Tyrrell’s first F1 win: Jackie Stewart on the 1971 Spanish GP

The win did not come easy, on one of the championship’s most challenging circuits after a fight at furious pace against Ferrari’s determined Jacky Ickx: a test of driver and car.

“Montjuïch was a fantastic circuit, very demanding,” says Stewart. “One of the great circuits in the world in my opinion, because it had both slow corners, fast corners, good long straights. Ups and downs, I mean a real difference in altitude. Barcelona, you know, really lived it. It was a very exciting place to race.”

Watching the race would have quickened the heart-rate too, as the Tyrrell vs Ferrari battle began in earnest.

“Stewart was hounding Ickx mercilessly and got by on lap six, but his lead was negligible,” wrote Denis Jenkinson in the Motor Sport race report. “For the whole race these two battled it out, lapping faster and faster, and Stewart was on the limit all the time, with Ickx driving equally as hard and keeping Stewart right on his toes.

“Diving, twisting and turning round the park these two kept at it in a masterly display of driving, leaving all the opposition behind, and lapping all the slower cars, some of them twice.”

It must have been a blast to drive.

“No,” says Stewart. “I removed emotion. If you got emotional you made a mistake. You learn how to be clinical. If you overdrive you make mistakes. The more relaxed you become, the faster you go.”

Stewart won’t admit to even a grin behind his helmet as he darted through the Barcelona parkland, with Ickx in hot pursuit.

And with Ken Tyrrell in charge in the pitlane, race weekends were businesslike for the team from Ockham, Surrey.

“There was no celebration,” says Stewart. “Really, not at all. Ken Tyrrell, all he did was clap his hand, and then rub his hands round in circles and then say, ‘Right, you get this box done you get that box done so let’s get home’.

“We had a system: every night after the car’s been run, you have the procedures system which you went through everything. And obviously, the night before the race well. The important thing was not to overlook anything, obviously, some things we’ve heard about the bolts, don’t happen, but fortunately we didn’t have any nasty disasters from outside. We go the car reliable and safe. The rest we left to Jackie.”

“The rest” wasn’t to be sniffed at. Though 1971 brought the hope of success, the Tyrrell — mostly car 003 used from the second race in Barcelona — would need all of his talent.

“It was a quick car, but it was a very difficult car to drive,” says Stewart. “Very short wheelbase, very nervous.”

On the challenging Montjuich circuit, the focus was on keeping the car on the road.

“You’re giving much more to the technique on overcoming the nervousness of the car,” he says. “You’ve almost to try to sedate it, so when you hit the brakes, you didn’t hit the brakes, you introduced the brakes and the gas pedal was the same — I learned a lot of that from Jimmy [Clark]. “You couldn’t bully the car. You had to caress it.”

It was a brilliant race, wrote Jenkinson in Motor Sport’s race report. “Hard-fought and won by sheer driving ability on Stewart’s part.”

Stewart won five more times that year to dominate the title, and he would win his third championship with Tyrrell in 1973.

The team would make 430 starts as a constructor, always under the eagle eye of Ken, before it was finally sold to BAR in 1997, in a journey that culminated in the current Mercedes team.

“Ken was focused and so down to earth,” says Stewart. “He was a fantastic man to work with.”