The Big Interview: Sir Jackie Stewart
The Scot thrilled Formula One fans but his greatest contribution to the sport has been the lives he has saved, after losing so many colleagues
By Paul Kimmage, sports interviewer of the year
“For my part, as a global ambassador, I have sought to add value to Rolex by wearing the watch in a way that reflects positively on the company. This involves arranging for my shirts to be made with a slightly wider sleeve cuff on the left side than the right, to ensure the watch moves freely and is always visible” – Sir Jackie Stewart, Winning Is Not Enough
This is how the interview with Sir John Young Stewart begins: it is a cool afternoon in November and I am standing outside a tailor’s shop at 95 Mount Street, London. The instructions from Susan Johnston (Sir Jackie’s diary secretary) are that I am to be at Hayward’s (Sir Jackie’s personal tailor for 35 years) for 14.30, when a navy-blue Lexus (registration 1 JYS) driven by Stuart Dean (Sir Jackie’s chauffeur) will arrive and drive us to his home in Buckinghamshire.
Why this obsessive attention to detail? Because for three days I have been immersed in Winning Is Not Enough – perhaps the most obsessively precise 176,000 words of autobiography ever scripted – and know pretty much everything about the eminent knight and three-times world driving champion.
I can also tell you everything you need to know about his chauffeur (a former sergeant-major, married to Kay, a cook), his butler (Eric), his PA (Niall), his other secretary (Karen), his two Norfolk terriers (Whisky and Pimms), his first wage packet (£1/12s/6d) and the make and model of his first car (a spruce green Austin A30 with yellow-and-red jeweller’s enamel lions rampant on each side, fashionable set covers made from Hunting Stewart tartan and numberplate ASN 500.)
The time (according to my Nokia mobile) is 14.10. The temperature (an educated guess) is 8C. I am wearing a pin-stripe Hilfiger suit, a white bespoke shirt, a red silk tie and a pair of laced black Hugo Boss shoes. Why have I chosen my finest suit? I have decided to adopt Sir Jackie’s creed. First commandment: “In any function or business meeting, an individual is still instantly defined by the way he or she dresses. Dressing well doesn’t get the whole job done, but it will start you off on the right foot. Dress badly and, very often, you won’t get out of the blocks.”
Why have I arrived 20 minutes early? That will be the second commandment: “I do whatever is necessary to be punctual. Based on the premise that I usually attend meetings with people who are more important than me, I always try to make sure that I arrive ahead of them and am fully prepared when the meeting starts.”
The appointed time arrives. I glance expectantly up and down the street, confident that his gleaming carriage will arrive and I will be swept from the cold pavement and pulled to his noble bosom like a long-lost friend. First surprise? He is 30 minutes late. Second surprise? He’s not exactly that prepared. “Er, sorry, what did you say your name was again?” he asks.
Apologising, he explains that he has just been honoured at a lunch with the Crown Prince of Bahrain, but I am suddenly, irrationally, peeved and spend the first 20 minutes of our car journey poking fun at his manic obsessions and curious veneration of class and royalty.
“So, tell me, Sir Jackie, how can a man who once baulked at the price of a flight to Nice buy his suits from a shop with no price tags?”
But then something bizarre happens; something that reminds you of the thing you most admire in him and why Sir John Young Stewart will forever be beloved.
As we edged through the traffic in the suburbs, our attention is drawn to a plume of rising smoke in the distance. “That’s a brand new fire,” Sir Jackie observes. “That could be in the road.”
A mile later we reach the scene of a blazing car parked on the opposite side of the carriageway. There are no indications of how the fire started, but the police have arrived and closed the road. “It’s a Lexus,” the chauffeur announces. “No, it’s a Honda,” his boss corrects, “and quite a new vehicle too. See how black the smoke is now? It’s got hold of it.”
“You paint some powerful images of smoke in your book,” I observe.
“Yes,” he says, and smiles. “Wasn’t that funny? Did you notice how I immediately picked up that it was a fresh fire? I haven’t seen a fire like that for a while, but it never leaves you . . . It never leaves you.”
“What the cold statistics don’t record is the hush that used to descend over the pit lane when an ambulance appeared . . . the sense of foreboding that spread through this small community when a plume of black smoke rose on the other side of the circuit . . . the unimaginably brutal way people died” – Sir Jackie Stewart, Winning Is Not Enough
HE IS at the wheel of his BRM P261 on a wet day at Spa-Francorchamps in the Belgian Grand Prix. It is June 1966. It’s the second race of his second season in Formula One. After some blinding performances – pole position in his first race, sixth in his first Grand Prix, victory in his fifth at Silverstone, a win at the Italian Grand Prix – the 27-year-old Scot is being heralded as a future great.
This new life as a star isn’t one he ever imagined. As a boy, shackled with dyslexia and scarred by the mocking of ignorant teachers, he was happiest serving petrol at the family garage in Dumbarton, or stalking deer in the glens with his friend Duncan Macbeth.
Trap shooting was soon a passion and the source of his first ambition. He dreamt of competing for Britain at the 1960 Olympic Games.
They told him to pack his bags for Rome. They told him the final trial would prove no more than a formality. They were wrong. He froze. He was named as first reserve. He returned to Dumbarton, met a beautiful girl from Helensburgh called Helen McGregor, and packed his sporting ambitions away. He was 21.
Then a wealthy client called Barry Filer, who had his sports cars serviced at the family garage, asked if he would like to race one of his Porsche Super 90s that weekend in Ayrshire and the course of motor-racing history was changed.
Six years pass. He marries Helen, fathers a son and travels to Spa for the Belgian Grand Prix. Life is heady. Fame has brought its spoils. He has dined with Prince Rainier and Princess Grace at Monaco, chatted backstage with Frank Sinatra in Vegas and pressed the flesh of entrepreneurs who have their shoes handmade. He likes the scent of that leather. He is on a rocket ship with the stars. But on this foul, wet, miserable day there are no free rides . . .
On the opening lap he narrowly avoids a multiple collision and is lying third behind Jochen Rindt and John Surtees when he reaches the Masta straight. The visibility is appalling. He is travelling at 170mph. He heads towards the Masta Kink – a right-left-right swerve – and the car begins to aquaplane. It flies off the tarmac and flattens a woodcutter’s hut, then careers over an eight-foot drop on to the patio of a farmhouse.
A few moments later Graham Hill spins off the track on the same plaque of water, but catches a luckier break with the slide. As Hill prepares to rejoin the race, he spots the wreckage of his teammate’s car and leaps bravely to his assistance. “Jackie? Are you down there? Jackie?” Stewart groans, but is barely conscious. The American racer Bob Bondurant joins Hill at the scene. There is no rescue crew. There are no marshals with yellow flags.
Stewart is trapped. The fuel tanks have ruptured and flooded the cockpit; one spark from the electrics, and the drivers are toast.
After a frantic search for a spanner, they manage to unscrew the steering wheel and lift Stewart to safety. “Graham, get my clothes off,” he pleads. His overalls are soaked in high-octane fuel. He doesn’t want to burn.
An ambulance eventually arrives and he is rushed to hospital. His wife and his close friend, the great Jim Clark, are in the ambulance.
When he starts moaning from the pain of his shattered collarbone and ribs, Clark is appalled. “For goodness sake, Jackie,” he snaps. “Pull yourself together. Helen is here.”
They built men differently in those days.
A month later, Stewart was racing again. Remarkably, he would compete for seven more seasons and win three world titles, without spilling a drop of blood. But his friends were not nearly as fortunate . . .
“Imagine an 11-year window of time when you lose 57 – repeat 57 – friends and colleagues, often watching them die in horrific circumstances doing exactly what you do, weekend after weekend. Helen and I didn’t have to imagine. We lived through it. To be a racing driver between 1963 and 1973 was to accept the probability of death” – Sir Jackie Stewart, Winning Is Not Enough.
WE HAVE reached his beautiful home and adjourned to the fireside in his study. He shows me some scrapbooks from his racing days and the small, leather-bound diary he used in 1968. He quotes from this diary several times in the book . . .
April 7: Jimmy crashed. April 10: Mike crashed. June 8: Ludovico crashed. July 7: Jo crashed. . . . and the details are exactly as he describes.
“I was interested that you used the word ‘crashed’ and not ‘died’,” I observe.
“Yes,” he replies. “Why?” “ Crashed wasn’t so bad . . . I wouldn't have put died.”
“I’d imagine that chapter was particularly hard to write?”
“Yes, there were times when I was writing when I cried . . . and it embarrassed me that I would have been that vulnerable because it happened in front of people I didn’t know [during the editing] and I just had to apologise because I didn’t know what to say . . . I see a little bit of it every time I watch the Cenotaph on the Remembrance Sunday. It was an emotional volcano that you can’t really explain unless you have come through that.”
April 7: He has flown to Madrid for a safety inspection of the Jarama circuit on behalf of the GPDA (Grand Prix Drivers’ Association) when word reaches him. Jim Clark had been driving at Hockenheim when, entering a broad, fast right-hander at 160mph, his car seemed to twitch from left to right before veering off the wet track and smashing into a densely wooded area. “Jimmy crashed.”
Three days later, he travels to Scotland for the funeral. The death of his friend cuts him to the bone and for the only time in his career he considers retirement.
“Where did you find the courage to get back in the car?” I ask.
“But you see I never thought of it as courage,” he explains. “I just thought that was the job. It’s a very intoxicating thing, driving a racing car, but the one thing you cannot have is the mildest form of distraction. Once you get into the car and pull that visor down, the lights go out and you are totally consumed by what you are doing. You don’t give a minute’s thought to the person who died the previous day.”
May 7: He is at the Indianapolis 500, but has broken his wrist and isn’t fit enough to race. His place in the Lotus 56 Turbine has been taken by a friend, Mike Spence. Spence crashes during practice. The front right wheel comes off and hits the driver in the head. Stewart watches from the pit lane and visits his friend that night in hospital. Spence doesn’t recover. “Mike crashed.”
June 8: Ludovico Scarfiotti, a nephew of Fiat chief Gianni Agnelli and a former winner of the Italian Grand Prix, is making an appearance at a small hill-climb event in Bavaria when a problem with the car shunts him from the road and into some trees. “Ludovico crashed.”
July 7: Stewart’s wrist has healed and he is at the French Grand Prix. Jo Schlesser, a bubbly Frenchman, is the crowd favourite. It’s raining and visibility is poor. On the third lap, the Frenchman spins his Honda car and smashes violently into a bank. The full load of fuel ignites and the car explodes. “Jo crashed.”
The race continued, and each time Stewart arrived at the scene of the crash, he was confronted by a wall of flame and forced to race, almost blind, through the smoke and debris. For the fourth month in succession, an established driver had been killed. For the first time, he felt scared. Who was next, he wondered. Why were so many of his friends being killed?
“The modern grand prix driver would have no concept of what it was like,” he says. “Take [Michael] Schumacher, for example, a seven-times world champion – he could test the limit of the car [in practice] every weekend by going off the road! We didn’t have that luxury. We didn’t have barriers. We had grass banks and trees and buildings, and you knew that you couldn’t take any liberties.” As president of the GPDA, Stewart began to bang the drum for change. Drivers would be compelled to wear flameproof overalls, six-point safety belts, officially certified helmets and thermal socks, underwear and gloves to protect against burns. Track owners and managers would be pressured to cut down trees and erect chain-link fencing. But not everyone embraced the call. Letters began to appear in motor magazines . . .
“There is little in motor racing today for which I can thank Stewart,” an angry TCW Peacock wrote. “I have enjoyed the scene less since he arrived rattling his money box and waving his petitions . . . It is unthinkable for any professional to accept the challenge and then try to change the rules to make it all safe and cosy. This is cheating. Perhaps this insecure driver, diarist, and emotional motorist should concern himself with the less dangerous but equally lucrative world of entertainment.”
The attitude of some drivers was even more curious. Innes Ireland, the first Scot to win an F1 grand prix, regarded Stewart as a “chicken”. The Belgian driver Jacky Ickx was another opposed to change. “Innes was a real brave guy,” Stewart recalls. “He’d had some terrible accidents and survived, but I think he regarded it as part of the culture. Jacky didn’t much like the ideal either . . . he wanted to uphold the purity of it. There was a lot of antagonism and it became quite wearing at times.”
The tragedies continued. In June 1970 the New Zealand driver Bruce McLaren was testing at Goodwood, when he veered off the track and crashed heavily into an obstacle, built to protect a marshal’s post no longer in use. It didn’t need to be there. McLaren died instantly. Two weeks later, at the Dutch Grand Prix, Piers Courage – heir to the Courage Breweries empire – perished when his car hit a sand-bank and was engulfed by flames.
A GPDA meeting was convened and Stewart made an impassioned speech. “Gentlemen, we have reached a crucial moment,” he began. “Bruce and Piers are dead, and I think it is fair to say both might have survived if the governing bodies and circuit owners had listened to what we’ve been saying. People say they agree, but nothing gets done. When Piers’s car burst into flames, there was not even enough fire-fighting equipment to extinguish the car. How long are we going to let the organisers be so careless and disrespectful with our lives? We must do more. We have reached a point where we need to be strong.
“We must say we will not race at any circuit that fails to implement the safety measures we have requested. And this is not a Jackie Stewart issue, it’s a GPDA thing, so let’s have a debate and decide together.”
When Stewart proposed that they boycott the Nurburgring – the greatest circuit in the world – there was uproar. “It’s stupidly dangerous,” he insisted. “There are 14.7 miles of track, and there’s hardly a barrier on either side. I told the owners what needed to be done. They refused. I’m sorry, I just can’t accept that.”
“Boycott the Nurburgring? Jackie, you’re out of your mind.”
“If doing that saves one life, yes we should.”
“Jackie, you just can’t do that.” “Why not? There are huge fir trees two feet in diameter right next to the track. It’s crazy. It’s that dangerous, so why should we race there?”
“Look, even if you’re right, we’re drivers and it’s not our job to make these decisions.”
“So who will make them?” “The governing body.” “The governing body has done nothing!” “People will say we’re scared.” “I am not scared of anything,” Jochen Rindt retorted. “But if my car has a technical failure and goes off the track at 150 mph, I would certainly prefer not to smash into a tree.”
A vote was taken and Stewart carried the day. The German Grand Prix would not be taking place at the Nurburgring.
Jochen Rindt, the man who wasn’t scared of anything, dominated racing that season and was expected to clinch the 1970 world championship when the circus arrived at Monza in September. Three months earlier, when McLaren had perished at Goodwood, the Austrian had explained the reality of his job to his friends: “Nobody is immune.”
In practice at Monza on the Saturday, Rindt appeared to be driving beautifully until his car swerved suddenly and slammed into the barriers. Stewart was sitting by his car in the Tyrell pit when he heard the news. He ran to the control tower and cornered an official. “What’s happened? How is he?”
“Well, we think he’s out of the car,” the official replied.
“Okay, so where is he?” Stewart persisted.
“He’s in the field hospital.” Stewart sprinted to the medical compound. His friend was lying in a pickup. There was nobody attending. Rindt’s head was propped up, but his eyes were closed. Then Stewart spotted the gaping wound on his ankle. It wasn’t bleeding. Rindt was dead. “Nobody is immune.” The image would never leave him.
Stewart continued to race for three more seasons. In 1973, with his third world title secure, he travelled to Watkins Glen for the final race with a young teammate, Francois Cevert. He hadn’t yet told Helen, but he had made an important decision. The US Grand Prix would be his last. His boss, Ken Tyrrell, knew and was planning for the future. On the morning of the first practice session, he requested a word. “Jackie, this is your last race, and you’ve already won the world championship.”
“Yes, Ken.” “Well, our cars are going well, and if it turns out that you are leading in the closing stages with Francois in second place, it would be a fantastic gesture for you to move over and let him win.”
“Ken,” Stewart replied, “That’s asking a lot.”
“I know.” “This could be my 28th win. That might be important. I would love to bow out with a win. Not many drivers have done that. You’ll have to let me think about it.”
“I understand,” Tyrrell said. They discussed plans for the practice session and soon both Tyrrells were fizzing around the track. Midway through the session, as Stewart entered that section of the circuit known as the bridge, he saw a marshal frantically waving a yellow flag. He slowed to a crawl and saw debris from his teammate’s car across the track. His heart was pounding. Stewart pulled over and started running towards the wreckage.
The stench of smoke and oil filled his nostrils. The cockpit of the car was mangled. He turned and walked away. “I’ve always regretted that I didn’t stay with him,” he says. “I didn’t go into the graphics of it in the book, but it was so bad. I was disgusted by it . . . shocked by it . . . but I believe that even though he was dead, there was something still there and I should have stayed.”
Tyrrell announced immediately that they were withdrawing from the race. The racing career of John Young Stewart was over. He returned to his hotel and broke the news to Helen: “As of this moment I am no longer a racing driver.” She burst into tears and wrapped him in an embrace: “Now we can grow old together.” OUR interview has reached its close and she has joined us. I have been poking fun at her husband’s manic tendencies and she is eyeing me curiously. “He must be an absolute nightmare to live with,” I suggest.
“Are you asking me a question?” she responds, smiling.
“Yes.” “No, he’s nice to live with . . . He’s very particular and I’m the opposite, but I try to keep up with him. He’ s very kind, generous, loving . . . and he’s got this strong side. I have tremendous respect for him.”
“I’m going to keep her for another week,” Sir Jackie interjects.
She laughs and kisses him on the cheek. The knight is pleased. “You see?” he says with a smile. “It’s a good formula.”
Any other good tips?
