Jody Scheckter, a champion full of surprises

Jody Scheckter had a very unusual Formula 1 career, full of surprises. He literally burst into the scene, a very fast, unruly driver in his first outings with McLaren in 1972 and 1973, proving extremely crash prone. He had a famous come together with Emerson Fittipaldi in France, while leading, caused a pile up in the first stages of the race at Silverstone, plus crashed in Canada. His mount was great, a first year McLaren M23, and he could have scored quite a few points. After all, smooth driver Jacky Ickx in fact scored a podium at the Nurburgring in his first try.

Then Jody was hired by Tyrrell for 1974. He was obviously not a first pick. Tyrrell was indeed a very conservative type of guy, at the time very much used to constant success. Unfortunately, things went from excellent to bad at the end of 1973. Tyrrell won the driver's title at Monza, then lost both Francois Cevert and Jackie Stewart at Watkins Glen, one dead, the other retired. I find it unusual that Tyrrell would hire two relatively inexperienced drivers for 1974, but that is what he did, after Chris Amon failed to strike Ken's fancy.

Surprisingly, the explosive Jody became a very sedate driver, in fact, he was not that fast in the early 1974 races, the 006 model known as a difficult to drive car. Only after the new 007 came onboard the results appeared, and by the end of the year he became quite the opposite of the 1973 Jody, a reliable driver who was expected to score points. The transformation was amazing, but quite a lot of the speed was gone - forever.

A couple of years more with Tyrrell proved inconclusive, then he was surprisingly hired by Wolf, for 1977, and more surprisingly still, won the first time out. A third surprise, he continued on the pace for the rest of the year, becoming runner up to Niki Lauda.

Then another surprise in 1978. He continued at Wolf, and all that pace and reliability disappeared. At the end of the year he was hired by Ferrari.

At Ferrari, he picked up the pace again, although he had a very tough internal battle, as his teammate was the extremely talented and fast Gilles Villeneuve. On the strength of reliability, a favorable scoring system and some luck (Williams did not debut its new challenger FW07 before), Jody finally became world champion, although not a dominating one.

Then good ole Jody sprung yet another surprise in 1980. All the fire was gone, his performance was pathetic, although, admittedly, that year's Ferrari was no piece of cake. By the end of the season he failed to qualify for a race, ending up with the worst year-after performance by a current world champion. Not surprisingly, Jody retired, although he claimed he still had plenty of offers.

He retired before reaching 30 years of age, never racing again.

Espionnage is bad - how about downright theft???

I am always amused when people say "what is this world coming to", whenever they hear reports of crimes, accidents, basic societal decay, as if to say the world was that much better say, 50 or 100 years ago, than today. Most cities had a terrible feces smell just a relative short while back, most of the world had no running water, much less sewage lines, politicians used to put contracts on their nemesis in many parts of the world instead of bad mouthing them, and sexual crime has always been bad. Just to a name a few things.

Many people had a very unusual response to the recent Stepney-gate, the spy saga that rocked the F-1 world. As if all types of such improprieties never took place, and decay had finally arrived in the hitherto pristine waters of Formulaonedom, fifty seven years down the line!!!

The following borders on the comical, and it just goes to show that bad things happened in F1 in the past too, although this was not an "inside job".

Jean Pierre Jarier had a nasty accident in the first lap of the Argentine GP of 1974, denting the tub of his Shadow DN1 quite badly, to the point that chassis 8A would be useless for the next race in Brazil. The chassis was taken to the next stop in the calendar anyway, although Shadow had to hurriedly ship another tub from England, much to the annoyance of the Brazilian customs authorities, who could not understand the need and did their utmost to bar entry of the chassis in the country. Eventually, the replacement tub came into Brazil legally, and Jarier was ensured a place in the race.

A picture in an Autosprint magazine of the time shows the bent chassis lazying about under the scorching January sun, against the pit garage wall in Interlagos. Apparently nobody was caring much for the tub ended up being stolen. Yes, you read right, stolen.

As late as 1994, Shadow owner Don Nichols still seemed very upset with the tub's disappearance, although DN1's were not that rare, eight examples were built. But it was his property, after all.

There is no official word on the whereabouts of the missing Shadow DN1, although wild stories circulate in Brazilian racing circles to this day. Lest anyone jump to conclusions, this had nothing to do with the Brazilian formula 1 project.

So, you see, Formula 1 is not this cocoon, where every one respects each other, that some people purport to be. The theft of the DN1, as I said, was likely not an inside job at all, as Shadow was a second-year builder, the DN1 was anything but revolutionary, and people had bigger fish to fry than study the last year Shadow tub. Exchanges of drawings by disgruntled employees, illicit photographs and hiring of competitor's staff with the sole intention of finding secrets have all been reported by F1 insiders.

I will say, it is harder to hide dirty work these days, for any length of time.