As the Greek tragedians demonstrated two millennia ago, every great protagonist demands an equally formidable antagonist. For Jackie Stewart, it was a bespectacled journalist with a long, wispy beard for whom the word ‘eccentric’ might have been coined. Denis Sargent Jenkinson, known by the byline DSJ to readers of Motor Sport, was the magazine’s longtime European correspondent. From April to September, he would cover races by speeding around the continent on a series of high-performance vehicles ranging from a Norton Manx to an E-type Jaguar.

In his private life, Jenks was an odd duck. He lived in a small cottage with a domesticated sparrow, an extraordinary library of automotive books and a wrecking yard’s worth of car and motorcycle parts. He had one dinner plate, one chair and no running water. Lighting was provided by six-volt bulbs hooked to a generator powered by a Fiat 500 that was parked outside. He lived for racing and fast motoring. This is a man who once tested a Formula 2 Lotus on public roads on Christmas Day because he figured the police would be less likely to be on the prowl.

“Jenkinson was, if anything, an anarchist with no interest in business or politics”

There were some obvious differences between Stewart and Jenkinson in terms of style and attitude, but most of them came down to the fact that they were products of different generations, with different mores. Stewart, paradoxically, was the more conservative of the two – a committed capitalist despite the Swinging Sixties plumage, while Jenkinson was, if anything, an anarchist with no interest in business or politics. What’s more striking in retrospect is how similar they were in so many ways. Both of them were small in stature yet large in character, willing to take on and maintain unpopular positions no matter how fierce the criticism. Both of them were cosmopolitan characters comfortable in the world beyond the borders of the British Isles. And both of them were repudiations of the stereotypes that their enemies constructed for them.

Detractors called Stewart a pampered baby who lacked the cojones to race on circuits that had been mastered by the titans of an earlier age. Yet it was Stewart who scored a win for the ages at the Nordschleife, finishing 4min ahead of his closest competitor, Graham Hill, in the German Grand Prix in 1968, in rain so heavy and fog so thick that BRM team manager Louis Stanley wrote: “Only a miracle prevented several major accidents that could have left a trail of spectator deaths and injuries.” Then, in 1973, during practice for the South African Grand Prix, Stewart’s foot went to the floor in the brake zone at the end of the long front straight at Kyalami. He spun the car at 180mph but still went through three layers of catch fencing before his Tyrrell ground to a stop, inches before his helmet would have hit an embankment. “There may be people who feel offended by safety gear, but had not Stewart himself suggested the placement of those wire fences in this location a couple of years earlier… well, there wouldn’t be a Jackie Stewart to kick around any more,” Pete Lyons reported in Autoweek.

Not only did Stewart stick around for the race, but he won it. As for Jenkinson, critics dismissed him as an antiquated blowhard as callous and ill-informed as the generals who’d ordered tens of thousands of young men to their pointless deaths during World War I. In fact, Jenkinson had been a conscientious objector during World War II, and he was a genuine and highly respected speed demon. He was the sidecar rider when motorcyclist Eric Oliver won a world championship in 1949. In 1955, he served as Stirling Moss’s navigator during their epic victory in the Mille Miglia in a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR. Before the race, Jenkinson invented the modern version of rally pace notes. Afterwards, Motor Sport published his long first-person account of the gruelling event – an article that’s generally acknowledged as one of the most memorable pieces in the history of racing journalism.

Jenkinson was the author of The Racing Driver, which was the first book to look deeply at the technique and psychology of motor sports. In it, he popularised the concept of ‘tenths’, as in ten tenths being balls to the wall and, say, five tenths meaning idling around like a poseur. He relished nothing more than a driver who could ‘tiger’, a term he used as both a noun and a verb to refer to someone who could grab a car by the scruff of the neck and make it go faster than reason – or, it seemed, the laws of physics – would permit. Moss was his paragon, not only for his unparalleled speed but also for his equanimity while driving flat-out, leaving no margin for error, even when he knew that a mistake could have serious, and perhaps fatal, consequences.

Stewart was elected president of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association in 1968. Previously, the job had been held by Jo Bonnier, an urbane gentleman racer old enough to have raced against Juan Manuel Fangio, Moss and pre-war great Louis Chiron. During Bonnier’s tenure, the GPDA’s chief concern had been negotiating more starting and prize money for the drivers. When Stewart succeeded him, safety became the focus. Speaking with his squeaky Scottish burr, Stewart gave voice to the convictions that most of his fellow drivers shared but were reluctant to say out loud – namely that drastic action had to be taken to make circuits less dangerous. At the end of the 1968 season, he wrote a remarkable essay in Autocourse titled Circuit safety, which served as the opening salvo in the war between JYS and DSJ.

“Stewart wrote a remarkable essay which served as the opening salvo in a war between JYS and DSJ”

“I earn my living from being a racing driver,” Stewart wrote. “I want to retain my interest in motor racing through being able to continue as a competitive driver for many years to come. This I feel will be more possible if I try to suggest improvements that will allow me to have accidents without serious consequence. I don’t pretend to think that I will have no motor racing accidents, but I would like to feel that if and when they do occur I have a reasonable chance of survival. I am not above making mistakes, and it is wrong for anyone to suggest that a Grand Prix driver should always drive within his limits. No human being is without the possibility of making errors, and I don’t see why death should be a necessary consequence of human error.”

To modern sensibilities, this sounds like a truth as self-evident as all men being created equal. But in Jenkinson’s eyes, Stewart’s statement of first principles challenged the existential foundation of the sport. “I have seen a matador killed and I have also seen a racing driver killed,” Jenkinson wrote. “To reach the ultimate one must ‘Dice with Death’ and often Death claims a victim, but when he does so under such circumstances let us not bewail the fact, but rather salute and admire a man who died doing his utmost in his own specialised sphere.

“I remember Jackie Stewart hollering at me about defying the boycott to race at Spa”

“Man has always strived for the unknown, it is that small factor beyond his knowledge that keeps him going, without it he would deteriorate. Remove the challenge and you remove the reason, whether it be to go faster than anyone else in a straight line, whether it be to accelerate faster than anyone else, or corner faster, or brake later; there has to be a challenge.”

In Stewart’s article in Autocourse, he outlined changes that the drivers wanted at various circuits on the F1 calendar. Most of the track owners agreed to implement at least some of the upgrades. But the GPDA couldn’t reach an agreement with the Royal Automobile Club of Belgium regarding Spa-Francorchamps. So in 1969, the drivers boycotted the Belgian Grand Prix, and the F1 round at Spa was cancelled. Jenkinson thought the decision was disgraceful. As he wrote: “I have always thought that one of the endearing features of a Grand Prix driver was that he had GUTS and would accept a challenge that normal people like you and I would not be brave enough to face; now I am not so sure.”

Ironically, several of the drivers who boycotted the race competed in the Spa 1000Kms later that year even though the 5-litre sports-prototypes were even faster than the 3-litre F1 cars. Some of them, most notably Mexican Pedro Rodríguez, were fatalists who considered most safety regulations pointless. Others, like Jacky Ickx, professed to be unfazed by the terrors of Burnenville or Stavelot. And then there were those who were drawn like moths to a flame. “I remember Jackie Stewart hollering at me about defying the boycott to race at Spa,” Howden Ganley recalled. “I said, ‘Jackie, but you’ve raced there and I never have, so I have to do it.’ It turned out that I loved Spa. It was second only to the old Nürburgring.”

Although Jenkinson never missed an opportunity to crow about the defectors from the GPDA’s party line, the truth of the matter is that most of the drivers privately agreed with Stewart, though, for a variety of reasons – self-interest, self-consciousness, self-preservation – they declined to speak out publicly. As Ganley said, looking back at his own behaviour: “Sadly, I was a bit ambivalent, and to my regret I did not support Jackie. I mean, I went along with him. But I was not vociferous about it. I was kind of like, ‘OK, that’s great, Jackie. Do what you want to do, and I’ll vote for you.’ But I wasn’t getting up on the pedestal and shouting about it.”

“I know we have recently had a series of nasty accidents, but we must not get hysterical”

Stewart was reviled as the personification of the lily-livered, money-grabbing, self-centred drivers who were supposedly ruining racing. He was name-checked in vitriolic letters to the Motor Sport editor and jeered by members of the old guard. Retired driver Innes Ireland, who’d given Team Lotus its first grand grix victory in 1961, would stroll past Stewart on the grid, flapping his arms like a chicken. Back in Ireland’s day, remember, drivers didn’t even wear what he described as “hysterical” safety belts.

“Stewart was the one who started all this crap, going on about his blood-group on his underpants and things,” he said. “You think it’s a good idea?” Moss was another ex-driver who couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. “They are emasculating our sport with safety demands,” he declared. “Over the years, we looked upon road racing as exactly that – road racing. When there was a kerb on a turn, we made damn sure we didn’t slide into it. Today, drivers insist kerbing be removed.”

To his credit, although Jenkinson routinely bad-mouthed Stewart as the “beady-eyed little Scot”, he never let his contempt for the man corrupt his appreciation for the driver. “I don’t think anyone will argue when I say that Stewart is easily the best driver in Formula 1 racing today,” he wrote in his report about the Race of Champions at Brands Hatch in 1971. “To watch his skill and reflexes at work on the wet track was to watch an artist at work and it was a joy to behold.”

As perceptive as Jenkinson was as a race observer, he was like a horse wearing blinkers when it came to safety. Commenting on a four-week span in the summer of 1970 when Bruce McLaren, Piers Courage, Hans Laine and Derrick Williams died in four separate road-racing incidents, he wrote: “I am well aware that motor racing, or any other form of racing, is dangerous, bloody dangerous, but that is what makes it exciting for spectators and competitors alike, and I know we have recently had a series of nasty accidents, but, for goodness sake, we must not get hysterical.”

But people did get hysterical, and Stewart was able to leverage the hysteria to effect major changes. In 1971, the Nordschleife was revamped before being allowed back on the F1 calendar. The Belgian Grand Prix at Spa, which had been reinstated the previous year, was cancelled again. Ditto for Mexico, which had been marred the year before by out-of-control spectators sitting on the edge of the racetrack, as if they were attending a rock concert rather than a motor race. In 1972, the Dutch Grand Prix was cancelled when the organisers failed to upgrade Zandvoort, and the Belgian Grand Prix was moved to Nivelles.

Like a time traveller transported to an alien future, Jenkinson was bewildered by the transformation Stewart had wrought. Speaking about a chicane that had been added in an effort to save Spa in 1970, he wrote: “Later, when I saw Jackie Stewart, who is the leader of the anti-Spa brigade, I asked him what purpose the GPDA chicane served, apart from adding some braking and gear-changing to the scene, as the cars seemed to be going just as fast down the Masta straight. His reply was that the chicane made Malmedy corner safer. I was speechless. It was the first time I had heard that Malmedy was a dangerous corner. ‘Oh, yes,’ said the pious little Scot, ‘it was very dangerous.’ I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, I was so confused. I thought the danger they were bleating about was the high speed, and suddenly here I was being told a corner was dangerous.’

“In my humble opinion a corner is as dangerous (or safe) as the driver cares to make it,” Jenkinson continued. “When race planning with those two Champions, Eric Oliver on sidecars and Stirling Moss on sports cars, if we thought a corner was dangerous we didn’t have it altered, we said, ‘That one is dodgy, we must treat it with respect.’ So Malmedy corner is dangerous. The leader of the GPDA milk-and-water brigade and his chums have made some remarkable statements in the past, but that is the best yet.”