AJ

by Alan Jones

  19

  Beatrice F1 – American Muscle

  LATE IN 1984 my old mate Charlie Crichton-Stuart called from England. Carl Haas was putting together a deal to do a Formula One team, and Carl was testing the water with him to see if I would be interested. I was – especially as in 1985 Australia was getting a World Championship Grand Prix in Adelaide, and I would love to be on the grid for that.

  Charlie wasn’t getting anywhere on the phone, so he jumped on a plane and came and spent some time with me. He started talking dollars, which had me sitting upright … ‘Look, I’ll level with you, AJ,’ which is probably Charlie being Charlie, ‘I’ve been told I can start at X, and I can go to Y. Why don’t I just go to that now, and I’ll spend four or five days down here and we’ll go fishing.’ In hindsight he probably had a Z as well, but I was happy anyway.

  The Alfa stuff to me was just a training run in preparation for this.

  Beatrice Foods, which was backing the Formula One team, also sponsored the Newman-Haas team in the CART IndyCar World Series. Mario Andretti had broken his collarbone and scored a hairline fracture in his hip from a crash in the final stages of the Michigan 500, and they wanted me to fill in for him at Road America in Elkhart Lake. I said yes to this because it wasn’t an oval track. Apparently Mario was a bit defiant about his injuries and when they took him off to hospital and told him the news he said, ‘This can’t be right, I’m Mario Andretti.’ They said, ‘We’ve got news for you. You are, and you are in hospital.’

  Because I hadn’t raced an IndyCar before and because they ran their own licensing system, I had to do a rookie test. Apparently, in America, if you win a World Championship and have run 100 grands prix or whatever, you may not be good enough to drive an IndyCar. So I did my rookie test at Firebird International Raceway. I had to do half a dozen laps without putting it in the fence, and then I had to do one or two pit stops where I came in, did a pit stop, and took off, and that was it. As you might have guessed, the whole test gave me the shits.

  Anyway I went to Road America, near Elkhart Lake in Wisconsin, which is a fantastic circuit. I’d raced Can-Am there so I was familiar with it. I don’t think I qualified all that well, but the race was good. I had two things going for me: first you had to turn left and right, and in those days the Americans weren’t all that clever at that, and secondly there was a drizzle of rain and they were even worse at that. Al Unser Jr had a big accident down the back straight, and a few others speared off too.

  I ended the race in third, which was great for my one and only IndyCar appearance. The team was called Newman-Haas Racing. The Newman was Paul Newman, and didn’t he love Foster’s. After the race we were down in the motorhome and he was drinking one of those big cans of Foster’s. We sat down and had a few beers, which, as you know, was what I liked doing after a race, and eventually I said I had to go. ‘No, it’s all right,’ he said, ‘I’ve organised the company jet to take you back to JFK.’

  When I flew into America, they gave me a brand new Cadillac to drive from there to Elkhart Lake, and I had the whole thing planned until Paul baffled me with Foster’s. I was on a late British Airways flight from JFK to London: all I had to do was drive that Cadillac two hours to O’Hare in Chicago and then get on a plane to JFK and then home. The company jet he was referring to was one of Beatrice’s jets sitting near their Chicago headquarters. So relax, AJ, take the easy way home.

  If only.

  When I finally jumped on the jet we sat on the runway for two hours; they wouldn’t let us take off for some reason. When we were finally allowed off it I had to jump on a cattle train with wings to fly to LaGuardia, which was as close as I could get to JFK, not that it mattered since I had missed my flight anyway. I got in there at some unearthly time of the night and stayed in a motel where your feet stuck to the carpet. I don’t know what time I got to bed, but I had to get up early because then they booked me on the Concorde to London.

  I got on a helicopter at LaGuardia to go to JFK but the thing stopped on top of the Pan Am building to pick up some others and I thought I was going to miss my second flight in two days. Anyway, I finally got it. That was a bit of an aside to that weekend, and it left me pretty frustrated, but I did get a third place and some prize money.

  Back in England, they started to put together the team. A deal had been done with Ford to use its new turbo engine when it was ready. The chassis was being built by a new entity known as FORCE (Formula One Race Car Engineering), which was created for this purpose, and ran as Lolas even though Lola had nothing to do with it. Key staff were coming on board too. Teddy Mayer, or the Weiner as James Hunt and I used to call him, was a former owner of McLaren and a big deal in the States, and he bought into the operation, which he would run. We got Neil Oatley on board and Ross Brawn as well, and anyone familiar with Formula One today will know those names.

  All the ingredients were being beautifully sourced. It was now just a challenge to see if it could all be put together properly. Our first race was at Monza in September 1985, with Hart engines instead of the promised Ford V6, since that wasn’t ready yet.

  You could probably have argued that the Hart wasn’t either. A couple of back runners were using it too, but it was nowhere. It was a 1.5 litre inline four which was theoretically the same configuration as the BMW, and its only real claim to fame was Senna’s second place at Monaco in 1984. I used to call it the hand-grenade engine, because it would always blow up. It was a boy trying to do a man’s job. It was basically a Formula Two engine that had been stretched – it was over-stressed. Mind you, when it was running it was better than the Ford when it finally arrived.

  At Monza I qualified 24th out of 26 and managed six laps before the Hart engine died with some sort of distributor issue. I wasn’t allowed to run in Belgium because of some stupid rule – the race weekend had started earlier in the year but the track fell to bits and the race was rescheduled. They said only the teams that were entered in that first meeting could run, so we had to twiddle our thumbs and wait for Brands Hatch, where this time I got 13 laps done before the engine suffered from terminal overheating.

  South Africa was an awkward weekend. Renault and Ligier were encouraged by the French government not to race there as a protest at apartheid, and other teams tried to get the race cancelled, but it was going ahead regardless. So we fronted up there to race. All around the world the politics around South Africa was getting interesting.

  Beatrice was a huge company that not many people knew much about. I think they were trying to raise awareness that it did more than just ice cream, which is how it began operations a century earlier. In my time there it had brands like Danone yoghurt, Krispy Kreme doughnuts, Tropicana orange juice and even businesses like Avis hire cars, and it was privately held. They also had manufacturing and operations in South Africa – which you could do when you weren’t on the stock market – so when we went there it was a big deal for them.

  During the Friday I was summoned to see Bernie Ecclestone in his penthouse. Not sure what I had done this time, I fronted up. As I went in the door Bernie said, ‘How do you feel?’ Standard greeting, although he had a look in his eye, I gave him a standard reply, ‘Pretty good, thanks.’

  ‘What do you think your chances are of winning the race tomorrow?’ he asked.

  Again, I felt no need to be subtle: ‘Bernie, I think you know the answer to that question. If I start now, probably pretty good.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got a bit of an idea. If you pull up sick and can’t run again this weekend, we’ll give you first-place prize money. Go home and visit Australia.’

  The background was that US civil rights activist Jesse Jackson had said that if a Beatrice car raced in South Africa he was going to get all of the black workers – thousands of them – at Beatrice around the US to go on strike. Beatrice couldn’t be seen to be backing down to an individual like him, but if they didn’t back down there was a chance of the strike.

  So Bernie came up with an idea. �
�If the driver falls crook and can’t drive, then the Beatrice car doesn’t race. It’s a force majeure. Jesse Jackson can’t get on his soapbox and say, “I forced that company to withdraw,” and he also couldn’t call a strike because the car didn’t race.’

  The idea was that I would wait until Saturday morning when everyone went to the circuit. I would quietly check out, and jump on a plane to Harare to get home (because Qantas wouldn’t fly to South Africa).

  This could not afford to leak at all. I’m pretty sure only Teddy and Carl knew from inside the team. I could not tell the mechanics or anybody.

  And so, on the Saturday morning I was gone. I just didn’t turn up. They had the car out ready to go, when they were told, ‘AJ’s been struck down by a virus and we are not racing.’

  I made a miraculous recovery for the Australian Grand Prix, which was just as well. Bernie allowed me to drive the first lap of the track in a Formula One car before the 10am practice on Friday, which was a pretty special thing to do on what was also my birthday. This pissed off Ken Tyrrell who thought we were being given an unfair advantage. I wish sometimes he paid a little more attention, one lap wasn’t going to help us at all … nothing was that weekend. That said, I did the lap, to the cheers of the fans – this was a big moment for Australian motor racing.

  We had a troubled run all weekend with engine and turbo problems, but I managed to qualify in 19th. I stalled at the start and was last after the first lap, but I turned the boost up to at least put on a show. No matter what boost I was using it was going to break, so why not have some fun. I was up to sixth on lap 20 when the electrics shut down.

  The Australian race, however, was a huge success and set a whole pile of new standards for the running of a grand prix. Firstly it was a great track for a street circuit and that made it good for the drivers, it just seemed to flow even though there was a series of 90 degree turns. On top of that, it was the final race of the season it always had a great atmosphere among the teams, some of whom had already shut down. I’d like to think I played a small part in getting enough inspiration in Australia to get the race up, but I had nothing to do with how well they did it. I was a pretty proud Australian that weekend. Bernie Ecclestone announced at a press conference that the standard of organisation was bad news for Formula One. Registering the dismay on everyone’s faces, he added the kicker: now everyone else would have to match such a high standard. Typical Bernie.

  Carl warned me not to expect to spend Christmas in Australia, since he was hoping to start testing the Ford engine. I spent my Christmas in Australia with no sign of the first engines, and that let me know what 1986 was going to be like.

  Patrick Tambay was my new teammate for the season and I am sure he was wondering where his career was headed. In 1984 he was with Ferrari and in 1985 he was a factory driver for Renault, now he was here living the great American dream with Haas.

  To start the season we both had retirements in Brazil, and in Spain for the second round Patrick managed to get a car home for the team’s first finish. Eighth place and six laps down. I had a first-lap crash with Jonathan Palmer, so who knows what was possible that day; maybe I could have been five laps down.

  Then I got the Ford engine. The much talked-about and well-hyped engine that was essentially a V6 Cosworth engine with Ford electronics. I knew there would be a settling-in phase, especially given we didn’t have enough engines to fit Patrick out yet. So I got to run it and I was more than two seconds a lap slower than Patrick. On the bright side it may have been more reliable, since I got 28 laps before overheating while Patrick got just five with the Hart.

  At Monaco, which was next, I was sixth fastest in Thursday practice – Friday’s a lay day for Formula One there – and they’re all going around saying, ‘Oh, yeah, now it’s showing its true colours.’ I kept silent, but I thought they were kidding themselves. Sure enough I dropped back to 18th in qualifying and then crashed out on the second lap, but at least we qualified.

  I was classified as a finisher in Belgium, but I didn’t see the chequered flag after running out of fuel on the last lap. In Canada, Patrick was injured in a warm-up crash when the suspension failed. We were continuing our trend of nailing it with one car while the other struggled. I qualified in 13th and drove into 10th only three laps down.

  Patrick had to miss the next two races and I got Eddie Cheever as a teammate for one of them, but we failed to finish in both of them, and the next as well. Adrian Newey had now joined the team as well, but there was no great turnaround. The cars were slow and unreliable, so even when we did finish we were laps down.

  Into the Hungarian Grand Prix we started to see something positive. Both of us qualified inside the top 10 and Patrick finished seventh, two laps down, high up the order because of the attrition rate. I wish I could tell you more about these races, but I have really tried to forget them.

  It was the same again with my memory of Austria, where we got our first points with me fourth and Patrick fifth, again two laps down on the leader, in what commentator Murray Walker called a race of attrition. We didn’t get points through speed, but strangely through reliability.

  I got another point at Monza in Italy, but I was really worried about where we were headed. I think it was in Hungary that a rule change was announced for 1989 that turbo-charged engines would be banned, and that meant only two more seasons with the Ford TEC engine from Cosworth. They shut up shop on development. Qualifying 18th and scrounging around for a point is not my idea of fun.

  This season was now well and truly in brown-paper-bag territory, I’m afraid. We were going nowhere. I love the way from the outside people wanted to give me advice, and I’d listen and nod and then walk away with the money and buy a farm, or a plane, because nothing I could do would change anything. I bought Carl’s Mitsubishi MU2 plane, which we used to call The Widowmaker. It was a turbo prop, but it didn’t have any aileron, just spoilers, and very narrow little wings. It was bloody quick.

  The guy that was flying it for me was named Jeremy, who later became Frank Williams’ permanent pilot (Frank at this stage had become a quadriplegic after his car crash in France early in 1986). Having the plane and Jeremy made life a little bit easier, we had a bit of a standing joke that we’d like to be back at my favourite Chinese restaurant in Chiswick before it closed on a Sunday. Jeremy used to get sandwiches and beer in the plane, we’d park it at the closest airport to the circuit, which we could do because this thing had a very short take-off and landing capability. I didn’t hang around long after a race.

  In Portugal I was fed up with the team, the car, everything. It was huffing and puffing and banging and farting – and going about 20ks slower down the straight than anybody else.

  I said to Jeremy, ‘Get it ready, mate. Get the sandwiches, get the grog, because we’re going to be leaving early.’ He said, ‘How do you know?’ I said, ‘Because I’m going to throw it in the sandpit,’ which I did. I made sure it was in the sandpit right behind the pits, so all I had to do was jump over the fence and go to the motorhome and get changed, and we’re in the plane and on our way home and an hour or so later I made the Chinese restaurant again. I’m not particularly proud of that, and it’s the only time I ever did anything like that, but that’s the way it was.

  Even in testing I gave it my all, so this was the writing on the wall for me. If I was that uninspired we were in trouble.

  The reasons I came back to Formula One were quite clear to me. First it was the attraction of Adelaide and the Australian Grand Prix. Also, this team looked to have it all. I was told the Ford motor company had this great new engine and we had the works deal for it. We had Goodyear tyres and we had plenty of money.

  So I come back to my cooking analogy. We had all the right ingredients, but when the chef put it into the oven it was either undercooked or overcooked and it tasted awful. The engine was at the root of all the problems. The Hart was so unreliable it was a waste of space. The Ford wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding.<
br />
  The Americans from Ford just couldn’t get their head around the electronics. They’d play around with it and you could either drive it out of the pits beautifully and it wouldn’t go on the track, or it would blup-blup-blup out of the pits and it would be OK on the tracks. It was just hopeless.

  I had two races to get through and then it would be all over for me in Adelaide. This team was just a joke. I got paid extremely well and that compensated for any disappointment I might have had, but worse for me was the loss of my motivation.

  In my whole time in Formula One the only place I had really been happy was Williams. Shadow was OK, they were nice people to work with, but it was a struggle on the money side of it. I had enjoyed working with Carl in the Can-Am Series and I had hoped this was going to be the same, but it just wasn’t.

  I got only 16 laps done in Australia and Patrick got 70. Beatrice pulled out of the team and shortly after the end of the season Carl shut up shop and sold the assets of the team. That was the last race for Team Haas (USA) in Formula One, and for Patrick and me too.

  At the age of 40, I had run in 117 grands prix and had 12 wins (or 13 if you count that one in Spain). There were pole positions, fastest laps, a World Championship and mates both alive and dead. Yes, there could have been more wins and more titles, but mostly I raced without regrets in my career; my decisions on the whole were right for me at the time.

  The way it ended this time there was going to be no itch to scratch, just a wound to heal. Formula One, for me, was over.

  Carl Haas

  Carl is the second-best bloke I ever drove for. Like Frank Williams, he realised that you were the driver and he took notice of what you wanted, within reason. He was very easy to get along with, and gave you the best equipment – or at least tried to – and the best mechanics. As a driver, that’s all you can ask for.

  He’s a funny bugger too. He used to come up and bless the car when it was on the grid. He had the cigar sticking out of his mouth, not lit, and he’d touch all the suspension bits, blessing them. I’ll tell you, you can take the piss out of it, but they rarely broke in the Can-Am days. I remember going to the Long Beach Grand Prix and I actually went out of my way to get him to come up and touch the car for me. Who knows, maybe there was something in America that he has, some divine right he had only there. It didn’t seem to work on the Beatrice, but that was rarely in the US.