Disillusioned with F1: when Alan Jones retired at the peak of his powers

“Where the hell was I going to find a world-class replacement for him at that stage of the year?” Frank raged. “It was grossly inconsiderate — typical of bloody racing drivers…”

A few days afterwards, Alan had his press conference, and it was a remarkably straightforward affair. Where Stewart, Hunt and Scheckter had given their reason for leaving the sport as a simple desire to survive it, Jones was simply homesick.

“The danger part of it never really came into my thinking,” he said. “I’ve never dwelt on that during my career — a certain number of accidents are inevitable. Actually, I worry more about what these stupid ‘go kart’ cars are doing to my spine over time than about having a shunt. Other factors come into it, sure, but the main thing is simply that I want to go back and live in Australia.”

So there it was. No great soul-searching, no blinding flash of light.

He had won the world title, made some money, and now he wanted time and opportunity to enjoy it.

A few months earlier, we had discussed the possibility of his retirement at the year’s end, and he had said that racing still outweighed the other side of his life — but allowing that the ‘other side’ had gained a few points recently.

What had changed?

“Well, to be honest, I wanted to retire — and yet I didn’t! Every time I’d pick up the phone to tell Frank, I would get butterflies and hang up — not because I was scared of facing his wrath, but because I just didn’t want to face the decision. I knew it was probably the biggest I was ever going to have to face in my life. I mean, you can buy a house or a car, and if it’s no good you sell it. But this was a fairly final situation.

“We’re only on this earth for a short amount of time. You should be doing what you want to do for as much of it as possible”

“So, although I verbally agreed terms to stay with the Williams team for ‘82 —which I sort of wanted to do — I started giving long, hard thought to it immediately afterwards. I concluded that if I was going to stop racing, I had to let Frank know by Monza, to give him a chance to get a replacement. And, in fact, I know I should’ve let him know earlier.

“I actually told him on Thursday night at Monza, and promised a final answer within a few days. He told me not to do it over the weekend, because it would be silly to chuck it in just through having a bad race, or something like that.

“He told me to go back to London, and spend a day thinking about it there. But that was probably the worst thing that could have happened. It was my boy’s birthday on the Monday; we all had party hats on — and then it started to piss down! We had to go inside, and I thought, ‘Oh, bugger it, at least if we were at home now we could stay outside…’

“So I’m going back, and I’ll do some touring car racing. I want to drive up to the old track, have a dice and a bit of fun, then have a barbecue afterwards. We’re only on this earth for a short amount of time, after all. I reckon that you should be doing what you want to do for as much of it as possible.”

As Jones said, there were other reasons behind his decision, too. In 1981, the ‘ground effect’ era was still in full swing, but the sliding skirts of previous seasons had been outlawed, and now they were fixed. If the seal with the ground were to be maintained, therefore, and the skirts not swiftly destroyed, the cars had to run effectively without suspension. For the drivers, it was not a pleasurable experience. “Perhaps,” Alan said, “if we had not got into this stupid situation, I wouldn’t have got so disillusioned with it all. Perhaps I wouldn’t have thought about retirement. You see, with all the money and everything else, I’ve always enjoyed my motor racing. That’s been tremendously important— and I haven’t enjoyed it this year at all.

“These cars are ridiculous. I went testing the other week at Croix-en-Ternois, and it was so bumpy that I was literally dreading every lap. I’d get out while they made changes, and I was honestly dreading having to get back in it. Driving was simply not fun, banging my head and my spine, my feet getting bounced off the floor onto the pedals…

“Every driver I’ve spoken to agrees with me, but nobody does anything about it. In Austria, Carlos Reutemann told me that he was on the verge of blacking out through one corner, simply because the car was bouncing around so much. This is crazy, you know.”

Inescapably, though, Jones felt bad about letting his team down, and I wondered, if he were in their position, whom he would hire.

“Given the choice of any, I would have Villeneuve, without a doubt, and probably Pironi. There are one or two others: Piquet’s a good driver — he’s got no manners and about as much diplomacy as a brick wall, but he’s quite a good driver. And I reckon Prost is going to be very good…”

None of them, of course, was available by that time, and Williams took a chance on a driver from the fringes of F1: Keke Rosberg.

A year on, Rosberg was the world champion.

“I loved my time with Frank and Patrick [Head],” Keke would say, “although I always had the feeling that they couldn’t quite forgive me for not being Alan Jones…”

He wouldn’t be the last Williams driver to say that.