Grand Prix legend Jackie Stewart is ready to take a back seat in the pursuit of further honours
MOTOR RACING:Adam Sweeting
IN 1963, Ken Tyrrell received a life- changing phone call. “I was running what was then a Formula Junior team, before the name was changed to Formula Three, so I was always looking for likely drivers. The track manager at Goodwood called me up one day and said: ‘There’s a young Scotsman going round here in an old sports car who’s pretty bloody good.’ His name was Stewart, and he came down and had a test drive. It was the first time he’d ever driven a single-seater, and he was quite exceptional.”
The partnership between Jackie Stewart and Ken Tyrrell blossomed into one of the great double acts of Grand Prix racing. When Stewart retired in 1973 he had won three world championships, one in a Matra run by Tyrrell, and two in Tyrrell’s own cars, while Tyrrell took the constructors’ championship in 1971.
When the 1997 Formula One (F1)season roars into life in Melbourne next month, Tyrrell and Stewart will both be there, but for the first time they’ll be battling head-to-head as bosses of their respective teams.
Stewart, now 57, has decided the time is right to take the plunge into the rarefied world of state-of-the-art aerodynamics and computer design, a place where you need the backing of a super-rich multi-national coalition merely to get to the starting grid.
Although Stewart has eight years’ experience of helping his son to guide Paul Stewart Racing to a dominant position in the British Formula Vauxhall and Formula Three championships, designing, building and racing a new Formula One car is like taking a leap into hyperspace.
“I’ve had a lot of people saying ‘why take the risk of destroying your reputation?'” Stewart reflects, radiating energy and briskness despite the fact that it’s dark, foggy and 7.15 in the morning. His chauffeur-driven journey from Sunningdale – where his house straddles the fairway of Wentworth golf course – to his team’s factory in Milton Keynes is a rare period of calm in his insane schedule, so he often uses it for interviews.
“I don’t see it as a risk at all. I see it as another business. I’ve done other things and they’ve been logically and carefully planned and executed. I don’t expect automatic success, but we’ll work at it like everybody has to work at every new business.”
By contrast, former F1 driver turned TV commentator John Watson says: “This is the most difficult challenge that Jackie Stewart has ever had to face in his entire career, because he can’t control every aspect of it, whereas as a driver you can control what you’re doing pretty much. Paul Stewart Racing will buy a car from a manufacturer, and if a part doesn’t arrive they give the manufacturer a bollocking. But Stewart Grand Prix is the team, the manufacturer and the customer, and that is what makes F1 so much more difficult. You have to make a huge commitment but there’s no guarantee of any reward.”
Stewart is as clinically logical in business as he was in the cockpit, and calculated the odds carefully. He knew Paul Stewart Racing gave him a solid platform. He knew his own reputation as a figurehead of the sport and as a roving ambassador for assorted prestigious companies, including Rolex and Met & Chandon, was a major asset. In particular, his 32-year relationship with Ford as adviser and product-tester has now translated into an exclusive five-year deal whereby the company is supplying Stewart Grand Prix with their new V10 engine, plus a mass of additional technical support. And, having led a charmed life in a lethal sport, maybe Jackie just felt lucky.
“Everybody assumes Formula One is so different today, but it was different at the end of World War II,” he argues. “When Ferrari and Maserati started in the late Forties and early Fifties, everybody said, my God, aren’t these sophisticated cars?
“Then, when the rear-engined Lotus arrived everybody said boy, a big technological leap. When we saw the pre-war Mercedes- Benzes and Auto-Unions, those cars were spaceships, and so are today’s. But they were no more spaceships than when I drove a Matra MS80 in 1969 and won the world championship.
“That was designed by a nuclear physicist and another man who had never tackled motor racing in his life, a total boffin. It’s just evolution and progress, and Grand Prix motor racing has always been the sharp end.”
So sharp, indeed, that Stewart has survived virtually alone of his generation of drivers. With Jim Clark and Graham Hill, Stewart participated in a decade of British dominance of motor racing from the early Sixties to the early Seventies, and the trio were close friends as well as fierce competitors. But while today’s F1 drivers know they will probably emerge from their careers in one piece, Stewart’s generation faced odds that a Battle of Britain fighter pilot might have balked at. It was Stewart who single-mindedly began the campaign to improve track and driver safety.
“The pall that fell on the motor racing community that weekend in Imola in 1994 when Senna and Ratzenberger died was extraordinary,” he says. “It was because it had been 12 years since a driver had died in a Grand Prix. People had not been exposed to the shock and the grief and the emotional destruction. In 1968, I saw that every single month for four consecutive months. In many cases, I had to assist in having the body taken back to wherever it had to go.
“Today’s drivers, God be thanked, have not had much experience of that. Nor have they packed the case, as my wife Helen had to do, of people who had died that afternoon, and whose wife somebody had to care for and move out of that hotel room.”
Yet he still recalls his racing heyday as a unique and thrilling period. He climbed to the pinnacle of his profession while Carnaby Street swung, and Britain baked in the white heat of Harold Wilson’s technological revolution.
Stewart retired on the weekend of the last race of 1973, at Watkins Glen. It would have been his 100th Grand Prix, but when his team-mate Franois Cevert was killed in qualifying, he decided enough was enough. He had already clinched that year’s championship.
For many drivers, racing is all they can do, but he climbed out of the cockpit and straight into the next phase of his career. A dyslexia sufferer who began his career as a teenager pumping petrol at the family garage in Dumbarton, he found that his racing prowess had made him a global citizen, accepted by politicians, royalty, tycoons and showbiz stars. He was far- sighted enough to exploit his advantage.
Stewart has claimed that he will be happy if his team scores one or two points in its first season, but not everyone believes him. “That’s like Schumacher saying he doesn’t think he can win the championship this year, isn’t it?” says Ken Tyrrell. “It’s a bit of an exaggeration.”