In a Beyond The Grid interview, Patrick Head described the type of driver Williams gravitated toward. "We liked real fighters," he said. "Drivers who liked to scrap."
Alan Jones was exactly that. In the car or out of it, he liked to scrap. He was a real character. That reputation extended well beyond the cockpit. Patrick recalled a sponsor event where Williams marketing man Charlie Crichton-Stuart had taken Jones outside the paddock.
As they pushed back through the crowd, fans kept tugging at Alan, asking him to turn around for photos. "Some guy had really got his goat," Head said, pulling at him over and over again. Eventually, Jones turned around and gave him an uppercut.
As Head noted, with Alan, you only needed one punch and the guy would be out cold.
Another incident came in South Africa in 1981. Jones had retired early and was posing for photos beside a Leyland truck with a promotional model sitting in the cab above him. When a drunk onlooker began making unpleasant comments toward her, Alan politely asked him to back off. He did not.
So Alan dropped him with one uppercut. The twist was that the man happened to be Leyland's biggest vehicle importer in South Africa. He was unconscious for 20 minutes and needed buckets of iced water to wake him up.
As Patrick put it: this did not happen often, but when Alan Jones hit someone, you knew all about it.
