Sir Jackie Stewart on how F1 has changed

There is an aura sur­round­ing Sir Jack­ie Stew­art. The wait­ers fuss around the 76-year-old Scot as he sits down for tea at his usu­al table in London’s smart The Berke­ley hotel. He seems at home among the ornate wood­en pan­elling and fine chi­na.

Sir Jack­ie, who was knight­ed in 2001 for ser­vices to motor­sport, is one of For­mu­la 1’s elder states­men. Hav­ing gone from cock­pit to pit wall and sev­er­al ambas­sado­r­i­al roles with­in the F1 pad­dock, he is one of a few peo­ple well placed to com­ment on just about all aspects of the sport. And com­ment he does.

The beau­ty of inter­view­ing Sir Jack­ie is that one short ques­tion will yield an expan­sive answer drip­ping with detail. One of his roles is as an ambas­sador for lux­u­ry watch brand Rolex and he doesn’t just recall the year he got his first time­piece, but where he bought it and even who rec­om­mend­ed it to him.

He is like a grand racon­teur regal­ing about rac­ing in days gone by and he isn’t afraid to share his opin­ion on how times have changed.

Driving is too easy

One of the biggest alter­ations in the world of F1 since the famous tar­tan graced the grid has been the dri­ver lad­der. Back then, the likes of Rubens Bar­richel­lo and John­ny Her­bert were picked on raw tal­ent, as opposed to the mon­ey-laden, nursed-and-nur­tured nature of some break­ing into the big time in recent years.

“This whole idea of buy­ing dri­ves is a very unfor­tu­nate thing and it spi­rals very neg­a­tive struc­tures with­in the sport,” he says. When you sit and lis­ten to Sir Jack­ie, he has a very astute way of mak­ing even the most com­pli­cat­ed issues seem very solv­able.

Stew­art (right) with Tyrrell team­mate Fran­cois Cev­ert on the podi­um after win­ning the Bel­gian Grand Prix in 1973

“For one thing – and this sounds bad – but the cars cur­rent­ly seem to be too easy to dri­ve. Almost any­body can go fast in a For­mu­la 1 car, if it’s a decent For­mu­la 1 car,” says the for­mer cham­pi­on.
“It’s not the dri­vers, it’s the cars. When the car is good now – there’s Mer­cedes, then there’s Fer­rari, then there’s Red Bull, then there’s Williams – any­body can get in those cars and almost imme­di­ate­ly dri­ve them. So there­fore there’s some­thing wrong that the engi­neer­ing has come to a point where too many peo­ple can dri­ve them.

“You’ve got to look at a time where there was Jack­ie Stew­art com­ing along in a For­mu­la 3 car and peo­ple thought, ‘Hel­lo, he’s won 11 out of 13 races, he must be quite good, so there­fore he’s in a For­mu­la 2 race now. And then he won a tour­ing car race and then a world sports­car race’. So peo­ple then began say­ing ‘We bet­ter hire him’.

“There is the arrival of both Max Ver­stap­pen and Car­los Sainz Jr – both boys are very nice by the way – but what’s hap­pen­ing when they can get in those cars and go that fast? It must be too easy. And that’s not me say­ing it out of jeal­ousy. I’m not say­ing that it is eas­i­er now than it was back then for me.”

Improving safety

Sir Jack­ie cam­paigned furi­ous­ly for years to improve the safe­ty of the sport, but does it need more dan­ger once again, as sug­gest­ed last year by Fer­rari dri­ver Kimi Räikkö­nen?

“Peo­ple are tak­ing lib­er­ties that we nev­er used to take in our day. We could not run wide on a fast cor­ner and expect to hold our posi­tions,” he says. “The worst exam­ple of that I think was Abu Dhabi 2010. All Fer­nan­do Alon­so had to do to win the world cham­pi­onship was to fin­ish ahead of Vitaly Petrov’s Renault. He fol­lowed him for the entire race.

“Petrov went wide four times off the road – all four wheels – and nev­er lost the lead to Alon­so. He scram­bled back on and Alon­so still couldn’t get past him. That wasn’t through Alonso’s inabil­i­ty; it was because Petrov was still car­ry­ing the speed. That’s wrong.

Stew­art rac­ing in Italy in 1969, the year he won his first world cham­pi­onship with Matra

“We don’t want some­one hit­ting a tele­graph pole, or a farm­house like I did, or a grass bank like Stir­ling [Moss] did, but you must have some­thing else that stops a dri­ver. We’ve got to have some­thing that doesn’t burst the tyre or break the wheel, but means the grip is not as good.”

Half a cen­tu­ry ago, a young Jack­ie made his first for­ay into F1 with Lotus as an injury replace­ment for fel­low Scot Jim Clark. Lin­ing up on the grid in Kyala­mi in 1965, no one could have pre­dict­ed Stew­art would go on to become a three-times cham­pi­on. He is in no doubt about who he most looked up to.

“Jim­my was the best rac­ing dri­ver I ever raced against with­out fear of con­tra­dic­tion,” says Sir Jack­ie. “Fan­tas­tic. So smooth, so clean, nev­er went off the road.” Classy and com­posed, Clark was a good friend from whom he learnt sev­er­al tricks and skills. “It was Bat­man and Robin, and there was no doubt who was Bat­man and who was Robin,” says Sir Jack­ie.

Clark, a shy farmer from Fife, won F1 cham­pi­onships in 1963 and 1965, but will be best remem­bered for the Ital­ian Grand Prix in 1967 when he dropped a lap down, fol­low­ing a flat tyre change, before cat­a­pult­ing his way into the lead. He matched his pole-posi­tion time in the process only to fin­ish third after suf­fer­ing from a fuel pump fail­ure.

Stew­art and Clark shared apart­ments and set the stan­dard for the next gen­er­a­tion to beat. Sad­ly, Clark was killed in a For­mu­la 2 acci­dent in Ger­many in 1968, but Sir Jack­ie class­es him as the great­est F1 dri­ver to have lived: “I always have looked up to him, I still do. He was the absolute leader.”

Looking back

Stew­art retired in 1973 and since the 1970s has become a lead­ing light in the fight to improve safe­ty, over­see­ing the impli­ca­tion of improved cock­pit pro­tec­tion, rig­or­ous crash tests and effec­tive recov­ery pro­ce­dures. Much of this had been done by the mid-90s when, with Ford’s back­ing, Stew­art and his son Paul formed Stew­art Grand Prix which won its first F1 race in 1999. The team became the Stew­art fam­i­ly flag­ship.

Sir Jack­ie says: “Ford said they want­ed to buy our team. At which point I’m think­ing, ‘Hang on, we’re mak­ing £5 mil­lion a year and not tak­ing any­thing because we’re pil­ing it back in, so that the val­ue of the team was being added’. Final­ly I did the deal because they said, if we didn’t sell, they’d take their engines else­where.”

It goes with­out say­ing that the ever-increas­ing finances sur­round­ing F1 have raised the pres­sure on teams since the Stew­art grand prix years; how­ev­er, Sir Jack­ie offers one piece of advice to the cur­rent bunch on the grid.

He says: “When it came to talk­ing to spon­sors, the min­i­mum rela­tion­ship for me was five years. And I said we couldn’t win a grand prix for five years with a new team. But if you under-promise and over-deliv­er, you’ll nev­er get the sack.” Some cur­rent out­fits could do well to heed these words of wis­dom.