AJ

by Alan Jones

  To cut a long story short, he told me that the bloke was actually selling the cars and not paying the finance out. The bloke also had a friend who came into the premises, put his own stock on the floor then they’d sell it and split the profit, completely bypassing me. All of that stuff was going on and I had no idea until I got that phone call. I came back and sold the businesses, which were now pretty much broke. My mate simply did the wrong thing by me. I gave him the best opportunity in the world but he got greedy.

  I had people to give me advice, managers and the like to guide me through a whole bunch of things. Managers like Harry M Miller and James Erskine, who never really produced much but were happy to put their hands out when I brought something to the table.

  I probably needed a bit more from Beverley, like I get from Amanda now. We had a very nice house with the tennis court and all the gear, and she always had a brand new car and she never worked. Our relationship in the end was only tolerable, and despite what she said in divorce court she didn’t play that much of a role in me getting to where I got. It would have been good if I could have bounced things off her. It’s good these days – Amanda pulls me into gear. She does my books and she is very successful in her own right working with IT in aged care and health, which I think is the big difference.

  Around the end of 1984 I knew a deal with Beatrice Haas was around the corner. I wasn’t getting much from Harry M Miller, so I went to him to cancel our deal. He wanted 20 grand to let me walk away, which I paid. Then later on I did the deal to go back into Formula One.

  I still get approaches today for various things, and I am a lot less tolerant and open these days. But if someone walked in and I thought he was a nice guy and he had a good concept, I could possibly be conned again. At least I’ve got Amanda to shut me down.

  Some people think they can get something for nothing out of me, that by offering me a good time I’ll endorse their products. Australian businesses can really be so naive. I’m not interested in going to another function – you’ll need to pay. And then they go on about plane flights and hotels and the like – seriously, they’re the last things I want. I’d much rather stay home with my family.

  One thing I did enjoy post-racing was my time on the board of the Australian Grand Prix after it moved to Melbourne. Ron Walker was the chairman and asked me to join because they wanted an ex-driver that could give them some information on what the drivers and teams want and need. There were some great people on the board: Dean Wills, who headed up Coca-Cola Amatil, James Strong who was then with Qantas and Brocky was there too.

  That was a good time for me. I wasn’t doing the TV at that stage because when it moved to Ten they didn’t want any of the Nine people involved. Then Ten asked me to fill in for one telecast, when Craig Baird was unavailable. We did that out of Melbourne one night and it quickly turned into a regular job that is still going today.

  I’ve worked there with both Greg Rust and Mattie White – both great blokes to work with and both very professional. With RPM I get to do some stuff with Mark Larkham, and he is very passionate about it all. You get in the car from the airport with him to go to the studio and by the time you get there he’s on about 100 decibels because he revs himself up – he’s self-revving. He studies, he draws, he gets totally into it. He’ll spend the whole weekend doing diagrams. Technically he’s very switched on, and he puts a lot of time and effort into staying on top of it all.

  I love cars for the look and the way they drive and that’s about it. If you took the body off and started going through the chassis, I couldn’t care less. He’ll come and explain how the twin turbo Merc works … He is genuinely passionate about motor sport and where he’d like to see it going – and anything else you’d like to talk about. He’s a good bloke, I really like him.

  Mark wanted to do Formula One, and today he lends a helping hand to anyone who he thinks has talent trying to get there. I’ve put money into drivers before, but I never had the time or the aptitude to mentor people like him. And we need that: we are not going to get our next Formula One driver from driving Supercars.

  Barry Sheene

  Barry was right up there with James in living life to the fullest. He is so much fun to be around. In many ways, it was no surprise they used to hang around with each other while Barry was still living in England, they were two peas in a pod.

  He was an unbelievable character, no airs and graces about him at all, which was a bit like James too. He couldn’t care how he dressed; if he was in jeans and a T-shirt he was happy. Barry was a mad smoker. He used to buy these cigarettes that were filtered because they were stronger than the unfiltered ones, and then he’d bite the filter off and smoke it. He had had a hole drilled into his helmet so he could keep smoking for longer until the race started.

  I knew him when I lived in England and he used to come around to my house and ask me questions about Australia. What’s it like here, what’s it like there, what’s it like in November, and just all these little bits and pieces. Even then he was sizing up Australia, maybe he knew with all his injuries a warmer climate was going to be better as he got older.

  I bought a helicopter thanks to Barry. I was at Brands Hatch testing the Williams, and he flew up in his chopper. Knowing Barry as I do now, there was obviously a good commission in there for him, and he went into sales mode. We had a 45-minute or so break in testing, I jumped in the helicopter and he took me over the hills to one of the paddocks in Kent and then he let me fly it up and down in a straight line.

  ‘I can get you one of these cheap, AJ.’ I enjoyed helicopters more than planes, so I bought one. I got an Enstrom 280C Shark, which had a turbo-charged piston engine in it and I bought it off Barry’s mates, who would insure it over the water. I thought it was going to be a great way to get around. Not so sure it was in hindsight, but I did enjoy it.

  When he moved out here he moved to the Gold Coast and we had a great time together. He’d fly back with me on a Monday morning after we’d done something with Channel Nine or after a touring car race when he was commentating. We’d hop in a taxi and out would come the bloody fags and the butt was bitten off and it was lit up. I’d say, ‘Barry, you can’t do it, mate.’ ‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ was what he would say.

  Sure enough, the taxi driver would turn around, ‘Excuse me, sir, you can’t smoke in here.’ ‘Yeah, what’s up? Haven’t I got windows down?’ Oh, then of course the arguments would happen, that and the smell of things was enough for me and I ended getting my own taxi.

  In keeping with his lifestyle, he ended up marrying a Penthouse pet, Stephanie. He would proudly overshare his exploits the morning after. ‘Thanks, Baz, thanks for sharing that with me.’

  Women loved him, he could walk up and be cheeky and they’d pinch his cheeks and say you’re a cheeky boy. Whereas, if I did it I’d get a slap over the face. He just had this way of coming across as a cheeky little boy. He got away with murder.

  22

  A1 Grand Prix

  THE A1 SERIES was a great idea, and to this day I think it could have been hugely successful if the right people had been running the show. I lent my name and was a part of the Australian entry, which is an interesting story in itself.

  The cars were all built by Lola with Zytek engines, and our car was going to be maintained by Allan Docking Racing, which was essentially an Australian motor racing operation in the UK. The races were in the European off-season, it was to run all around the world, and the teams would represent nations, and the driver had to be from that nation, making it a sort of World Cup of Motorsport. It was an interesting concept and it took a little while to get going – about 18 months – but I was very interested.

  I was in England when I first heard about it and it was supposedly owned by Sheikh Maktoum out of Dubai, so I decided to call into Dubai on the way home, ostensibly to look at the new circuit they had just built, but also to track down Sheikh Maktoum and have a chat with him. He was pretty full-on, he wanted a fee of
something like $10 million for a three-year franchise and then he wanted control of everything … including where you put your advertising. I looked at the numbers and I thought there’s no way I’m getting involved.

  I got back to Australia and I got a phone call to say that a consortium of Australian business people had got together and organised A1 Team Australia and they wanted me to run it and have a little partnership in it. I thought this sounded like a load of bullshit, because if there was a consortium of Australian people that were going to do that, I think I would have heard something. Anyway I thought don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and I agreed to do it. Like everyone else, I assumed at that stage that Sheikh Maktoum was the head guy.

  The first race was at Brands Hatch in September 2005 and they spent a million bucks on hospitality at the Pangaea Club, complete with a new bridge to get across the track. I soon realised the Sheikh didn’t have as much to do with it as I thought. He sold out his interest after one year of racing.

  We had a guy called Adam Gotch looking after the engineering side of the operation; he runs a Formula Four team now in the national series. I used to call him Anal Adam because he was really well focused on the small things. He ran a good team, while I concentrated on the drivers and promotions.

  Off the track a guy called Tony Teixeira, a South African diamond entrepreneur, was getting more involved. He used to run a lot of security for the mines and both he and the Sheikh were pumping money into this thing. I thought at the very early stages that it wasn’t going to be sustainable, even a Rockefeller couldn’t pour that sort of money in week in and week out, but it seemed Teixeira could. For a while.

  Most of the nation’s franchises were not bought as was originally planned and Teixeira and his mob were underwriting it all. They got Jan Lammers to look after Holland, Niki Lauda had Austria, Emerson Fittipaldi had Brazil and I had Australia. All these teams were being funded by A1 themselves. I’m not sure how many of the others were in the same boat.

  Sheikh Maktoum had these dreams of taking on and beating Formula One, but that was never going to happen and they should have just focused on making the series as good as possible and the rest would have sorted itself out. Problem was, the sheikh wanted revenge on Bernie Ecclestone, who had awarded the first Gulf region grand prix to Bahrain, not Dubai. The sheikh sold Teixeira on the dream of being bigger than Formula One – they proceeded to sink a rumoured £100 million into it just in the first year.

  But if he was told once he was told a hundred times, forget Formula One. They’ve got 50 years of equity, you’ve got 50 minutes. You’re not going to be anywhere near Formula One. With that we went around the world racing A1 cars and it was a great concept. The average lay person could understand it; nation against nation. I used to call it the Admiral’s Cup on asphalt.

  After four years it was going well, but it wasn’t giving a return on the substantial investment.

  Then they started making some silly decisions. In the fourth season, 2008-09, they switched to a chassis built and designed by Rory Byrne at Ferrari and put a 4.5-litre Ferrari/Maserati engine in it. It was completely unnecessary and a great waste of money. The previous car and engine combination was really good, and they are still used in a series in Italy.

  Ferrari used to send engineers and mechanics to every single race to monitor the engines. If you looked like you were having a problem with the engine they would tell you to change the engine, and that cost an unbelievable amount of money. On top of that Baz had these three or four birds running around the place looking at cars and photographing them every half an hour making sure that all the sponsorship was in the right place.

  These were the same people who gave us grief after Peter Brock and Steve Irwin – the Crocodile Hunter – were killed in accidents in Australia. These were two iconic figures in Australian culture and we decided to honour them on our car. They came up and told me we couldn’t do it. We had an argument about who they were and what they meant to Australia, but they didn’t care. We ran it anyway.

  If I wanted to find a new sponsor for the car I had to go through them and they wouldn’t give you any information to use in the sales process. No Australian company was going to fork over 500 grand or a million bucks not knowing all the information, just because I asked them. That side of it was a disaster.

  I never ceased to be amazed at the amount of people that wanted to stick their noses into the team, some of whom wanted to take control and all they did was take us backwards. Not the least of which was Alan Evans, who was with NRMA, and he said his business expertise was going to transform what we were doing, when all he really wanted to do was wear a set of gold headphones and look important. He was in cahoots with Rod Paech, who was some sort of consultant promoting the Eastern Creek race. But that wasn’t enough for him, and like all consultants he knew everything, so he wanted to have an involvement in the team as well.

  After a while, Graham Walpole was employed in England to oversee all the A1-owned teams, which included us. He in turn suggested a gentleman by the name of Daniel Zammit to come in and look after the Australian team. Daniel wanted to build a workshop in Parramatta Road with glass walls so people could see the car being prepared. He had no idea that after every race the cars went back to a central workshop near Silverstone, where they were all maintained.

  Then there was this South African, Roy Peater, who they forced on our team because A1 borrowed some money off his brother in Perth to make sure the Eastern Creek race was run. Roy was living in Sydney and in he came like he owned the team, conducting interviews and questioning everything we were doing. It didn’t take long before we had a major blowout. I told him to fuck off and get out. I couldn’t stand him.

  Just as it was getting traction, the South Africans stopped paying some of their bills. Then they were having trouble air-freighting the cars around because they couldn’t or wouldn’t pay the bills. I’d organised a race here in Australia where the IndyCars used to race and Emerson organised a race in Brazil. Had they been able to make those two first races they could have continued for the year, but the bloke that owned the transport business wouldn’t release their cars and that was it.

  Losing the Gold Coast race two weeks before it was due to run was a major embarrassment for me, but thank god the majority of people realised that it wasn’t me at fault.

  So that died a graceful death, when it could have been powering on. A1 was a great concept ruined by people who just didn’t know enough about motor racing.

  As a team we didn’t get the results we wanted, but I got to run a lot of young guys in the cars. We started out with Will Power and he nearly won the first race, but he already had a deal to do Champ Car and he moved on to do that and eventually won that championship. We then ran my son Christian, followed by Will Davison, Marcus Marshall and Ryan Briscoe all in the first year. In the next three seasons we also added Karl Reindler, Ian Dyk and John Martin to the racing squad, while Daniel Ricciardo tested for us.

  We tested Daniel at Silverstone and I was really impressed. He’d never been to Silverstone, he’d never driven the car and he was super quick. I wanted to sign him up but Helmet Marco had him tied up and wouldn’t release him.

  At one stage I was accused of giving too many people drives. There was no continuity in that sense, but for me it was a great way of looking at some young talent – and look at where most of those drivers are now. I’m proud of that.

  I copped a bit for running Christian too, but he had won the Asian Formula Three championship and that meant he was a worthy choice. We had some heated father-son discussions at the time. I still believe he is a really good driver, but I don’t think he was dedicated enough at the time. I said to him, ‘Christian, you have to try twice as hard as anybody else because 99.9 per cent of the people are going to say you’re here because of who you are and not what you are.’

  He could have won the Porsche Carrera Cup two years in a row too – he was leading the series when the car let him down.
Porsche thought enough of him to fly him over to Stuttgart for the end-of-season dinner as a ‘we’re sorry’ type thing for the car letting him down.

  I was comfortable putting him in the car, just as I was the others.

  What I really hoped was that we could show Australian companies what we could do if people got behind us, but it was a catch-22, because we needed them to come on board to show what we could do. Even in a one-make series, money buys speed.

  If you head to Europe, which is where you need to be if you want to reach the top, and in my eyes everything else in motorsport is a lesser option and a cop-out, you’ll see a lot of Brazilian kids with Brazilian companies sponsoring them. There’s still people out there who remember that Yellow Pages helped Mark Webber. What the companies don’t realise is that if they sponsor a young bloke, the benefits go on for years. Australian companies just don’t have the foresight of those in other countries. They didn’t when I started and they still don’t.

  That’s why I make no apologies for how I went about my career. I have never paid for a drive in my life, I have earned money from pretty much everything I have raced, even it was just £2000 a season in the early days.

  I may have had to sell my soul at times, but it was mine to sell and ultimately I built a great life out of it. Hopefully some of what I have given back to the sport will help other young Australians live their dream too.

  Daniel Ricciardo

  I really hope Daniel wins the World Championship one day; I really don’t want to be Australia’s last World Champion. I think he can do it too, he is a great driver. He is also so marketable, but what I like is that he seems to be the man that we see. He has a personality and he is not a wanker like some of the others.

  Daniel’s family’s got a bit of money – they’re not filthy rich, but they are not living by the seat of their pants either. His dad Joe’s got a Ferrari, and he’s got a couple of other good cars. He’s a worker from an Italian family with good ethics. They’ve raised Daniel to be polite and happy and it shows.