Watson: Purebred racer
Mclaren man reflects on an illustrious top-flight career
Ulsterman John Watson rose through Formula 3 and Formula 2 to drive in Formula 1 most notably for Brabham and Mclaren. It was with Penske, however, that Wattie took his first grand prix win in 1976, the win costing him his trademark beard, the result of a bet with team owner Roger Penske.
Watson moved to Brabham in 1977 and then to Mclaren before being replaced by Alain Prost for the 1984 season.
A career in sportscar racing followed, although he had raced the Mirage at Le Mans in 1973, for Jaguar, Porsche and Toyota.
Along with spells commentating for Eurosport and F1 Digital on grands prix, Watson was part of the BBC’S commentary team on the British Touring Car Championship, the world feed for A1GP and is now co-commentator for SRO’S GT World Challenge Europe.
His enthusiasm for the sport and F1 is undimmed and the memories came tumbling out….
Question: “What would John have done if Penske had stayed properly for 1977...if they had committed properly to F1 what would they have achieved in his opinion?”
Simon Hill
Via Twitter
John Watson: “Well, it would have grown into a two-car team, so the personnel would have expanded exponentially, but it needed control to be in the UK not Pennsylvania. Roger Penske was in a phase of growth but I think realised just how much effort was needed and from so far away and the enjoyment disappeared. He realised, too, that it would have been more expensive for a two-car team, and a third car as a spare was needed, and the whole scale of the operation would have extended over Penske’s capability. It was an arm’s length too much. That is why it ended.” Motorsport News: Did it have potential?
JW: Yes, why not? Roger was very good at cherry-picking people who deliver for his team. All the packages that he has created go on to win championships, like Indycar and NASCAR, for example, but the unfulfilled child was Formula 1.
Don’t forget that the Formula 1 team was created in 1974 and won a race in 1976 which is no mean feat in such a short space of time. So yes, I think it had great potential but the problem was it was a big operation too far from Roger’s USA base.”
Question: “Silverstone in 1981 maybe Wattie’s most famous victory (and I was privileged enough to be there) but surely his finest was Long Beach ’83 when he came through from the very back of the grid [22nd]! or was it Detroit the previous season [when he started in 17th place]?
Dominic Malvern
Via Twitter
JW: “I think that although I only had a few victories, each one has its own special memories. Silverstone in 1981 was special, of course, for many reasons: I won my home grand prix, it was in front of my home fans and my family was there. So there were lots of elements combined to make it very special. But what really made it better was that it was the first win for the carbonfibre Mclaren and it was a huge gamble by John Barnard and Ron Dennis at the end of 1980 to go the carbonfibre route. No-one else had committed to it and used it in John Barnard’s way as a substitute for aluminium and steel. The chassis were long and thin in those days and it was hard to get the rigidity in them, but carbonfibre was so strong. Understanding it was the key and once it became understood it evolved into the standard construction and nine years later saved Martin Donnelly’s life at Jerez. So that was another reason why Silverstone was special because it said to the industry that it had to accept a new show was in town and that was carbonfibre.”
MN: Now, people go to Silverstone expecting a Lewis Hamilton win.
That day was a surprise to everyone.
JW: “It was a bonus to the crowd, I’d say. The circuit was as it had been from 1975 with the Woodcote chicane added but otherwise the layout followed the perimeter roads. It was a fast circuit, which helped the turbocharged cars and you have to remember how quick they were in the race not just in qualifying.
Silverstone played to the turbo cars, but Renault was better than Ferrari on the high-speed tracks, so they were always going to be strong. Early on, Gilles Villeneuve was out of control at Woodcote and lost it, Alan Jones couldn’t see him and got caught up in it and I braked so heavily, my engine stalled.
You are doing this in a split second, but I got the electric fuel pump back on, bumpstarted the car and set off again but lost five or six places. I overtook people but the Renaults [of Alain Prost and Rene Arnoux] and [Nelson] Piquet [Brabham] were ahead of me. Then Piquet had a problem as did Prost and I started catching Arnoux, who took over the lead. Then he had a problem and I caught and passed him and I would say the place erupted! I had Ron Dennis falling over the pitwall telling me to slow down which I did by reducing the revs from 10,400rpm to 9000rpm, changing gear at those revs. Ron thought I’d disobeyed
him because I wasn’t slowing much but I was looking after the car.
“As for the America races, I don’t buy that I was a poor qualifier. Look at 1978 and the Brabham – I was up at the front. The trouble was that the Mclaren was on Michelin tyres and on low fuel in qualifying, we just couldn’t get the energy out of the tyres. On low-grip circuits, the rubber just wouldn’t work, but on race day with the weight of fuel in the car it performed as it should and so I came through the field. I won in Long Beach in 1983 and then at Monaco, we slid around on Thursday practice.
Now, Ron knew Michelin had other tyres that weren’t at Monaco so he demanded they were brought for Saturday practice. Our times in the morning session would have easily put us in the race and then before qualifying, guess what? It rained!
We had to rely on our dry, Thursday, times which were slow and so neither Mclaren qualified. It was a severe loss of face to Mclaren but it was down to the tyres more than the car. Anyway, on race days, I proved I was a good race driver and a good overtaker and used those qualities to get the results.”
Question: “John Watson was renowned as a great overtaker – was it a case of being braver than the other driver, or is it that suited his driving style?” Michael Butterworth
Via Twitter
JW: “There are two elements to being a racing driver. There is being a driver or being a racer, and I was a racer. Niki Lauda, my team-mate on two occasions, was gifted on many levels and worked out what he needed to give him the advantage, but his greatest strengths weren’t like mine. He couldn’t get down and dirty and be a street-fighter like I could, and that’s why he didn’t win those races in ‘82 and ‘83 that I did. I was good on the brakes, braking very late into a corner, which puts you alongside a rival and then you worry about where you are on the race track. It was easy to overtake in a good car, as I proved in those two American races, because the car came alive in the races. Niki had the same car but didn’t get the best out of it. He’d decided that you couldn’t overtake and talked himself into that belief, but me, as a thicko, hadn’t worked that out and just overtook people!”
Question: “Did you need much persuading about the carbonfibre technology that Mclaren introduced into F1 in 1981? Were you convinced straight away (I guess you were after you crashed at Monza 1981)…”
Ian Ellesley
Via email
JW: “No-one really knew much about it in motor racing, certainly not how John Barnard wanted to use it, but my teammate Andrea de Cesaris had crash tested it a lot in 1981, so any doubts had gone! John Barnard knew what he was doing and we looked for an advantage so we were happy to go with the car and after my Monza accident, where the engine and gearbox were ripped off the chassis, underlined how strong carbonfibre was. I stepped out and walked back to the pit lane where people were fearful it was a bigger accident but I hadn’t realised how spectacular it had been. The carbonfibre provider, Hercules Corporation in Nevada, wanted my chassis to show the strength of carbonfibre to the American military, which was losing aircraft to attacks. They underlined that aircraft would be less vulnerable with carbonfibre. Like I said before, carbonfibre revolutionised F1 car construction. It was hugely important.”
Question: “You drove the 1991 Jordan before anybody else, what was that experience like? Did you get any inkling the car would be as good as it was? Would you have liked to race it?”
Ed Sleigh
Via email
JW: “Before I drove the car, I had to get through a barrage of abuse from Eddie Jordan! He’d put together a small nucleus of talented people [Gary Anderson, Trevor Foster and Ian Phillips] but he wanted someone to drive it whom he wasn’t negotiating with for a drive. He rang me and said: ‘Would you forkin’ drive the forkin’ car?’ So I drove it at Silverstone and my reaction, after seven years out of F1, was that it was a very sweet car. You get an instant feeling as you drive down the pitlane and my reaction was that it was one of the sweetest cars I’d ever driven. It was well balanced, well built, had good aero and, with Gary Anderson’s expertise, ticked every box. After that, EJ said: ‘You can fork off you forkin’old wanker’and they got Bertrand Gachot and Andrea de Cesaris to race the car. They were paying drivers, which suited EJ very well, but when Michael Schumacher drove it at Spa, he raised its performance above what the incumbents had been doing.
“I thought it was so good that I said to Ayrton Senna that year that if he drove it and put a Honda engine in the back, it would win a World Championship for him. Now, looking back, with the Honda engine having such a high centre of gravity, maybe it wouldn’t have been as successful as I imagined at the time, but I really did believe in it.”
Question: “You were commentating on the San Marino Grand Prix weekend when Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna were killed and Rubens Barrichello had that massive accident. How tough was that for you?”
James Hilton
Via email
JW: “It was a horrible weekend for everyone. On Eurosport, we covered all the practice sessions as well, so we had the Rubens Barrichello accident and then on Saturday we saw these pictures of Roland Ratzenberger slumped in his car. Then we got the replays and I could see from his head that either he had a neck or spine injury, but we couldn’t cut away from the pictures: Eurosport didn’t have any options but to take the Italian feed. I didn’t know Roland well but I had raced against him in Group C, but I did know Ayrton and again, we didn’t have an option to cut away. Allard Kalff and I had to keep talking. We said on a lazy mic to Eurosport that we weren’t comfortable talking endlessly about the Senna crash, but the attitude was that this was the biggest story in sport that day.”
MN: Were you surprised by the severity of the Senna crash?
JW: “It was clearly a big hit, but we had seen big accidents there for Nelson Piquet and Gerhard Berger in previous years so it looked survivable at first. Then the car came to rest and it looked as though he was unconscious and there was a slight movement off Ayrton’s head. ‘Look, his head moved. He’s Ok.’when Sid Watkins and the medical team arrived, you started to realise the severity and what sealed it for me was that Sid didn’t go with him in the helicopter. They were personal friends and when he didn’t travel with Ayrton, I realised that the greatest F1 driver had gone and that there was more to the crash than we had seen.” MN: Was it harder or easier to deal with than deaths of rivals when you were racing?
JW: “I had a friendship with Ayrton, but I had done 152 grands prix with death as a passenger so I had a way of dealing with it. I had barriers that I brought down to cope. I was with Niki after his Nurburgring accident, I was with him at the side of the track after we got him out of the car and then I jumped back in mine and raced. It all came from Watkins Glen in 1973 when Francois Cevert had his awful accident and my team boss, one Bernard Charles [Ecclestone] said:
‘What are you doing? You’re a racing driver and up until that nano-second before his crash, Cevert was doing what he loved, so get back in the car and drive.’i kept that with me and used it to shut out the tragedies.”
Question: “Is the 1987 World Sportscar
Championship one that got away? What was the Jaguar XJR-8 like to drive?” Emma Facey
Via email
JW: “It wasn’t one that got away, no. sportscar racing is a team sport, because you have a co-driver and we just didn’t get as many points that year as our teammates. The car was tricky as it was dominated by the Jaguar engine that was like a boat anchor on the back! It was a good engine, similar in power to the Porsche, but we couldn’t turn up boost in qualifying like they could. On cold tyres, you had to be careful with the Jaguar because it was set up in a very rigid way on stiff rollbars to stop it rolling around, but it was a very efficient and effective car. The 1987 Le Mans was a failure because they tried to reduce the drag out of the regular car for Le Mans and although we did 240mph down the Mulsanne, it became a handful.”
Question: “When you retired, you made a very definite decision to walk away and weren’t tempted back like so many others. What was behind the decision?” Barry May
Via email
JW: “I didn’t retire, I stopped! My F1 career came to a sudden end, because Alain Prost was fired by Renault and signed a few days later by Mclaren, and I didn’t really know what to do with my life. I’d been a grand prix driver and now I wasn’t. So Group C sportscars was one option and there was talk of an Indycar project with Lotus and Roy Winkelmann but that never came to anything and I’m glad actually. So, apart from F1 the obvious place to keep earning a living was Group C and I had contact with Porsche both as an owner and through the Tag-porsche engine in the Mclaren so I drove with Stefan Bellof in a few races and we won in Fuji. No, Stefan won and I assisted. He got in a 956 and ragged it. He was special and without the ego and the bullshit that you see in Formula 1. The team loved him, like he was the heir to the company.
“Actually, I had a chance to go to
Lotus in 1984. Initially, they asked
Derek Warwick but he had signed for Renault and the team came to me, but actually, they didn’t want me, but Peter Warr [the team manager] just didn’t want Nigel Mansell. He’d have walked over hot coals before he put Mansell in that car, so it wasn’t that the team really wanted me. There were things in the offer I didn’t like and I have always trusted my instinct – I said no to
Lotus. Not being the driver the team really wanted was a major factor in that decision.”
MN: You never looked at touring cars or historic racing. You never wanted to be on a track to make up the numbers, did you? JW: “No, but the only touring car championship of a standing was the European that ended really in the late 1980s, but teams weren’t looking for someone in my age bracket. And then, in the late 1980s, BBC’S Sport on Sunday programme asked me to join Simon Taylor in the radio commentary booth and I realised that this was a role I enjoyed and gave me a purpose again in the F1 paddock. I wasn’t stood there like a prick at a wedding, I had a real reason to be there and was doing an important job. The value of a commentary to any sport cannot be overstated: it is vital and it stimulated and motivated me and gave me a new direction over racing.”