Brian Henton on Alan Jones (& others): My Greatest Rival

This might sound big-headed but when it came to my rivals I always believed I was as good as, if not better, than all of them. You have to have this confidence when you’re starting out and dreaming of Formula 1.

“We all had that ambition in Formula 3, and to get noticed in such a fiercely combative era you had to have belief in yourself, the mental strength for the psychological warfare as well as the driving ability. In ’73 I was up against Alan Jones in the BARC Forward Trust Championship. We both had a GRD. Alan had the works car, I was a privateer, so he had better engines and more support.

“Being an Aussie, with some very Australian adjectives, Jonesy was pretty blunt, like me. We called a spade a shovel, so you couldn’t intimidate him. It was water off a duck’s back. It was wheel to wheel. Neither of us was going to give an inch – we learnt that about each other. We were not the smallest or lightest of drivers so we carried about the same ballast and were always on a piece of track that we both wanted at the same time.

“We both got to Formula 1 in ’75, Alan with a privately entered Hesketh and I went to Lotus but, amazingly, later on I was the first man to drive Alan’s Williams FW07, at Donington. Patrick Head asked me to shake the car down. In the wet the grip level, with the ground effects, was phenomenal and I realised Alan had a very good car for ’79. We’d been F3 rivals and now I was setting up his car that later won him a Formula 1 world championship.

“It was respect rather than rivalry, just as it was with Ronnie Peterson my team-mate at Lotus. I was the boy, he was the elder statesman. The car wasn’t good in ’75, when Goodyear changed the tyres. It was up to me to improve it technically. Ronnie just drove it. He was as quick in a car with three wheels as he was in a car with four wheels. I didn’t see him as a rival, simply as a great driver.

“He’d fall asleep before a race. I’d have to wake him up, tell him to get in the car, and all of a sudden those blue eyes would light up and off he’d go. He had that fantastic Scandinavian ability, especially in the wet.

“Then there was Derek Warwick in Formula 2. Again there was respect and rivalry. I had all the experience; he was young, a quick learner and a lovely bloke. That Toleman with the Hart engine in 1980, my championship year, was a car to die for, and it was a great team, the nearest I ever got to a team that was truly competitive, with top engineers like Rory Byrne and the resources to stay ahead.

Brian Henton and Alan Jones head-to-head

Stats taken from BARC Forward Trust, Britain Lombard North Central and John Player British European Formula 3 championships, 1973