by Alan Jones
Ferrari, the reigning champ, had a new car, the 312T5, to race against our FW07B. There were stories going around that the engine was so bulky it made it hard to get the ground effects to work as well as those of us with physically smaller engines. Good.
We also had to pay attention to what was coming from Ligier – remember how fast they were at the start of 1979 – Renault, Brabham, McLaren and, of course, Lotus. There were lots of other changes up and down the field: Alain Prost was starting his grand prix career with McLaren and Carlos Reutemann had joined me at Williams. Carlos was bloody quick – he had won races at both Ferrari and Brabham and spent a year at Lotus before we lured him across.
Instead of going to Paul Ricard, we tested in mid-December in Argentina with the 1979 car updated to FW07B spec. Most of the main teams were there with us and we came away fastest, which meant to our eyes no-one had found a demon tweak yet. I flew back to the US with Mario Andretti, who was on his way back to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, while I went across to Los Angeles, California, and home. When the season started I was again based out of London, but I wasn’t going to stay there until I absolutely had to.
‘Shit, I hate to think what you’re going to do in the new car,’ Mario said – and it stuck in my mind. So Lotus was worried. He knew the FW07B was coming, and while it wasn’t new it had some major improvements.
Testing in a place like Argentina for three or four days is a costly exercise – there is nothing cheap about sending a car, a driver, spares and mechanics 10,000 kilometres by air – but it proved valuable. We were able to dial the car into the circuit and do some very profitable work with Goodyear, who provided our tyres, and thus, when January and the race came along, we could just roll the car out of the trailer and assert our superiority over the rest of the field.
Or so the thinking went. We turned up in Argentina to start the season in the middle of January with a brand new car and it never turned a wheel in anger. The Buenos Aires circuit had quite a long straight after you exit a beautiful right-hander, and the new car was porpoising down the straight, which meant it was just not pointing right. Patrick had moved the centre of gravity of the car back and it didn’t work.
Luckily we left the car that I tested down there as a spare, rather than ship it back to England. So after the first practice session I just said, ‘Hey, give me last year’s car. I’ll race that.’ That was the best thing we ever did. My new teammate Reutemann was Argentinian, so there was a lot of attention on him that weekend, meaning I could avoid the spotlight and do what I wanted and needed to do.
The drivers were now becoming an even more vocal body – and we were all upset at the state of the track. Some were talking of boycotting the race, but that never entered my mind. I was a race driver; I was there to race, not play politics. I could control my own risk. My job was to race cars; it was Frank’s job to deal with that stuff.
Sometimes, though, I got some enjoyment out of the politics, precisely because I simply didn’t give a shit. I’d sit in the meetings and not say a word, then I’d throw a hand grenade into the argument and walk away.
Politics and sport don’t mix. The Frenchman Jean-Marie Balestre had a few manufacturers from Europe on his side, and he was trying to wrest control of the sport from the Formula One Constructors Association – FOCA – which was largely being driven out of the UK by people like Bernie Ecclestone and my old mate Brian Kreisky.
I didn’t know it at the time, but politics and other bullshit was going to leave a bitter taste in my mouth during 1980.
For me, I had one job, to win races. Sitting in meetings talking about bellybuttons was just not me. Fortunately there were enough like me who figured we’d come a long way, the crowd had paid their money and the track was the same for all of us, we just had to use our brains and get on with it.
So race we did. I qualified on pole and led away from the start. The track was breaking up as expected and with all the cars in racing mode they were tearing it up quite a lot. I got some paper in my radiator duct and had to pit to get it removed – the temperature was going off the dial and that wasn’t going to end well. We didn’t have telemetry or radio back then, so I had to make the decision for myself, and with a lot of pointing the crew knew exactly what was needed when I pitted.
In those days to make a pit stop for anything other than tyres meant you were pretty well rooted. I made a decision. We now had a system where the radiators could be repressured easily if they’d lost any water, and we did that and I got going again back in fourth. I managed to pass Laffite and then Villeneuve spun off because he just couldn’t slow himself down for the conditions and I won the race from Nelson Piquet and Keke Rosberg – now there was a podium that told a story of the future.
It was a very rewarding race to win – I had made the decision to make the pit stop to clear the radiator, which I thought had buggered me, and we came back out and dominated. Pole, fastest lap and win … I liked the sound of that.
Mansour Ojjeh, who was running his family business, TAG, was sinking money into Williams at the time. TAG was an interesting business – they had an aviation arm, which distributed planes through the Middle East, as well as a few other technology-based businesses, and later they bought Heuer Watches and rebranded them as TAG Heuer. His younger brother Aziz was in Argentina and was staying with us until after the next round in Brazil. I flew into Brazil with him in his BAC One-Eleven and I was not in a good state. I was a little ill from the night before – read hungover – and I was lying down not thinking about anything, not able to think about anything. We had a really bumpy landing and I thought we were still at 20,000 feet and I shit myself. I thought I was going to die.
We had two weeks to kill. Charlie Crichton-Stuart and I went to a coffee plantation for a bit of a look and we sat there for three days drinking caipirinhas, the national drink, and going into the local villages.
I think maybe I was too relaxed, or that those days had an impact on me, but I wasn’t myself when the race weekend started. I qualified 10th and then was equally as shit in the race, although I did finish third. After the race, the team said I had more fuel in the car than I should have had, so I wasn’t using the accelerator enough. I wasn’t being aggressive enough. They didn’t have telemetry, but the buggers knew, and in their eyes I wasn’t trying hard enough. Frank dubbed it the Mobil Economy Run!
I can’t remember much about my mindset from that weekend, but I do know I was stung by that feeling. It wasn’t going to happen again.
There was more of a shitfight in Brazil from the drivers. Jody Scheckter wanted to boycott the race well before we even got there. The Interlagos track was bumpy and the safety facilities were certainly below par. As it turned out, this was the last time I would ever race there. In terms of layout, it is one of the finest circuits there is, yet it is far from my favourite track. Getting there through city traffic is hell and, once you’re there, the organisation leaves something to be desired, which is a polite way of saying it’s chaotic.
But that’s not all. It is also fiercely punishing physically, as Interlagos is one of the very few circuits around the world that runs counter-clockwise. This makes it very hard on the neck, because we are used to taking the g-forces the other way. There are a lot of fast corners, which puts the strain on the body, and after about fifteen minutes out on the track you become acutely conscious of it. It is the only circuit, for instance, at which I need a masseur; if he wasn’t there to attack me for twenty minutes after each session, my neck would stiffen up completely and I’d be useless. The neck muscles, hugely built up to race clockwise, were simply not up to the strain.
South Africa’s Kyalami, with its thatched-hut ranch and insufferably slow service, its icy pool in which only the bravest swim, its tennis courts where the Formula One family play, is high on everyone’s list of favourite circuits, and it was up next.
I liked going to South Africa. It was a good place to relax – and you could order your meals in English. The circuit i
s interesting, challenging and fast, and at more than 1500 metres above sea level it was perfect for the turbo-engines. Renault was comfortably on pole – as they were at Interlagos, 800 metres above sea level, a month earlier.
The secret to the track was to get the car going as fast as you could down the long straight. I can remember the days when you had to get your car set up just right to take the approach corner, Leeukop, flat out after clearing The Esses. With the 1980 car that task was a lot easier, but it had plenty of other challenges too. Fast tracks carry danger, as Prost and Marc Surer found out in separate crashes in practice – both broke bones and missed races.
I qualified eighth and got a tremendous start and was actually leading the two Renault turbos down the straight as far as the bridge, and then they passed me. I was third and then Laffite passed me and that is where I stayed for 30 laps until the gearbox bearings gave way and that was that for me.
I was not in the best of moods, disappointed at not finishing. I wanted to get out of the track fast and told Frank as much. But he wanted me to go and shake hands, smile and sign autographs at the Leyland hospitality tent. Reluctantly I agreed; after all it was part of what I was paid to do.
Anyway, I went down to the tent and it was surrounded by barbed wire, cyclone fences and probably machine-gun nests as well. The guy on the gate said, ‘You can’t come in here.’
So I turned on my heels to go when someone inside noticed me and ushered me in. I wasn’t in the frame of mind to be doing hospitality. It wasn’t going to end well when a drunk car dealer came up and ‘Hey, boy, you blew your car up, eh?’ After a few more words and a stumble here and there, I just whacked him a couple of times and he hit the deck. Guards appeared from everywhere, and I left. When I woke the next day I was pretty worried about the fall-out, but when I picked up the paper my worry was over – ‘Drunk Attacks Sportsman In Hospitality Tent.’ It wasn’t quite that way, but it saved us all embarrassment.
Renault’s René Arnoux now had two wins in a row and led the championship, but I figured the two high-altitude tracks would be the Renault’s best tracks. The next race was at Long Beach, just near my home, a track I really enjoyed. This weekend wasn’t going to be one of them.
It remains for me a race marred by the serious accident which paralysed my old friend and teammate Clay Regazzoni. His brakes failed when doing 180 mph. For some reason, too, neither my car nor Carlos’s seemed properly set up for Long Beach. Nelson Piquet in his Brabham was the man to watch; he was on pole and a second and a half faster than me. I had qualified fifth, Carlos seventh.
It was a race marked by numerous retirements and crashes. Some ten laps in, I was lying third, with Piquet in front and Depailler behind him. After a prolonged duel, I managed to overtake Patrick, but I seemed unable to do anything to catch up with Nelson, and two-thirds of the way through the race while lapping Bruno Giacomelli, he went into the side of my car and put me out of the race. It was after this race that I began to sense the threat posed to us by Piquet, who now led the championship alongside Arnoux. I also decided to have a few words with the new boy Jack O’Malley, as we used to call Bruno.
Not to worry though, because a month later the European season was about to start with the Belgian Grand Prix. This was my favourite time of the year. It was just more organised, and easier on everybody. There aren’t those long flights; you get to the track on a Thursday and you have some chance of getting home by Sunday night; you get a rhythm going in your life and feel you have a base of sorts. I’m one of those people who always feels better if I know where I’m going to be and when.
After South Africa, we did a lot of testing for Goodyear. In fact, during the season, we tested at nearly every circuit, sometimes months before its grand prix. And, as we tested for Goodyear, we were able to sort our car out, too. All of it was a help.
Our testing duties were split though. Carlos did the Zolder test with the team and I went to Paul Ricard. When I got to Zolder for the race, the cars didn’t have any front wings, because the Ligier didn’t have front wings, and they were pretty good cars. Carlos thought that because they were winged cars, the front wings were offsetting the air going into the actual wing part of the car. He overthought things. He tested without the front wings and he was happy. But of course when he was testing, he was working on new tyres all the time, so when the tyres were worn a little it was a different story.
Zolder is on everyone’s list of disliked circuits. Sandy, wet, inhospitable, it is many miles away from civilisation. At the time of the Belgian Grand Prix, the great battle between the warring authorities of FISA and FOCA was out in the open. Everyone’s mood was sour, and few will forget the belligerent press conference Balestre held on race day: the sport would bend to his will, he implied, or he would force it to do so.
Though we were all watching the quarrel looming, my mind was only on the race and getting a result after two failures. During qualifying, however, I seemed to be unable to do much better than third or fourth in my race car, and finally, not far from the end, it simply broke down. I raced back to the pits to get into the spare car, only to find that Carlos was out in it. I admit to being pissed off at this, but Frank waited until Carlos had made the best use of his fresh tyres; then he put on another new set for me, put five gallons into the tank and off I went: to pole position! Satisfying, that!
But we had had serious problems with understeering throughout practice and I thought the race wasn’t going to be kind to us. Didier Pironi had been just behind us in his Ligier all through qualifying and when it came to the race, he got a superb start and walked away with it. I couldn’t get near him, I had to battle ever-increasing understeer to save second spot … which I did. As Carlos took third, the result was good for Williams, and I have no complaints about the six points I picked up for myself.
But I was pretty annoyed. Without the front wings, we had no way to control the understeer that appeared as the tyres were wearing out. I thought the front wings were really good for the balance; you can’t just change the dynamics of a car that massively. If it was designed with wings, it needed wings and just because others weren’t using them didn’t mean you shouldn’t. It’s the bloody purple-pole syndrome. We did run some races later in the year without wings, but we understood it by then and had tested it properly.
Monaco was next, and I did not like it any more than before. It’s not just the poseurs and their yachts, though they’re bad enough; it’s not just the aggro getting to and from the pits; it’s the race itself, which is just a bloody procession.
I qualified third, made a good start and got into second place as I went up the hill, missing the shambles taking place behind me. I was surprised how slowly Pironi was going, and how he was holding me up. I was sitting there just waiting for him to make a mistake. Unfortunately for me, before he had a chance to make one, my gearbox blew up and I had to coast into the pits.
It was another disappointment, because I felt certain I could have won that race. Despite my dislike of Monaco, I would dearly have loved to have won there. Every point was going to count in the championship and here we were in three of the last four races watching the race’s end from the pits.
I had 19 points up and trailed Nelson by three and René by two. The scoring system, of course, was 9-6-4-3-2-1 points for the first six in each race.
According to the history books, we didn’t go to Spain for the next grand prix. We didn’t race there because one particular Frenchman decided we wouldn’t. We raced and I won – but there were no points on offer. The bitter taste lingers to this day.
There were warning signals flying from every flagpole at Jarama and the battle for the control of the sport was about to get real. Jean-Marie Balestre was not a nice man; he was a megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur, and as far as I was concerned the less I had to do with him, the better.
In one corner we had Balestre and FISA, the body that governed the sport. There were three teams in that camp, all vehicle manufactur
ers with Formula One teams – Ferrari, Renault and Alfa Romeo. That left 12 out of 15 teams affiliated with the Formula One Constructors Association (FOCA), headed by Bernie Ecclestone, who owned Brabham, in the other corner.
Balestre had announced a compulsory drivers briefing, but the lawyers for our FOCA teams said it wasn’t in the rule book and we didn’t need to go. So we didn’t from Belgium onwards. For that we were all given a $2000 fine, which we refused to pay. On the day before practice was meant to begin, Balestre decided to suspend the racing licences for 15 of us, me included.
There was a bit of argy-bargy going on between all the parties, including the race organisers, who had the paying public and even bigger paying sponsors to appease. On the Friday morning Balestre declared the race would not be sanctioned – but would go ahead.
It was a heated day of practice, that’s for sure. First, there were some teams who were going to go out and practise and some who weren’t – in the first session only Renault, Ferrari and Alfa Romeo practised. Then when all the FISA officials were escorted from the track, we practised and they sat out – along with Osella, in its first F1 season, which was worried about other repercussions. The ones who refused to race were known as the ‘loyalists’ and the rest of us were branded as ‘rebels’. Sounded like something out of Star Wars.
It was a stupid quarrel that came close to wrecking the sport and took more than a year to sort out.
Come race day, Osella had found a way to circumvent possible FISA sanctions and lined up, but the FISA loyalists were there with their cars watching. Not racing. We were there to race, and race we did.
For me, it was a lucky victory. I had three cars in front of me from the start, but all of them either broke down or crashed, and I ultimately won the race. To this day, I still can see no way in which the Spanish Grand Prix was not valid for the championship and, from a driver’s point of view, I know that just as much effort, preparation and risk went into that race as any other.
