The chaotic Monaco GP where 'underrated' John Watson made his point

On lap 19 he passed Jacky Ickx’s Lotus for eighth, and on lap 28 James Hunt’s sixth-placed Hesketh suffered a driveshaft failure, which promoted Watson to seventh. Four laps later Lauda’s Ferrari, which had been leading the race, was stopped by ignition failure. Watson was up to sixth: a points-paying position.

Better still, he now found that his old Brabham was handling beautifully, and that, now on tyres no less grippy than anyone else’s, he was able to close on and begin to look for a way past Emerson Fittipaldi’s fifth-placed McLaren. He harried Fittipaldi doggedly, drawing close often but never quite close enough to pass the wily Brazilian, who was defending his position cannily, until a couple of laps before the end, at which point Watson’s old BT42 began to run low on fuel. As a result he was not able to have a crack at the banzai bid for fifth place that he had been planning, but fortunately he was able to coast around to the flag and finish a fine sixth: both his and the team’s first ever F1 point. Only the two Ferraris of Lauda and Regazzoni, and the Lotus of Ronnie Peterson, who had won the race, had been circulating more rapidly that day, for the fourth-fastest lap of the race had been driven by Watson while he had been hunting down Fittipaldi. And let us not forget that he had been driving a one-year-old car.

He soldiered on with that ageing Brabham BT42 for four more grands prix – Anderstorp, Zandvoort, Dijon, and Brands Hatch – until Michaels bought him a new BT44 for Nürburgring. He qualified it 14th and retired it with suspension failure after a single lap. At Österreichring two weeks later he qualified 11th and finished an excellent fourth. At Monza the following month he qualified a superb fourth and finished seventh. At Mosport he qualified 15th and retired again, also with suspension failure, albeit this time after 60 laps. And at Watkins Glen he qualified seventh and finished a fighting fifth. But, even so, sadly, Michaels called time on Goldie Hexagon Racing after that.

He raced on in F1 for many seasons longer, for Brabham and McLaren, winning four F1 grands prix for the latter. But you are reading a column, not a biography, and I have neither the space nor the scope here to chronicle year by year what he did over the next decade. Suffice it to say that, perhaps because he came up against an unusually politically shrewd megastar team-mate, Lauda, in whose shadow he was forced to operate in 1978 at Brabham, and again in 1982 and 1983 at McLaren, he is underrated today — unfairly in my opinion. After all, he drove that neat Geoff Ferris-designed Penske PC4 beautifully in 1976. He was super-quick — and super-unlucky — in Gordon Murray’s fast but troublesome Brabham-Alfa BT45B in 1977. He more or less held his own with Lauda in their Brabham-Alfa BT46s in 1978, Lauda’s two grand prix victories that season the results of (1) the rogue one-time deployment of the infamous BT46B ‘fan car’ at Anderstorp and (2) 60-second jumped-start penalties at Monza for Mario Andretti (Lotus) and Gilles Villeneuve (Ferrari), who had both finished well ahead of Lauda on the road. And at Detroit in 1982, and at Long Beach in 1983, Watson scored two of the most sensational grand prix victories in F1 history, carving a path from 17th on the grid to win at Detroit, and at Long Beach forcing his way through the field to victory from even farther back, having qualified in P22.

By that time he had become one of the very best racers – and overtakers – in the sport. Yet, even so, he lost his McLaren drive at the end of the 1983 season, despite having outscored Lauda comfortably in both 1982 and 1983. His dismissal would surely have been regarded as one of Ron Dennis’s oddest decisions had Lauda not won the drivers’ world championship in 1984, and had Dennis not replaced Watson with Alain Prost, who went on to do rather well for him.

Watson drove a few sports car races in the mid-1980s, and, sharing with Stefan Bellof then Jan Lammers, he won some of them, too. At the end of that decade he hung up his distinctive silver and red helmet to turn his energies to commentating, or co-commentating to be precise, for Eurosport, whose F1 TV coverage came to an end in 1996 and is still missed by many middle-aged race fans, for he was a very good co-commentator. Now aged 78, he is still working, delivering expert and entertaining TV race analyses on GT World Challenge Europe races. It is great racing, but by rights he should be co-commentating or at least punditing on F1. He was too good a driver, and he remains too astute a race analyst, for the pinnacle of global motorsport not to be enhanced by his input in at least one of the world’s many English-speaking countries to which F1 races are broadcast.

But do not feel too sorry for him, even though he is a lovely guy. He had a very good racing career – and 50 years ago, at almost exactly the same time as he scored a point in an F1 grand prix for the first time, he bought himself a Porsche 911 Carrera 2.7 RS Touring. He still owns it. It is totally original, and, last time I saw it, it had covered fewer than 50,000 miles. Now that is a car that any middle-aged race fan, including yours truly, would lust after.