Jackie Stewart
Sir John Young Stewart OBE (born 11 June 1939) is a British former Formula One racing driver from Scotland. Nicknamed the "Flying Scot", he competed in Formula One between 1965 and 1973, winning three World Drivers' Championships and twice finishing as runner-up over those nine seasons. He was the only British driver to win three championships until Lewis Hamilton in 2015.
For other people named Jackie Stewart, see Jackie Stewart (disambiguation).Born
John Young Stewart
11 June 1939
Milton, Dunbartonshire, Scotland
British
100 (99 starts)
27
43
359 (360)[1]
17
15
Outside of Formula One, he narrowly missed out on a win at his first attempt at the Indianapolis 500 in 1966 and competed in the Can-Am series in 1970 and 1971. Between 1997 and 1999, in partnership with his son, Paul, he was team principal of the Stewart Grand Prix F1 racing team. After retiring from racing, Stewart was an ABC network television sports commentator for both auto racing, covering the Indianapolis 500 for over a decade, and for several summer Olympics covering many events, being a distinctive presence with his pronounced Scottish accent. Stewart also served as a television commercial spokesman for both the Ford Motor Company and Heineken beer.
Stewart was instrumental in improving the safety of motor racing, campaigning for better medical facilities and track improvements at motor racing circuits. After John Surtees' death in 2017, he is the last surviving Formula One World Champion from the 1960s. He is also the oldest living F1 winner.
Early life[edit]
Stewart was born in Milton, Dunbartonshire, Scotland, a village fifteen miles west of Glasgow. Stewart's family were Austin, and later Jaguar, car dealers and had built up a successful business. His father had been an amateur motorcycle racer,[2] and his brother Jimmy was a racing driver with a local reputation who drove for Ecurie Ecosse and competed in the 1953 British Grand Prix at Silverstone.
Stewart attended Hartfield primary school in the nearby town of Dumbarton, and moved to Dumbarton Academy at the age of 12. He experienced learning difficulties owing to undiagnosed dyslexia, and due to the condition not being understood or even widely known at the time, he was regularly berated and humiliated by teachers and peers alike for being "dumb" and "thick".[3] Stewart was unable to continue his secondary education past the age of 16, and began working in his father's garage as an apprentice mechanic. He was not actually diagnosed with dyslexia until 1980, when his oldest son Mark was diagnosed with the condition. On learning that dyslexia can be genetically passed on, and seeing very similar symptoms with his son that he had experienced himself as a child, Stewart asked if he could be tested, and was diagnosed with the disorder, by which time he was 41 years old.[4] He has said: "When you've got dyslexia and you find something you're good at, you put more into it than anyone else; you can't think the way of the clever folk, so you're always thinking out of the box."[5]
At the age of 13, Stewart won a clay pigeon shooting competition and then went on to become a prize-winning member of the Scottish shooting team, competing in the United Kingdom and abroad. He won the British, Irish, Welsh and Scottish skeet shooting championships and twice won the "Coupe de Nations" European championship. He competed for a place in the British trap shooting team for the 1960 Summer Olympics, but finished third behind Joseph Wheater and Brett Huthart.[3]
Stewart's first car was a light green Austin A30 with "real leather [covered] seats" which he purchased shortly before his seventeenth birthday for £375, a detail he was able to recall for an interviewer sixty years later. He had saved up the purchase price from tips received from his job at the family garage.[6] He took up an offer from Barry Filer, a customer of the family business, to test in a number of his cars at Oulton Park. For 1961, Filer provided a Marcos, in which Stewart scored four wins, and competed once in Filer's Aston DB4GT. In 1962, to help decide if he was ready to become a professional driver, he tested a Jaguar E-type at Oulton Park, matching Roy Salvadori's times in a similar car the year before.[7] He won two races, his first in England, in the E-type, and David Murray of Ecurie Ecosse offered him a ride in the Tojeiro EE Mk2, and their Cooper T49, in which he won at Goodwood. For 1963, he earned fourteen wins, a second, and two-thirds, with six retirements.[7]
In 1964, Stewart again signed with Ecurie Ecosse. Ken Tyrrell, then running the Formula Junior team for the Cooper Car Company, heard of the young Scotsman from Goodwood's track manager and called up Jimmy Stewart to see if his younger brother was interested in a tryout.[7] Stewart came down for the test at Goodwood, taking over a new, and very competitive, Formula Three T72-BMC which Bruce McLaren was testing.[7] Soon, Stewart was bettering McLaren's times, causing McLaren to return to the track for some quicker laps. Again, Stewart was quicker, and Tyrrell offered Stewart a spot on the team.[3]
Racing safety advocate[edit]
At Spa-Francorchamps in 1966, Stewart ran off the track while driving at 165 mph (266 km/h) in heavy rain, and crashed into a telephone pole and a shed before coming to rest in a farmer's outbuilding. His steering column pinned his leg, while ruptured fuel tanks emptied their contents into the cockpit. There were no track crews to extricate him, nor were proper tools available. Stewart was rescued by fellow drivers Graham Hill and Bob Bondurant, who had also crashed nearby. There were no doctors or medical facilities at the track, and Stewart was put in the bed of a pickup truck, remaining there until an ambulance arrived. He was first taken to the track's first aid centre, where he waited on a stretcher, which was placed on a floor strewn with cigarette ends and other rubbish. Finally, another ambulance crew picked him up, but the ambulance driver got lost driving to a hospital in Liège.[19] Ultimately, a private jet flew Stewart back to the UK for treatment. After his crash at Spa, Stewart became an outspoken advocate for auto racing safety. Later, he explained: "If I have any legacy to leave the sport I hope it will be seen to be an area of safety because when I arrived in Grand Prix racing so-called precautions and safety measures were diabolical."[20]
Stewart campaigned with Louis Stanley (BRM team boss) for improved emergency services and better safety barriers around race tracks. He said: "We were racing at circuits where there were no crash barriers in front of the pits, and fuel was lying about in churns in the pit lane. A car could easily crash into the pits at any time. It was ridiculous."[21] As a stop-gap measure, Stewart hired a private doctor to be at all his races, and taped a spanner to the steering shaft of his BRM in case it would be needed again. Stewart pressed for mandatory seat belt usage and full-face helmets for drivers, which have become unthinkable omissions for modern races. Likewise, he pressed track owners to modernize their tracks, including organizing driver boycotts of races at Spa-Francorchamps in 1969, the Nürburgring in 1970 being joined by his close friend Jochen Rindt, and Zandvoort in 1972 until barriers, run-off areas, fire crews, and medical facilities were improved. Some drivers and press members believed the safety improvements for which Stewart advocated detracted from the sport, while track owners and race organizers baulked at the extra costs. Stewart later said: "I would have been a much more popular World Champion if I had always said what people wanted to hear. I might have been dead, but definitely more popular."[22]
Commentator[edit]
ABC's Wide World of Sports and NBC Sportsworld[edit]
During the period 1971 to 1986, Stewart covered F1 races, NASCAR races and Indianapolis 500 as a color commentator, and also functioned as host for the latter. He was a play-by-play announcer for the Luge at the 1976 Winter Olympics and the Equestrian at the 1976 Summer Olympics (partnered with Chris Schenkel) on ABC's Wide World of Sports. He was noted for his insightful analysis, Scottish accent, and rapid delivery, which once caused ABC's lead sports commentator Jim McKay to remark that Stewart spoke almost as fast as he drove. In his book Winning Is Not Enough, Stewart revealed that he used notes to read from to do a TV broadcast as he could not read from an autocue due to his dyslexia. In 2023, Stewart revealed on the Beyond the Grid Podcast "I was doing ABC's Wide World of Sports because I was reasonably good at it, I got to know how to do it by a man called Jim McKay who is the best commentator of sport in the world weather it was the Olympics or all sorts of different sports. I would go to Atlanta, Georgia to do a Stock Car race and we would be telecasting it not live, it would be for the following week or week after that. I would fly in Concorde more often than anything else and fly into the location was of a race, ABC had all the things organised so I would have a helicopter to get me out of the track and get me back into the night flight, I would never take Concorde on the evening flight because it was slower sleeping on a plane than on a 747 but I would always use Concorde from the UK or Switzerland to the United States. I had it very well organised."
Stewart was often critical of driver safety in his broadcasts especially of driver negligence with fireproof clothes. In the 1977 Daytona 500, Bobby Wawak got burned after his car caught fire, Stewart said: "The drivers themselves are negligent, drivers should always wear flame resistant underwear and thermal underwear. The accident we seen today is just typical if you're not properly protected." Stewart also revealed there was tension between him and ABC Sports producer Roone Arledge as Stewart was doing commercials for Ford Motor Company as well and several of the commercials aired on Wide World of Sports which he was a regular commentator there and that led him to leaving ABC in 1986. Stewart revealed in his book that "Wide World of Sports began to lose it's soul when ABC first merged with ESPN and then with Capital Cities, prompting severe headcount cuts and reduced budgets." Later, Stewart covered CART IndyCar races starting at Long Beach in 1987 on NBC SportsWorld, along with Paul Page. He returned in 1988, along with Charlie Jones. Stewart only covered road course and street races in his brief time at NBC. He did not return in 1989 and was replaced by Johnny Rutherford and Tom Sneva.
Australian and Canadian TV coverage[edit]
Stewart worked on Australian and Canadian TV coverage from late 1986 to the mid-1990s.
British TV coverage[edit]
Stewart occasionally appeared with Murray Walker as a co-commentator on the BBC's F1 coverage, including the British Grands Prix of 1979 and 1993.
Personal life[edit]
Stewart has been married to his childhood sweetheart Helen McGregor since 1962, and they have two sons: Paul and Mark.[51] Paul is a former racing driver, who later ran Paul Stewart Racing with his father, before selling it in 1999. Mark is a film and television producer. The couple currently live in the Buckinghamshire village of Ellesborough, on a 140-acre farm that was the hunting grounds of the nearby Prime Minister's country house, Chequers. Between 1969 and 1997 the couple lived in Begnins, near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, and later sold his house to Phil Collins.
Stewart dictated his autobiography titled Winning Is Not Enough due to his dyslexia.[52] In a 2009 interview, and in the book, he discusses his close relationship with his older brother Jimmy, who was also a successful racing driver in his youth but had a long struggle with alcoholism. Jimmy died in 2008.[53] In 2018, he set up the charity Race Against Dementia. In 2016, Helen McGregor Stewart was diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic with frontotemporal dementia. As of 2018, she has limited short-term memory and impaired mobility, and requires round-the-clock care support. Stewart believes that the application of Formula 1's technology and out of the box thinking could bring about earlier solutions to society coping with dementia.[54]