AJ by Alan Jones

Author:Alan Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2017-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

15

The Championship Year

I TURNED UP for work for the start of the 1980 season confident but nervous. We were the team all the others had to catch, but that didn’t mean it was going to be easy. The bookies had Gilles Villeneuve favourite for the championship in the Ferrari, but we felt we had the upper hand for a number of reasons.

Patrick Head wasn’t going to let the others catch us though; he was as competitive as me. We had the Ford Cosworth engine, which was good and solid, but more than half the field was using it and it was clearly not as powerful as the Ferrari flat 12 or the Renault turbo, although they did have their own issues.

Ferrari, the reigning champ, had a new car, the 312T5, to race against our FW07B. There were stories going around that the engine was so bulky it made it hard to get the ground effects to work as well as those of us with physically smaller engines. Good.

We also had to pay attention to what was coming from Ligier – remember how fast they were at the start of 1979 – Renault, Brabham, McLaren and, of course, Lotus. There were lots of other changes up and down the field: Alain Prost was starting his grand prix career with McLaren and Carlos Reutemann had joined me at Williams. Carlos was bloody quick – he had won races at both Ferrari and Brabham and spent a year at Lotus before we lured him across.

Instead of going to Paul Ricard, we tested in mid-December in Argentina with the 1979 car updated to FW07B spec. Most of the main teams were there with us and we came away fastest, which meant to our eyes no-one had found a demon tweak yet. I flew back to the US with Mario Andretti, who was on his way back to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, while I went across to Los Angeles, California, and home. When the season started I was again based out of London, but I wasn’t going to stay there until I absolutely had to.

‘Shit, I hate to think what you’re going to do in the new car,’ Mario said – and it stuck in my mind. So Lotus was worried. He knew the FW07B was coming, and while it wasn’t new it had some major improvements.

Testing in a place like Argentina for three or four days is a costly exercise – there is nothing cheap about sending a car, a driver, spares and mechanics 10,000 kilometres by air – but it proved valuable. We were able to dial the car into the circuit and do some very profitable work with Goodyear, who provided our tyres, and thus, when January and the race came along, we could just roll the car out of the trailer and assert our superiority over the rest of the field.

Or so the thinking went. We turned up in Argentina to start the season in the middle of January with a brand new car and it never turned a wheel in anger.

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