AJ

by Alan Jones

  I’d never had what was essentially a start-line shunt at that point. If it’s a gamble, bugger it, let the other man through: there’s always time left to have a go at him. If you’re in the last five laps, that’s different; then you have to have a big, aggressive go at him. But early on, you have to say to yourself, ‘Frank didn’t fly the car and all those mechanics all the way to Canada for you to wipe the car out on the first corner.’

  Aggression is necessary, but uncontrolled aggression won’t help anyone win grands prix. Yet despite the fact that every driver knows this, there are still some drivers who seem prone to accidents. Look at Jean-Pierre Jarier in Interlagos the previous year: he had a five-hour lead and still went off. If all the cars had spun off where he did, that would have been different. But he was the only one that did – and someone else won that race.

  If my lead is big enough, or if I have any doubts of any kind, I back off. I’ll have put a lot of effort into building that lead, and I know if I need to, I can always build it up again. To win a race by two seconds is as good as winning it by forty. There were many races in 1980 where I backed off and did slow gear changes; I knew that whoever was lying second could get close to me, but the car had enough to rebuild the time I was losing. I concentrated instead on conserving the car, not over-revving it, not wearing out my brakes or tyres.

  The smart driver plays each lap as it comes, and the really good ones win races in the slowest times, not the quickest. Unfortunately, I dearly loved having a go. Nothing pleased me more. Psychologically, I didn’t like being on pole. Inside me, I think I preferred being on the second row so I could work someone over. It was a justification for driving that little bit harder.

  Necessarily, you have occasional run-ins with other drivers. I never actually whacked one, but I had been mightily tempted to do so. I had that set-to with Bruno Giacomelli at Long Beach. He knew he was being lapped and he should have made it easier for me to pass. Bruno knew Piquet was leading the race, because Piquet had just gone past him: he could either screw me or make the whole thing neutral by moving over. I tried to outbrake him, and he just turned into me – which should not have happened since I was lapping him, he should have just let me pass. I had a go at him after that and brought it up at a drivers’ meeting later.

  Or there was the other side of the boot when I left my braking too late once and had to scream off up the escape road, which happened to be the entrance to the pits, and ruined a lap for Elio De Angelis. Afterwards, I apologised. It was my fault. When I said I was sorry, he questioned my motives. He said, ‘Are you sure that’s what happened – you just left your braking too late?’ That was like a red rag to a bull. If I had the decency to apologise, he ought not to have questioned it.

  So now we have to do the start again. For a driver, the sensation at the start is very different. He is concentrating, he is composing his mind. I had a process. I walked to my car and climbed in, knowing that I would not be getting out until my race was over. Once in the car, my effort was to try to relax, so that when the five-minute board is shown, I am completely at ease. The greater the tension, the greater the need for calm. At Montreal, fighting for the World Championship with the only man who could beat me sitting beside me, that was tension.

  I used to play a game with myself. When the five-minute sign came up, I would say ‘cinque minuti’ and start counting down, or just counting, in all sorts of languages. It was a deliberate form of distraction from what is going on around me. I was no longer looking around at what was going on, I was getting my mind into that first corner.

  The start of a race is neither joyful nor frightening. It is a commitment. I was there because I chose to be there. I do not sit in my car wondering what I’m doing there or wishing to get out; nor do I think, ‘Gee, this is great, I’m really enjoying this.’ I simply go through whatever is necessary to get the best result. And that means going through a drill with myself.

  For instance, I tried to leave the car in neutral for as long as I could, because if a driver puts it into first too soon and keeps blipping his accelerator, the clutch will burn out. By going through a drill, I am actually starting the race before the light turns green.

  Mentally, I am thinking all the time, ‘What might give me an advantage?’ At the re-start of the race in Montreal in 1980, all I was focused on was getting my car to sit exactly on the tyre marks I’d left from my practice and my first starts. Piquet drove up and put his wheels between his tracks and I got the better start … again.

  As the outsider might gather, the start puts a terrible strain on both car and driver, and it’s my job to keep that strain to the minimum. I leave the car in neutral until the red light comes on; at that point I still have ten seconds to get into first gear. If you don’t get excited or flustered, that’s plenty of time. The five minutes of waiting for that first positive act – getting into gear – feels like a month. Like everyone else, I tend to think I’ve left getting into first too late. The truth is, it’s a fine line between over-revving, which will wreck your clutch, and under-revving and stalling. By the time you’ve thought through all the variables, there’s little time to have butterflies.

  I used to spend that long five minutes, for instance, taking careful note of where the other cars were and guessing what each driver was likely to do. My aim was to outguess them. I think, behind me is so-and-so, he’s going to try to scream up between myself and the wall; so I move the car fractionally closer to the wall to close up the gap.

  I didn’t check the drivers in front of me before the start. I simply concentrated on the lights. It’s like keeping your eye on the golf ball: you’re not supposed to be looking where you’re aiming, but at what you’re hitting. Of course, as soon as you line up your car, you take note of where you’d like to go. In every start, there’s an ideal position to be in. And, as soon as the lights change, my eyes come right off them and I go as fast as I can into the position I have decided to take up. If I feel I’ve done a good start, but I’m aware that someone behind me has done an even better one, well that’s his bad luck: I put my car where it’s going to make him wait, because that is my right.

  But a start is forever fluid – there are many factors outside of your control that change what you had planned. You need to be able to think quickly, rely on reflexes and make judgements on the value of a risk or an opportunity. You will not win a race on the start or the first lap, but you sure can lose one.

  Knowing what you can and can’t do is instinct. A good start simply means one in which you’ve got into the position you chose. If you are heading for a gap between the two cars ahead of you, you must actually be there already, so that they can see you out of the corners of their eyes and can no longer shut you off. The tyres are wide, the cars are quick: to pass someone or sneak through a gap is not a matter of speed, but of spoiling your opponent’s manoeuvre. You have to position your car in such a way that he is the one who has to yield. When he backs off, you automatically get that little extra bit of speed that enables you to overtake him. You’ve taken away his line and established yours.

  From the outside, a start may look like an almighty scramble. From the inside – at least in my day, when we were lined up two abreast – it was not so different from being on a motorway. The track is about three lanes wide and nothing obstructs your vision. What is more difficult is making the instant decisions that someone else’s move may force on you. I’ve gone for lots of gaps that have closed up, and I’ve also been blocked and seen a gap open up before me. Suddenly there’s this great big space in front of you and you can drive right through it! Afterwards, people say what a great start you made, but in fact it was just easy.

  A driver has just enough peripheral vision to make this sort of decision. I worked on the theory that if I can’t actually see them alongside me, then they were not there. If they were a quarter way into me, they didn’t exist; if they’re alongside me and I could see them, they were there. Even at the speeds we were going and with all
the confusion of a start, you can always sense another car alongside your cockpit.

  Just their presence, however, doesn’t mean that I was going to give way. I could still try a bit of bluff and pretend I’m going to take my own line regardless. It quite often worked. The bloke thinks, ‘Christ! He hasn’t seen me,’ and it’s he who backs off. But the good drivers stick to their guns and if you see another car alongside you, you are the one who is going to come off second best if you touch.

  After the shunt, Nelson along with a few others ran back to the pits to jump into their spare cars, which were now being warmed up as the debris was being cleared. The only problem for Nelson was that he now had to race his qualifying car and that was going to be interesting. In the race, they couldn’t get away with using the ‘special’ fuel, but we didn’t know if they’d changed the engine or not.

  On the second start it was the same again, only this time there was no contact between Nelson and me, but he almost hit Didier Pironi in the same corner. I led the opening two laps from Didier and Nelson … but then that qualifying car came into its own. The next lap he was second, and then he was first, he passed me like he was driving a turbo-car … they hadn’t changed the engine!

  On the twenty-third lap, his engine blew. Then I knew for sure that, as long as I conserved the car, the championship was mine if I won, which I was pretty sure I could do when they put up a board telling me Pironi had been penalised for jumping the start. Me winning and Nelson not taking a point was the only scenario where the title would be settled in that race.

  This was the only time in my Formula One career I can remember going into a fully conservative mode. I didn’t need to race Didier, so when he challenged I let him through and all I had to do was keep Carlos behind me and finish within 60 seconds of Didier, which I did.

  I was pretty sure Carlos wouldn’t pass me, but as I learnt next season that was the kind of assumption I shouldn’t make, but I did make sure I kept him far enough behind so as not to be any sort of threat.

  Didier did finish first, but with his penalty he dropped back to third and I won both the race and, as the calculator told me, the championship.

  I hadn’t gone into the weekend thinking about anything other than winning the race; if I did that the other stuff could sort itself out and I didn’t have to worry about calculators. When I saw Nelson as a steaming mess beside the road with his fragile qualifying car and I was told about Didier’s penalty, I knew what I had to do. Just keep it on the island.

  As a racer, it is not easy to drop back from 100 per cent and conserve. I wasn’t an endurance racer and I didn’t race compromised touring cars; I was in the most highly tuned racing car in the world. And when I was in it, we were at our best when we were going for it, not playing lap times. It wasn’t easy.

  I’d never been in that situation before. I’d never had to play the numbers to win a World Championship. It was a bit pointless saying, ‘I’m a racer. I’m getting on with it.’ I didn’t need to win by a minute. I just needed to win.

  In the modern era, they just push a few buttons and the car looks after it all. The engine’s computer changes everything to conserve the engine and the gear changes are all made in safety mode. In 1980, that computer was my brain. When you’ve been taking the same lines, braking at the same spot, accelerating at the same spot for many laps in both practice and the race, and then you consciously ease off a little bit, you’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to get into a new groove, a new mark, a new reference point. I didn’t back off all that much. I still kept doing reasonable lap times. I might have short-shifted a little and pulled the brake marker back in my head a metre or two. I just had to make sure everything was OK.

  When I saw the chequered flag I was quite emotional. I would dearly have loved for my father to be there to experience that with me. Mum was living in Melbourne, but it wasn’t the same without Dad. This was the culmination of something I had been working on since I was 13. I started crying in my helmet on the cool-down lap. I remember thinking, ‘Jesus, pull yourself together. You cannot go back with tears.’

  The feeling was and still is indescribable. There is an emotional release that only comes when the chequered flag waves. You know a few laps from home that you’ve got it. But you also know that motorsport is a cruel mistress and she can take it all away very quickly. The chequered flag mostly means that mistress is under control, and with no intervention from Balestre this weekend, no-one was taking this away.

  Back in the pits the team was into it already. Remember, this team was really only three years old and we had conquered the world.

  That weekend I did what now seems a silly thing. I had raced in Simpson overalls all year as I had pretty much done for a while – remember I shared a driveway with Bill Simpson. On the Saturday Yves Morizot, who ran Stand 21, which makes equipment for drivers, had brought over two pairs of green overalls, all badged up for me. Because they were green to match the car, I tried them on and used them in a session and I was quickest on the Saturday. I thought, ‘Geez, these overalls are quick,’ and I decided to race with them.

  It was absolute stupidity, not thinking that poor Bill had supplied me with overalls for a long time, and then, I won the World Championship in someone else’s gear. Here I am on the podium with photographs all over the world wearing Stand 21 overalls. You can imagine how that went over with Bill. No more free Simpson overalls.

  I went back to the hotel, and I remember dancing in the shower and singing the Queen song We Are the Champions but with a little tweak to the lyrics: ‘I am the champion. I am the champion …’ Then we all met down in the ballroom which Mansour had organised. His family owned most of Canadair that made the Challenger private jet, so this was a big weekend for him even without the championship win.

  In that space of time, he had the walls covered in photographs, framed with non-reflective glass. How many people it would have taken and how much money it would have cost to do that in the space of a couple of hours, I don’t know. But it was very impressive. The next morning I woke up with a very sore head and Mansour offered us one of his jets, ‘Take the jet. Go wherever you want.’ Charlie and I looked at it and then tried to work out where to go.

  At that stage, I was seeing Dominique, a Penthouse pet of the year, who came to most races, but she was married to a New York copper, so I had to be a little bit careful. Beverley was back in our London home with Christian, but I wasn’t going there with Miss Penthouse.

  First step was to drop Dominique home, so New York. We had cucumber sandwiches and some champagne on the plane and flew to New York. I think we must have taxied to the wrong spot after we landed. This big New York copper came up and started abusing people in the plane.

  It was a shemozzle on the plane, but Miss Penthouse got off and then Charlie and I looked at each other and said, ‘Where do we go now?’ In hindsight, we should have just gone down to Miami for a couple of days or something. Anyway, we couldn’t make up our minds, so we flew to Elmira, where the next race was going to be at Watkins Glen. It’s a nice part of the world and our motel overlooked one of the big lakes up there and we had a game of golf or two, but what a complete waste of a jet. It was just sitting in Elmira Airport while we stayed at the Ptomaine Palace, as we used to call it because you could get ptomaine poisoning.

  I was determined to finish off the season as I had started it, absolutely competitively: if for no other reason than to prove that champions do still try! During the first days of practice, however, my engine was down on power and the best I could qualify was fifth. Frank and I had a discussion about it and when I told him I thought it was down on power, he just changed it. Come race day it was like night and day. I was quickest in the warm-up and thus pretty confident for the race.

  I like the Glen. It wasn’t the best place to get in and out of, but we solved that by getting a helicopter from the tennis court at the Palace up the circuit – no crowds and no traffic. It’s a true driver’s circuit and, when the
old green light came on, I did a fantastic start, jumping into second place behind Giacomelli at the first corner. That bloody Alfa had so much power, it was his first pole and the first time he had led a grand prix, so this was going to be interesting.

  The Americans have got this bad habit of spreading cement if anyone’s had an oil leak. Someone in one of the support races obviously had a major oil leak down into turn 1, and there was about nine tonnes of cement everywhere. I was the first to slip off the track on it, but a few others followed me off too.

  I thought I’d thrown it away, that I had damaged the skirts and my dreams of finishing the season with a win were gone. But when I got back onto the circuit and tried the car out on a couple of corners I found it was functioning all right. From there it became the most enjoyable race of the year for me. I came back on in 14th or thereabouts and, except for Giacomelli, who broke down, and Nelson, who cracked under pressure from Carlos and spun into the catch fencing, I literally passed one car after another to win the race.

  I passed Carlos around the outside at the end of the main straight into this big, right-hand sweeper. He backed off a bit and I swung around the outside to take second. A lap or two later Bruno stopped and I had the lead and Carlos came home second for another Williams one-two.

  It was a great finish to a great season for the team, and especially for me.

  Mansour was back to help me celebrate and he lined up the jet to fly us to Kennedy Airport the next day for a Concorde trip home. Charlie was enjoying it, ‘Champ, this is a bit of us.’ He could call me Champ now. When we landed at Kennedy we actually taxied up beside the Concorde, jumped out of the private jet and straight onto it. ‘Who are these people?’