Sir Jackie Stewart(1939–)

John Young Stewart was born on the eleventh of June 1939 at Milton in the Vale of Leven, Dumbartonshire, second son of Robert Stewart, the proprietor of the Dumbuck Garage at Milton on the A82 Loch Lomond road, and Jean Young. He was raised at the garage, was schooled at Dumbarton Academy (where his undiagnosed dyslexia produced the educational underperformance that became, in his later interviews, the central biographical fact of his early life), left school at fifteen to apprentice at the family garage, and through his teens took up competitive clay-pigeon shooting in which he won the Scottish, British, English, Welsh and Irish national championships and narrowly missed selection for the British team at the 1960 Rome Olympic Games.

He took his first competitive car race at Charterhall in Berwickshire in March 1961 in a small Marcos sports car owned by the Dumbarton garage customer Barry Filer, won the Ecurie Ecosse Trophy at Charterhall in 1962, and through 1963 took the British Saloon Car Championship in a Jaguar 3.8 for the Ecurie Ecosse team. Ken Tyrrell signed him in November 1963 for the new Tyrrell Formula Three team. He won the British, French, Belgian and Italian Formula Three championships in 1964 in his twenty-fifth year, took the Formula Two title in 1965 for Cooper, and made his Formula One debut for British Racing Motors at the South African Grand Prix at East London on the first of January 1965, finishing sixth on debut.

He won his first Grand Prix at Monza in September 1965 in his second F1 season (the famous wet-weather drive in the BRM P261), drove for BRM through 1965 to 1967 and for Ken Tyrrell's Tyrrell Racing from 1968 to his retirement in 1973. He won the World Drivers' Championship for the first time in 1969 in the Matra MS80 with seven Grand Prix wins (the South African, Spanish, Dutch, French, British, Italian and the season-deciding Monza), took the second title in 1971 in the Tyrrell 003 (six wins), and won the third in 1973 in the Tyrrell 006 (five wins). He retired at the end of the 1973 season after his Tyrrell team-mate François Cévert was killed in qualifying for the United States Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, having committed before Cévert's death to retiring at the conclusion of his hundredth Grand Prix start; the Watkins Glen race would have been his hundredth. He never started it. He retired with twenty-seven Grand Prix wins (the single-driver F1 wins record at his retirement) and forty-three podiums from ninety-nine starts.

His central single legacy was the safety campaign he ran across his racing career and the next four decades after his retirement. The Formula One of 1965 to 1975 killed approximately one driver per year; the circuits had no Armco safety barriers, no medical facilities at the track-side, no fireproof clothing, no full-face helmets, no roll-over hoops on the cars. After the death of his BRM team-mate Jim Clark at Hockenheim in April 1968 and the deaths of his Tyrrell team-mate François Cévert in 1973 and a long sequence of contemporaries (Bandini, Schlesser, Rindt, Cevert, Donohue, Pace, Pryce), Stewart led the Grand Prix Drivers' Association campaign for fundamental safety reform: medical facilities at every circuit, six-point safety harnesses, fireproof Nomex driving suits, full-face helmets, the redesign of the cars' fuel-tank rupture-resistance, the removal of the worst circuits (Nürburgring Nordschleife, Spa-Francorchamps in its original 8.7-mile form). The campaign was bitterly opposed by the sanctioning bodies of the period (the FIA and the circuit owners), and Stewart took the personal political brunt of the opposition through the press. The reform programme was adopted in stages across 1969 to 1985 and brought the driver-fatality rate from approximately one per year through the early 1970s to two between 1982 and 1994, the longest sustained safety-improvement programme in the history of any major sport.

He founded Stewart Grand Prix Formula One team in 1997 with his son Paul Stewart, took the team to the Constructors' Championship fifth place in 1999, sold the team to Ford in 1999 (the team continued as Jaguar Racing 2000 to 2004 and then as the basis of the modern Red Bull Racing from 2005, which has won the World Constructors' Championship six times since 2010). He has served as President of the British Racing Drivers' Club and as a long-standing ambassador for dyslexia awareness through the Andy Stewart Foundation. He was knighted in the 2001 Birthday Honours List. The Stewart name in modern Scottish sport carries the weight of the three World Championships and the safety campaign.