Chapter One - Formula 1

There is humour in its retelling – featuring as it does nudity, a distinguished English gent with military moustache, shocked nuns and a ‘Carry On’ ambulance journey – but it wasn’t funny at the time. Stewart’s fearsome crash after a sudden deluge on the opening lap of the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix at Spa, which saw him run through a telegraph pole and a shed before an 8ft drop onto a farm’s front patio and which resulted in burns, broken ribs and internal bleeding, was Damascene.

One year earlier, at the same circuit and in similar conditions, he had finished second and brushed aside winner Jim Clark’s concern on the podium: “Sure, I’m fine. What’s the problem?” Stewart’s ‘Rocket Ship’ was accelerating still and he was enjoying the ride: a point in South Africa on his world championship debut with BRM; second in the Race of Champions at Brands Hatch; pole position and joint fastest lap in Goodwood’s Sunday Mirror Trophy; and victory – the International Trophy at Silverstone – in only his fifth Formula 1 race. Come September, he would be keeping a cool head during a typically frenetic slipstreamer at a Monza without chicanes to win the Italian GP.

But these were deathly circumstances – flimsy cars on ballsy circuits – and Stewart, who incredibly shed not a single drop of blood during his career, would lose more than 50 friends to the sport. In 1968 the toll was one per month.

Having survived his ‘biggie’ – the groggy Stewart was freed from a bent cockpit filling with fuel by fellow drivers/crashers Graham Hill and Bob Bondurant using a spanner borrowed from a spectator – the chirpy Scot rightly became chippy: why had there been no sighting lap? Why did the ambulance take a half-hour to arrive? He would never be short of a question thereafter and race organisers and circuit owners were irked when he wanted answers, and demanded action.

Stewart’s safety crusade – he dislikes the phrase but that’s what it had to be – made him enemies while saving friends. Not that all were appreciative at the time; Innes Ireland used to making clucking noises in his presence. It was craven, however, to accuse him of cowardice. Stewart raced as bravely as anyone: in 1967 he finished second at Spa while holding his car in gear; in 1968, with a broken wrist, he won by more than four minutes through the fog and rain of the Nürburgring; and in 1970, tears stinging after friend Rindt’s fatal accident, he set his then fastest lap of Monza. Some reckoned the latter to be a death wish. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Stewart never craved the fastest car. He wanted a competitive car whose integrity he could trust while stretching his personal elastic to achieve that crucial final tenth. He also wanted a team boss whose word was his bond. Enzo Ferrari was not that man and their mooted deal for 1968 collapsed after it had leaked. In stark contrast Stewart trusted Ken Tyrrell with his life. Their decision to step up together to F1 was a leap. They almost won the title at their first attempt with Matra, although Stewart later admitted that he was not yet ready to be a world champion. That was emphatically not the case by 1969 and he swept to the first of his three titles. Turmoil followed. Matra wanted him to use its V12 whereas Stewart preferred the gutsier Ford-Cosworth V8 even if it meant using an unloved March before another leap: Tyrrell would become a reluctant constructor by the end of 1970.

Stewart’s ability to form new relationships – most of which he curated long after he retired – and to operate on several fronts before filtering out any ‘noise’ once his visor had been shut was fundamental to his second and third titles. Tyrrell 003, on newfangled Goodyear slicks, won in Spain to trigger another unstoppable championship charge.

But he was not bulletproof. That steel-trap mind was willing but the body was being weakened by a hectic schedule: a diagnosis of anaemia followed by a bleeding duodenal ulcer. The re-emergence of Lotus and Emerson Fittipaldi meant that Stewart be fully fit in 1972. He was not. Not even his wife Helen knew of Stewart’s plan to retire at the end of 1973; only Tyrrell and Ford bigwigs Walter Hayes and John Waddell did.

Now comfortable with his decision, he set about winning that third title. It was all so typically neat. A total of 27 GP wins, and the finale at Watkins Glen was to be his 100th F1 World Championship start.

For three years he had selflessly groomed team-mate François Cevert to be his successor at Tyrrell. Now, on the verge of his accession, this handsome prince of a man crashed fatally in practice. Stewart did a handful of laps to try to understand the accident – likely an unsettling hump attacked in too low a gear – before clambering from a competitive cockpit for the last time.