Alan Jones on the way to victory at the 1979 Dutch Grand Prix, one of four wins he took for Williams that season. Credit: Koen Suyk / Anefo, Nationaal Archief (CC BY-SA 3.0 NL)
Alan Jones, the 1980 Formula 1 world champion, has died at 80. F1 and Williams confirmed the news on Thursday, and Stefano Domenicali called him “a true great of our sport and an extraordinary racer.” Every tribute will lead with the title. The better way to understand Jones is to look at the year after it.
My argument is simple: Jones was the driver who taught Williams what it feels like to win, and his final season there showed what a team has to put up with to get that. Williams itself calls him a “fast, uncompromising racer.” In 1981, that adjective stopped being flattering and started being a management problem.
The résumé, quickly
Jones was born in Melbourne on 2 November 1946 and made his F1 debut at the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix in a Hesketh. His first win came for Shadow at the 1977 Austrian Grand Prix. At Williams he kept collecting “firsts”: the team’s first podium at Watkins Glen in 1978, and its first pole position at Silverstone in 1979. That weekend Clay Regazzoni gave Williams its first victory, so Jones was not strictly the team’s first winner. What he did was turn one win into a habit, taking the German, Austrian, Dutch and Canadian Grands Prix later that year.
In 1980 he won five of 14 races and took the title in Williams’ fourth F1 season, becoming Australia’s second world champion after Sir Jack Brabham. Twelve career wins, eleven of them for Williams. If you want the full case for how he built the team’s winning habit, we covered that here. The more revealing story comes after the trophy.
1981: first race, last race, and a row in between
Jones opened 1981 with a win in the USA West Grand Prix on 15 March and closed it with another at the Caesars Palace Grand Prix on 17 October. In between sat Brazil, where Carlos Reutemann won on the road. F1’s own obituary records that Reutemann refused a team order to hand victory to Jones, and that Jones never forgave him for it.
The final standings tell you what that kind of season costs: Nelson Piquet 50 points, Reutemann 49, Jones 46. Williams had two drivers in the top three and a champion in neither seat. The gap between Piquet and Reutemann was a single point.
What it means
I would stop short of saying one team order lost Williams a title. The numbers do not isolate a single race, and nobody can replay Brazil. But the shape of the season is hard to ignore. A team that was fast enough to win the opener, the finale and several races between them still ended the year with two alpha drivers who each believed the car should bend to them. That is the price of hiring someone like Jones. His refusal to be second to anyone is the reason the 1980 title happened, and it is the same trait that made the garage hard to run a year later.
It is worth noting how the car itself kept paying out. Williams’ FW07C throwback livery was a nod to the car from this era, and the team went on to win far beyond it, as in Thierry Boutsen’s rain-soaked Adelaide win in 1989. Jones set the standard that kind of team measures itself against.
What to watch next
Today’s Williams has Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon, and both paid tribute: Albon called Jones “a legend to Williams,” and Sainz said losing the team’s first champion is a big loss. Oscar Piastri said Jones embodied the Australian spirit. That is the sentiment. The practical question, and this is my interpretation rather than anything the team has said, is how much of Jones’s edge Williams wants back in its garage. Teams say they want drivers who push. The 1981 season is the case study in what happens when two of them do.
Jones’s wife, Amanda Bulker-Davis, said in a statement through Motorsport Australia that he dedicated his life to motorsport. On the evidence of 1980 and 1981, that is easy to believe. Our condolences go to his family and friends.
Lead image: Koen Suyk / Anefo, Nationaal Archief (CC BY-SA 3.0 NL), via Wikimedia Commons.
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