Sir Jackie still stopping the traffic 40 years on

Published on Tuesday 6 September 2005 00:15

SIR Jackie Stewart went for a walk in Monza's atmospheric royal park, on the outskirts of Milan, on Sunday armed with a chipped tartan-trimmed white crash helmet, a less than burnished and uninscribed trophy plus a 1965 motorsport annual.

Wearing familiar tartan trews and bunnet he could well have left the motor-racing artefacts on the Challenger executive jet at Linate Airport as he strode from the helicopter landing area, through the ardent Italian "tifosi" F1 fans and into the ring-fenced Grand Prix paddock.

Such is John Young Stewart's enduring, transcending popularity, he is to his sport what Jack Nicklaus is to golf, Mohammed Ali represents in boxing and Pele means to football.

The accompanying props were soon pressed into service in front of a battery of cameras: the helmet and goggles worn on another balmy race day in September 1965, the trophy which accompanied the garland, and the annual record-ing Sir Jackie's first Grand Prix victory 40 years ago.

All that was missing was the spindly orange-snouted British Racing Green BRM that carried him to the first of 27 wins as he capitalised on veteran teammate Graham Hill's error on the daunting Parabolica corner two laps from the finish. Looking on with benign bemusement was another motor-racing knight, Sir Frank Williams, whose gleaming corporate hospitality motor home provided the backdrop for the Stewart photocall and sundry interviews.

Not that the setting was totally a courteous arrangement between two F1 doyens. Virtually every shot included Sir Jackie's crisp white shirt emblazoned with the Royal Bank of Scotland logo. This was testimony to the former triple world champion's pulling power as a commercial sponsorship networker and RBS's significant contribution to BMW Williams' annual 200 million budget in a three-year deal.

Marking that pivotal first win out of 27 Grand Prix triumphs (from 99 races) also served to contrast the racing eras where Sir Jackie's 1.5-litre BRM was devoid of sponsors' decals.

Four years later Monza, still with no chicanes, was the setting for another Stewart career milestone as he won a slipstreaming epic for Matra-Ford at over 140mph to seal his first world title. The wheel-to-wheel racing, Sir Jackie recalls, turned out to be less dangerous than the enthusiastic crowd, who trapped the new champion and his wife Helen in a toilet block, before they took refuge in a tyre truck, which was nearly overturned.

But Monza's motorsport heritage has been earned by tragedy and triumph and in 1970 Stewart lost close friend and rival Jochen Rindt, who was killed in practice driving a Lotus.

Rindt became the sport's first posthumous champion and Sir Jackie, after paying his respects to the dead Austrian, resumed qualifying and finished an "automatic pilot" second in the following day's race.

Sir Jackie recalled: "My team boss Ken Tyrrell told me I had to go back out and he was right. I remember being in tears, but shut the visor down and went fastest in the session.

"When I came back to the pits and the visor was up the devastation resumed. It seemed callous, but it is about compartmentalising emotion."

While he would never claim to be an amateur psychologist, Sir Jackie concedes that the current generation of drivers, blessed with immensely strong cars, and inherently safer tracks, are less cautious if not reckless.

He includes the seven-times champion, Germany's Michael Schumacher, in that judgment. Sir Jackie said: "Schumacher goes off the road most race weekends, in practice or qualifying finding the limits.

"I can count on one hand the number of times I crashed out. We could not afford to hit telegraph poles or trees. Schumacher knows which corners he can stretch the elastic on.

"I am concerned the higher safety thresholds have made drivers more complacent but I am not saying ours were the glory days."

So spoke a driver whose often unpopular safety crusade laid the foundations for today's sport, whose last victim was Ayrton Senna at Imola on 1 May, 1994. "The overalls I wore when I won that first race were light cotton and might as well have been pyjamas and that helmet lasted me all season," he explained.

"Now the guys wear several layers of fire-proof material plus head and neck braces, and their 5,000 helmets are replaced after every race."

In 1965, his F1 debut year, Sir Jackie grossed 20,000, of which 4,500 came from his BRM retainer, although he points out that the chairman of ICI then earned around 5,500.

This year, Schumacher is likely to generate around 35 million in earnings. Without naming names, Sir Jackie doubts if the current generation, except perhaps his former protg David Coulthard, will have the same commercial and media clout four decades after they finally pull into the pits.

He reasoned: "I am still commercially alive because sport provides a tremendous springboard to network in other spheres, business and government, whether it is in boardrooms or corridors of power." Or even palaces in his case via links with royalty. His relationship with Ford, which lasted more than 40 years and for whom he won 25 grands prix, ended last year on good terms. Now Sir Jackie conducts much of his business from the back of a gleaming black Lexus.

The third year of the affiliation between RBS and Williams is rumoured to involve an engine deal with Toyota, for whom Lexus is a premium division. With that penchant for networking and bringing sport and business together, a pair of RBS-liveried Williams-Lexus on the 2007 grids has a certain logic to it.

'Tough for Schumacher'

SIR Jackie Stewart believes Michael Schumacher should have quit at the end of last season when he was at his peak, writes Ian Parkes.

Schumacher's fall from grace, after five years as champion with Ferrari, continued with Sunday's lowly tenth place in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza. With four races to go, the German is already out of the title race.

"If he had retired last year he would have done so as the complete hero, the dominant person," said Stewart, who went out at the top when he won his last title 32 years ago.

"But he now has to win grands prix, and not just one or two, he has to win the world championship to prove his dominance again if he is going to go down in history as the man of his time."