by Alan Jones
Frank is a racer, an absolute racer, no doubt about it. He lives and bloody breathes it. He used to share a house just near Heathrow and they used to get up to all sorts of things. At that stage Frank used to operate out of a phone box, that was his office. He’d leave the number and he’d wait outside the phone box and answer the phone. No one would be any the wiser.
When he was trying to lock down the Saudi deal, and even after that make it work, he’d go down to Saudi Arabia and he would sit in one of the sheikh’s waiting rooms for eight or nine hours. Of course, those bastards knew that you were there. Half the time, I think, they just did it for a bit of sport, but he wouldn’t leave, he’d stay there until he saw them, very determined.
He never drank or smoked, so I did have some doubts about him. He used to run about eight miles a day with his mate Dave Brodie, who raced touring cars. Frank always got this magazine with different running shoes and cross-trainers and he and Dave would look at it the same way I’d look at watches. But I’ve never known two people to have so many colds. They reckoned if you’re really super-super-fit you’re more inclined to pick up colds and things.
He would leave Didcot and call into my place in Kew. He’d get changed into his tracksuit and have a ‘fix’ as I’d call it, going for his little run. Then he’d come back, go into London, have his hair cut, which he did once a week, same barber, always wore a navy blue pullover, and then when he had his hair cut he’d go back to Didcot, which was a little more than an hour away. I think he was just a bit OCD.
His wife, Ginny, died in 2013. She was a lovely woman and together they were pretty powerful. He was as tough as she was nice. When they started getting a few bob, they’d buy a house, and she’d decorate it and do it all up and sell it and make a few bob. The boys used to call her the Duchess of Didcot, because she had a very posh accent. So does Frank, but it wasn’t like Ginny’s.
Bev, Christian and I used to go to their place and play tennis on Sunday and stay for lunch. There are very few people I worked for that I socialised with like that; I really enjoyed going up there. Nine times out of ten Patrick would be up there as well and we’d all end up having a game of tennis. It was really pleasurable, and it just meant that when we went to the races it was almost like a continuation of being at Frank’s place playing tennis.
Driving for Frank and Patrick was absolutely the best team I have ever driven for. It was happy and comfortable. Frank was able to get the very best out of me, not through threats, not through promises of rewards; he just knew how to get me giving my best. I think that’s a bit of a bloody thing in itself, an art.
My time there has also ensured that Australia has a soft spot for Williams, and Frank feels the same about Australia. He always had a lot of Aussies working for him too. My chief mechanic was a guy called Wayne Eckersley, who unfortunately passed away a couple of years ago. Then there was Sam Michael, who has come home and joined Triple Eight Race Engineering in Brisbane. Wayne was good value and fitted into Williams very well, but he was hard work. He was a bloody good mechanic. He would not leave that circuit until he was absolutely satisfied everything was 101 per cent – that always gave me faith in the car.
So not only did I get on well with Frank, but he chose good people to work with us. And he trusted me as a driver. There was one time when I had no speed and I said to Frank I felt the engine was down on power. Rather than doing a Graham Hill or John Surtees and questioning anything other than the engine, he just changed it. Didn’t question it, he just said, ‘Well, if you think it’s down on power we’ll change it.’ Then I was quickest in the warm-up, went off in the first corner and climbed from 14th to win.
He gave me confidence in the team and I wanted to do the best I possibly could to reward him for doing it. He was very clever. And a good bloke, a really good bloke.
I am not surprised in the slightest about the empire and legacy that he has built. He always poured a lot of money back into the team, while others were pocketing the cash. Eddie Jordan might have a big yacht that he travels around the world in courtesy of his little stint in Formula One, but the Jordan team no longer exists. Whereas Frank was always putting it back into the team to improve it, buying machinery, improving the factory.
His daughter Claire now essentially runs the team and she will take up more and more of the backroom duties over time as well. She is very much like Frank and they’ve got enough good people around them to be successful again. People like Rob Smedley are very smart.
Williams has now outgrown Didcot and the team is up in Grove, at an amazing centre. Now they’ve got a museum and a lot of the old cars there, and a convention centre. There is a bar named after me, which shows Frank’s sense of humour.
Alain Prost
Prost I liked. Once again, a tough little bugger and he has this nickname of The Professor. He was good at working the system, you see. He was one of those guys that when he came into Formula One you knew that he was going to be a show. Even when he was in the McLaren, before he went to Renault, I knew he was going to grow as a threat.
He was more of a thinker than many – hence the nickname – certainly more than someone like me or Ayrton. Senna was more entertaining to watch, he used to get the car and strangle it a bit more than Alain. I think Alain would spend a lot more time setting the car up to do what he wanted it to do, whereas Senna would just jump in it and do it.
They were very different people and very different drivers, and that is what made them so interesting to watch.
Ayrton Senna
I raced against Senna in Formula One in my Beatrice days, which meant I really didn’t race him as such. I had breakfast with him a couple of times during 1986 – and he was such a nice guy. He’s the only race driver that’s ever sent me a Christmas card. Now, whether that was just a bit of process for him or whether he was just generally nice and said, ‘Let’s send Alan a Christmas card,’ I don’t know. I also don’t know how many others he sent them to, but it was something I will always remember.
He was always very respectful. I remember I bumped into him at Adelaide one year and he was with his girlfriend and he said, ‘This is Alan Jones, he’s an ex-world champion,’ which meant you need to treat him right. He liked the sport and its history, and he understood what you had done and what it took. He was very quiet and I liked him a hell of a lot.
He got a bad run from the English press because he wasn’t English and he was keeping Poms out of the seat they expected for their people.
But here was another guy that would do anything to win a race, and he was very focused. It was all about winning. He grew horns when he hopped in the car, except it wasn’t the devil’s horns, because he was a devout Christian.
The thing that used to astound me with Senna is that time after time after time he would wait with literally two laps left and just jump in and go whoosh, and whack it on pole, and by a lot. That takes an unbelievable amount of confidence in your ability, because anything can happen. Someone could blow up an engine, oil could be dropped, the session could be red-flagged … He just seemed to get away with it all the time.
My work on TV had me watching him a lot, analysing what he was doing, which was normally something more than everyone else. There was one particular instance I remember in the wet at Donington, and I thought his brakes had failed, but they hadn’t. I don’t know how, but he passed a pile of cars like they were parked. He just went that deep under brakes it was amazing, staggering car control.
Every now and again a genius comes along, someone that’s blessed with an innate natural ability, and he was certainly one of those.
His death when driving for Williams was a great tragedy, a freak outcome from a seemingly light crash. He went through that left-hander and I suspect the tyres hadn’t built up their proper pressures, because they had been under a safety car, driving at a much lower speed. Then there is a bump there and I think he’s hit that and he’s gone into the fence.
It was absolute nonsense to think a
modern Formula One team would start hacksawing a bloody steering rod in the pits, as some alleged. The carry-on from the Italians was embarrassing. A lot of people think it was the steering rod that went through his helmet, but it was a piece of carbon fibre. He lost so much blood that he died, otherwise he wasn’t all that badly knocked about at all. I know that crash affected Sid Watkins too; he was very fond of Ayrton.
Carlos Reutemann
Carlos Reutemann lost me when he dishonoured his agreement with Frank. The reality is, I did not care who my teammate was and I never asked for any agreement. It is unlikely I would ever have agreed to any terms in my contract where I had to give wins to people – but he did and he should have stuck to his agreement. He had every opportunity to take it to his solicitor, he had every opportunity to go and sleep on it, he had every opportunity to say to Frank, no, I don’t like it, but he signed it and as far as I was concerned that was that. I could have passed him in Brazil before he was asked to let me past, but I knew he would be asked to, so I didn’t have a go. I waited for him to do what he should have done.
They showed him the Jones-Reut sign for a few laps but he ignored it. I kept expecting him to do it, I would have honoured an agreement if I had signed it and I expected the same from him. He didn’t and that was it for me. In hindsight, I wish I’d had a go at him and just passed him.
I told Frank from that point on to forget about me helping him, and perhaps the mind games I played with him at the final race that year helped him to cough up the title to Nelson. It must have broken his little heart too, and then Keke Rosberg, who in effect replaced me in the team, went on to win the title in 1982 when Carlos walked away.
It was kind of appropriate he became a politician, where his dishonesty could work for him.
Gilles Villeneuve
We used to call him Jiles Vile-Enough. I used to come up with names for lots of people, or just say them in different ways. Patrick Tambay was Patrick Tampax and because he was French he never knew what was going on. Gilles was Jiles.
He was not a bad little bloke, a complete lunatic though. I once said, he was never going to die in bed, and he didn’t. Even when he used to fly his helicopter from Monaco up to Fiorano he’d get there with about one pint of fuel left in it. He was a risk-taker.
I think that’s why the Italians and Ferrari loved him, because he personified what they’d like to be, brave and fearless, and he never left anything on the table. If you passed Gilles you had to earn it. He’d never leave the door open, and even if you were right beside him you’d be rubbing wheels and he’d still try to slam the door on you. I remember we raced at Montreal and Frank said, ‘Wait until your fuel load gets down a bit before you start really hopping into it.’
Gilles did a better start than me and I followed him for what seemed like a long time right up his gearbox and he just left the door open a little bit too much into the hairpin and I dived down the inside, and he came over on me and we rubbed wheels, which in hindsight was a bit silly because it could’ve ended his race and mine right there. As it turned out, it didn’t.
As soon as I got in front of him, I thought I’d get away because he was holding me up, but I didn’t. The little bugger stuck right up my arse until the end of the race. He was a very tenacious little fighter, and you had to earn everything.
At Zolder in 1982 his new teammate Pironi was giving him a bit of a touch-up and ignored team orders at the previous race – hello Carlos. Gilles was keen to prove a point and was going to out-qualify him no matter what. He came over the brow of the hill to go down through a big left-hander at Zolder. I think he may have double-guessed Jochen Mass and he clipped the back of his car and it flew into the air and started to disintegrate as it tumbled down the road and he was killed.
He let Pironi get to him – he was furious and I think he made a poor decision. He had qualifying tyres on, it was near the end of the session and he should have been smarter. Jochen did nothing wrong, he stuck to his line and Gilles just got it wrong when he should have slowed and cursed him for ruining his lap.
The anchor points of the seat came out, ripped through the bloody floor, and he was thrown across the track and into the catch fencing. Not that seeing any big crash is good, but this was shocking. You can ask whether the anchor points should have come out, but he should never have made that mistake.
If you have a look at the amount of shunts that he had he may have been lucky to make it that far. He had a complete disregard for anyone and everyone on the track. There’s quite a few things he did I thought were ridiculous. Too much bravado and all the shit that the Italians loved – Forza Gilles.
He was fast, but reckless.
18
Retirement … Part 1
I WASN’T ENJOYING my racing anymore. It had nothing to do with what Jean-Marie Balestre was doing to the sport, which a lot of people at the time thought was a factor. It was becoming a job. I wanted to live in Australia. I probably wanted to increase my chances of being at Christian’s 21st. There were a number of factors.
I was really just flat and looking forward to life in Australia. Today I’m not sure why that was such a big pull for me, but it was. Perhaps I’d climbed my Everest and maybe the next climb didn’t seem as much fun.
But you have to look at the other side of the coin. I was living out of a suitcase and getting on too many planes. People reading this today might think, ‘Oh, poor bugger,’ but let me tell you – getting on and off planes all the time is not fun.
And if you wanted to ring home, you’d pick up the phone in your room, and the person that answered the phone couldn’t speak English. Then you had to go down to the reception, give them a piece of paper with the phone number on it, and either race back to your room or wait next to cubicle number three to speak to whoever you wanted to speak to in England, the US or Australia.
Today you could go back to your room, watch any number of TV channels in pretty much any language you desire, or you could ring up somebody from your mobile. It is a different kettle of fish.
When you’re stuck in a foreign country and you don’t speak the language and all you’ve got to do is listen to a foreign language on TV and you can’t make a phone call, it gets a bit boring.
From the start of my time at Williams, if not before, I was really ten-tenths all the time, and as I said if I didn’t qualify in the top three rows I used to bash myself up. So I was hard on myself and that is draining – ask any athlete. When I did come back to Australia, I was only a few months into my retirement when Didier Pironi ran up the back of somebody at Hockenheim in his Ferrari. Lo and behold, Ferrari rang me to see if I could come over and fill in.
Very stupidly, in typical fashion, I’ve deliberately buggerised them around, which I thought would be a bit of fun, because I thought they’d done the same to me in 1977 when they signed Villeneuve and cancelled my contract. I got a mate to answer the calls and spin them out a bit. ‘He’s just down the butcher’s, he’ll be back shortly.’ Because they couldn’t get me quickly they signed Mario Andretti, and he stuck the thing on pole at Monza and then made it onto the podium.
Funny how the world turns: in ’77 they would take me if they couldn’t get Andretti and now it was the other way around. If I hadn’t have been so stupid I could have milked that dry. I could have said the only nation in the world I’d come out of retirement for was Italy, and the only team I’d come out of retirement for was Ferrari. I tell you, I would never have paid for anything in Italy ever again. Free spaghetti sauce forever.
The minute Bev found out about the offer, she flung herself on the ground and went into one of those fits only women can do. I thought, ‘Oh Jesus. Is this worth the shit?’
She didn’t want me to do it. Probably more so because she thought she might have to go back over there and go through all the crap again. Maybe if I had said she could stay in Australia and do whatever she wanted she would have been OK, but she was pretty clear about it.
I just didn’t kno
w whether a temporary drive for Ferrari was really worth the aggravation.
I’d been doing some racing in Australia and I was quite enjoying the low-stress nature of what I was doing. Without the pressure of racing in the biggest show in the world, and with the stakes lowered, I just started driving cars for the fun of it. I’ve always been competitive and I always wanted to win, but the pressure was different because, to be blunt, it didn’t really matter that much to me.
Although I am not sure you would describe racing a Camaro touring car at Amaroo Park as fun – there was probably not a greater mismatch between car and circuit anywhere else in the known world. But that is what I did in March 1982. I decided I needed to get a little serious about touring cars, so I got George Shepheard, who was well known for his work with the Holden Dealer Team and for building rally cars, to do me up a Falcon, and he charged like a wounded bull. I think I paid something like three hundred grand for it, which was big money.
I just hated the car. Bob Morris drove it at Oran Park in a 100-lap race and won, and I decided I preferred the Mazda RX-7 I had run with Barry Jones a couple of weeks before at Amaroo Park, where we had won an endurance race together. I kept running Bob in the Falcon and I ran the Mazda – with number 27 on the door – for a DNF in the Sandown 500 and then paired up with Barry for Bathurst, where we broke a gearbox. I was cross-entered with the Falcon there and practised but did not race.
Earlier in the year an opportunity came up with Alan Hamilton, who I had been friends with since we were kids. Alan was the Porsche importer for Australia. He was having a look at running a Porsche 944 in the Australian Sports Saloon and GT Championship and he rang to see if I was interested. Of course I was, but even more so when he decided to do it with a 750-horsepower Porsche 935 – that was more me – and he ran Colin Bond in the 944, which is how I got to know Colin.
