JOE SAWARD

(This interview originally appeared in my 1990 book Grand Prix People)

The International Editor of Autosport once described a driver as tzigane (gypsy-like) and referred to certain of the Monza tifosi of the feminine gender as callipygous (beautifully-bottomed). Besides a predilection for peppering his prose with such 'sawords,' Joe Saward has another unique distinction among the journalists: he doesn't drive a car and has no desire to get a license to do so.

Saward believes that may be an advantage because he doesn't think like a frustrated racing driver, hence the path to making better critical judgements is less encumbered. If his background contributes to any particular way of thinking it may be that of a spy, since Saward's specialty while earning a degree in history from London University was the covert actions of the CIA in South Vietnam in the '50s, particularly psychological warfare and black propaganda. Thus, Saward may be better equipped than most to infiltrate the shadowy world of intrigue that prevails in the darker corners of pit lane and behind the smoked glass windows of the motorhomes in the paddock.

While still in school Saward discovered Formula 1 racing.

"What first got me interested was in 1977 when I would turn on the BBC and there were these two crazy guys called Pironi and Patrese who kept crashing all the time and I thought this was great. Then in 1978, at Monza, I watched the Ronnie Peterson accident and I suddenly thought, Jesus, this is serious!  Before it was a game and then suddenly there is a guy dead and I thought, why do they do it? And then I started buying the magazines, getting drawn into it, wanting to know the answer to the question, why do they do it?  And that continued while I was at university and I got to be the archetypal magazine reader."

By the time of his graduation Saward had his sights set on a career as journalist for his favourite magazine, Autosport, but his scholastic achievment was no immediate passport to that already crowded vocation. But close scrutiny of Autosport revealed that no one was reporting regularly on the European Formula 3 Championship and Saward decided he would leap into that void. He sat in the grandstand at Silverstone for one event, submitted a report to the magazine and was given the job "at an incredibly ridiculous figure that you couldn't live on."

The enterprising young man then went to Motoring News and told them, since Autosport now had a Formula 3 correspondent, Motoring News couldn't afford to be without one, and Saward was just the man to do it. That publication agreed, but his twin incomes still left him ill-equipped to finance a season in Europe, so Saward applied for, and was given, a university grant to cycle across America and write about it. That adventure had to wait, as Saward embarked for Europe with a borrowed camera and a tent in the summer of 1983 on an escapade that was: "Madness, complete madness!"

He mainly travelled by rail, then hitchhiked to the circuits, and wrote his first magazine report "sitting in the middle of a station somewhere in Denmark at four o'clock in the morning. I just basically bummed all over Europe in '83 and again in '84 when I also covered the European Touring Car Championship. Didn't make any money at all. The bank managers were going bananas. They never knew where I was and I never went to the same bank twice. By late summer I was completely bankrupt. I came home in a tire truck at the end of the season. It was just ridiculous. I thought I was going to be arrested!"

Saward managed to escape the long arm of the law, and instead was given a temporary job in the production department at Autosport which staved off starvation until he was assigned to cover the British Touring Car Championship. His continuing excursions abroad to follow the European saloons were made much easier when Saward talked Tom Walkinshaw, leader of the Jaguar team, into giving him a seat on his private plane. In 1988 Saward finally went Grand Prix racing for Autosport, reporting on the qualifying sessions (and writing an occasional Globetrotter column), working with that magazine's Grand Prix Correspondent (and Fifth Columnist), Nigel Roebuck.

"All that secret service stuff is actually quite funny because, even with the nicest one in the world, when you are dealing with team managers, they like to keep secrets. Because to have a secret is to be powerful and they use all kinds of methods to keep their secrets. So, if you ask a question, you have to ask the right question. I'm talking about wording, because if you ask a question that is slightly loose, they will slip out of the trap. The phrasing of the question is super-important because if you don't ask the right question, you don't get the right answer.

"When you first start out, you don't even notice the games they play, but the more you play the game the more you notice.  And to be honest, some of the Formula 1 team managers are quite good about black propaganda.  You get told a lot of things and some of them are not true and you have to work out what is true and what is not. And if you believed everything that you were told by the PR men, you would write absolute rubbish!

"So you have your own spies and you build up networks within the teams. And it is like, in a way, being a sort of mini-spy master.  Because I have got people in all the teams, whose names are never mentioned, who slip me bits of information. People love to spill the beans. They like telling secrets and all I do is I just sort of massage the secrets out of them."

Besides his intelligence gathering, Saward loves language and words and he enjoys communicating to an audience that is clearly defined in his mind. "I am writing, first of all, for the guy who I used to be, so that he knows what has happened and how exciting it is to be there. You have to tell them what it is like to be in Rio de Janiero because otherwise it can be anywhere, a report is a report is a report.  What you have to do is feed the market and the market is dreamers."

Joe Saward is still trying to find answers to the original question that attracted him to the sport. "I'm sure that the thrill and the competition are factors. But I think it is deeper than that, psychologically speaking. I think that the drivers all feel the need to prove something, whatever that might be. Why are Grand Prix drivers, generally speaking, womanizers?  Because they are trying to prove something to somebody. Maybe themselves, maybe the world, I don't know.  But they are all different, so you can get the motivation of one and you think you have got it sorted out, and then you see another one and you think, no that doesn't work."

"The sport attracts unusual people. Most of them, obviously the drivers, but also the engineers, the journalists, all of them have taken massive risks to get where they are. That is something that only a limited number of people will do.  Most people say, I will settle for a nice, comfortable life. I'll earn my 70,000 pounds, have a car, a house, a dog, a wife - not necessarily in that order - but they have security. But people who come and do this generally have no security because it is a rotten kind of life if you want to have any sort of normal, stable existence.  So they all are a bit nutty in their own way. It does attract a weird kind of person. They're a bit like the retired spies I've met: they have unusual minds, they think laterally, they think side-ways, they have fun, they live for the moment and it is a different kind of attitude to life.

"This is an interesting, fascinating world, that is why I'm here. Every little kid wants to join the circus, that is what I did. It is just a sort of grown up kid's dream. And it affects your life. Sometimes when I would go to a party in London, I would hate myself for writing everybody off as being boring. But at that party you might meet one extraordinary person and if you are going to a party of extraordinary people all the time it is quite hard sometimes to make the adjustment to the real world."

Joe, with one of his famous friends

© Sutton Motorsport Images