner that took out Niki Lauda and Patrick Depailler, while others were damaged like Andretti, Clay Regazzoni and Vittorio Brambilla. Wilson Fittipaldi and Arturo Merzario pulled out in protest of the barriers, and that all meant I made up a lot of spots …
Then Jody Scheckter blew the engine in his Tyrrell and I crashed out with Mark Donohue on the oil that was left. But this race turned into disaster about 20 laps later. Rolf Stommelen was driving for the Embassy Hill team being run by former world champion Graham Hill, and the rear wing flew off his car approaching the Stadium jump. The car flicked into one of the dodgy fences and bounced across the track, where it was glanced by the Brabham of Carlos Pace and became airborne, hitting a lamp post and destroying a barrier on the far side of the road and flying into the crowd.
The race kept running for a few laps because Stommelen’s car had taken out TV and phone cables and reports of the crash didn’t make it back to the pits. It was red-flagged on lap 29 and that is when the news started to filter through.
Five spectators were killed. Rolf broke a leg, a wrist and a few ribs. That was the last time we raced at that track, and it made for a very sombre mood later. It didn’t bother me too much though, which may sound callous now, but they were going to races to watch us get killed and it was a very dangerous sport back then. Yes, you feel sorry for spectators who get killed, but that’s about it for me.
The other notable aspect of the race is that it’s the only Formula One event where a woman has earned points. Lella Lombardi came sixth for March – but only half points were awarded, so she got just half a point.
When I came up into Formula One, the big names were people like Emerson Fittipaldi, Ronnie Peterson, Niki Lauda and James Hunt, particularly James, who seemed to like living his life bathed in brilliant publicity. It was something I would have to get used to, though I was just a beginner and nobody paid all that much attention to me yet. It was still an odd sensation to see my name and picture in the papers: even when I couldn’t understand what they were saying about me in the countries where English wasn’t the language.
For me though, it was all about the racing. I was there among the biggest names in the sport, and already I was sizing them up as the people I had to beat. If I could get in front of them, that was just another brownie point for me. You get no help from other drivers when you start out in Formula One, and nor would I expect it.
There were two types of drivers: the ones who made you feel welcome, and the ones who snubbed you. I was a new boy, and tradition dictates that you snub new boys. It was like going to a new school; you have to force your way in.
In Spain some drivers came up and said hello and made me feel welcome; others walked right past me as though I wasn’t there. Emerson was always polite; Carlos Reutemann was one of the friendly ones, ironic given how things panned out. Jochen Mass was one of the nicest – but then he’s just a supremely nice man. Too nice to be a racing driver, some said, though that’s not my opinion. He was driving just as hard as the rest of us, but never had a first-class team. He did win my debut grand prix though, his only win in Formula One.
A number of drivers were just neutral: they did their own thing and left me alone to get on with mine. Tom Pryce was nice, but very shy. As for the ones who snubbed me in 1975: they were the ones who were going out of their way to be nice in 1978 and 1979 when I started winning. And when it came to the end of 1979 and they felt I had some say in who my teammate would be for 1980, they were more than just ordinarily friendly.
I can understand why they don’t help you out. I would not myself presume to go up to a new driver and give him advice. He might be a better driver than I am. It would be different if he were a younger teammate: Clay Regazzoni and Carlos Reutemann were both helpful to me at Williams, as I was to them. We’d swap information. We were driving very similar cars; we could legitimately help each other. But basically I’m very reluctant to tell anyone anything. You never know: the man you help today could be your enemy tomorrow. I have my own career to think about. Why should I help some newcomer to blow me off?
My second grand prix for Hesketh was at Monaco, which was a bit of an eye-opener in a Formula One car. It is such a mongrel of a place, not suited to Formula One at all. If in 1975 you had proposed to start up a race there, the people running the sport would have laughed at you … but they were racing there; it had history on its side. I used to call it Posers’ Paradise … still do in fact. It’s beautiful to see all the lovely yachts, and all the exotic cars parked in Casino Square and all that crap, but as a racetrack it’s hopeless.
Having said all of that, I really regret not having won it. I led it by 20 seconds one year and had a fuel-starvation problem. Gilles Villeneuve passed me going up the pit straight with Murray Walker yelling out, ‘Look at that magnificent passing manoeuvre.’ That’s my favourite place to pass, up the straight. That always gave me a bit of a giggle.
Anyway, there were only 18 starters allowed after the disaster in Barcelona, and I only just scraped in, last qualified. Graham Hill didn’t qualify and some other hot-shots didn’t either. With about 10 minutes to go in qualifying it looked like I
was going to miss. We put on a set of new tyres and I went out on the track as hard as I knew how; and when the flag showed qualifying was over, I remember sitting in the pits waiting for the PA system to tell me if I’d made it. They read it out, starting at the front and after seventeen other names, I finally heard mine.
The celebrations in the Hesketh pits were as if qualifying were winning a grand prix. I was lying 10th in that race when a wheel came off.
At Zolder in Belgium for the next race, I again improved my qualifying but a crash with Jackie the Foot on the opening lap made that my shortest race yet in Formula One. I had qualified only two spots behind James and I was the new-found hero. Alexander was frothing at the mouth saying he would run two cars the next year for James and myself.
Well may he froth: Alexander was soon reclining in his motor-home strapped into all these tubes with an oxygen mask trying to come back to life after a monumental hangover. Meanwhile at the other end of the social scale a bloke called Tom Parks, who owned a restaurant, was cooking bacon and eggs for the mechanics. Whacky days.
Then we jetted off to Anderstorp in Sweden, which was a good little track set up on an airfield, where I got my first finish – 11th off 19th on the grid. But it was also my last race for Harry Stiller and Hesketh. It seems the tax man still wasn’t being that friendly, and Harry was off to the States after all. I was devastated. It wasn’t that he was out of money, he just didn’t want to pay tax in pounds. Harry had put a fair amount of his own bread on the line and had to talk to a lot of people before he got me that drive with Hesketh. I wouldn’t have got to where I did without him and George Robinson.
When Harry bailed out of England to sell cars in Los Angeles, he told me not to worry, he would fix an American Formula 5000 for me. While earlier in the year that would have all been great, I now had four grands prix under my belt and I’d been bitten by the bug. I thought I could make it in Formula One. In fact, I thought I could be world champion, and I didn’t welcome the thought of quitting Formula One to go race in the unknown in the States.
He was a bloody character Harry. We had some great times together and he will always be the bloke that first put me in a Formula One car. He is back in England living in Christchurch, Dorset with his wife, Annie. He’s a life member of the BRDC, he won the British Formula Three Championship in 1966 and 67, and you’ll often see him around the track. I heard recently he was trying to do some sort of deal with Bernie Ecclestone to get him to look after the British Grand Prix.
Harry represented everything that was great about the British people at that time and British motorsport in general. He didn’t care if I wasn’t British. When he decided his racing career was over and he was going to run a team, he just wanted the best driver he could find.
He obviously thought that I had the talent that warranted giving me a go, and so he did. There were a lot of English people like that and I’ll be forever grateful to them.
Fate intervened, as it does. First, there was Rolf Stommelen’s big accident in Barcelona; that put Rolf out of commission for a fair bit of the season. Then there was Graham Hill, who ran the Embassy Racing With Graham Hill team – everyone just called it Embassy Hill – for which Stommelen was driving. Hearing on the grapevine that old Harry was taking off to the States and that I might be without a drive, Graham asked me if I would take Rolf’s place until he recovered. Yes thanks.
Graham had tried a couple of drivers during Rolf’s layoff, including a fellow Australian named Vern Schuppan, who went on to win Le Mans, but he was still searching. From the outside it looked like a dream job, but it wasn’t the happiest period of my life, even though I drove in four grands prix for Embassy and scored my first points. The Hesketh was a much better car than the Hill, but a drive is a drive.
Socially, butter wouldn’t melt in Graham’s mouth; he could charm snakes out of the trees. He was a superb diplomat and I learned a lot from him. I’ve seen him turn from a monster in a heated debriefing argument into a smiling, jovial snake-oil salesman: all it required was that someone from outside would walk in the door. The moment that person left, his smile would vanish and it would be back to business. A great showman, a great ambassador, but a wretched man to work for. Graham was one of the two most difficult people I ever drove for. Having been a world champion, he knew better than any driver how to set up a car. Deep down he just wanted to drive. He wouldn’t listen to advice. He was stubborn and inflexible. As a result, every car I drove for Graham was different; no two were ever alike.
One race it would understeer like a pig, next it was taily and all over the place. It was almost impossible to handle, and when Stommelen did come back to the team, he had exactly the same trouble with the car and with Graham that I did; it ended in a flaming row and Rolf quit.
So I did my races with him at Zandvoort – where James Hunt scored Hesketh’s first and only win – Paul Ricard, Silverstone and Nürburgring. It was good to debut there at Zandvoort, I knew that track. I’d won there in the Formula Three and learnt some tricks. They always had fantastic crowds there too. It is right by the sea and the wind comes off the water, blowing sand over the track, so it can be quite difficult and slippery in places – and different on each lap. But I knew the circuit. The race started in the wet, and although it wasn’t my first time in an F1 car in the rain – it had rained at Monaco and Zolder – they were nasty cars in the rain with all that power.
I finished that race in 13th – which was only the second time in Formula One I had seen the flag.
At Paul Ricard I had a spin while dicing with Carlos and Ronnie and I finished in 16th, but it was great to be racing hard with some of the name drivers. To me, it felt like I was starting to settle into Formula One; it felt like I was making an impression.
Silverstone for the British Grand Prix was a very big weekend. Graham was a pretty big name in British motorsport and that weekend he announced he was retiring as a driver. Until the Australian Grand Prix came about, this was my home grand prix too, so it was always special to race there. Tenth wasn’t too bad a finish at the time either, given the car, but it was a wet race and I’ve always been good in the rain. The race was actually cut short when the rain got really heavy and cars were firing off everywhere and there were only six cars still running when they red-flagged it. Of those I was third; if they’d let it run another lap I could have been on the podium.
The German Grand Prix was at the real Nürburgring, with its near 23-kilometre lap and 174 corners that made it near impossible to learn the track in your first outing. You had to drive on reflexes rather than memory. I hadn’t been there before as a driver, and like a lot of people I went and hired a little BMW and started to learn the track.
In those days it was a few Deutschmark to do a lap. I had a stopwatch and I just did lap after lap, but you had to stop at the end of each lap to pay your money before you can go again. At the start line there’s a whole lot of people, mainly young guys, that wanted to go around as passengers. One guy kept saying, ‘Can I come? Can I …’
‘No mate, I don’t even know where I’m going myself. I don’t want to have a passenger with me.’
I was trying to pinpoint various geographical points to help me and I really didn’t want any distractions. There’s sections with blind corners and rises, and you need to find landmarks – a tree or a church or whatever – just to get a bit of a guide.
It is the sort of track where you can never do enough laps, which is what I was doing. Anyway, after about the 10th lap or something I pulled up to pay my money again, and there he was again, banging on my window, ‘Can I come with you? Can I come with you?’
I gave in this time. ‘All right, jump in.’ Sure as eggs, halfway around I’ve lost it and gone into the Armco and pushed the side of the car in and broken the windscreen. My passenger was screaming and the last thing I remember is him jumping out and running off into the distance. The car was rooted, it was crabbing with the front left-hand wheel tucked under it. ‘Bloody hell, i
t’s a hire car – what do I do here?’
Around the track there’s breaks in the Armco where the marshals have these little chalets. I pushed it into a gap and the idea was to wait until dusk when the circuit was nearly closed, and then try and get out of there. Mark Donohue, who was obviously a stranger to the Nürburgring as well, was doing laps, as was James Hunt. They pulled up and said, ‘Are you okay, AJ?’ I said, ‘Yeah, no dramas.’
They escorted me out at dusk with this thing crabbing like you wouldn’t believe. I drove it about 20 kilometres down the road and then rang the hire car company and said I swerved to miss a deer – ‘and the car is not in a very good state’. They came and exchanged cars and off I went with the replacement. At the time I was panicking a bit, but now it’s quite funny – especially with that bloke pestering me.
Quite a few teams were struggling after Silverstone, because the storm that hit late in the race made the conditions treacherous, and a lot of cars were badly damaged. A couple of cars didn’t make it to Germany at all.
It was a real weekend for upsets and upstarts at Nürburgring. Again I qualified nowhere, which I wasn’t really enjoying. To say the race was only 14 laps is to perhaps misrepresent it. What the lap distance meant was that if you had trouble somewhere, it could take a very long time to get back to the pits. And so it was …
Carlos Reutemann ended up winning the race – his first win of the season – and amazingly Jackie the Foot, Jacques Laffite, was second for Williams. It was his first time in the points and his performance from near me on the grid shocked plenty in the paddock. Only 10 cars finished the race, and I was in fifth – my best ever result and two championship points.
I can tell you, after a grand prix at Nürburgring you come away with a stronger sphincter valve, which I was going to need for the flight home. I flew back to England with Graham. It was a hair-raising flight – he wasn’t the most attentive pilot I’ve ever been with. He sort of wandered a bit. ‘Graham, there’s a plane in front of us.’
