Auto Racing: Ruler of the Road

Scotland’s Jackie Stewart is something of a brooding fatalist. His elder brother Jimmy preceded him as a racing driver but retired after two serious accidents and a near-fatal collision in the 1954 Le Mans classic. In 1968 his roommate and closest friend, the incomparable Jim Clark, was killed in a crash on the Hockenheim circuit. “The loss of Jimmy was an enormous blow,” says Stewart, “but it couldn’t make me give up racing. Jimmy was a professional, and so am I.”

And few are better. This year Stewart, 30, has replaced King James as the Scottish ruler of the road. Last March, in the South African Grand Prix, first of the 1969 world championship Formula I series races, he roared into the lead on the very first lap, and has rarely been behind since. In the most astonishing driving display in Grand Prix history, Jackie raced his 430-h.p. Matra-Ford M580 to victories in Spain, The Netherlands and France. He lost at Monte Carlo only after a faulty drive shaft forced him to drop out one-third of the way through the race; at that point he held an extravagant 30-sec. lead. Two weeks ago, he won his fifth victory in five finishes in Great Britain’s rugged 246-mile Grand Prix at Silverstone. That race gave Stewart a total of 45 world-championship points. His nearest rival, New Zealander Bruce McLaren, has only 17. With a full five Grand Prix races yet to run, the flippant, flamboyant Scot has virtually sewn up racing’s most coveted prize.

Cutting Corners. Stewart invites comparison with Clark for more reasons than a heritage of heather; Europeans consider him a “natural” driver, as they did Clark. Accurate and adaptable, he consistently picks the most efficient curb-shearing line around corners, which gives him an extra jump into the straightaway. At Silverstone, he crashed his car during a trial run, and had to race in a slightly inferior model usually driven by a teammate. On top of that, his clutch jammed on the fourth lap and he was forced to powershift for the remaining 80. Yet his average speed of 127.25 m.p.h. was nearly 10 m.p.h. faster than the existing track record—set in 1967 by Clark.

Stewart’s father ran a small garage near Dumbarton, and his mother was a lively lady who liked to roam the moors in modified sports cars. After her first son’s ill-starred attempts at a racing career, though, she had no intention of letting Jackie get behind the wheel. The young man did not much care; he was too busy pursuing his first love—trap shooting. “I put more effort into it than I put now into my racing,” he recalls. Between 1957 and 1962 he won the Irish, Welsh, English and British champion ships and was named as a substitute to the British Olympic trap team. Finally persuaded to race at Charterhall, where Clark had made his start several years earlier, Stewart finished third. To fool his mother, he says, “I snuck out to race under the nom de plume of A. N. Other. I thought that terribly clever.”

Cautious Conservatism. After he joined the European circuit in 1964, he and Clark shared an apartment in London. Their digs soon became known in racing circles as the “Scottish Embassy.” Stewart married a Lowland lassie, Helen McGregor, who came to understand the substance of her mother-in-law’s fears. At the Belgian Grand Prix in 1966, her husband’s car spun out of control as he whipped around a rain-slick corner at 150 m.p.h., and ripped through a telegraph pole and a tree before it screamed to a halt. For 35 minutes Stewart was trapped in the cockpit as the gasoline from his full tanks rose to his armpits. Miraculously, the car did not explode, and a team of workmen managed to pry him out.

Coupled with Clark’s death, that near-tragedy had a signal effect on Stewart. Off the track, the little (5 ft. 6¢ in., 148 lbs.) driver is all Scottish charm; he wears Savile Row suits and affects shoulder-length locks. When it comes to his profession, however, he is all caution and conservatism. The Belgian Grand Prix was canceled this year largely because of his argument that the race would be too dangerous on wet roads. He was among the first Grand Prix drivers to use the six-point-contact seatbelt, and he introduced the idea of remote-control fire extinguishers in the engine compartment and cockpit, which racing authorities may make compulsory.

Such precautions do not imply that Stewart’s passion for driving has diminished. “I know it’s an old cliche,” he says, “but a car is really very much like a woman. One day, you have to be very gentle. The next, you may have to give it a good thrashing. But the worst thing that can happen is to let it control you. When that happens, you’re no longer a driver—you’re just a passenger.” So far, Stewart has shown that he knows just when to coax his high-strung lady, and when to coddle her.