by Alan Jones
There was always this myth about no-one could ever do back-to-back championships. No-one had done it since Jack Brabham in 1959-60. No-one really knew why. Frank and Patrick said I drove better in 1981 than I did in ’80, but it was all these stupid little things that were hurting me. I was now in fourth in the Championship and 19 points behind Carlos.
As luck would have it, the car held together in Austria, where we just didn’t have enough speed to challenge for the win. Jones’ Law. I was in a great battle for third place for many laps with Didier, Nelson, Jackie the Foot and eventually Carlos. It was a familiar story, Didier’s turbo Ferrari would pull away on the straights and we’d close in on the corners. Nelson and Jacques were swapping spots in front of me as each tried to pass the Ferrari. As they did that I kept inching closer.
Jacques Laffite was the first to clear Didier and he went on to win the race. The rest of us cleared the Ferrari too, but the extra lap or two allowed a huge gap to appear and that was it. Both the Renaults out in front had issues, Prost’s suspension failed and Arnoux killed his tyres, but they had enough of a gap for Nelson and me not to catch up and I finished fourth. It was nice to finally finish and get some points, my first since Monaco.
Zandvoort was next and even from my early days I had a good record there. I qualified in the second row and jumped Nelson off the start to follow those bloody Renaults again. Arnoux was easy pickings, but Prost was hard. I followed him for lap after lap looking for gaps, trying to make gaps where they weren’t. I was all over him, but it was hard work for both me and the tyres, and eventually the tyres went off.
I tried to settle for second, but Nelson, who hadn’t been in any battles, still had good tyres and by the end of the race he rounded me up and took second. Third for me.
I was starting to get very frustrated with racing. I was driving my heart out and getting no real reward. It was either mechanical dramas, other people’s problems or just having to work things too hard to battle shitboxes with great engines.
Monza was more of the same, only this time it was second place. John Watson had a huge shunt in the McLaren, which a season or two earlier would have killed him. The car was destroyed and left debris everywhere, but being a carbon fibre monocoque he walked away with bruises. That was impressive.
It looked like no-one really wanted to put a mark of authority on the 1981 Championship. Carlos and Nelson had been out in front for most of the season but weren’t putting up enough wins and points to take control. In Italy, Carlos joined me on the podium. It was only his second podium since his win in Belgium eight races ago. Nelson was collecting points, but not in an emphatic way … and that left the door open ever so slightly for Alain Prost, Jacques Laffite and myself, who were within two wins and striking distance of the title.
Despite this, my enthusiasm wasn’t lifting any and it was pissing down with rain in the Canadian Grand Prix and I banged wheels with Carlos into turn 1 – remember, no favours from this boy – and led the early laps. The car was a pig to drive in those conditions and I spun out of the lead and then retired. If I was having little fun before, now I was having none at all.
I was out there risking my life every lap of every race, giving my all and getting nothing back. I thought, ‘Fuck, all these mechanical failures I’ve had, I haven’t got any chance of winning the championship, I’m not going to stick my neck out. Screw it, I’m going home.’ I made the decision to quit from Formula One. It was that easy and that sudden. In hindsight, the urge to walk away had been growing, I just couldn’t see it.
We had been looking at getting residency in Switzerland when I made the decision, and Bernard Cahier, who was a very well-known photojournalist who had been around forever, was helping me out with that and to find a house on Lake Geneva. We went there with him for a look one weekend, and he was good mates with Peter Ustinov, who also lived there, and we ended up all having lunch together. We had this fish they said was only found in Lake Geneva. Well, that’s what they said.
The house Bernard had found for us had its own little acre or so beside it with its own vineyard where the guy would come in and make wine and you could keep a certain number of the bottles and he took the rest. It was all terrific.
I was paying for an advocat – Swiss lawyer – to go back to Bern and get the OK from the mayor of the Canton de Vaud, which was where the house was located. They had the VD designation on their number plates, which always amused me. We were still looking at adopting another child, so when I said, ‘Fuck it. I’m going back to Australia,’ that knocked both Switzerland and the other child on the head.
In hindsight I should have stayed and at least got my residency, which I would never have lost, and that’s always a handy thing to have. But, anyway, it was typical of one of the impetuous and stupid moves that I make all too frequently. This was perhaps the one snap decision of mine that Bev didn’t mind – she was happy to pack our bags and move back to Australia.
The next week I went home to do Bathurst, in a Holden with the upside-down suspension for Warren Cullen. He had some special suspension which he thought was going to help him win the race, but it wasn’t that good. I remember Kevin Bartlett and people like that coming up and saying, ‘What are you driving that piece of shit for? There’s better cars to drive.’ I got $50,000 to do Bathurst. That was more than the bloke that won it. You couldn’t turn around to the likes of him and say, ‘Yeah, is that right? I’m just doing it because I love it, mate.’ I got my airfare paid back to Australia, 50 grand, and then back to Vegas. Thank you.
Honestly, I couldn’t have given a rat’s arse about Bathurst, still couldn’t really. I had my eye on the brown paper bag, and that was what it was all about, which is in essence all touring car racing ever was to me.
Then we had my final grand prix. It was meant to be at Watkins Glen, but the people who ran the race there went belly-up during the year, so we lined up in the car park at Caesars Palace hotel in Las Vegas. This was a funny little track. It ran counter-clockwise, so that was hard on the drivers, but the surface was really smooth and the track with all its little straights and hairpin-like bends had plenty of places to overtake.
I was out of title contention, but Carlos led into the final round. I didn’t need to remind him I was not there to help him; I think the whole world knew that at the time.
Frank took four cars to this race, one each for qualifying and one each for the race. That was to give Carlos his best chance to win the championship, but Frank didn’t want to be seen to be giving favouritism to either of us, so we both had two cars. I’d bent a valve in the engine of my qualifying car, so I took over my race car to qualify, and it felt fantastic. I qualified second, not that far behind Carlos, who had pole.
I thought I’d play with him. ‘Have you seen where pole is? It’s just a disgrace, there’s shit everywhere, I don’t know how you’re going to get off the line.’ It worked. Carlos said to Frank during a debrief or something that this was a big problem for him. I said, ‘Well, you know the man who gets on pole can claim whichever side of the track he wants to start,’ and I just left it at that.
Sure enough, he’s gone up to the organisers, ‘I want to start on that side.’ I got on pole thanks to my mouth.
It was only about 50 metres down to the first corner. You could have done the worst start known to man, and you still probably would have led into the first corner if you started on the inside line, which I now had. In the morning warm-up, I ran down the inside all the time, shit flying everywhere, but I was cleaning it all up. Frank knew exactly what I was up to.
Of course, I out-dragged him into the first corner, as did Villeneuve, Prost and Giacomelli. He was fucked from there on in and he went backwards. I lapped him. They had a jumbo full of Argentinian journalists that flew in to see him win the world championship. Piquet, the man he was battling for the Championship, was rooted, feeling ill. He was spewing and carrying on. All Carlos had to do was finish in front of a sick Piquet and he would have been Wor
ld Champion – because I was going to win, and that ruled everyone else out.
In the end, I did win. Easily. I lapped Carlos and probably laughed when I did so. Prost and Giacomelli finished on the podium with me and that was a very satisfying way to end my Formula One career. I hadn’t just won, I dominated and let the whole world see that I may not have had the Championship, but I was still the best.
Nelson finished fifth, which moved him one point in front of Carlos who missed the points altogether, and won the Championship.
After the race, in all the interviews, I was asked time and time again about Carlos missing the title. My favourite quote was: ‘I don’t see how I could help him. I would not care for holding up people, as I’m a member of the British Commonwealth, Australia specifically, and I would consider that unsporting.’
But he didn’t deserve to win. There was a doco made about that season, and it had a very funny bit in it. ‘And down at the pits, we’ve got blah, and in the meantime, here’s Carlos!’ And there was footage of Carlos laying by the pool. ‘Now we’re down at the Renault pits, and you can see Alain Prost going through his telemetry with his team, and here’s Carlos!’ Down by the pool again. It took the piss out of him like you wouldn’t believe.
I finished my career finally satisfied with a race that year. It would have been a shame for it to end any other way. We had a major party in my room, and Frank was still trying to talk me out of it. I just wanted to go home, I was essentially one flight away from Australia and I had no desire to go anywhere else. ‘Alan,’ Frank said, ‘come back and drive the six-wheeler.’ That was the new car he was getting ready for 1982. I debated with him as best you could after a few Foster’s, and he ended up winning. Fuck!
I went back to England, and it was freezing cold. I stayed in a motel near Donington. I had a Jaguar, which in those days didn’t have central locking, you still had to put a key in it. I had to boil the kettle to pour hot water over the lock so I could unlock the car, that’s how cold it was. We went out to the circuit, got in the transporter and all the metal was cold to touch. When the sun eventually came out and the circuit dried up, we did some laps. It didn’t really feel all that much different. It wasn’t blindingly quick, and certainly wasn’t good enough to impress me.
I said, ‘Right, we finished?’ With an affirmative response, I jumped in my car and went down to Heathrow, boarded a Qantas jet, went up through the clouds, overcast and dull, and into bright sunshine. I had an ice cold Foster’s, and I thought, ‘I’m on my way home.’ Although for me I was always sort of home already on a Qantas flight. I hated the weather in England, and that alone played a big part in my decision to quit.
Whether the six-wheeler had potential or not we’ll never know – they banned it before it even raced, so that put Williams back a little for 1982. I was sure I’d made the right decision and I felt I had done so honourably – as soon as I knew I told Frank. Frank still says I didn’t give him enough notice, but at least I did it near the end of the season and not part way, like Reutemann did to him in 1982.
My decision was quick. I was over the weather and living in England. I’d tried commuting from the US, where I liked the weather, and that didn’t work. I could maybe have done something from down south in Europe, but again I would have been flying a lot and I was missing Christian as it was.
I was over it. Over the weather. Over the travel, over going to countries where they didn’t speak any English and you could not talk to anyone. We had no mobile phones or computers back then, so you couldn’t easily talk to home. The TV was crap and invariably I couldn’t understand it. I didn’t socialise because that wasn’t good for my racing. So aside from the occasional enthusiast of the female kind, I was pretty much alone.
It all bubbled up inside me on one weekend and I decided that was it.
Frank Williams & Patrick Head
If I hadn’t had such a great working and personal relationship with Frank Williams and Patrick Head I’m not sure I would have had the F1 career I had.
Even when I was with Shadow I got on reasonably well with Frank because he’s a very personable bloke, but I didn’t really meet Patrick until I went to the factory to have a look at the car. I had about half an hour with Patrick, and found him very down to earth, very matter of fact, and that was enough to convince me about what I should do.
You could see he was aggressive, competitive and single-minded about what he wanted and where he wanted to be. That feeling was only confirmed the more I got to know him. There was a standing joke at the workshop, Frank would be up in his office and you’d hear Patrick stamping up the stairs. A part wouldn’t have arrived or something else had gone wrong and he’d come storming up the stairs to vent at Frank.
There was this great mutual respect between them. It just all worked out. I joined the team, we’re all similar age, and it gelled. It was a really good place to be.
I had missed out on Ferrari – but I think Ferrari would have been quite different and ultimately wouldn’t have suited me as much. Yes, I would have had the equipment to do the job, but something would have gone missing for me in the memos telling me where to be and what to do. I still would have driven at Ferrari though, because as a driver you hunt for the best car you can find – friendship disappears fast when you are at the back of the grid.
I reckon I could have even driven for people like Colin Chapman and Ken Tyrrell if needed. Colin seemed not to take his drivers into his confidence and he was rude and aggressive, which is not behaviour I like … but he was very clever. Ken was a very dominant figure in his teams, I’m not sure he listened to his drivers enough and simply wanted them to do it his way. They would have been hard work for me, but if it meant winning I would have found a way to cope. I mean, I survived both Graham Hill and John Surtees and we weren’t winning. But I was at Williams – and I was happy about that.
Patrick and I shared a dry sense of humour, and he too did not like to lose. At Long Beach once, I went wide in qualifying and I scraped the wall. He let me know in no uncertain terms, ‘Why the fuck did you do that?’
‘Well, Patrick, I thought I’d just put it in the wall just for a bit of fun.’ We used to have our words, but we all had the same goals. That meant everything that was ever said or done was for a reason.
I got to the stage with Patrick where he understood exactly what I needed by what I was saying. I could do a warm-up lap on the morning of the race and think I needed a bit more grip at the front, or the back; he’d make a change and nine times out of ten it’d be right.
He always used to say to me, ‘Don’t tell me what to do,’ which suited me because I had no idea what I wanted to do anyway, ‘just tell me what it’s doing that you don’t want it to do and what it’s not doing that you do want it to do.’ That I could do, and then I trusted him to get it right and bang, it’d be brand new.
You look back now at the people that have come through in Formula One under Patrick, people like Adrian Newey, Rob Smedley, Neil Oatley and Ross Brawn, who is now the Director of Motorsport for Formula One. He’s had some brilliant engineers that have later gone on to become leading designers in their own right. He’s had some really good guys come through. Patrick is a brilliant engineer. His strength is his ability to be able to simplify things and use parts for more than one job.
Formula One is enormous now, but even in my day it was big business. It was and still is equal parts sport and business, and as such is at the mercy of all – and requiring different talents for each. The variables make it so complex. There is the personality of the driver to mollycoddle; there are sixteen mechanics each with different skills and different problems; there are the factory staff who build and repair the cars, each of them a technician and a specialist. In the 1970s there were few enough for you to know them all, yet too many to spend all your time getting to know their individual psyches. There is sponsor-chasing, there is the logistics of carrying cars and people all around the world; there is negotiation with the tyre pe
ople, and suppliers of engines, gear-boxes, spark plugs, any one of an inventory of thousands – all that has to be kept in your head, alongside the main business of getting out on the track and winning.
And Frank is exceedingly good at it. Anyone who can run a Formula One team successfully can run any other business there is.
Frank was the commercial bloke, the one with the vision. I think the fact that he’s still going to grands prix in a wheelchair after all this time shows a bit about his determination and drive. I couldn’t do it, there’s no way I could go to that many grands prix as an able-bodied person.
I liked Frank even before I worked for him, even if he didn’t really know me. He was jovial and polite, and I put a high value on politeness.
Civility is very important. Being civil doesn’t detract from your inner combativeness or your interior strength. You don’t have to be arrogant or rude to be a good fighter. The popular notion of the driver as arrogant, rude, macho and boorish, derives from the Teutonic, aggressive Lauda and Jochen Rindt – the 1970 world champion, awarded posthumously after he died in practice, his throat cut by his seat belt. They set a style: if you weren’t rude and arrogant then you hadn’t the balls to be a top racing driver. Not true of course – James Hunt wasn’t like that.
I was somewhere in between, and I knew what was required of me on the track and what I had to do to achieve that. But even in my most focused times, I never dropped my values. A waiter is not a pig for spilling the soup. The world is full of my equals. I’d like to think I was the best in my sport and I would do anything to keep myself on top. But the rest of the world remains my equal.
Frank’s politeness doesn’t get in the way of his competitiveness. As we got closer to a race, he got more wound up inside – but I never saw him be impolite. The truth is that, like myself, he’s a very controlled man. And also extremely determined, competitive and intelligent. He’s by far the best man I’ve driven for. But then I’ve had some lesser ones, haven’t I?
