During the era when Jack Lewis was a racing driver, small private entrants actually had a fighting chance to achieve an occasional decent result even at the highest level of motorsport…although it certainly was not easy. Being most successful in Formula 2, he also recorded nine starts in the Formula 1 World Championship, recording four retirements and five top-ten finishes with the best of 4th. David Holland sat down with him in August 2006 at Jack’s home in Stroud.
D.H. What really sparked your interest in motor sport in the first place?
J.L. I should think the very first was reading a book. I can remember lying in bed, I can’t remember how old I was but I was a young boy, and reading a book about racing cars or racing drivers, I can’t remember which book. I’ve got a vision in my mind of lying in my bed late at night probably after my parents had turned the light out and seeing pictures of racing cars going around the banking at Monza. That is the first thing I can remember. I often wonder whether that made an imprint on my mind which as I got older I recalled, when I became a teenager that looks fun, which most people do. My father had a bike shop (H&L Motors) and I didn’t get into cars before I got into bikes. I learnt to ride a bike in the fields by keeping falling off, it’s an unstable vehicle really. I learnt to ride on quite a big bike and then got a proper bike and passed my test and I rode that all the time. Then I did national service and I turned up on this bike making hell of a bloody racket. You’re not supposed to ride that here, being the lowest gunner in the Royal Artillery and the bike was confiscated which wasn’t a good start. I got posted to Tenby, a place called Manorbier and I used to ride the bike to Stroud every weekend. I can remember timing how long it would take me from Manorbier to Stroud which is about 160 miles (257 km). I can’t remember how long it used to take me but I remember thinking if I couldn’t average 60 mph (97 km/h) then I wasn’t really satisfied. This was before speed limits, mind you, there wasn’t much traffic then and the bike had a maximum speed of 115 mph (185 km/h). I got to know the road and I treated that as my own personal road, not my private race track. Every weekend I was seeing how long it took me to do it. I was following Formula 1 half heartedly really, like you do when you’re a teenager, vaguely interested. This was 2 years before I started racing. I started racing almost immediately after national service, probably a year gap in between. Grand Prix in those days used to last about 3 hours and I was doing this trip of 160 miles at 60 mph in 3 hours and I remember thinking this is the length of time you’ve got to concentrate if you were doing a motor race. I had enough juice to do it non-stop, so in my mind I was almost, without realising it, thinking along the lines that this is the kind of discipline you need. If you’re going to race cars, you’ve got to concentrate for 3 hours.
So although you were on 2-wheels you were thinking in more of 4-wheels at the time.
Yes, it’s strange that. Obviously I was following bike racing as well, Geoff Duke and all of those, but I never imagined myself riding around the Isle of Man TT course. It’s strange that, looking back that would’ve have been the logical thing. Then I stopped doing national service and I remember one of those occasions when father asks his son what is he going to do with his life, And I didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do.
Couldn’t you have gone into the family business?
No I wasn’t in the business then. My father didn’t want me in the business; I was a 19 year old kid and I knew nothing. I knew a lot more when I left the army than when I joined, put it that way. Because you do learn a lot when you do national service. Previous to that I’d lived a pretty sheltered life. I went to public school, Winch Cliff just along the road in Stroud. Everybody was honest, there were no locks on the doors and I went into the Army and the first week I was in there, all my kit was nicked. I landed in the real world rather suddenly (laughs). When you answer the question exactly, it kind of crept up on me and when my father said what are you going to do with your life I had an option to be an apprentice at the Jaguar factory, I didn’t really want to go to university. I said what I really wanted to do was go motor racing. All he could say was why not race bikes, since we’ve got a bike shop, for Christ’s sake. I said that to be honest, I’d rather go motor racing…you can earn a living motor racing. In those days not many people did, but bike racing there was no real money in it. And I thought to myself, well for some reason I’m more interested in joining cars than bikes. Although I’d never driven a fast car, it’s a bit strange that looking back. To my surprise my old man said, that if I really want to do it we’ll get a car and see if I am any good at it. Which was too easy really, to be fair. So we talked about it, in those days it was Formula 3, Formula 2, Formula 1 and I saw no problem in making that progression. There was saloon racing, but I wasn’t interested in that, I wanted to do proper races. We realized that if we get a Formula 3 car they’ve got a motorbike engine, so our mechanics could look after it. I had to buy the car, though and had no money. What I had was a life insurance policy which my parents took out when I was a baby. Cashing that in that gave me enough money to buy a racing car, but my father made me bear in mind that if I don’t cash it in and keep it, it’s going to be worth a great deal of money when I am older. I was 19 and can’t actually remember how much we paid for the car, but the cash-in value was roughly what the car was going to cost. And he said that I have got to do this with my eyes open because this is a big lump sum for the future. My father was a bit like that, I suppose he wanted to test me just saying it and not pursuing it. So I thought fair enough, let’s get on with it. So he cashed the policy in and we went over to Ivor Bueb’s garage in Cheltenham. He had a F-3 car for sale, I think he had won or come second in the F-3 championship the year before so it was a top car, a Cooper. So it wall all well in the beginning.
I read that you went to the Cooper school at Brands Hatch.
That was a joke (laughs) yes I did. Actually it was very good for me, I‘ve no complaints at all because it allowed me to join single seater cars in the context where my performance was being compared with other people without actually racing in a situation where there was someone who knew about racing to assess what you were doing. So as a result of going down to Brands and whizzing around in the car which I think was a F-3 car with an 1100cc Climax engine in. I’ll tell you all about it if you stop this…(tape switched off by request).
…and that gave you the confidence to go racing that year.
I had the confidence anyway. That gave me the information that I was going faster than all the other guys at school, so I wasn’t a complete bloody dud. It was only in the context of the guys and I was faster than any of the others and Ian Burgess said that I obviously got some talent, but he didn’t know at the time how much. I was quite confident to go racing and not trail around at the back, put it that way.
The books say you won three times in 1958. So the following season you took the step up to the Formula 2 Cooper.
That was the 1½ litre Formula 2, but I don’t know the designation.
You won your first race at Montlhéry. So you were racing abroad then?
Yes because the F-2 championship was racing in Belgium, France and others, it was called the European Formula 2 championship (official European Formula 2 Championship was not established until 1967 and various national and commercial championships were organized before then. But the main 1960 F-2 Championship was held throughout several countries and became de-facto European). The thing that was good about it was that in some of the races the Formula 1 guys would turn up. And of course, they were obviously quicker that any of our group. When at the big F-2 races the F-1 guys would turn up, if you were winning when they weren’t around, you were racing for 8th 7th or 6th when they were half a dozen F-1 guys who obviously could be quicker than you. Although some of the F-2 guys did pretty well actually, as we knew the cars better. They were dropping down from what they were used to in F-1, which was in those days 2½ litre and they were much bigger cars and engines.
I also read you were having trouble getting you entries accepted in 1959.
J.L. The continental organisers had never heard of me, well no one had heard of me. I did win a couple of races in F-3. I remember racing against Trevor Taylor who was Formula 3 Champion the year I did it, but then what you would normally do is stay in F-3 for another year and try and win the Championship and then move into F-2. We didn’t do that, we thought we’re doing pretty good at this and let’s move up. They were reluctant to accept my entry because they had people who’d been there the year before and had a bit of a reputation and there was this young guy who hadn’t done anything. I don’t remember actually failing to get in anywhere because we got friendly with Jabby Crombac. My father got on quite well with Jabby and he helped a lot.
Were you a professional racer at this point?
(Long pause)…well, you couldn’t seriously say I was a professional racer, because I wasn’t paid anything, but on the other hand my father sponsored me because all I did was live at home and go racing. I didn’t pay for racing either and my cost of living was covered by my father. You could say he was providing me with what I needed to live instead of paying me, but I wasn’t a professional driver in the normally accepted sense. He ran the car and took the starting money, I drove the car. I was a full time racing driver, I didn’t do anything else, but you couldn’t seriously say I was a professional racing driver. I don’t suppose at that point anyone else would’ve paid me to drive their car. They might have done after the finish of the second season when I won the European Championship (more exactly, in 1960 Jack won the parallel Autocar Series while Jack Brabham won the primary F-2 Championship). At that point people started to think that obviously this guy can do something.
Montlhéry was a banked circuit. Did you take to this naturally?
Yes although I don’t know why. Although this is where I talked about reading that book in bed a lot of the old racing was on banked tracks. I often wonder if I felt an affinity with the banked tracks because I already had all these stories and pictures in my mind. I did things on the banked tracks that you weren’t supposed to do.
Such as?
On a banked track the guy in front if you want to overtake, you can obviously get quite a tow because strange things can happen because on the banking you’re in a state of equilibrium you’re not actually steering round corners. Because of the angle of the banking you find your own level. The fastest way around is to let the car find its own level if you’re steering up you’re scrubbing off speed and if you’re steering down you virtually let go of the steering wheel and let the car find its level which varies on how fast you go. The fastest you go the further up the banking is the natural line. If you want to overtake someone you have to steer up the banking which obviously scraps off speed, on the other hand you get a good tow if you go down the bank but once you start going down it’s a hell of a job to get back up again. What you’re always told before you race on a banking was not to go down because that’s how you crash on a banking. It’s not recommended, but you can do it. At Montlhéry the banking is fairly shallow at the bottom and I found in fact you could go underneath people. At first it was a bit nerve-raking because doing something you’re told not to do you’re a bit apprehensive, but you could it.
With that confidence of the championship you moved to Formula 1 at the time it moved to 1½ litre.
Which had the formula not changed to 1½ from 2½ we probably wouldn’t have done it, but we felt that because I’d been used to the car the F1 would just be a development of the car we were already driving and wasn’t going to be a big step, so it put us in with a shout really. Had we had to have gone out and buy a 2½ litre we might not have done it, I don’t know. It seemed like the obvious thing to do really.
Your first GP was the Belgian where Ferraris were 1-2-3-4.
Yeah, the fastest Cooper or Lotus was racing for 5th place really.
Being the new boy in small private team, did you find it difficult to get entries at that level?
I don’t recall there being any difficulty getting accepted to take part in qualifying. As far as I remember they let people turn up to qualify and a certain number got through to race so if you were slow you didn’t get in the race. So you only had to convince them that you were half competitive to take part in qualifying. Being last year’s F-2 Champion, I suppose they thought the guy can do it to a certain extent, so we’ll have him and see what he can do. I can’t really remember how many people used to turn up but there were usually more cars in qualifying than in the race. But then after a couple of races people didn’t turn up because if you failed to qualify once or twice you though this is a waste of time so I’m not going to bother. So it boiled down to the same people in the end really. I don’t think we ever were refused to try and qualify.
How did you find the Spa-Francorchamps track?
There were no Formula 2 races there, so it was new. I thought that it was a great place.
Was it noticeable that your rivals were a notch above previous experience?
I didn’t feel intimidated, but I knew that I wasn’t going to be, at that point in time, up with the fast guys. For one thing, at Spa-Francorchamps Ferraris were very quick so again the fastest Climax was going to be fifth or something. The Ferrari had their new V-6s and we had the old 4 pot Climax which were flat out for long periods of time. The gearing was quite critical because we were running our own car. We had a spare engine yes, but we didn’t want to push it. The actual fastest lap time was obtainable with the rev counter at 7600 rpm, but the problem with that was every now and again you drop a valve. So we always geared it for 7200, because we knew if you ran it at 7200 it would run all day. It was very, very reliable engine at 7200. The engines we used in F1 were the twin cam version derived from the fire pump engine.
Later you raced at Reims and Aintree in the wet.
I can’t really remember much about those races. The trouble is I did two seasons of F-1, and without sitting down and trying it’s hard to recall exactly which race was which.
Your final GP of 1961 at Monza was the race you scored World Championship points, which was a tremendous achievement at that level in your first season.
In fact ironically it didn’t do me any good at all, because I finished 4th. Bruce McLaren was 3rd by the length of this room, in front of me. When it came to me joining Cooper next year, which was a distinct possibility, McLaren refused to have me as second driver, because I’d done so well at Monza. Ironically my best result actually stopped me from getting a works drive at that point in time.
Where were you in the bunch at the time of von Trips’ accident?
I was many yards behind. I saw it. Well I say I saw it happen, I saw the result of what happened. I didn’t see first hand what actually caused it.
Did that taint the celebratory feelings afterwards?
Yes it did but not to the extent it would today, because in those days if you were racing you got killed or died doing it, that was accepted. With the cars you were sitting in a mobile fuel tank, you had fuel on both sides in just an aluminium tank. If you had a crash they split and drivers were covered in petrol. Compared to today’s cars they were absolutely lethal.
Did your father or mother raise any objections?
No. Well yes, you’d be a total lunatic if it didn’t cross your mind. I think on average something like one in ten F-1 drivers got killed each season. When you averaged it out over say five years you’ll find ten drivers got killed one way or another. So you’d be naïve if you ignored that possibility, but if you wanted to go motor racing that was the risk you took. You couldn’t really justify it on any normal level, but from my own point of view I wanted to do it badly enough to take that risk, evidently or otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. At the time it seemed like a good idea. If someone asked me today whether it is a good idea to take a risk of 1:10 chance of killing yourself, I’d probably say no.
We turn to 1962, your second Formula 1 season and final year of racing. You were a graded driver at this time.
I think it gave you no automatic entries to GPs, but made it pretty difficult for organisers to refuse you. I think you had to be an A grade driver to be able to participate. There were rules, there were various ways of qualifying to be an A grade driver.
You went from being entered by H&L Motors to Ecurie Galloise. Why the name change?
At that time sponsorship was just beginning to come in and we thought we had some sponsorship lined up with a Welsh business man. Part of the deal was that we would call ourselves that name and this Welsh businessman was going to promote this Welsh racing team. Which was a slight stretch of the imagination because I’m not actually Welsh. But I do have got Welsh connections, he was Welsh and it was his team. Well he financed it, yet in fact it never happened. It turned out to be a complete waste of time. So the name just became a name and didn’t actually mean anything.
A lot of the history books say you’re a Welsh racing driver but do you consider yourself English?
Put it this way it was stretching credulity (laughs). It was a marketing tool I suppose you’d say in modern language. I mean I wasn’t born in Wales, my parents were both born in England. I think one of my mother’s parents was Welsh, my father’s parents were Welsh and the guy who was going to sponsor us was Welsh, so you could say it was Welsh. I mean, what if an Italian runs a team from England? It turned out not to be a brilliant idea and my father was feeling the pinch financially and it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it wasn’t in fact a good idea at all.
The first GP at Zandvoort was won by Graham Hill in a BRM. Had you looked a buying a BRM at this time?
I bought it before the season started because we originally were going to buy a BRM engine and put it in the Cooper chassis and it was going to be entered as a Cooper-BRM, possibly affiliated to the factory and they would help us with entries. Then BRM said why don’t you buy the car, because their new car looked completely different to the previous car. If you buy last year’s chassis with the engine you’ll have everything, the running car. Although the new model was visibly quite different the basic layout of the car was quite similar. So we thought rather than buy the BRM engine and take it down to Cooper factory and get them to fit it into the chassis and then work out all the cooling and all the ancillaries to go with it…it’ll be easier for us to just buy the BRM, which is what we did. John Cooper wasn’t very happy, although to be fair we hadn’t contracted to use a Cooper chassis, we’d asked if they would fit the engine, and they said yes they would. I suppose in terms of today’s ethics that is perfectly normal, but in those days that wasn’t quite kosher if you know what I mean. But anyway at the time we thought it was our best option to do that.
Monaco was a rude awakening and for the first time you failed to qualify. What was the reason for that?
J.L. The reason was that with one part of the track, I couldn’t figure out a way of getting round the hairpin. On the rest of the circuit I was fine, I was always good on road circuits like Pau, but I was losing a second/second and a half on the hairpin. The track was different in those days and there was a very sharp hairpin at the end. My BRM engine was on carburettors, the factory ones were on injection and we never actually figured out why this engine wouldn’t pick up coming out of that hairpin. What I landed up doing to try and get it out of the corner in a half sensible lap was dropping the clutch half way round and booting the throttle and then letting the clutch back out, which is not the best way of doing it. But it was the only way I could get the power down, round the rest the track I was able to keep it on the power band and the fact that it didn’t pick up from lower down the revs wasn’t critical. But that is such a sharp corner, and it wasn’t actually critical on any other circuit, but that one corner was an absolute killer. There were people timing around the track and I was doing pretty competitive times and I failed to qualify by not very much. I think Jo Siffert was the last one in (it was Tony Maggs). I would have been better off with the Cooper no question about it, but we had a new BRM car and thought we would take it to all tracks. It would have been far better if I’d taken the Cooper.
It needs to be noted that although Jack’s best recorded time was slower than Siffert’s, it was better than those put in by Jo Bonnier, Trevor Taylor, and Tony Maggs. But in those days factory drivers had guaranteed grid positions even if the privateers were faster, and there was only marginal chance for someone like Jack to make the 16-car starting grid.
I read in Doug Nye’s BRM book you sent it back to the factory.
What happened was that every time we used the car in a race the crankcase cracked, which meant we were only able to do every other race effectively because we couldn’t turn the car around quickly enough as we had to rebuild the engine all the time. In the end my father got fed up and being in charge he just said we can’t go on like this we ought to go back to the Cooper. Either give us an engine that’s not having to be rebuilt after every race with a new crankcase or give us our money back. So they gave us our money back.
Is that why you didn’t go to Spa-Francorchamps? You next turned up at Rouen and had a brake problem, had an accident early on in the race.
Is that when I hit Graham Hill off the road (yes) or a F-2 race? Do you know I honestly can’t remember. I can remember being in the pits and having steering problems.
Later on that season at the Nürburgring was your last GP. You then did the Oulton Park Gold Cup and retired quite suddenly from the sport. Why was that?
It’s very hard to put into words actually. Obviously, with what happened in the first year of Formula 1 doing so well and then I made a complete cock-up of the second year effectively, which wasn’t actually my fault in terms of lack of talent, but circumstances. I started wondering whether I actually thought it was a good idea to carry on. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to drive racing cars, but the problem is that the upside to driving a racing car is the satisfaction and feeling that you are able to do what you’re doing. You’re able to control the car and go faster than the next guy and the number of times you get that feeling of satisfaction driving a racing car in a race is really outweighed by the number of times it goes wrong. So it’s very hard to justify risking your life doing something which you find pleasurable, when it’s not in fact that pleasurable in the overall context. You only really enjoy driving the car, the rest of it is hassle, plus it’s extremely dangerous. So if you stop and think what you’re doing, which I always have done. Partly due to my education, when I was at school people would say why am doing what I’m doing, is it a good idea to be doing what I’m doing. If you apply that thinking to motor racing you’re on pretty thin ice, really. Because it’s a pretty hard thing to justify. I got to the point where I thought, is my desire to do it greater than my frustrations of how difficult it is, if you’d like to put it that way. And I thought well maybe I could live without and of course that’s a fatal train of thought really because obviously you can live without it (laughs). It’s fairly hard to remember the thought processes at the time, because I didn’t go home from Oulton Park and think that’s it I’m going to give up racing. It wasn’t a decision in that sense. Over a period of time we were planning what to do next season…my father said he couldn’t afford to go on financing it. Obviously, I could have got a drive with someone else of some sort, perhaps not Formula 1. And I seriously started thinking, do I want to carry on with this. And than an option came up whereby my father bought a farmyard in Wales. And the option came up for me to run the farm, because obviously he didn’t want to run the farm as he was running the family business. I can remember him saying why don’t we just miss a season, give ourselves time to figure out whether I want to run the farm or not. One can live on the farm if he doesn’t want to go back. And of course, had I been totally committed to it I would have thought that’s ridiculous I’ve got to keep doing it, let’s face it if you take a year out you’re history. So I didn’t decide to keep going, so obviously at the time I must have felt I can live without it. It’s very additive motor racing and you can land in a situation where you feel you’ve got to do it, because you’ve promised yourself you’re going to do it and you can’t quite face not doing it, if you know what I mean. You could get pretty philosophical about it and when
you introduce the element of killing yourself as well…once you stop and start thinking quite deeply about why you’re doing it, it is very hard to justify, if you’re a rational person. It’s not a rational thing to do. Nowadays you could say it’s not that dangerous, people don’t kill themselves doing it. So it wasn’t one thing, I never actually decided to stop because I had an option of going back in after I’d taken the time out. In fact when I took the time out I realised I was quite happy without it to be honest. Which I found extremely disappointing because I always felt when I started racing I was in it like everyone who starts motor racing. I wanted to be World Champion, I felt I could do it. I‘ve thought about this off and on over the years and other people have asked me why did you stop doing it when you had done, in quite a short time, quite well up to the last season. And I think there is a complimented attitude of mind in doing something as competitive as motor racing and that is the difference between the person who does something to prove to himself he can do it and the person who does something to prove to everyone else he can do it. Now I was the first category, I knew I could drive a racing car as fast as virtually anyone because I’d followed them round like Bruce McLaren at the Italian GP. I knew I could to it. I didn’t feel the necessity to prove to the outside world that I could do it by being World Champion or whatever, and obviously if you’re going to be a World Champion you’ve got to have the second attitude, you’ve got to want to prove it to everybody else. It’s no good being self-satisfied, because no one believes you, it’s no good me saying to you I know I can drive as fast as anybody, you say oh yeah prove it! I don’t have to prove it to myself…I know I can do it. I can’t prove it to you except by doing it next year can I? See what I mean?
Did you ever look over your shoulder?
No.
Did you follow it at all from 1962 onwards?
No, well I heard it on the news. Not so much when I actually ran the farm in Llandovery for 15 years, where I lived since the Spring of 1963. Since I came back to Stroud when my father eventually decided he wanted me to help him run the business, I’ve always watched Formula 1 on TV.
Does H & L Motors still exist?
Yes and no. H & L Motors still owns the site on which we used to run the business and I just rent it all out now. I closed the bike business in 1988.
Who of your contemporaries you raced against did you rate as the best drivers?
Oh Stirling Moss definitely. No question, any driver would say that…including Moss (laughs).
Do ever see any of the drivers or keep in touch with any of them, through BRDC or otherwise?
While I was racing I wasn’t what you might call mates with anybody. Funny enough I got to know Taffy von Trips quite well, because during a Grand Prix he was a brilliant bloke. The German organisers were messing me about, I can’t remember the details but he was in the office at the same time as this organiser was telling us we couldn’t have the money we were expecting or something other, and von Trips interrupted the conversation and negotiation and said to the organisers you stick to what you said. He had no real reason to do that other than he felt that they should do the right thing, he was a good bloke. I think he was a member of the German aristocracy, a real gentleman. Once at Clermont- Ferrand I got to know Stirling Moss quite well as one or two things in the pits cropped up. I was a BRDC (British Racing Drivers Club) member at the time, but my subscription lapsed years ago. I’m not sure if it’s a character defect or attribute, but I’m not really interested in following up the past, I don’t know why some people do. I wouldn’t say I have no interest as I read about it. I think I have an attitude that you either do something or you don’t, which I’ve done with other things like farming. At school I played county cricket and rugby and practically did nothing else but play sport. I left school went in the army played rugby all through national service left and never played a game since. And yet I played rugby every weekend all through my school and all through national service. When I came home after national service the local rugby team said, do you want to come and play rugby, no I’m not interested. I stopped just like that. And then I went motor racing and stopped motor racing, went sheep farming and bred Arabian horses on a farm in Wales. I was a sheep farmer for 15 years, stopped sheep farming came up to run a business and never had an interest in farming since. So I seem to be a person who devotes his attention to something through a time span and then quite capable of chopping it off and doing something else for 15 years, then chopping that off and doing something else. This is either plus or minus, it means you have an interesting life, but means you never reach the top in anything because you actually jump ship. Yet, when I raised purebred Arabian horses…that was fascinating.
