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.

Better than they appeared?

Talk about motor racing to an outsider, and sooner or later, he or she can almost be guaranteed to comment "But surely its all about the cars isn't it? How do you know who the best drivers are when you need the best car to win." For me, this additional complexity - the way that the abilities of the driver and the speed of the car can be so hard to disentangle - is one of the things that fascinates me about motorsport where most other sports leave me cold.

Such a discussion normally leads to another question: Of all the drivers you've seen, which would have proven to be really first-rate had they been given the opportunity in a front-running team? My own answer to this question is unusual - but I stand by it. In the time I've been following Formula 1, I really don't think that any driver who had a career of any length - let's say a whole season - was an undiscovered superstar. The obvious possible exception was Stefan Bellof - the young German who drove for Tyrrell in 1984 and 1985 before dying in a sportscar race at Spa. He might have had what it took to mix it with Senna, Prost, Mansell, Piquet and Berger in the late eighties. But really, he's the exception that proves the rule. Even in the desperately uncompetitive atmo-Tyrrell, he'd done enough to catch the attention of the big team bosses - and had he lived, he would have been in a Ferrari in 1986. The 1986 Ferrari was not exactly the finest piece of kit ever to come out of Maranello, but it would have been enough for Bellof to show whether he had it what it took.

Is there anyone, though, who might have been overlooked through their whole career? Not really. A case can perhaps be made for Bernd Schneider, whose 2 years in Erich Zakowski's awful Zakspeed cars never really gave him a chance to shine. His subsequent long and highly successful career in the DTM against pretty classy opposition suggest he may have been rather better than he appeared in F1.

There have been plenty of drivers who could have won races in the right car. People like Derek Warwick, Martin Brundle, Eddie Cheever, Pierluigi Martini and Nicola Larini. None of these, though, were true greats, and they got just enough chances, that had they been something really special, they would have been able to show it. They were, if you like, the Felipe Massas and Giancarlo Fisichellas of their day.

If anything, the strongest cases are probably those who, for whatever reason, never got to F1 in the first place. Tom Kristensen and Sebastien Bourdais just might have been very quick indeed - although I still hold out the hope that Sea-Bass at least might yet be given an F1 chance. The question of drivers who never got the opportunity to race in F1 in the first place, though, is not quite the same - and perhaps I'll return to it some other time.

To return to our argumentative man in the pub, it is interesting that he never puts his argument the other way round. Never says "I don't understand Formula 1, you never get to find out who's really built the best car because it all depends on who has the best drivers." Now, that's perhaps understandable. People are more interested in superstars than in teams of anonymous boffins. But it goes beyond the casual fans - even on the motorsport talkboards, I struggle to recall a single thread about cars whose potential was frustrated for want of a quick driver. Which is odd really, because I think there have been a few...

Cast your mind back, if you will, to 1988. In a year utterly dominated by Mclaren, just three teams actually led a lap of a Grand Prix. Mclaren - of course, for they won 15 of them, and Ferrari, who occasionally turned up the boost and disappeared into the distance until they ran out of fuel... and, though many fewer will remember, the beautiful aqua-marine March that was Adrian Newey's first racing car. It may only have led a single lap - in the hands of Ivan Capelli at the Japanese Grand Prix - but it was a rather better car than the statistics suggest. The bare facts are that their best result was an impressive second place in the Portuguese Grand Prix, pushing Prost's Mclaren all the way to the line, and that they scored 20 points, placing them equal 5th in the constructor's championship. What that doesn't tell you is that, towards the end of the year, they were, on occasion, Mclaren's closest rivals.

At the time, a large part of this was put down to the talents of Messrs Capelli and Gugelmin - seen as hard young chargers taking the new March team much further up the grid than it had any right to be. Team manager Ian Phillips, later of Jordan and Midland/Spyker, remarked that he had "the best two 25 year old drivers in the business." But did he? Capelli would come close to winning again with March (or Leyton House as they were known by that time) in 1990 at Paul Ricard, but neither Capelli nor Gugelmin ever achieved much in their post-March careers. Capelli was destroyed by Alesi in the admittedly awful Ferrari F92A before disappearing altogether, tail between his legs, after a couple of races with Jordan in 1993. Gugelmin was equally anonymous in the, to be fair, rather hopeless Jordan Yamaha in 1992, and following the end of the season would never be seen in F1 again. He spent nearly ten years in Champ Cars after that, but won just one race in that time - suggesting he was competent, but hardly special.

In retrospect, it appears to me that the March 881, and its later derivatives, were much quicker than we realised - and let down, at least in the final part of 1988, by a very average driver pairing. Perhaps this is no surprise, given that they were the early works of Adrian Newey, a man whose creations would dominate F1 through much of the following decade. Later, he would comment that while the Mclaren MP4/4 was clearly the class of the field that year, when it came to aerodynamic performance, he was convinced the March was superior. That's not to say the March was actually a better car. It manifestly was not. It really didn't like bumps, it was at least arguably too small and cramped to be driven to its full potential, and it was very fragile. It did, on the other hand, seem to cope with the cooling requirements of John Judd's early V8 F1 engine rather better than the Williams managed. What it does suggest, though is that the March was a better car than its results indicated.

Sometimes, its not so much that a car doesn't reach its full potential because of its drivers, as that a driver gets more credit than they are due for what they achieve with a car that is better than anyone realises. In 1988, Tyrrell got it horribly wrong with their understeery 017. The following year, they bounced back in style. The Tyrrell 018 was a very effective device indeed - quite possibly the best handling car on the grid. In the hands of Michele Alboreto and Jonathan Palmer, it was decently, rather than exceptionally quick. Palmer, though was no more than a journeyman, and Alboreto never really recovered from the bruising he took at Ferrari through the mid-eighties. When Jean Alesi stepped into the car at the French Grand Prix that year, after Alboreto had fallen out with Tyrrell over a sponsorship clash, he made an instant impact, running as high as second, and finishing fourth.

He would continue to race part-time in the Tyrrell through the rest of the season, as and when his F3000 commitments allowed. Despite competing in only half of the season's 16 races, he finished up 9th in the drivers championship that year. The best result for the 018 though, came in the first race of 1990, where Alesi led Senna in the early stages round the streets of Phoenix (a place where handling was always going to count for more than outright power). In the event, he would finish up second, sealing his reputation as an up and coming talent. He would move to Ferrari the following year, but through a further decade in the sport, never really lived up to that initial promise. All of which inevitably leads towards the conclusion that his apparent brilliance was an illusion - he was a good, rather than a great driver, in a car that was much better than anyone realised.

The Tyrrell 018 and the March 881, good as they were though, were never going to be regular race winners. If, for instance, Senna and Prost had been driving the March, and Gugelmin and Capelli the Mclaren, then March might have picked up a race win or three, but Capelli or Gugelmin would undoubtedly have ended up world champion. This begs an interesting question - was there ever a car that was not merely better than it appeared, but might have been a championship contended had the driving line up been right?

One has to be careful here. The 1995 Williams might have been the best car in the field, but nobody can pretend that this was something the average race fan was entirely unaware of. To my mind, a much better case can be made for the 1990 Williams. OK, so Adrian Newey hadn't yet sprinkled his magic fairy dust at the Grove factory. On the other hand, the Renault V10s were, in retrospect, probably already at least the equal of, and perhaps better than, the lumps produced by Honda and Ferrari, which certainly had power, but were thirsty and heavy. With Thierry Boutsen and Riccardo Patrese, the team won 2 races that year - level pegging with Benetton and well behind Mclaren and Ferrari. But who could honestly say that either driver was on the same kind of level as Prost, Senna or even Piquet. It is hard to know for sure what the ultimate potential of the Williams FW13B was, but one this is for sure - when Mansell joined the team the following year, they became a force to be reckoned with. Coincidence?