STEWART WAS ALWAYS AFRAID OF THE ORIGINAL NURBURGRING, YET HE WON THE NOTORIOUSLY DANGEROUS RACE FOUR TIMES (Rainer Schlegelmilch photo)
One of the most successful and influential drivers in F1 history tells it like it was then, and how it is now... Jackie Stewart's racing record - three times a World Champion and the winner of 27 of his 99 Grand Prix races - ranks him among the best F1 drivers of all time.
 |
| (Formula1.com photo) |
Jackie Stewart was born in Dumbartonshire, Scotland, on 11 June 1939. Inspired by his hero, the great Scottish driver Jim Clark, Stewart began racing in the early 1960's and was immediately a winner. After a brief apprenticeship in saloon cars and F3 racing he embarked on a F1 career that flourished for nine seasons spread over two decades. Beginning in 1965 he drove for the BRM team for three years, then switched to a Matra-Ford fielded by the British entrant Ken Tyrrell, a partnership that paid of with Stewart's first driving title, in 1969. After one season using March chassis the Tyrrell team began building its own cars, and the winning combination of Jackie Stewart in a Tyrrell-Ford forced even such famous names as Ferrari, Lotus, and McLaren into the background. Stewart won the World Drivers' Championship in 1971 and again in 1973, before retiring at the end of the latter season.
"It was an extraordinarly profound period for Formula One," Stewart says of the 1970's. "Technically, it was a time of accelerating innovation, in that the cars were transformed from fairly primitive machines into much more sophisticated devices that paved the way for what we have today. At the beginning of the seventies we were still slipping and sliding around on treaded tires in chassis that were shaped like streamlined cigars with little wings front and back. Then we began using wide, slick tires and considerably more complex aerodynamics came into play. By the mid to late seventies the cars grew horns - sprouted wings and had ground effects technology based on aircraft principles -- and in combination with the wider slicks it was as if the cars were stuck to the road with crazy glue.
"The other thing we had in my time was a fantastic parity of power, thanks to the Ford Motor Company. By the beginning of the seventies nearly everybody was using the Ford Cosworth DFV engine, because it was fairly cheap to buy and it was wonderfully reliable. Of course, Ferrari built their own engines as they continue to do now, but the rest of us had fairly equal horsepower. So we were all on equal footing in that department and it was up to the driver to find the extra time."
Stewart took the time to find new ways to gain the advantage, not just with his driving skill. While most drivers simply jumped in the car and drove it hard, Stewart's professional approach included examining every aspect of what was required to find more speed. Today's drivers who spend many hours working with their teams to find performance improvements are following the example pioneered by Stewart.
"I did a lot of things that gave me an extra edge, something that I felt I needed at the time because I didn't feel I was better than the other drivers. I tried to endear myself to the car designers, engineers, mechanics and gearbox people, tyre people and so on. I felt that if I was going to be a professional racing driver, then I would have to deliver. And if I delivered better than anyone else, then I'd be more valuable than anyone else and would thus have a better chance of earning more money.
Stewart is one of the very few F1 people from the 70's still associated with the sport. A main factor for his longevity was his decision to continue to keep himself in the public eye as a TV commentator after he retired.
"The seventies were wonderful times to be describing the action to the fans. We had some terrific racing, some great characters among the drivers and some memorable champions. Emerson Fittipaldi (World Champion in 1972 and 1974), for instance, became a big hero in his home country of Brazil and started a trend that brought us great Brazilian champions like Nelson Piquet and Ayrton Senna. Niki Lauda was another great champion (three times), and surely one of the bravest drivers. Remember how he was nearly killed (at the Nurburgring in 1976) and came back to become a champion again. That was one of the great comebacks of all time, and Niki brought a lot of attention to the sport."
In his role as a F1 commentator Stewart could be critical of drivers he thought didn't project the right image for the sport, among them James Hunt, the 1976 World Champion.
"James was one of the great characters and there is no doubt he got a lot of publicity with his colourful lifestyle, though I had my reservations about some of his behaviour. He might have been a modern young person who was anti-establishment but his habit of dressing too casually, wearing inappropriate clothes even when meeting royalty, I though was bad form.
"Whereas past champions, the Jim Clarks, Graham Hills, the Jackie Stewarts, if you like, were always fairly well presented, James seemed to go over the top the other way. I certainly didn't approve of that because I was then, as now, deeply involved with multinational corporations associated with the sport, and I was worried James was projecting the wrong image for Formula One. Of course, times have changed, and drivers like Jacques Villeneuve and nowadays Lewis Hamilton can be more uncoventional in the way they dress and conduct themselves, and many fans are attracted by it. James Hunt started all that.
"Mario Andretti, on the other hand, was a wonderful ambassador for the sport. Mario was Mr. Motor Racing in the US, and when he won the 1978 World Championship it helped increase American interest in Formula One, which was a major benefit to the sponsors who wanted access to the huge American market. We could use another American champion in the modern era."
During the time he flourished as a driver Stewart faced such illustrious opposition as Jim Clark, Graham Hill, John Surtees, Jack Brabham, Jacky Ickx, Denny Hulme, Jochen Rindt, Ronnie Peterson and Emerson Fittipaldi. Like Stewart, several of these famous names also became champions, but some of them died behind the wheel, as did too many others.
A total of eight of his peers were killed in Grands Prix contested by Stewart and in 1970, after his close personal friends Piers Courage and Jochen Rindt were killed at the Zandvoort and Monza circuits, respectively, Stewart was a pallbearer at their sad funerals.
IT WAS DURING THESE TRAGIC TIMES THAT F1 BECAME KNOWN AS 'THE CRUEL SPORT...
To the many people who wondered then how Stewart could continue participating in an activity that could so very easily take his life he responded with an eloquent defense of his profession, and explained why he kept on racing.
"First you see the destruction of the car and the man's body. Then you see the hopeless tearing of the heart in his family and friends and the way they are invaded by despondency about their future. You see how the fans and, especially, your own family view what is happening and how bad it is for them - and yet you go out and do it again. Confronted by their case you accept the fact that motor racing is totally futile and stupid and still you carry on. As a driver you are able to do it because what is out there on the track is so exhilerating for the selfish man behind the wheel. It is as if someone anaesthetizes you against the terrible possibilities and leaves you hooked on the marvellous, irreplaceable excitement."
But Stewart's addiction to racing did not immunize him against the harsh reality of its perils. The starting point for his safety crusade came in the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix at the notoriously dangerous Spa circuit. A sudden shower of rain sent half the field spinning off the track on the first lap, among them Stewart, who found himself trapped in his car upside down in a ditch, with fuel leaking all around him.
"With no marshalls, no safety crew to help me," Stewart recalls. "So Graham Hill and Bob Bondurant, who had also crashed, had to get me out of the wreckage. There was no ambulance out on the track and at the so-called medical centre, which was just a shack, I was put on the concrete floor littered with cigarette butts and dirt. They stuffed me into an old ambulance and provided a police escort to go to the hospital in Liege, which was quite a few miles away. On the way the ambulance driver lost the police escort and didn't know how to get to the hospital.
"As it turned out I only had a broken collar bone, but when you see all these things happening you say this is just ridiculous. Here was a sport that had serious injury and death so closely associated with it - in those days there was a two out of three chance of a driver getting killed in his career - yet there was no infrastructure to support it, and very few safety measures to prevent it. So, I felt I had to do something.
"THEY SAID I HAD NO GUTS. I WAS CALLED A COWARD. BUT JESUS CHRIST! - NOT MANY OF MY CRITICS HAD EVER CRASHED AT 150 MILES AN HOUR!"
"My attitude was that as a driver I was being paid for my skill. I was not being paid to risk my life. But it was a very tough job to get any support for what I wanted to do. There was criticism from the media, even from some drivers, and people said that if Jackie Stewart couldn't stand the heat he should get out of the kitchen. I was accused of trying to wrap the drivers in cotton wool. It was said I removed the romance from the sport, that the safety measures took away the swashbuckling spectacular that had been. They said I had no guts. I was called a coward. But, JESUS CHRIST! not many of these critics had ever crashed at 150 miles an hour.
"Fortunately, I was still achieving a lot of success, winning races in hideously dangerous conditions, and that gave me greater influence. For instance, I won four times at the original Nurburgring in Germany - over 14 miles to the lap, more than 170 corners - the most dangerous circuit in the world, where far too many people had been killed. Nothing gave me more satisfaction than to win at the Nurburgring, and yet I was always afraid. When I left home to race in the German Grand Prix I always used to pause at the end of the driveway and take a long look back at my house. I was never sure I would come home again.
"I won a Nurburgring race (in 1968) by over four minutes in thick fog and rain where you could hardly see the road. There were probably close to 400,000 spectators, though they mustn't have seen much of it. That race should never have been held, and having won it by such a big margin gave me more credibility when I demanded changes in the interest of safety. But if I had wanted to win a popularity contest I wouldn't have done what I did."
It was after his Tyrrell team mate and good friend Francois Cevert died in a horrible accident (his body was cut in half by a steel guard rail) during qualifying for the 1973 United States Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, that Jackie Stewart, aged 34, hung up his helmet and never raced again.
"Watkins Glen would have been my hundredth Grand Prix, but Ken Tyrrell and I decided not to race out of respect for poor Francois. I had already decided to retire at the end of that season, though I had only told Ken and Walter Hayes of the Ford Motor Company about my plans. I didn't tell my wife Helen because I felt if she knew I was retiring she would worry more than ever that my number would come up. I didn't want Helen to go through that pain and agony, that fear and apprehension, because she had already gone through so much. Too many of her friends had lost their husbands and she had seen at close proximity all the terrible devastation caused by a driver's death. And our sons Paul and Mark were getting to the age where it affected them too."
"GIVEN THE DANGERS OF HIS PROFESSION A F1 DRIVER IS WORTH EVERY PENNY OF WHATEVER HE CAN GET, AS FAST AS HE CAN GET IT"
"MOTOR RACING HAS PROJECTED MY LIFE INTO A KALEIDOSCOPE OF COLOUR, MOVEMENT AND SENSATION"
"If I had the chance to live my life again," he once said, "I would not change a thing. The personal pleasure which I have been allowed to enjoy has been so intense that it has often frightened me. Motor racing has projected my life into a kaleidoscope of colour, movement and sensation, which I honestly feel has magnified my appreciation of living beyond what would have been possible had I done anything else. To have lived so vibrantly and experienced so much in my career was a great privilege. My wish is that all Formula 1 drivers could have the capacity and time, as I had, to appreciate the full flavour of the world's most exciting sport."
One of the things he thinks is missing in his profession now is the cameraderie among the drivers.
CLARK, HILL, BONNIER, RINDT, CEVERT, COURAGE - SADLY, THEY WERE ALL KILLED BUT AT THE TIME WE WERE ALL CLOSE FRIENDS"
"Formula One today is incredibly complex, and very expensive, but not to the detriment of the sport. Actually, it has been a plus as it has brought the sport to a perceived level of quality, whether its hospitality, whether its presentation, it's become unique. A Grand Prix paddock is now a very impressive arena. It doesn't matter who you are or what your interest, when you go into the paddock you can't fail to be impressed by the quality or the technology, the transporters, the tractor units, the motorhomes, the garages, the Paddock Club.
"The truth is that despite all its faults Formula One has never been better. Some people like to look back over their shoulders through rose-coloured glasses and say it was better in the old days. Memory lane is by nature a comfortable road to walk because you only remember the good bits. There are a lot less bad bits now than then, and many of the good bits now are immensely better than they ever were."
and abilities into 'Race Against Dementia' - a charity he founded to fund a breakthrough in research for the prevention and treatment of dementia. https://www.raceagainstdementia.com/
| Jackie and Helen Stewart (Rainer Schlegelmilch photo) |
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete