‘The camaraderie we had no longer exists’
F1 is safer these days but Sir Jackie Stewart tells Natasha Henry he fears much has been lost
Sir Jackie Stewart’s home in Geneva could hardly feel more removed from the mad swirl of the Formula One circus. The oldest living world champion’s abode, shared with his wife of 55 years, Helen, is perched on a mountainside and is so serene it is almost silent. It is stiflingly hot when we visit, yet Sir Jackie, 78, still shows all the vigour and zeal that made him a three-time winner of the most illustrious prize in motorsport.
He retains a keen interest in the modern-day championship, attending 10 races a year, and is far from a rose-tinted nostalgic. Yet there is regret in his voice when he contemplates the question of whether the sport has lost its soul in its aggressive pursuit of commercial riches.
Stewart won his first title nearly 50 years ago, battling with luminaries such as Graham Hill and Jim Clark, rivals but also close friends. And it is this loss of camaraderie in the modern-day paddock which makes him wince.
“There was a huge joint care for each other – we all knew each other well, the media included, because we all travelled together, we all ate together and in those days there were no motor homes. In the early days, we would eat in the back of a transporter on little tables,” he recalls.
“Helen was getting to know their wives as well. There was a group for the partners called ‘The Dog House Club’ which was where the girls hung out together when the men were driving.
“Now the drivers cut themselves off from society to a large extent and that camaraderie doesn’t exist any more. I think it is sad, I think if they spent more time together they would get on better.”
According to Sir Jackie, the deterioration in relations between the drivers off the track has partly been caused by incidents on it. This season alone, team-mates Esteban Ocon and Sergio Perez (Force India), and Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo (Red Bull) have crashed into each other.
The potentially dangerous situations are not consigned to team-mates, with championship leader Sebastian Vettel deliberately wheel-bumping rival Lewis Hamilton at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. It was an action that earned the Ferrari driver two points on his super licence.
Not only was it unlikely that this would have happened in Sir Jackie’s heyday, but if it did, the transgressor would have been sharply reminded of his responsibilities by drivers who were largely self-policing.
“The danger element categorically comes down to disciplined behaviour on the track,” he observes. “On a racetrack, when someone behaved badly, it could be dealt with, because we were a tight group. Every single race had a meeting after and the boys would say: ‘Oi! I’ve had enough of that. I was behind and I saw it and you could have had a big shunt because of this.’ In our era, when big shunts came, people died. That almost certainly meant you would go to the funeral, it almost certainly meant your wife was having to look after the girlfriend or the wife of the driver who had just been killed. You go to the funerals and you’re meeting the father, the mother, the children or siblings. Up close and personal. That’s what the guys don’t understand today.”
There were too many of those funerals in Sir Jackie’s time, when on average two in three drivers would die due to injuries sustained while racing. One of the most poignant, for Sir Jackie, was Clark’s in 1968, after he perished in a crash at Hockenheim.
“When Jim died, I had just become a non-dom resident of Britain and I had to ask the Prime Minister to fly in from Geneva to go to the funeral because I couldn’t not go into the funeral,” Sir Jackie says. “In those days, you weren’t supposed to return to the United Kingdom for a whole year. So I called Harold Wilson and said to him: ‘Jim is one of my best friends and a fellow Scot. I want to go to his funeral even though I know I’m not supposed to come into the UK. Please let me.’ I was, on the condition I didn’t talk business.
“The funeral was huge in Scotland. We went to the farmhouse for refreshments afterwards and his parents were so strong and talking about how he saw me and other drivers. And when you see that happening to other drivers, to your friends, your respect goes further and the camaraderie goes deeper.”
It is the memories of the sport’s darkest hours that shape his views on the compulsory and controversial halo shield that will be seen in the 2018 season. While many are against the addition to the car, Sir Jackie is in favour, as befits someone who has always argued for safety improvements, regardless of their popularity.
“In my time, Nuremberg was the greatest track of them all – but there was no safety, nothing,” he says. “I had to take a doctor with me who was a professor in three different medical areas, as we were dealing with primitive conditions. The tracks had no barriers, no firemen. The whole place was a joke. I was driven to change that and it worked. Some of the changes – like seatbelts – were unpopular but attitudes change. Now, there’s not a racing driver who wouldn’t wear a seatbelt.”
Now he is solely a spectator, his campaigning focused on Lady Stewart’s fight against dementia, just as she always supported him in his racing career, primarily in the form of his Race Against Dementia charity.
“If I could have got preventative medicine for my wife, I would have spent any amount of money in the world to get it,” he said.
It is a battle which lends some perspective to squabbles on the Formula One track. Sir Jackie – who has lost more loved ones than he should – knows better than anyone why time should be cherished.