Alan Jones during practice for the 1980 Dutch Grand Prix. Credit: Nationaal Archief / Anefo (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons
Alan Jones, the 1980 world champion and the first drivers’ champion in Williams history, has died at 80, three days after his birthday. Formula 1 announced his death on Thursday, and Williams said everyone at the team was “deeply saddened.” The announcement gave no cause.
The tidy headline is “Williams’ first champion.” The more useful one is that Jones is the reason Williams became a team that expected to win. The 1980 title was not a lightning strike. It was the receipt for two years of steady, visible progress, and Jones was the one driver at the centre of all of it.
The ladder before the title
Look at the sequence. Jones gave Williams its first podium at Watkins Glen in 1978 and its first pole position at Silverstone in 1979. In 1979 he won four times and finished third in the championship. By the time 1980 arrived, nobody at the factory was guessing what a Williams could do.
Patrick Head, the team’s technical director, put the effect plainly in a 2012 interview: “Alan was already a Grand Prix winner, and his arrival made us say, ‘We’d better shape up here’.” That is the sentence worth keeping. A driver who has already won raises the standard for everyone building his car. Jones was a Grand Prix winner before Williams was a team of winners.
The stat that explains 1980
Jones won five of the 14 races that year: Argentina, France, Britain, Canada and the United States. The FW07B was a ground-effect car designed by Head, Frank Dernie and Neil Oatley, and Williams scored 120 points, almost double the total of Ligier, its nearest rival.
But the number I would frame is a duller one. According to Williams’ own records, Jones and teammate Carlos Reutemann each retired only three times, the fewest of anyone in the field. Ground-effect speed is cheap if the car breaks. Williams had speed and a car that finished, and Jones drove it without handing points away. Williams sealed the constructors’ title in Canada with one round to go, and Jones closed the season by winning at Watkins Glen on 5 October with Reutemann second. Jones took the title ahead of Nelson Piquet and became Australia’s second world champion after Sir Jack Brabham.
Eleven for Williams, one before
Jones won 12 grands prix in total, 11 of them for Williams. The other came at Shadow in Austria in 1977, in a seat he took over after Tom Pryce was killed that year in South Africa. It is a reminder that his career was built on moments when someone else’s misfortune or a team’s need opened a door, and that he walked through it quickly.
He left Williams after 1981, with two more wins and third in the standings that year, and retired. Formula 1’s own look back at his career notes that he later regretted stepping away early. He returned for a one-off Arrows drive at the 1983 US Grand Prix West and then raced for Beatrice in 1985 and 1986 before leaving the sport for good. No win followed 1981, which says something about how much of his best work depended on the right car at the right team.
His final season overlapped with one of the great finales of the era, the 1986 Australian Grand Prix in Adelaide, where the championship was decided on a tyre failure. It was a very different way to end a career than the title he had won six years earlier.
What he started
Williams has since had six more drivers’ champions: Keke Rosberg, Nelson Piquet, Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost, Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve. Jones was first, and he set the template of a fast, forthright driver in a car built to finish. Even the commercial side of that era rhymes with the present: his race suits carried Saudia branding, the same money story behind Williams’ Madrid throwback livery.
Jones later worked as a television commentator in Australia and, in 2010, as an FIA stewards’ advisor at selected grands prix, which is a neat bit of gamekeeper-turned-poacher history for a driver who was never shy about saying what he thought. Williams said it simply: “Alan was instrumental in making Williams what it is today.” Anyone who looks at the team’s trophy cabinet can see the point.
Lead image: Alan Jones during practice for the 1980 Dutch Grand Prix. Credit: Nationaal Archief / Anefo (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons.
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