Formula One was never like this.
Jacky Ickx was awestruck at his visit to the Team New Zealand base in Auckland last week, marvelling at the technology and dedication of the staff to be the very best.
The 72-year-old Belgian former motor racing driver is in New Zealand to be the guest speaker at the Chris Amon celebration dinner on Sunday evening and also take in the NZ Grand Prix at Manfeild.
The track has been renamed Circuit Chris Amon in honour of one of New Zealand’s greatest ever drivers and it’s fitting that his former Formula One team-mate, Ickx has made the trip from Monaco to be at the dinner.
But before he headed to Feilding, he spent an afternoon touring the Team NZ base and while it’s easy to assume there are similarities between preparing a car or boat to go as fast as possible, Ickx says he never saw anything like this in his day.
“I’d call my time in Formula One the stone age compared to this,” Ickx said.
“The people here are full of passion. There’s the pride of a country behind this, because New Zealanders have a soul for their country.”
Ickx and Amon were together at Ferrari in 1968. It was Amon’s second year with the Italian team, with his best result being a second place finish at the British Grand Prix.
Ickx won the French Grand Prix that year and over his career he’d have eight Formula One wins and also win 24 Hours of Le Mans six times, plus Bathurst with Allan Moffatt in 1977 and the Paris-Dakar Rally in 1983.
But this trip to New Zealand isn’t about him, it’s about Amon and perhaps reflecting on the country’s golden age in motor racing, when there were three Kiwis in Formula One.
“Chris was an outstanding driver and New Zealand has had a lot of very good drivers,” Ickx said.
“The first one on the list is Bruce McLaren, there’s also Chris and Denny Hulme.
“Then in the younger generation there’s Earl Bamber, Brendon Hartley and Scott Dixon.
“Chris is part of all of that. But he didn’t get the success he deserved, because he didn’t have the people around him, when I say that, I also mean the right car and the right timing.
“He won Le Mans in 1966 with Bruce and it was probably the victory of his life.
“But he was leading Grand Prix, quickest in practice and the fastest in races and he did what he had to do in the best possible way.
“In my opinion, he was good times two. He was good as a talented driver and also good as a person.
“If you’re too kind, or don’t have a really strong ego, if you’re not selfish, then that’s not very attractive, but it’s the way you can be efficient.
“But Chris was never like that, he was fast, talented and eager to win, but he was always a mountain of courtesy and sweetness.”
Amon, who died of cancer last August, is often referred to as the best Formula One driver to never win a championship race, with bad luck so often ruining races for him.
Former Formula One champion Mario Andretti once said of Amon: “If he became an undertaker, people would stop dying.”
But Ickx doesn’t think Amon was unlucky, far from it.
“He had talent, maybe he didn’t get what he deserved, but in the end he was lucky, both of us were,” he said.
“At that time motor racing was very dangerous. It didn’t change our attitude to racing, we loved it and we accepted the risk, but every year there were one or two drivers dying and we still kept our foot down on the throttle.
“Chris died at the age of 73 that’s a great deal of luck for someone who raced in that era, few of them have reached that goal.”
Ickx saw plenty of his friends die in races and his career was bookended by fatalities he was involved in.
On the first lap of his first Grand Prix race in 1966, in Germany, his car collided with John Taylor from Britain. Taylor emerged from the wreckage badly burnt and died four weeks later.
In 1985 at the 1000km of Spa, German driver Stefan Bellof tried to overtake Ickx at a corner, the cars hit and less than a minute after coming to a halt, Bellof’s car exploded into flames.
Ickx joined in trying to get Bellof out of the car, which still had smoke pouring out of it. But Bellof was pronounced dead at the track hospital.
That was enough for Ickx, who retired at the end of that season.
“Definitely, I can only be happy [to have survived]. Except that I saw death around me much more than others.
“Chris may have been frustrated at certain points, but he lived for a long time, even if we consider that dying at 73 these days is too young.
“But he didn’t have a bad accident and managed to return home safely and have his farm and his family.”
In modern motor racing the first person any driver wants to beat is their team-mate and the recent feud between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg at Mercedes was of legendary status.
Ickx says it wasn’t like that with him and Amon.
“Chris was the No 1 and I was the No 2,” he said.
“I wasn’t dangerous to him in those days, so there wasn’t any reason to become enemies.
“You only become enemies when you’re equal.
“But there’s still a place for friendship these days, although examples of it aren’t easy to find in motor racing today.”
Ickx and Amon remained friends after that 1968 season, when Ickx moved to Brabham and says he feels privileged to come to New Zealand to pay tribute to his old mate.
“I could hardly resist the offer to come and honour Chris,” he said.
“You have to keep in mind the people you liked, who deserve not to be forgotten.”
