Jackie Stewart
In a short career, Scottish race-car driver Jackie Stewart (born 1939) won 27 Grand Prix races and was world champion status three times on the Formula One circuit. Stewart was also an advocate of driver safety and after his retirement worked as a lively commentator for ABC-TV's "Wide World of Sports."
Often wearing his trademark tartan-patterned racing helmet, Stewart earned his nickname the "Flying Scot" for his speed on the race course and for his meteoric climb to the top of the world Grand Prix racing circuits. Racing for the first time in 1965, Stewart was one of the top drivers on the Formula One circuit into the 1970s. During his career, the sport was revolutionalized by design advances that made cars more aerodynamic and much faster. With 27 Grand Prix wins, Stewart combined a natural talent for the sport with a charisma that made him the darling of the media and an effective and outspoken advocate for race course safety.
Racing in His Blood
John Young Stewart was born in Milton in Dumbartonshire, Scotland in 1939. As a child he exhibited exceptional eye-hand coordination, and his father, a former motorcycle racer who owned a garage and sold Jaguars, had hopes that his youngest son would become involved in racing. Stewart grew up around cars and soon became an adept apprentice mechanic. Meanwhile, his older brother, Jimmy Stewart, went from a successful run of local races to qualifying for the British Grand Prix in 1953. Eliminated from the race at Copse after his Ecurie Ecosse car hydroplaned on a wet track, Jimmy Stewart was involved in an even more serious accident while racing at Le Mans, France, forcing him to leave the sport. Stewart's parents, thankful that their oldest son was still alive, discouraged their youngest son, 15-year-old Jackie, from taking up car racing.
Never a promising student, Stewart, who was dyslexic, left school prior to graduation. He soon took up clay target shooting. Competing in shooting tournaments in Scotland, he hoped to qualify to join Great Britain's 1960 Olympic team. His poor performance during the final round of the Olympic trials on his 21st birthday ended that plan, however, and Stewart returned home, believing he was destined to work at his father's garage.
A Formula Three Natural
In 1963, Barry Filer, a customer of the family garage, approached Stewart, then 24, and asked him to track-test a Formula Three car at England's Oulton Park speedway. His driving impressing several onlookers, and word went out to Cooper's Formula Junior team manager Ken Tyrell. Constantly on the lookout for new talent, Tyrell asked Stewart to come and try out for a position as driver. Taking over the wheel from experienced Formula One driver Bruce McLaren, Stewart held his own in the car, a Cooper F3, and soon matched and even passed McLaren's times around the track. Impressed by the young Scot's lightning-quick reflexes and cool demeanor behind the wheel, Tyrell offered him a place in his Formula Three team, and Stewart accepted.
Formula Three cars such as Tyrell's Cooper are scaled-down versions of Formula One race cars. Aerodynamically designed single-seaters with two-liter racing engines, these cars are designed to run close to the ground, corner on a dime, and attain speeds upwards of 165 miles per hour. Considered a junior version of Formula One racing, Formula Three has been the traditional stepping-up point for many future world champion race drivers, and as someone with fast reflexes and intense focus, Stewart was no exception.
During his three years on the Formula Three circuit, Stewart won the championship title easily, winning 11 of the 13 races he competed in and finishing a close second once. In 1964 he also won England's Express & Star Formula Three championship. He particularly enjoyed working with Tyrell - he would later comment, as quoted on the Formula Three website that his "British Formula Three Championship days were the best of my life.… It was fantastic winning all those races against some top names, and I think it really sent me on my way." Nonetheless, the Formula One circuit - which included the course in LeMans that had broken his older brother - beckoned. In 1965 the single-minded Scot left Tyrell and joined Graham Hill's BRM Formula One team.
Formula One Experience
Confident after his successes in Formula Three, Stewart traveled to South Africa, where he placed in his first race as a Formula One driver and won his first point toward the coveted world drivers' championship. That race set the pace for the rest of the racing season: during his eighth race for BRM at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, he got his first win, and by the end of the 1965 season Stewart was ranked third in the world drivers' championships behind Jim Clark and Graham Hill.
Stewart remained with Hill and BRM for two more years, and though his ranking went down he gained experience, including one event that would change his outlook on auto racing forever. The year 1966 held several disappointments, one of which was taking the lead at the Indianapolis 500 only to lose it in the last eight laps due to a scavenge pump malfunction. However, that paled in comparison to Stewart's experiences while competing in the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa. A sudden downpour caused cars to careen off the track, and Stewart was soon among them. Sliding into a ditch, he found himself pinned in his car by the steering wheel, the side of his car crushed inward. Unable to escape, he lay helpless and in pain while fuel began leaking out, soaking his racing suit through to his skin. For twenty-five minutes he lay there, counting every second, while Hill and others in his crew dismantled the steering wheel in order to free him. With no doctors or medical facilities nearby, Stewart was deposited in the bed of a nearby pickup truck and remained there until an ambulance finally arrived. Taken to the track's First Aid center on a stretcher, he was placed on the floor, amid cigarette butts and other garbage, and lay there until yet another ambulance crew picked him up. En route to a hospital in Lié, the ambulance drivers got lost.
During the hours he lay on his stretcher, enduring severe pain, Stewart had a lot of time to reflect on his situation. He had fractured his collarbone, but his injuries could have been more severe. If they had involved internal bleeding, the lack of medical care and the lax emergency transportation would likely have meant his death; if it had been a spinal injury, as many at first feared, he could have suffered permanent disability and the end of his career. He also recalled the deaths of other drivers during the 1960s, casualties of the experiments and advances in Formula One technology.
"Something Sadly Wrong …"
After his experience at Spa, Stewart worked with BRM team leader Louis Stanley to campaign vigorously for improved emergency services, better safety barriers around race tracks and the introduction of safety-related devices in race cars. As he was quoted as noting in a biography for the Grand Prix Hall of Fame website, "I realized that if this was the best we had there was something sadly wrong: things wrong with the race track, the cars, the medical side, the fire-fighting and the emergency crews.… Young people today just wouldn't understand it. It was ridiculous."
Stewart soon recovered from his injury and returned to complete the 1966 season, finishing in seventh place. The following year would be his last with Hill: the redesigned car Stewart was assigned to drive proved useless on the track. Ending 1967 in ninth place, a frustrated Stewart reconnected with Tyrell, who by now had established a Formula One team and quickly signed the Scot to drive his Matra Ford.
Proving that his lackluster performance in the world drivers' championships the previous year had been the result of Hill's BRM car rather than a lack of driver ability, Stewart ended 1968 in second place, despite battling the winding course in Nürbugring, Germany, in the pelting rain and the discomfort caused by a recently fractured wrist.
First Championship Season
Driving a Matra MS80, Stewart won his first world championship for Ken Tyrell's team in 1969; he was also named British Formula One champion. During the season he charted up winning points by taking the trophy in seven out of the fourteen races he entered.
The following year proved to be a disappointment. Problems with the Ford chassis in Tyrell's Matra cars forced Stewart from several races, and the Scot raced for Tyrell in only the Mexican, Canadian, and U.S. Grand Prix that year. Desiring to finish the season out, he raced for March and finished 1970 in fifth place.
By 1971 Tyrell had begun to build his own cars. Stewart gladly returned to the Tyrell fold and won his second world drivers' championship. The following year he was again sidelined because the tension of the track had begun to take its toll on Stewart's health. Plagued by stomach ulcers, he nonetheless persevered, ending in second place despite missing several races.
In 1973, 34-year-old Stewart chalked up his third and final world drivers' championship. His decision to end his career after his 100th race had been made at the start of the racing season. But at the Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, New York, Stewart and Tyrell walked away from the planned final race because his friend and teammate François Cevert was killed in a crash during the race's qualifying round. As Stewart would later comment to March Bechtel of Sports Illustrated, "The key in life is deciding when to go into something and when to get out of it."
With 27 wins in 99 starts, Stewart scored a total of 360 points during his nine-year career, and led at some point in 51 of those 99 races. His record of 27 Grand Prix wins would stand for two decades, until bested by Alain Prost during the 1987 race at Estoril.
A Head for Business
Popular with the press due to his intelligence, easy wit, and charm, Stewart was just as beloved among racing fans, and his advocacy of racetrack safety earned him the respect of many, both in and out of the sport. After his career in Grand Prix racing came to a close, he remained an active presence in the world of Formula One. For the next 14 years his heavy Scottish brogue could be heard in coverage of Formula One Racing on ABC's popular "Wide World of Sports" TV show. He also worked as an engineering consultant for the Ford Motor Company, continuing a relationship that had started on the track, and assisting the automaker in researching and developing new generations of Formula One engines. In later years he added such firms as Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company to his client list.
A beloved figure in his native Great Britain, Stewart was honored by Queen Elizabeth with the Order of the British Empire in 2001. He was also inducted into both the International Motorsports Hall of Fame and the Sports Hall of Fame. Outside the world of racing, Stewart and his wife Helen, whom he married in 1962, raised two sons, Paul and Mark.
Combining his canny business sense with an equally strong sense of civic responsibility, Stewart founded a successful shooting school at Scotland's Gleneagles Hotel in 1985, and held seats on several corporations while also serving as president of the Scottish Dyslexia Trust beginning in 1995.
In 1997, Stewart became chairman of Paul Stewart Grand Prix Racing, a team he founded in partnership with his son Paul and Ford Motor Company. Signing drivers Rubens Barrichello and Jan Magnussen, Stewart managed his team from their first appearance at the 1997 Australian Grand Prix with the same intensity he once showed behind the wheel. Selling Paul Stewart Racing team to Ford in 1999 for 60 million pounds, a year later Stewart retired from active involvement in what was renamed Jaguar Racing, citing the desire to spend time with his family. As of 2003 he retained his role as president of the British Racing Drivers' Club as well as president of the Scottish Dyslexia Trust. He also remained an active role as a Ford Motor Company consultant, acted as trustee for the Scottish International Education Trust, was the Springfield Club's president, and acted as chairman for the Grand Prix Mechanics Charitable Trust. Stewart also was on the board of Moet & Chandon and was a patron of the British Dyslexia Association. He left Formula One auto racing a far safer sport than when he entered it almost four decades before.
Books
Legends in Their Own Time, Prentice Hall General Reference, 1994.
Periodicals
Financial Times, November 29, 2003.
Forbes, May 10, 1993.
Sports Illustrated, February 25, 2002.
Online
Gran Prix Hall of Fame,http://www.ddavid.com/furmula1/stewbio.htm.
Official Formula One Web site,http://www.formula1.com/.
Official Formula Three Web site,http://www.fota.co.uk/.
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