AJ

by Alan Jones

  ‘Oh, okay, thank you.’

  Anyway, we got back to England, went and had a pint of beer just near where he kept his plane north of London and then I went home. It was a relatively successful outcome because Embassy Hill got a couple of points, and so he was happy, and felt like I was up and running, although even then I knew it was about to end – Rolf was fit, so that was it for me.

  It was also it for my debut season in Formula One. I had points on the board and no drive lined up for the next season. In spite of that car and the problems, I scored more points for the Hill team than anyone had before, or since, and Graham asked me to come back and test their new car at Ricard although he changed his mind which turned out to be okay.

  Only a few weeks after that he took Tony Brise down to Ricard for testing instead of me. Graham flew them and four other team members back to London’s Elstree Airfield. But they never made it home, crashing in a fog while trying to land. It could easily have been me I suppose.

  I wasn’t surprised Graham died in a plane crash. I’m not saying anything about the cause of the crash, but he was a shit pilot. As a pilot he didn’t concentrate. Numerous times with him I feared for my life. Keeping in mind he was a complete legend in England, you couldn’t say anything about him for fear of being run out of the country.

  I found out about the crash while Bev and I were hosting an early Christmas party and John Hogan, who was pretty much in charge of the Marlboro money at that stage, rang and delivered the news. So much for the party … Graham, Tony and the four engineers all died. He was landing in fog after being advised to use a different airport. Typical Graham, ‘No, I should be right, I’ve done this a hundred times,’ and he’s flown straight into the side of a hill at a golf course.

  But Graham gave me a drive and I’m very grateful for that and I’d like to think I repaid it, because I gave him his highest ever finish as a team owner. At Embassy Hill if you could keep Graham away you could get somewhere. And don’t forget, he was twice World Champion as a driver.

  1975 was coming to a close and, once again, I had nothing lined up for the next season. I did a few Formula 5000 meetings for RAM Racing in a March with a 3.4L V6 engine and scored a couple of podium finishes and some wins. The team was owned by a couple of mates of mine, John Macdonald and Mike Ralph (remember about working the paddock?), and they eventually made it into Formula One as well. Even though I enjoyed the Formula 5000 cars, and winning, it all seemed hollow to me. It was just filling space until the next Formula One opportunity arose.

  I had the odd telephone call, I had promises, and I had hints, but nothing solid. I had a midnight call from Louis Stanley, a real waffler if ever there was one, who used to run the BRM team and was now running his own offshoot, Stanley BRM.

  There are some cars you don’t want to drive and some people you don’t want to drive for: Louis and his team covered both of those. His car came to be known as the Stanley Steamer because on track it behaved just like an old-fashioned tea-kettle. He gave me the business as he always did, about how wonderful his car was, how wonderful he was, how wonderful his organisation was. I just didn’t believe him; not about himself, not about his car.

  The next to call was John Surtees. He said, a bit loftily I thought, that he was trying out a few new boys and would I care to come down and test his car. ‘Fucking test drive?’ I felt like saying, but beggars can’t be choosers.

  I went down to Goodwood, a track I knew quite well from all those laps with March, and put in some pretty competitive times. John took me to the coffee shop and offered me a drive for the ’76 season.

  It was the best offer available and it was Formula One, so I said ‘yes’ on the spot. If I thought Graham Hill was bad to drive for, I was about to find out he had a competitor.

  The whirlwind began. ‘We’re going down to South Africa to do a week’s testing in the new car, the TS19,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you down there and you can get to know the car.’

  So I fronted up to Heathrow a few days later. We were sitting in the lounge when he pulled out a contract for me to sign. I tried to fob him off, ‘John, I’d really like my solicitor to have a look at this before I sign it. Nothing personal, but that’s what I should do.’ It was a one-year deal with an option that he could exercise.

  ‘I’m not taking you all the way to South Africa and spending all this money without making sure that I’ve got an investment.’

  I thought, ‘Shit, hang on. This is not looking good.’ In typical fashion though, my mind was saying be careful, while my hand was saying ‘Bugger it, I’ll do it and worry about it later’ while signing the paperwork.

  Then he said, ‘I’ve booked us a spare seat between us.’ We were flying economy, and I should have known then what I was getting myself in for.

  We hopped on the plane and there was a lady sitting in the middle seat – the plane was full and they put someone in there. John carried on as only he could, and eventually we took our seats with the lady in there with us, although we shuffled around and she had the window, which left me next to John.

  She started talking to me. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I’m going down to South Africa to …’ and he started jabbing me in the ribs, ‘Don’t say anything, she could be a plant.’

  I thought, ‘What? Who would want to plant somebody on an aeroplane to find out about John Surtees’ new car?’ He’d never won a grand prix – did he think Ferrari had put somebody on the plane as a plant to find out what was going on with his new wonder car? My doubts were growing fast; I may have just signed for a lunatic.

  It’s a long flight, so she put the blanket on and it got a bit interesting – but Surtees was still stressing and jabbing me in the ribs. The odds of getting lucky on a plane are very long – and I’ve got to be sitting next to bloody Surtees when it does. Bloody typical! That stymied me. I didn’t even have a drink because I wanted to create the right impression. I didn’t want him to think, ‘AJ’s on the juice.’ What a fucking flight.

  In South Africa we headed out to Kyalami and I got to meet Brett Lunger, my American teammate who had brought Chesterfield sponsorship to the team. Because he was paying, the first car built was his – and it was the only one that was taken to South Africa. So he did most of the testing, and the fabricated rear uprights kept cracking and breaking. So they’d take bits down to the local engineering shop to have them re-welded.

  So I spent most of that week on an off-road bike going up to the nearby snake farm. I didn’t get near the car until the Friday. I think John must have suddenly thought, ‘Oh, shit, I’d better put AJ in the car and give him a few laps.’ This was the bloke that said, ‘I’m not spending all this money and investing all this time unless you sign the bloody contract.’

  Anyway, I finally got some laps – six I think – before the uprights cracked again. That was it; that was my test in South Africa. A complete waste of time.

  I had my worries about the team and John, but I knew I could outdrive my teammate and maybe we could get some results and the car would be OK if they could make it last. Despite my concerns, I had a drive in Formula One, there was no tax man coming for the team owner, and maybe I could relax this Christmas.

  5

  I Was There … But I Didn’t Want to Be

  AS IS SO often the case at the beginning of a career in Formula One, getting a drive at all is hard enough, and almost always complicated by the involved deals that are required to make that bit of magic possible. That was doubly true in the case of John Surtees.

  Surtees had just enough money, but it came from Brett Lunger, who was Bert Plunger to me. Plunger had all sorts of money behind him, being one of the heirs to the DuPont fortune in the States. He had connections too – which was OK when it was helping me.

  He had, in fact, taken over my Hesketh for the final three races of 1975, and now he was my teammate. Because he was the money-man he was to get his car first, and everything else, and I would get mine as soon as it was built.

 
1976 wasn’t a happy season for me, though it could have been. The TS19 was a pretty good little car to drive and it had a lot of potential. Neither car was ready for the season-opener in Brazil in late January, but Plunger raced in South Africa a month later, qualifying 20th and finishing 11th.

  I had to wait another week for my first race for Surtees at the Brands Hatch Race of Champions event. I arrived at the track and walked around everywhere looking for our transporter; it hadn’t arrived, which was a worry. Here I am with helmet and race suit ready to race, and I have no team and no car. It did eventually arrive, just before the first practice session, and there was my first real exposure to the frenzy I came to associate with John’s running of the team. The mechanics were working on the car in the back of the transporter getting it ready to run. In some ways it was funny, in others scary.

  I had to take the car out literally untried. It was brand spanking new, but luckily, because it was a wet, greasy sort of day, preparing the chassis didn’t count for much; it was a matter of having some track knowledge and just having a go.

  We had already caused quite a stir that weekend. The London Rubber Company was our major sponsor and we were running Durex branding on the cars. England wasn’t very enlightened back then, and the idea of the BBC covering an event with a condom-maker prominently displayed on a car was just not going to happen. At that stage in England, they weren’t even allowed to run sponsor logos on football shirts in televised games, so we were really pushing some boundaries.

  There was a lot of debate going on. The BBC demanded we take the signs off the cars, and John was rightly refusing to do so. Not every Formula One race was being telecast back then, so the fact this non-championship race was on the agenda was pretty significant, and the effect of the Durex backing even more so. John wouldn’t back down and the BBC packed up and went home. I think they didn’t cover a race all season because of the word ‘Durex’ on the car.

  I qualified sixth quickest as the lone Surtees. David Purley, the driver who tried to rescue Roger Williamson from his burning car in 1973, was down to drive the other car, but it just wasn’t ready, which was good because it meant I had the full attention of the team … and it didn’t have much attention to give.

  The race started in the wet and eventually dried and the cards fell my way early. Tyrrell had a trick at Brands, particularly when it was cold, where they used to put lots of toe-in to generate a lot of heat in the tyres and get a bit more grip. Jody Scheckter had used that trick to comfortably qualify on pole and he flew off into the distance at the start of the race and then flew off the track. When that happened I was leading, and I was in front of James Hunt for most of the race, with the car getting better and better as the track dried out. James finally overtook me to win the race, but I finished second and everyone was running around saying our car was obviously going to be the car for the season. Except that we went to Long Beach and only just scraped onto the grid.

  I had a very fraught time driving for Big John. He was like Graham Hill in that he thought he knew everything there was to know about racing; he presumed that because I was relatively new to the championship, I knew nothing. Every time I changed gears in that car I scraped the skin off my knuckles. I asked John to put a bubble on the side of the cockpit. He wouldn’t do it: he thought it would look funny if there wasn’t a bubble on the other side of the cockpit. It just wouldn’t look symmetrical. Damn symmetry, I thought; I’d rather be able to change my gears and not come away bleeding.

  John was something else. He would take our car down to Goodwood and test it without any bloody wings. All right, except for the fact that if you take the wings off, you’ve got to change the spring rates to compensate for the loss of the extra downforce. But John would go down and take the car around in a leisurely one minute and 12 seconds and pronounce it ‘beautiful’. I’d go down there and take it around in three seconds quicker and it would be a shambles. Any time you take a car out as though you were taking the kids out for a drive, it’s likely to feel marvellously good; it’s only when you put the real stresses on that the car begins to hurt.

  I couldn’t understand why you would bother testing the car without wings. He said it was to get a feel for the actual geometry, the mechanical grip. I said, ‘But once you put the wings on you’re going to generate “X” thousand pounds of downforce and that’ll push the car down and give you a completely false reading of what you’ve had when driving the car without any wings.’

  It was just a nightmare.

  It took us four months to develop a nose on the car that would generate more downforce. It had a full nose on it like a sportscar, as opposed to a skinny nose with wings like most of the rest. On the full nose you have a splitter, which comes out from underneath the nose, and the further out you bring that, in theory, the more downforce you should create at the front. Then at the side of the full nose it had aluminium fences that came up the sides, which also made more downforce.

  And so we’d go through this bloody pantomime at every grand prix. He’d unload the car from the transporter. The front splitter would be in, the fences at the side of the nose would be down and I’d get this bloody crap about how there were some new tyres that would probably suit the car better, blah, blah, blah. Then of course after the first 10 minutes or so, we’d start to undo his theories.

  ‘What’s it doing?’ ‘It’s understeering.’ ‘OK, just put the splitter out a little bit at the front and put the dams up.’

  Ten minutes later. ‘What’s it doing?’ ‘It’s a bit better, but it’s still understeering.’ ‘OK, put the front splitter out a bit more.’ By the end of this dance, we’d end up with the front splitter and the dams exactly where they were after the last race. I mean, it was just like a comedy.

  We always had to go through the rigmarole of John insisting on his opinions; sometimes it was as though we were re-inventing the wheel. It was a shame, because as I said it was a sound little car, the right shape and very quick in a straight line. If Patrick Head, the designer at Williams, had got his hands on that car, it would have been a world championship car. It had the right stuff.

  Then there was the bubble. I was wearing out a set of gloves and still taking the skin off my knuckles. Still he wouldn’t give me a bubble. It took a major incident in Germany – the 10th round – to get him to make the change. I was having a nice dice with Vittorio Brambilla – the Monza Gorilla – who was in a March. There’s a lot of gear changes on that track, and I was struggling to get it into gear and it was damaging the gearbox.

  Early in the race I missed a gear going over the Adenauer Bridge and I wound up with the nose of the car in the gutter and Vittoria went off with me. I got going again, running about ninth or 10th and literally had to do the last two laps without being able to get into third or fourth gears. After the race, I screamed and yelled at John and showed him my hand which was scraped raw through my gloves.

  ‘You put a fucking bubble in this thing otherwise I’m not driving it. I’ll end up writing your car off because I can’t change gears properly.’ He said, ‘We’ll do that in next year’s design, but we’ll do it in such a way we do the other side so it’s symmetrical.’ I said, ‘Fuck symmetrical, I want to change gears.’ This is the sort of bullshit you had to go through with him.

  Anyway, we went from Brands Hatch to Long Beach in the US and I scraped onto the 20-car grid in 19th and, as I said, that was a big comedown for us as a team, especially given the Plunger didn’t even make the grid. That track was a great little street circuit and it had a unique character.

  The Spanish Grand Prix had moved to Jarama for 1976 after the disaster the previous year at Montjuïc, and while we still qualified well down the order we were more competitive in the race, although Brett again missed the cut. This was the race where Tyrrell ran the six-wheeled car for the first time and James won the race with McLaren, was disqualified and then eventually reinstated after an argument over whether tyres expand when they get hot. The politics of the
sport baffled me then as much as it does now.

  My next race was something different. I had a relationship with Teddy Yip, because I knew him from running in the Macau Grand Prix on my way home each year. I got on well with him, and as it turns out he was looking for a driver for the SCCA/USAC Formula 5000 Championship in the States. There was only one round I couldn’t do because of a Formula One clash, but otherwise I was in. It was running here that I formed a good relationship with Jackie Oliver, who was running in the series for Shadow.

  Teddy’s Lola was a good car and the team, which was being run by Sid Taylor, posed a stark contrast to what I was dealing with in Europe. Rather than chasing the quicker cars with a more nimble V6 as with my previous Formula 5000 outings, they opted for a Chevy with V8 grunt, and it was a different beast altogether. I settled in really quickly. In Pocono for my first race, held on the one weekend free between Spain and Belgium, I qualified third and finished a lap down in seventh after some dramas.

  Sid was a real character. I liked working with him and he kept popping up in my career for a while. He always wore maroon patent leather shoes. Once in the States we went to a pizza restaurant for dinner. When the waitress brought the pizza out, she asked if he wanted it cut into four slices or six. He answered in his strong Irish accent, ‘Jesus, four, I couldn’t eat six.’ He was fun to be around.

  No sooner was that race done than I had to get from the wilds of Pennsylvania to New York then England and then off to Belgium. Remember, this was in the days before lie-down beds on planes. I had set myself a pretty gruelling schedule.

  Belgium was funny. John had the motorhome parked, literally, next to the track going into turn 1. Brett came up to John in the transporter, and with all due respect, lovely guy, but a typical American running around feeling his pulse and going through the theory of everything rather than just getting on with it, and he said, ‘John, I know I can go a second quicker.’ Surtees looked at him and said, ‘Well, if you brake 50 metres later into this bloody corner that’ll help.’ I just burst out laughing.