AJ Read online

  The trick was to try and pull your hand away, so you took a lot of the sting away. You had to time it perfectly, because if the prick thought you did it too much, he’d go again.

  One day during catechism, where we’d be taught religious knowledge, Father Brown belted the shit out of me for not knowing why Jesus was kind and gentle. I thought, ‘Hang on, this prick is his representative on earth, and he’s belting me up for not knowing why Jesus was kind and gentle.’

  That’s when I became an agnostic.

  There was a lay teacher, Mr Tilley. He hit me with a ruler and cut my eye open once. The old man was so angry he flew up there and dragged him out of the classroom. Mr Tilley was screaming like a sheila. Dad whacked him, which not too many parents at Burke Hall or Xavier would do. But what others would do didn’t ever stop him.

  The school didn’t do anything about it because Dad was going to press charges for assault on me if they did. After that Mr Tilley used to shit himself every time he saw me; he wouldn’t come anywhere near me. Good.

  I like to take things as they come. I always believe that tomorrow is another day. It doesn’t matter how bad things get today, you go to bed and tomorrow is another day, another opportunity.

  It’s like in my racing career – I was always able to sleep well the night before a race because I wasn’t overthinking things. You’d get to the circuit and some drivers would say, ‘I didn’t sleep last night.’ I used to think, ‘Jesus, why tell me that? You’ve just shown me a chink in your armour.’

  I used to say, ‘Oh really? I slept like a log. In fact, I slept in,’ which I didn’t. Those mind games are part of the game. I was competitive. I looked for every advantage. I looked for weaknesses in my opponents.

  That was something I got from the old man, as was the whole motor racing thing. It was in my blood, if you believe in that concept, which I am not sure I do. You’ll find out why soon. The old man was good enough to be offered drives for Ferrari and BRM, but he had a young son and a business that was going quite well, so he turned them down.

  One of the guys he was racing and beating was Jack Brabham, who did take those opportunities, went to Europe and won three world championships. The truth is though, the old man could drive Brabham into the weeds. And he did so. When Brabham was New South Wales champion and Dad was Victorian champion, they had a grudge race at Holden’s home, Fishermans Bend, in Melbourne, just the two of them. When Brabham crossed the finish line, my old man was already out of his car sitting there drinking a Coke. I admire everything Brabham did, but I reckon my old man was as good or better as a driver.

  Dad took his regret for not taking those opportunities to his grave, especially after his business went broke and he was left with nothing. I didn’t want to die with regret. I didn’t want to live under a question mark of ‘what if?’ My old man died wondering whether he should have gone to Europe or not; there was going to be no question mark over me. I decided I’d go over, give it a good go and if I turned out a failure, I could still look at myself in the shaving mirror and say I’d given it a go, had some fun and had some stories to live on. But the old man died with the question hanging there.

  As I said, I lived with Dad when my parents split, but I really just spent a lot of time with housekeepers and nannies, because Dad used to go off to work and never got home until late. More often than not he was in at Mario’s in Exhibition Street having dinner with his girlfriend or something, and he used to leave me to my own devices. The housekeeper was supposed to make me do my homework, which I didn’t. I used to lock myself in the bedroom – she thought I was doing homework, but I used to climb out the window and go down the street. But I conned them into thinking I’d spent the last two hours in my room studying. They’d swallow it and tell my old man what a good boy I’d been, and he’d be pleased and say, ‘Good boy, Alan.’ I learnt the world was a con; it never bothered me to abuse their confidence.

  I was learning some important life lessons. Firstly I was becoming independent, which made moving to Europe, and doing what I needed to do at the age of 19, a lot easier. The second was about the con and the sale. I was good at that.

  I started driving cars when I was 15. No, that was not legal. I used to drive myself into Melbourne for Taylors College, park up in Collins Street, and then walk down to school. Eight times out of 10, I never made it to school; I used to drive somewhere else.

  Racing was there very early in my life. I started out in billy-cart racing when I was seven or eight. To race a billy-cart the first thing you need is a great big hill. You sit in your billy-cart at the top and race others to the bottom. Yongala Street in Balwyn, where we lived then, was perfect, as was Balwyn Road. They even used to have a soap-box derby there, which was great. You couldn’t do it these days with the amount of traffic, but back then it was different. Cottee’s, loved by kids throughout the land for their cordial, had a special billy-cart with all the jazzy wheels and bodywork, and the old man bought it for me. I raced it and took home my fair share of wins.

  I was born into an environment where my father was racing cars and I would go to as many races as I could with him. We went to the 1954 New Zealand Grand Prix at Ardmore, flying TEAL Airways in a Douglas DC-6B with four propellers on it. I always remember Ardmore because the train went through the middle of the town. It’s funny how things stick in your mind. There was a big pool there where I went swimming. I had a Saint Christopher medal around my neck – the patron saint of travellers – and a Maori girl came up and ripped it off me. I also went to an outhouse there and there was this huge spider, the biggest I had ever seen in my life.

  Ardmore certainly left an impression on me, especially when Dad won the race. That was a big deal, the biggest win of his career at the time. He beat some big names in some pretty special cars – Brabham in a Cooper, Ken Wharton in a BRM, along with a pile of Alfas, Ferraris and Maseratis. Dad was in the Maybach Special, an interesting Australian car, certainly not in the same league as those others. It had its fair share of dramas on the weekend, but came through in the race.

  We always had racing people calling around to our house. People like Bib Stillwell and Bill Patterson came around for pleasant Sunday mornings and they’d all have a few drinks. I think the modern thing now would be brunch, but I don’t think there was too much food involved.

  I grew up in an environment with car-racing people, and that’s all I ever wanted to be – a driver. A winner. A champion. I didn’t go racing to hang around the pool or play golf. I was there to win. When I did go to Europe, I made a conscious decision to forego a lot of things. I couldn’t go around to Mum’s and have a roast dinner on a Sunday for instance. No-one was going to get in my way. I was going to do what I wanted to do, and that was it.

  So I think what I got was an attitude. People say, ‘It’s in the blood.’ And OK, it may be, but I don’t think you inherit it.

  Christian, my first son, is adopted, and he’s a bloody good driver. It’s not in the genes. You look at most Formula One drivers – they don’t have racing fathers. So you don’t need it and you don’t inherit it.

  Dad more or less did his own thing when I was growing up. On several occasions, he made the fatal mistake of leaving the car keys lying about. One such car was the ex-Dan Gurney two-door Galaxie that was raced in England. I used to pinch it and scream around the neighbourhood.

  I came home from school one day and one of the neighbours said, ‘Alan, can I see you for a minute? Tell your father to stop testing that Ford race car because the coppers are onto him and they’re going to lie in wait.’ I said, ‘Oh, thank you very much, that’s great. Thank you.’ That was a lucky escape.

  Dad didn’t want me to start racing too early. I think I was 13 when he bought me an Azusa kart from America. We had quite a bit of success with that one. Because he had no idea what he was doing, he also bought me another go-kart, which had twin 125cc engines. Little did he know that the maximum capacity allowed was 200cc – and this had 250. It went like a
bloody rocket ship, and although it couldn’t race it was fun. It also meant that when I got into the 100cc one, it felt like I could get out and walk faster.

  Most of the tracks were converted drive-in theatres, full of undulations. There was one out in Broadmeadows, at Melbourne’s northern tip, and a really good one at the Puckapunyal army camp up the Hume Highway that hosted the Victorian titles.

  Dad would send me off with one of the mechanics from his dealership to look after me. One of his secretaries, Elsie Pretty, had a go-kart she used to race. One day when I broke mine she lent me hers and I won the Victorian title in it. It was a Rainey kart, built by a guy called Maurie Rainey, who was a dwarf. His daughter used to race as well. Good little go-karts, actually.

  Dad never really used to help me as such. Although he did buy me the go-karts. He also let me drive his Cooper Climax and bought me my first competitive car, a little Mini 850 I raced at the Geelong Sprints in my first ever competitive outing in a car. But that was it.

  No sage words of advice, just the brutal truth on what I did wrong. He used to abuse me if I didn’t win, or if I did something wrong. He never really praised me if I did anything good. I don’t know whether he helped me or not.

  It wasn’t a nurturing, ‘Listen to me, son, I can teach you something’ type of relationship; he just wasn’t that sort of a person. He’d rather get his mechanic to come and help me. It’s a bit like when we used to go to the Melbourne Show; well I say we, but it wasn’t really. He got his secretary to take me and he’d give them a handful of money and tell them to buy me some bags and make sure I was happy. He would no more think about taking me himself than flying to the moon.

  That’s just the way he was and to a certain degree, I’m a bit like that. You learn things at an early age that just aren’t that easy to unlearn.

  I’m not big into the parent-teacher interviews or going to the father’s days at the school and all those sort of things. I’m just not into it. Sometimes I think I should be, but it’s not me. Thank God I’ve got a wife that does do all that – it means I don’t have to.

  I developed into who I was at an early age, and that is pretty much it. I was a shit of a kid, I used to fight all the other kids. Exactly the sort of kid I don’t want any of mine to be.

  Dad’s business was going quite well and he was going all over Australia to race, with me in tow. But running a car dealership in Australia in the 1960s is not like what it is now. You couldn’t hold more than one franchise at a time: if you were a Holden dealer, that was it; you couldn’t do Alfa or Fiat as well. You also couldn’t own more than one Holden dealership. When he was racing on the Gold Coast once, he bought another Holden dealership off a guy called Jack Moran, and then he bought Tweed Motors a little later. General Motors got in touch with him and said, ‘Hey, you can only have one. Pick which one you want to keep.’

  Unfortunately he kept the Essendon one.

  It’s a funny old world, I’ll tell you. Dad raced the Maybach on the Gold Coast, at a race track in Ashmore – and years later, I bought an industrial complex at 73 Ashmore Road, not knowing it was exactly where the pits were for the race track. He had a big shunt there too. He was going over a bridge in the Maybach 2, which had its fuel tank behind the rear axle. As the fuel load dropped, the back got light and he went over the bridge and off she went into the trees. The Maybach was cut in half. All Dad got was a cut chin – and maybe concussion, because he was still sitting there with the steering wheel in his hands, saying, ‘How am I going?’

  Then he went back to Moran Motors and they all got into the grog and tore crabs apart and that is when he bought that dealership.

  These days I live on the Gold Coast, which is where I used to go just about every school holidays. I’d bring the dog up, we’d go down the beach. It wasn’t very developed then: there was the old ski gardens with the go-kart track out in the middle of the cane fields, which I went to as often as I could. The weather was good, and that was what I remembered most, which is why I moved here.

  I was quick in karts and starting to win other races as well as that Victorian title. Karts were great for someone like me, who wasn’t very technical: if I take something to pieces, you can absolutely guarantee there’ll be something left over when I put it back together. If I change a light bulb, I think I’ve done a major job.

  You couldn’t change gear ratios or anything serious on karts. You could change sprockets, make it go a little bit harder down the straight or a bit more out of the corner, and you could play around with tyre pressures, but that was it. What you were doing was honing your race craft. You’re lining up people, you’re going deep, going in under brakes and all that sort of stuff. Whether you know that or not, you’re learning that for the next level of racing. It was all stuff that I took with me.

  Feel, perception and judgement are the biggest assets that a driver can have – and a nice big set of balls helps too. You need to be willing to take a bit of a risk – and you do have to take a risk every now and again. If you don’t, you’re not going to get anywhere.

  I was very happy to take risks in the kart. I used to ride over people and I wasn’t scared of banging wheels. I would do whatever was necessary to win. If it meant having somebody off, I’d do it. That sounds bad, but so be it.

  Back then in karts, as it was for a long time here, it was ‘Stan’s son’ that was going OK. For the last 30 years or so it’s been the other way around: he’s ‘Alan’s dad’.

  Even with the Jones name and even with the wins, it wasn’t easy and I don’t think it ever is in car racing, especially if you want to drive Formula One. There were hundreds of thousands of young drivers around the world chasing one of 20 drives, and I was just one of them. A bag full of cash – which I didn’t have – makes it easier, but you still have to be good.

  Fortunately, I was one of those people that was often in the right place at the right time, and used the equipment I was given to show my ability. With that I was able to keep getting into the right cars.

  Some of the guys Dad got to help me were pretty handy too. I’ll never forget the day the old man sent Otto Stone to help me in a race up here on the Gold Coast, when Dad was racing a Maserati. Otto was the chief mechanic on the Maserati, but there he was looking after young Alan. I took my karting as seriously as he did the Maserati.

  That day I jumped into the lead early and was half a lap in front of the field. Otto was leaning over the fence going, ‘Slow down, don’t win by too much. Slow down.’

  I go around the bloody track and who should be hanging over the fence but the old man saying, ‘Speed up, you little …’ There was a lady next to him saying, ‘Look at that little smart arse, he’s slowing down.’ To the old man, that was a red rag to a bull; to him, that was embarrassing.

  So he’s there saying speed up, Otto’s saying slow down.

  In the end, I slowed down, and then I copped another lesson in life: the kid behind me screamed past and won. Then I got abused by the old man, and I said, ‘Otto was here, you told me to take notice of him.’ I would have won by a lap had they left me alone. But I learnt my lesson: the only bloke who knows what’s happening is the driver, and that’s me. Even to this day, when people say this, that and the other thing about what is going on in a race car, the only bloke that really knows is the driver.

  I learnt that your attitude must be to win at all costs. Nice guys don’t win, I’m afraid. By the time I was leaving the house for a race, I was starting to turn into a nasty and aggressive person. It didn’t matter whether I was on the plane or in a hire car, I was going somewhere to win, not make friends.

  I’m a bad loser, simple as that. I’m very, very competitive – and not just at car racing. When I was driving for Williams I’d go up to Frank Williams’ place and play tennis – and I used to smash my racquet and carry on. I’d get very upset. Same with golf; I used to throw my clubs and have little dummy spits … my wife refuses to play with me. It wasn’t because I was being beaten, it was
because I couldn’t manage the shot that I wanted. I didn’t know why I wasn’t able to hit that ball like Greg Norman. If he can do it, why can’t I?

  I was hard on myself, which is one reason I retired early. If I didn’t qualify in the top four, you couldn’t talk to me. I used to go back to the motel in a shocking mood.

  I was also superstitious, although I wasn’t developing too many little quirks in karts. If I had parked in a certain spot in the car park and I got on pole, I’d try to get that spot the next day or the next time I was at that track. I happened to have a red pair of underpants on one day and I thought, ‘These are quick,’ so from that time on, I always used to race with red underpants. I always used to hop in and out of the car from the left-hand side. Just stupid little things.

  Don’t ask me why, but I always liked it when I saw an ambulance. I would say ‘ambulance’ under my helmet. Fortunately I didn’t need the ambulance much in my career or life.

  The closest a car ever came to killing me had nothing to do with racing. I was playing tag with my cousins on the median strip in Hoddle Street – Melbourne’s main north-south road, would you believe. I was rolling around on the ground, and I rolled off the median strip onto the road. A car’s tyre went past my head so close I felt it brush my hair. I could have been squashed or killed easily.

  I’m not a religious person, probably not game enough to be an atheist, so I’m an agnostic, and I’m sitting on the bench until He comes and tells me otherwise. I am a believer in destiny, and I think that just wasn’t my day to be squashed under a wheel.

  I loved every part of my racing back then. I spent quite a bit of time with people who worked for Dad, like Otto. It is funny looking back about the ones I remember and why … it wasn’t always about what I learned from them, it was often just something that was different. Like Otto’s wife always used to give us toasted sardine sandwiches – and I’ve never forgotten Otto’s K3 MG, which was a beautiful maroony coloured car, stunning. Then there was John Sawyer, who had a moustache and always wore the flat hat like the English wore back then.