by Alan Jones
After Fritz had the cattle all settled in for me he headed back to Switzerland and I gave him a going-away party at the pub. We all went down there and when it was time to close I said, ‘Right, close the doors. We’re continuing on.’ The manager came up and said I couldn’t do that. ‘It’s time to close,’ he said. I said, ‘Look. It’s my fucking pub. I’m staying here and this party’s going on.’
He said it was his licence we were using, so I told him to fuck off and I sacked him on the spot. He got in the car and left. This was about midnight.
Then I thought, ‘Okay, now what are you going to do, dick-head?’ Someone had to open up the next day and someone had to stay with the takings. I got Beverley to go back to the farm and get a shotgun for me, and I stayed there with the bloody gun next to me, with the smell of cigarettes and beer that you get only in a country pub.
Then I had to go like buggery to get a new manager for the joint. Once again I had to pay for a spontaneous stupid act. I couldn’t wait to get out of the bloody joint. Every boy’s dream is to have a pub and a farm – and his second dream is to get rid of them. But, anyway, it’s another box ticked.
Regardless of that, I was in a good place. The days of worrying over Christmas about what I was doing the next year were now well behind me. I was firmly ensconced at Williams and I knew we were building to something special. There were people sniffing around to see if I’d drive for them, but I was going nowhere in 1980. I was truly happy with Williams, and got on extremely well with Patrick, Frank, Charlie and everyone else too. My chief mechanic was an Australian named Wayne Eckersley, or ‘Wayne the Pain’ simply because it rhymed.
Strangely, even after the run we’d had I was looking at 1980 as just another year to race a car. 1980 was another 16 races and I wanted to win as many as I could. I never really thought, ‘I’m going to win the 1980 World Championship.’ I thought I was going to give it a fair old nudge, but the thing in Formula One is you never know who’s got what.
Chapman could have had some super-duper bloody thing coming out of the garage at Lotus. Or Renault might have got some reliability. Anything could happen … and it is not easy to win that championship. 1980 was the 31st championship year, and up to then out of the hundreds who had tried only 17 had won titles and maybe only 50 or so had even won races.
Yes, I thought I had a chance, but to use an old cliché, it really was one race at a time.
James Hunt
James was a character, one of those guys that you never knew what he was going to do next. A really nice guy he was, very kind-hearted. James was one of the few drivers I actually liked. I respected him as a driver too. It should never be forgotten just how bloody good he was.
He didn’t give a shit about anything. He’d go and buy a brand new Mercedes when he was living in Spain, and he had this whacking big Alsatian. He’d take him down to the beach, straight off the beach, sand and everything, into the back seat of the Merc. It was completely rooted after a month. He didn’t care.
He also used to run up to some of the functions barefooted. He got off a plane once in Brazil and a bloke stood on his foot. He said, ‘You fucking mongrel,’ or something like that. It cost Marlboro a wing at the local hospital to get the incident all hushed up.
He used to call me ‘Big Al’. ‘Come on, Big Al, we’ll go and do this and we’ll do that.’ But shit, could he get me into trouble … I blame him.
I went around to visit him one day when he was living in Wimbledon with his second wife, Sarah. I used to ride my bike up to see him on the pretence of training. I lived on a park and I used to ride quite a bit, so I didn’t need that trip at all. But Wimbledon wasn’t that far, so I’d ride up there for a beer or two. As ever, he was out the back with his budgerigars. He loved those birds, and because they were Australian he’d always say, ‘Bunch of Aussies, Big Al.’ I went out there and was on the hoochie coochie. He used to tell the wife he was going out to train the budgies and he’d get stuck into the hooch. I’m sure those budgies must have been high most of the time.
The things he used to get up to were just unbelievable. We went to the official opening of the brand new Nürburgring in 1984 and all the living world champions had been invited to race identical Mercedes 190e 2.3-16s. Which means James and I were in the field and so too was Ayrton Senna, since Mario and Emerson couldn’t make it. Anyway, the race itself is quite famous. I was leading with seven laps remaining when the power steering broke and Senna went on to win. Senna’s car is now in the Mercedes museum; I would have loved for it to be mine.
Anyway, Lufthansa was catering the event in a huge tent, and straight after the race it started pissing with rain and all the drivers went for cover. We started drinking, and soon we were placing bets on who could get back to the hotel first. We were racing hard, passing bloody trams on the wrong side and wheels on the grass and Christ knows what. I’ve no idea who won, and it’s not really the point, is it. We got back there and James said, ‘Big Al, come up to the room.’
When we got into his room, Sarah, his second wife, was in bed sick, not that it bothered James to invite someone in. We started on the beer and then after a couple he handed me a joint. I’d tried a bit of cocaine once and some other soft drugs too, and marijuana actually did little for me … or so I thought. ‘This is good stuff, Big Al, try it.’
I’ve had a taste of this thing and since I’ve got no idea what I’m doing and I’m a few beers into a big night, it didn’t stop there. Anyway, obviously it’s got the better of me. I said, James, I’ve got to go down for dinner and I headed off. Then James took me aside and said, ‘Big Al, there’s a waitress there and I’ve got a good shot with her. She’s going to meet me in the car park. I’ve worded her up about you, when she comes over, can you give her the nod and tell her that I’m out in the car park?’ I said, ‘Yeah, no dramas.’
James’ partners knew of his ways and no-one could ever change that about him. He was an upfront character and we were used to it. He’s still one of the most celebrated personalities in the sport of Formula One.
I knew I was sitting at the table with the managing director from Mercedes-Benz Australia, and as I was heading there I couldn’t stop laughing. I didn’t know what was going on, and I was out of it. I thought, ‘I know what I’ll do. So they won’t be able to see my face, I’ll walk down the stairs backwards.’ Well, that got everyone’s attention.
Every word uttered at that table was hilarious. I laughed at everything. My sides were in knots. My face muscles hurt. Then I picked up the dinner menu and began shaking it up and down. All sense of control was lost by this stage.
Anyway, the waitress has come up and given me half a nod. I thought, ‘Jesus, she fancies me,’ completely forgetting that it was the deal with James. ‘She’s trying to pull me.’ I started with the legendary Jones’ charm. James was by now bobbing up and down in the car park, slinking between cars waiting for her to appear. At that point, all the directors of Mercedes-Benz started to arrive in their armoured cars with bodyguards – they were all security-conscious because one of their directors had been kidnapped previously and they weren’t taking any chances. So they move in packs and had the guards on hand. Anyway, they fronted up to this hotel and there’s this bloke bobbing up and down between the parked cars. One of the bodyguards has seen him and it was on.
Inside, I continued to eye off the waitress, thinking that I was in with a chance. Then I saw security from the entire venue rush out the door to meet up with the others responding to the threat. They chased this bloke for a good minute before crash-tackling him to the ground. They pinned him down and turned him over to find that they’d captured James Hunt, ex-Formula One driver. I think as soon as they discovered who he was they let him go. It was just a nightmare. I didn’t get the waitress. Nor did James.
Later on, he abused the shit out of me. I stood my ground, telling him that he should never have influenced me to suck a big puff out of that joint.
My adventures with James
also broke through the darkness that could descend after losing a race. I remember once going back on the plane to England with him when he was absolutely blind drunk. James made the plane his own by playing around on the public address system and hanging out with the pilot in the cockpit. It was a long flight and all I can remember is how he made the trip one heck of a good time. It felt like a party.
Meeting Alan Jones
One night at a party in London, I met Alan Jones the racing driver. That was a highlight for me. There were a lot of Aussies at this pub and I was talking to this bloke and he said, ‘I race cars.’ I said, ‘Really? What’s your name?’
He said, ‘Alan Jones.’
‘Really?’ I just let him go, hoping to Christ that someone would tap him on the shoulder and say, ‘Guess what.’
I had some fun with him for the rest of the night, introduced him to my mates.
13
My Favourite Thing About Winter Is When It Is Over
LIFE WAS PRETTY strange back at the end of 1979. My run in the second half of the season had put me firmly in the spotlight, which was both good and bad. It meant I was earning a lot of money and I certainly felt some of the pressure and expectation that was coming my way, but I was dealing with it.
Because the weather in California was so good, I stayed there for the break between seasons. Back in Australia I still wasn’t really on the radar, so there wasn’t much to do there for me, but we had a nice home in a place we liked. The Australian version of 60 Minutes did a program on me around that time, entitled ‘Alan Who?’
They flew over to California and did the interviews with me while I was learning to fly out of Torrance Airport. One of them very stupidly came up on the plane with me, a little Cessna 180. We went for a burn around LA, came back and landed. Relatively safely. I eventually decided that fixed wing was a bit boring, so I got into helicopters and I really enjoyed them.
Anyway, the whole show was about how no-one back home knew who I was. In Europe it was a different story, and the US was somewhere in between. But the 60 Minutes show also proved that things were changing back home; my winning streak was having an impact. Channel Nine – which ran 60 Minutes – was starting to get into Formula One and people were paying attention.
I had a new turbo Porsche with California plates ‘AJ Turbo’, so there was a little bit of wanker in me, but it was still under control I thought. I had a boat that I kept at Marina Del Rey. I don’t know why, because on the coast of California, particularly down around that area, there was nowhere to go. The only place to go was Catalina; the boat wasn’t big enough to get to Mexico.
I started up a business with an old friend of mine who used to live in Melbourne and was now in Los Angeles, and we called it Grand Prix Sunroofs. We had a bunch of Mexicans working for us installing – as you may have guessed – sunroofs.
Kent was my mate’s name, and he was fucking mad. Mad, mad, mad. Had an apartment on the footpath in Manhattan Beach, half an hour from Palos Verdes, and all the sheilas used to skate by. He’d get them up in the apartment pretty easily – it was as if he had a fishing rod. He was a complete lunatic. He’s dead now. But, yeah, funny days.
After all those winters of discontent, I was now finally enjoying my time off. Life was good. Christian was still really a baby and Bev and I were enjoying that too.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was not really enjoying aspects of the travel that came with my life and success. Over winter, we’d go testing at Paul Ricard and it was bloody cold. You couldn’t go onto the track until about ten in the morning, because we had to wait until it dried. Then it used to get dark about four.
You’d then go back to the hotel, and they wouldn’t serve dinner until eight. There would be no cable TV, so it would only be TV in a foreign language. I’m not all that clever, so I don’t speak another language. I never used to read all that much either, so it was not like I cuddled up with a good book. I used to go for a walk. It was all very boring.
But the urge to not travel was starting to grow in me.
14
BMW Procar
I DON’T KNOW how the BMW M1 Procar series came about, and in my purely selfish fashion nor did I really care. It was good for me, and that was all that counted at the time.
For the series they built these supposedly identical cars and they sold some to privateers and then made half a dozen available to Formula One drivers that qualified in the top six. It ran as a support race to several of the European grands prix, with nine races in 1979 and then, for us, six of the nine races in the series for 1980. Luckily in those days I very rarely qualified out of the top six so I was pretty much always there for a run.
There was good money in it for us drivers, and there were prizes of cars for winning races and for certain spots in the championship. Everyone wondered why the team owners were allowing their drivers to participate, but it turned out that the team owners were getting the same money as the drivers. That was a nice little earner for doing nothing – and I’ve never seen a team owner who didn’t want more money.
For me it proved to be quite good because it paid for my tennis court at the farm and I ended up by winning a BMW, which I then put a few extra bob into, upgraded it to a black 325 convertible and sold it to a fairly wealthy lady in London for a tidy profit.
How it worked was that after practice if you were in the top six you went down and claimed your BMW M1 and they put your name on the windscreen and all the pro cars (as in the Formula One drivers) were done in white with the red and blue stripes that is now the badge for BMW’s M spec cars. The privateers had their sponsors and their cars looked totally different. I think Niki Lauda had a privateer one, so he raced whether he made it into the top six or not, and that is how he won the first series.
The series was a great concept and a lot of fun – a great pressure relief on a high-pressure weekend. The cars were pretty good too, properly geared up for racing. But like anything with us drivers, it was also serious. At one race meeting in Avus we were all taping up the gaps in the panels and doors and around the pop-up headlights. We were all looking for that little bit extra on the long straights, and this would make the car more aerodynamic. If someone else was doing it, so were we.
It was a classic example of the purple-pole syndrome. If Mercedes today came out with a 90-foot purple pole at the front of its car, you’d bet your life that a few of the boys at the next race meeting would also have a 90-foot purple pole. They wouldn’t know what the hell it did, but they’d have it and then work it out.
All us drivers had egos you couldn’t jump over, so we all wanted to beat one another. And we felt we were the best in the world, and I think we pretty much proved that – it was very rare that we’d get beaten by one of the privateers.
Over time it became very clear to me that the cream would rise to the top. You’d go to circuits around the world, say in Can-Am or a race meeting on an airfield in Germany where we were all in Cortinas – the Formula One guys always ended up quicker than not only the locals, but also the guys experienced in that type of car.
We proved time and time again why we were all racing in Formula One – because we were the best.
One of the great things about the M1 was that it had guards and panels and was a little more forgiving if we touched each other. In a Formula One we’d avoid contact; we did touch wheels every so often, but it was a lot less forgiving and you knew every time there was a chance that could end your race. So we were very conscious of that and tried to avoid it, but in these things a little tap here and there was OK. Somewhere like Monaco in particular, in those things you were inevitably going to have some body contact … and we did.
If you saw a gap you went for it and if you had body contact you had body contact and you just hoped that it wouldn’t rub a guard against the tyre. It was like when I went down the inside of Peter Brock at Siberia at Phillip Island when I was racing touring cars – I knew you could just lean on him and I’d be OK, so I did
. We contacted pretty hard and I smashed all the windows on the left hand side of his car, but that was it. We continued racing. He didn’t come up afterwards and he wasn’t ranting and raving like I’d just taken his first-born for a sacrifice. He realised it was a racing incident. Just like what Jamie Whincup did at Bathurst when he passed Scott McLaughlin in 2016. They took the race off him for that, which really annoyed me. I mean, do you want people to race or not?
You never consciously said ‘I’m going to enjoy this because I can lean on somebody’ or just belt the other bloke out of the way. The trick was not to do it, because there was always that chance you’re going to damage yourself – put the bodywork in on the tyre or bend a steering arm – so you did avoid it.
This was an era where drivers were still getting killed in Formula One, so I think we all had respect for what we were doing. Look at those years, it’s carnage. There were still people having crashes and getting injured, the carbon-fibre monocoques that revolutionised driver safety were still a year or two away.
I don’t think any of us at that stage were driving through the tunnel at Monaco with the belief we couldn’t get hurt. So even in a BMW M1, we treated the racing with respect.
15
The Championship Year
I TURNED UP for work for the start of the 1980 season confident but nervous. We were the team all the others had to catch, but that didn’t mean it was going to be easy. The bookies had Gilles Villeneuve favourite for the championship in the Ferrari, but we felt we had the upper hand for a number of reasons.
Patrick Head wasn’t going to let the others catch us though; he was as competitive as me. We had the Ford Cosworth engine, which was good and solid, but more than half the field was using it and it was clearly not as powerful as the Ferrari flat 12 or the Renault turbo, although they did have their own issues.
