Winning Is Not Enough - Book Review

To be honest, I've never been a great fan of Jackie Stewart. Though I'm too young to have seen him race, I'm well aware that he was one of the sport's all time greats. You don't win three World Championships without being very special indeed, and you certainly don't win by four whole minutes - in the rain - at the Nordschliefe, without otherworldly talent. No matter how good Dunlop's wet weather rubber might have been....

But out of the car, or more to the point, in his post-F1 career as a team owner, sponsor's 'representative' and pundit, I never warmed to him. To me, he came across as hectoring, self impo0rtant and someone who had played a part in the sport's becoming more corporate, more sanitised. I've never met the man, though, and to judge him solely by his public persona is being more than a little unfair. Nonetheless, it was with some ambivalence that I picked up his mammoth 500+ page autobiography, Winning is not enough.


Stewart's Tyrrell 001 - the car in which he won his first World title.

The book left me with a somewhat revised, and perhaps more positive opinion of Stewart the man. Reading his account of growing up, the son of a garage owner in a small conservative Scottish town in the early 1950s, it becomes clear that he's very much a product of his time and his place. A fastidious, serious-minded and honest man, from a culture which believed in the virtues of hard work, of being careful with money, of not taking unnecessary chances. His account of his early struggles with dyslexia, and of his later work to encourage the UK and Scottish Governments to do more to assist children with the condition left me with a newfound respect for the man - it is hard to imagine many of today's pampered sportsmen - racing drivers or otherwise - being prepared to put in the time and effort required to influence Government policy.

The problem I had was not so much with Stewart the man, but with the book. Fundamentally, people will pick it up because Jackie Stewart is a triple Formula 1 World Champion, a winner of 27 Grands Prix, who later went on to establish his own team with his son, which itself went on to win the German Grand Prix of 1999 before he sold up to Ford. Yet his racing career takes up, I think, less than a third of the book.

Now I suspect that Stewart himself does not regard his F1 titles as necessarily the greatest achievements of his life, and he perhaps does not want to be defined by them. I doubt I'm alone though, among likely readers, in not being especially interested in Stewart's post-F1 business career. And an awful lot of the book is given over to his later work for Ford, Rolex and sundry corporations. For the most part, it's not terribly interesting stuff. His account of his work for Ford advising them on new models is mildly diverting and shows how the skills he learned on the race track could be put to use elsewhere, but I fail to see why anybody should be particularly interested in his role as an 'ambassador' for the Royal Bank of Scotland and his friendship with its disgraced former Chief Executive, Fred Goodwin. More than anything else, this was a book crying out for a good editor to impose some discipline, get rid of some of the more tiresome name-dropping and the life-advice that reminded me of nothing so much as a mother reminding her son to wash behind his ears...

There's some good stuff lurking in this book though. A paean to the Tyrrell 003, the car with which Stewart won 8 Grands Prix and the 1971 World title, and arguably the most successful individual chassis ever produced in F1. A moving tribute to his 1973 team mate Francois Cevert, who was killed in practice for the final race of that season at Watkins Glen is just one illustration of quite how much more dangerous motorsport was in Stewart's day. He was one of many of Stewart's contemporaries - Clark, Mclaren, Rindt, Siffert and many more besides, who died at the wheel. For all that Denis Jenkinson never entirely forgave him for it, Stewart deserves much credit for his single-minded drive to improve safety standards in the sport and probably there are not a few drivers who would not be alive today but for his work.


If Stewart can dedicate a whole chapter of his biography to his dogs, then you can surely forgive me one picture of my old Setter...

Unfortunately, there's not nearly as much detail about his racing career as I would have liked to have seen. The 1968 and 1972 seasons get only a few dismissive lines - which in a book of more than 500 pages, seems hard to justify. Especially when he's quite happy to dedicate more than 20 pages to a meeting with King Hussein of Jordan, and a whole chapter to his pet dogs. There are aspects of his post-F1 career I would have liked to know more about though. The establishment of Stewart F1, the last real independent Grand Prix team to emerge before the manufacturer teams took over at the turn of the century, was an incredible achievement. That, together with his son, Paul, he created a team which won a race in only its third season and did so without ever going into debt is, in the context of the litany of expensive disasters that is the history of new F1 teams over the last 30 years, scarcely credible. And yet there's only a fairly brief potted account of how he actually did it.


A 1998 Stewart F1 car - now resident in the National Museum of Scotland

His reluctance to provide more than a summary of his time as BRDC president is more understandable. As he himself remarks, that chapter of his life really needs a book in itself, and given some of those involved, a veritable phalanx of lawyers to go over it prior to publication. He makes a spirited case for the Government lending financial support to the British Grand Prix, though in the end, I remain unconvinced, and left wondering if he fully appreciates how politically difficult it would be to pour taxpayers' money into CVC's coffers, no matter how many jobs the race might ultimately sustain.

Perhaps it is Jackie Stewart's very success, the sense of a life well lived, which is the downfall of this book. I was struck by how much more interesting the last racing biography I read, Tommy Byrne's Crashed and Byrned, was - but perhaps that is only because the reasons for Byrne's ultimate failure at the highest level of the sport make a more intriguing tale than Stewart's success.

In the end, while I didn't dislike the book as such, I can't really recommend it wholeheartedly either. If you're a huge Jackie Stewart fan, there's probably enough to hold your interest, but if you're looking for a racing biography, there are better books out there. Aside from the aforementioned Crashed and Byrned, Niki Lauda's biography, To Hell and Back, is similarly comprehensive, in covering his life outside racing, but, perhaps because Lauda was always a more outspoken, less polite man, its a more interesting read. And that's the problem with this book. Stewart, a man who settled easily into corporate life after his retirement, is not a man to dish the dirt, to tell untold stories. And in a man, that is perhaps admirable, but in an autobiographer, it left me feeling a little short-changed.

Book Review: Crashed And Byrned - The Greatest Racing Driver You Never Saw

Some years ago, I found myself talking to an elderly relative about his time as a football talent scout for, I think, Blackpool, in the North East of England. I wondered if he had ever run into Paul Gascoigne in the course of his work: "Oh yes" he told me "Saw him when he was 8 years old. Incredibly gifted, a real natural. But it was clear even then that he wasn't right in the head." I asked if the club he worked for had ever tried to sign him. He shook his head. "No, he looked like he would be far too much like hard work. We'd never keep him on the rails. I didn't think he would ever make it as a professional player." History, I suppose, has proven him both right and wrong in his judgment of Mr Gascoigne.

You might be wondering why I bring the story up. The answer is that I was reminded of it while reading Tommy Byrne's recently published autobiography, Crashed And Byrned - The Greatest Racing Driver You Never Saw. I'm not suggesting that the two are especially similar. Byrne may have had a wild side but the book does not suggest a man as fundamentally troubled as Gascoigne. It's more than they were both incredible natural talents who, perhaps because of their upbringing, or perhaps because of their innate disposition, were cursed with a self-destructive streak which made it difficult for them to make the most of their otherworldly abilities. Byrne may never have been as troubled as Gascoigne, but while football clubs are well used to handling and reining in wayward kids from difficult backgrounds, the moneyed world of professional motorsport was not.

Written with one of the best motorsport journalists of our time, Mark Hughes, this is a book which I had been looking forward to for a while, and it is certainly a driver biography quite unlike any other I have read.

Byrne came from a poor Irish family in a rural village outside of Dundalk. The early part of the book, recounting adventures from his childhood, will have a familiar ring to anyone who had read accounts of growing up poor in Catholic Ireland in the 1960s and 70s. Certainly, it is a world away from the upbringing of the man whom Hughes considered his only real rival in terms of outright pace, Ayrton Senna. Nonetheless, there's a curious parallel early on in the book. Both had their earliest driving experiences at the wheel of a tractor. However, while Senna picked this up on his millionaire father's vast cattle ranch, Byrne did so while helping out at a nearby farm whose owner had realised that the local kids provided a cheap (i.e. free) workforce to help him get the harvest in.

Byrne gets just one lucky break to get him started on the motorsport ladder, when his mother inherits a bit of farmland and he persuades her to borrow £3000 against it to buy Byrne an elderly Crossle Formula Ford. It's hopelessly uncompetitive, even in the backwater of Irish Formula Ford racing, but its enough to bring him to the attention of Mondello Park Racing School, who give him loan of a Royale for the 1978 Formula Ford Festival at Brands Hatch. In a field of several hundred, and on a track he has never seen before, he finishes in the top 10, in a car which was far from truly competitive. From there on in, he secures drives on talent alone - he has to - he certainly doesn't have the money to pay for rides.

The next four years of Byrne's career is the story of a meteoric rise through the ranks, achieved on a shoestring budget. Formula Ford 1600 champion in 1980, FFord 2000 champion a year later, and British F3 champion in 1982 with Murray Taylor Racing. It's told in Byrne's conversational, scattergun style, with co-author Mark Hughes adding occasional background commentary to move the story along. It's immensely readable, and provides an intriguing insight into the racing world of the early 1980s. It says much for Byrne's talents behind the wheel that he never paid for a drive. In F3, in particular, he scraped by from race to race, absolutely dependent on the wins to get the money together for the next race.

This part of the book also gives a flavour of what was perhaps both Byrne's greatest strength and his undoing - his sheer bloodyminded front. Here he was, racing for free in F3 where drivers are usually expected to bring the budget to the team, and he threatens to walk out on them unless they gave him a new chassis, engine and race engineer. He got the chassis, and sure enough, he was instantly right back on the pace - old engine and race engineer notwithstanding. But still, how many young, inexperienced drivers would have had the nerve to demand what he did from a team so clearly struggling for cash?

By late 1982, Byrne was a Grand Prix driver. After Derek Daly had been snapped up by Williams, Teddy Yip's ailing Theodore team were in need of a replacement, and following a standout performance in that year's British GP F3 support race, the team alighted upon Byrne. The car, and more particularly, the team, were a lost cause, and Byrne found himself no more able to get a competitive result out of it than Daly had been. He raced 5 times for Theodore, making it through qualifying only twice, and crashing out of both those races.

Then came the Mclaren test on which both Byrne and Hughes consider his career to have hinged. A prize for winning the British F3 title, Byrne was invited to test for the team alongside Thierry Boutsen, Stefan Johannson, and two men who subsequently disappeared into obscurity, David Scott and Quique Mansilla. By all accounts, Byrne was the star of the test - a second a lap quicker than Boutsen, who went on to have a successful F1 career and win 3 Grands Prix. Suggestions that the timing was faulty and he was actually faster still, and that the team were so nervous that Byrne would write off their car that they didn't give him full throttle, if true, indicate his performance was more impressive still. It wasn't enough to get him a race drive, and as he'd walked out on Theodore at the end of the 1982 season, Byrne was left without a seat for 1983.

The book takes an altogether different turn from here on in. Byrne's confidence, it appears, was always built on shaky foundations, and following the knock-back from Mclaren, he lost focus and his career went into a downward spiral. Three years later, he wound up racing in the US, driving for a succession of underfunded Indy Lights teams, and working on the side as a hired gun in the US IMSA series. There is more than a hint of Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing about it, and a cast of grotesque characters such as could have come straight from a Carl Hiaasen novel.

There's Marshall Robbins, the manic-depressive multi-millionaire who is utterly convinced that he will win the 1992 US Presidential election, and who pays a succession of stooges to follow him around. Then there's Orchio, the Mexican bisexual playboy alcoholic who liked to celebrate team victories by hiring gaggles of prostitutes for team orgies and then trying to have his way with his driver - enough to make Max Mosley blanche, I don't doubt. He even ends up teamed up with Motley Crue's Vince Neal in a final, shambolic run at the Indy Lights Championship. It's gripping, comic stuff, but there's an underlying sadness about it all. Here is a man who just might have been one of the outstanding talents of his generation, wasting away in obscurity in the backwaters of the US racing scene, unrecognised, driving for any lunatic who'll pay his bills.

If I have a gripe with this book, it is that at just under 200 pages, it is too short. Too much is passed over without explanation. This may be in keeping with what one suspects is Tommy's hyperactive, attention-deficit personality, but it does sometimes leave the reader thinking - wait? Where is he now? Who's he driving for? I've heard it said that that the book was cut back considerably at the behest of the publishers, and had originally been rather longer. If so, it's a shame, because I suspect the longer book would have been a better read.

Of course, the book's central point is that Byrne was a great talent, in the same kind of league as Villeneuve, Senna or Prost, who was overlooked because an elitist sport couldn't get past his poverty-stricken background and his Irish urchin sense of humour. I'm afraid, even by the end, I'm not completely convinced. I can't help but think that a man as hair-trigger and temperamental as Byrne was probably not quite the complete package as a potential F1 World Champion. He might have had the talent, but did he have the application? The patience? Did he bring the same kind of intensity to his racing that, for example, Senna did? After all, while none may have come from the kind of dirt poor background that Byrne did, Messrs Kimi Raikkonen, Fernando Alonso and Michael Schumacher, who between them have won every F1 title this decade, were not born wealthy - they got where they did through sheer talent. What did they have that Byrne didn't? Luck, maybe, but one can't help but think that they also had a calmness, a focus on the job that Byrne lacked.

The sad thing is, we'll never know now. Not for sure. What Crashed and Byrned did persuade
me was that this was a man who was unfairly overlooked - someone who had done enough to merit a decent shot at F1, but who never got it. Why wasn't he banging on all the teams' doors after he won the F3 Championship in 1982? Why did he walk out on Theodore without another drive in place? Might he have got further had he hired a proper manager to promote him? This book might not answer those questions - they are unanswerable, but it is a racing biography quite unlike any other. I highly recommend it.

Book Review - The Last Road Race - by Richard Williams

The Last Road Race - Richard Williams

Trivia question: What was the longest circuit ever to host a round of the Formula 1 World Championship? The common wrong answer would be the 14-mile Nordschliefe - the legendary undulating strip of tarmac that snakes through the Eiffel mountains and which last hosted a Grand Prix back in 1976. In fact, though, the longest circuit ever to appear on the F1 calendar was the 15 mile road circuit on the Adriatic Coast, based around the Italian town of Pescara.

Pescara held but a single F1 Grand Prix, in 1957. While the Nurburgring was an ever-twisting constant challenge, Pescara was a triangular course consisting in large part of two very long straights, with a third side which twisted up the Abruzzo hills before gently descending back down towards the sea. It was not a driver's circuit in the same way that the 'Ring was, though opinions on its merits differed. Stirling Moss told Williams "I thought it was fantastic. It was just like being a kid out for a burn up. A wonderful feeling, what racing's all about." Jack Brabham, on the other hand, opined that "Those road courses were bloody dangerous and nasty, all of them. And Pescara was the worst."

Richard Williams' slim volume tells the story of the 1957 race. Had the book been about the race alone, which was no classic in the conventional sense, it might have ended up a rather dull read. The truth is that, while Luigi Musso put up a decent initial fight, Stirling Moss was never really challenged in his Vanwall after the opening laps, and finished over 3 minutes ahead of his nearest pursuer. The other Vanwall drivers hit trouble, and the Maseratis of Behra and Fangio simply couldn't live with them for pace.

Readers of Williams' motorsport books though, will know that he is all but incapable of writing a dull book, and this is no exception. The book provides pen portraits of the event's major protagonists - be they drivers like Moss, Tony Brooks, Luigi Musso and Roy Salvadori, or team owners such as Enzo Ferrari and the Vanwall chief who aped and despised him, bearing magnate Tony Vandervell. These give an interesting background not only to the race, but to the state and nature of Grand Prix racing as a whole in the late 1950s. Of particular intrigue is the rather convoluted tale of how Enzo Ferrari opted to boycott the race, in the wake of the Mille Miglia tragedy earlier that year, but contrived to ensure that Luigi Musso turned up in a Ferrari 801 anyway.

The book also gives some of the history of the Pescara circuit itself. While the venue only ever hosted one F1 Grand Prix, the annual Coppa Acerbo race had been taking place since the 1920s and had a considerable history. The first race had been won by none other than Enzo Ferrari himself, shortly before he gave up driving. The circuit was as dangerous as Brabham suggests, claiming the life of Algerian ace Guy Moll after he collided with a backmarker and ploughed into a house in 1934.

Interviews with the surviving protagonists also add much to the book. The reminiscences of Moss, Salvadori, Brabahm and Brooks help to give a flavour of what the world of Grand Prix racing was like back in the 1950s. Of equal value are the diaries of legendary motor-racing correspondent Dennis Jenkinson, provided for use by Doug Nye. Together, they paint a picture of a very different racing environment, where drivers did deals from race to race, and would gather to party together on the evening after the race, rather than flying off in private jets or hiding in personal motorhomes.

Much more informal and ad-hoc than it is today, there are nonetheless hints of the transition that was already beginning to take place, and which would eventually lead to the TV dominated, corporately controlled, multi-million dollar sport that is modern F1. By 1957, the Pescara race was already something of an anachronism - a throwback to an earlier time when motor races were point-to-point affairs, racing through the countryside from city to city. The track may not have been on the scale of the Targa Florio, but at 16 miles, it was substantially longer than all but a handful of the other F1 circuits of the time, and unlike the Nurburgring, it was held not on a permanent circuit, but on dusty, rough public roads.

Richard Williams admits that Pescara was not, in fact the last road race in F1. Road racing continued at Spa for another 15 years or so, and if street racing counts, continues to this day in the form of the ever more anachronistic Monaco Grand Prix. Rather, Williams feels that the title conveys an emotional truth. For him, "It marked the end of a certain philosophy of road racing. No longer would massed-start races, on open roads from town to village and back again, be organised in that ad hoc way, without permanent facilities or even the vaguest notion of safety precautions."

In a world where two-bit production line biographies of current F1 stars are ten a penny (quite possibly literally, in the case of remaindered copies of the many rushed biographies of Lewis Hamilton produced for last Christmas) Richard Williams book offers something different, and worth seeking out. Others have written more comprehensive histories of this period of the sport (Doug Nye, in particular) but no other book I have read does so well in capturing the spirit of that age. An unreserved recommendation.