You take it any way it comes,” said Alan Jones, with typical unsentimental pithiness, after winning a tense Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal in 1980 that made him that year’s Formula One world champion. This came during his third season with the Williams Grand Prix team, after making a promising showing the year before with four race victories. Jones, who has died aged 80 of cancer, had taken full advantage of the aerodynamic excellence of the new Williams FW07 car, featuring revolutionary “ground effect” technology, which was introduced in the latter part of the 1979 season.
In 1980, in the improved FW07B, he won five races, as well as finishing in the top three in five others. This made him the first Williams driver to become world champion, and also gave the team the first of their nine constructors’ championships, which they won again in 1981, Jones’s final season with them. The only other Australian to win the drivers’ championship is Jack Brabham, who won three times between 1959 and 1966.
This was the one world championship triumph for Jones, but many knowledgeable observers and fellow drivers insist that at the start of the 1980s the pugnacious Australian was the finest driver on the track, despite the presence of such gifted competitors as Nelson Piquet, Carlos Reutemann and the newcomer Alain Prost. The expert F1 commentator Mark Hughes described him as being: “Strong like an ox, psychologically more airtight than anyone who’s ever climbed into a race car, and the most aggressive wheel-to-wheel racer who scared the living daylights out of his rivals.” He was good enough to be summoned to Ferrari’s headquarters in Maranello and offered a drive for 1978 by the enigmatic Enzo Ferrari, known as Il Commendatore. Jones recalled to MotorSport magazine’s Simon Taylor how “they ushered me into the presence of this white-faced figure with dark glasses, and my first thought was, ‘He’s dead.
They’ve propped him up and they’ve got a recording of his voice coming from behind a curtain.’” But Enzo was in fact fully conscious, and signed a contract with Jones on the premise that he had got the job unless Ferrari signed Mario Andretti instead, since a north American driver would boost sales of Ferrari’s road cars. In the event they signed the Canadian driver Gilles Villeneuve, prompting Jones to call Frank Williams, who had expressed interest in him, and the rest would become history. As for Frank Williams, “Frank is the best bloke I ever drove for, because he was such a great motivator.
He could make you walk over glass.” The combination of the no-nonsense Jones and the ruggedly hard-headed duo of Williams and his designer, Patrick Head, might have been created in motor racing heaven. Born in Melbourne, Alan had racing in his blood, since his father, Stan Jones, was an Australian motor racing hero in the 1950s, and won the New Zealand Grand Prix, the Australian Drivers’ Championship and the Australian Grand Prix. He also ran a chain of successful car dealerships.
Stan and Alan Jones are one of three father-son pairs who won the Australian Grand Prix, the others being Keke and Nico Rosberg, and Graham and Damon Hill. Stan separated from his wife Alma (nee O’Brien) when Alan was 12, with Stan taking custody of their son. Alan attended the Roman Catholic Xavier college, and recalled how he got a start in racing at the age of 16 by doing hill-climb events in a Mini.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
