F1's best of a golden era, ranked by a driver who lived it

In late 2018, Autosport magazine asked its readers to vote for their favourite era of Formula 1, with 1974-82 coming out on top. This was the era after Jackie Stewart retired and before the turbo-powered cars began to clean up, swiftly followed by the Alain Prost-Ayrton Senna rivalry.

Considering the formidable talent on offer during 1974-82, John Watson - the five-time grand prix winner turned commentator - is perfectly placed to pick out his leading drivers of the era.

10 Carlos Reutemann

In 1981 in Las Vegas, Carlos drove that grand prix doing something I've never seen a driver do. He drove that race in his mirrors - he never once looked forward. He got passed left, right and centre. Nelson Piquet didn't win that championship in 1981 at Las Vegas; it was Carlos who blew it.

He was probably the most psychologically fragile of all the drivers we're including here. A very talented, quick guy, overanalytical probably - every gear ratio change, spring change, rollbar change, he'd write it down. A very good driver, but not a racer. He was unusually quiet for a Latin American - probably because he's a German! Carlos and his wife Mimicha were not social like Carlos Pace. He was insular.

Carlos had such good qualities but his fragility was illustrated by what happened in 1981. Remember, there was a clause in his Williams contract where if Alan Jones was closing, Carlos was required to let him by. I think Carlos felt there was prejudice and the team was working against him and in Alan's favour, and you can understand why. Alan had the team in the palm of his hand because he was the kind of racing driver Williams wanted.

They didn't want some sensitive South American who needed an arm putting around him. He always seemed to choose the car that had won the championship the previous year, and then realise he'd made an error.

He left Brabham to go to Ferrari in late 1976, he went to Lotus in 1979, so he was always a year or more out of step. When Carlos went to Ferrari, Niki told me that he turned around and said: "I'm going to fuck that guy." And he did. That's one of the qualities that makes a good driver a great driver, and Carlos's mental flaws blighted his whole career.

9 Keke Rosberg

In 1978 at Kyalami, I was coming up around the Jukskei kink, which was just about flat at that time. Keke was in front, driving the Theodore, and he had that car dancing around on its nose. I tell you what - [famed ballet dancer Rudolf] Nureyev would have been pleased with some of those moves.

Rosberg was an illustration of massive car control; he was out-driving the car by a million miles. That car would never be higher than the back of the grid, but did he know that?

Later, at Fittipaldi, he was masked because the money was going in the wrong places I suspect. When he went to Williams for 1982, he did a great job in winter testing and impressed the hell out of Patrick [Head]. The characters blended together.

The Williams of 1982 wasn't the best car; it was on the wrong tyres arguably in certain circumstances, especially at high-speed circuits. But Keke wrung its neck in qualifying. He's got great car control and he's a smart guy - whether or not you like his banter and his humour.

He replaced Alan Jones at Williams. How could a Finn and an Australian have any similarity? I'd have said in some respects Keke is a more intelligent guy than Alan, but Alan is a clever operator with more mouth than Bournemouth! Both were racers. They never really raced one another in comparable equipment, and it would have been interesting to see how they would have done against each other. I think Alan would have come out on top just because of sheer bloody-mindedness.

Keke showed very clever restraint in 1982. He built the points to the last race, where I had to win while he was fifth or lower. The other thing is, his team-mate was Derek Daly. He wasn't a threat, whereas I had Niki Lauda's considerable presence and force, which at different times was destructive.

8 Mario Andretti

There's no doubt about it, Mario is the most versatile driver - he's won championships in Indycars, he's won in NASCAR, he's won the world championship. And he's a smart operator.

When Mario went to Lotus in 1976, that car was a shitbox. But Mario was good at feedback, helped the engineer get a picture, and that's fundamentally where the relationship is built.

The main thing with him is you were never sure whether his bigger commitment was to Indycars and he was using F1 to fill in, but he gave that commitment to Colin Chapman and stuck with it.

When he got the Lotus 79 in 1978, rightly so Colin said, "Right Mario, you've put all the hard yards in", and also Colin was about to launch products in America. So Mario deserved that position as number one in the team. He'd built that, and it was part of his ability to work things out.

Mario's a good racer too. He grew up racing those little midgets in America and he knew what it was all about. But then he came from racing wheel-to-wheel on ovals to racing against James Hunt - "Fuck off you American, I don't want you fucking passing me!" You can almost imagine James saying that...

Before Lotus, he raced the Parnelli. That was a beautiful car, basically the Mk2 version of the Lotus 72 that Maurice Philippe [who designed both cars] had done. Part of the reason for Mario's lack of success there was operational, rather than technical. His ability was not in question at all, but it was an American-owned team.

What inhibited Parnelli was they didn't want to be European based with an American owner [like Penske, for which Watson won the 1976 Austrian GP]. It was a pragmatic judgement [to pull out]: Parnelli Jones and Vel Miletich were multi-millionaires and they didn't want to become just millionaires.

7 Alan Jones

Alan was an underappreciated, undervalued driver when he got to F1. He was a kind of archetypal Australian larrikin, skin like a rhinoceros, bloody-minded self-belief, didn't give a stuff about anybody, which fundamentally is the right approach.

The moment he was kissed by the frog was when he went to Williams [for 1978] - I don't know if he was aware of what Patrick Head [designer] was working on for 1979. He was given an opportunity, used it mercurially and then he pissed off.

He had some great races with Didier Pironi, who was equally bloody-minded, and with Nelson Piquet. One time Alan ran Piquet off the track, and Piquet came up to Alan and said: "Next time you do that I kill you." Wrong person to say that to, Nelson! Because if anyone in the paddock could kill you it was Alan, and he would have done that with pleasure.

It wasn't just the FW07 and Alan at Williams. You had Patrick - and Frank Williams is pretty hard-nosed as well. Whether by design or good fortune, Frank created the platform for Patrick to produce a car for a driver of Alan's ability. In a funny way, it became a mini-Ferrari - like Niki Lauda, Mauro Forghieri and Luca Montezemolo. There were three key people among a number of other important people, and Alan used that car to maximum effect.

I asked Alan one time, "Patrick could be abrasive, so if the car wasn't working what did the team say to you?" He said, "If the car wasn't working, I'd go to Patrick and say, 'You've got a problem, this car is fucking shit, fix it'. And Patrick would go, 'Right. Right. Right. Oh. Oh'."

And that's what Alan did - he was the fuel that drove the Williams team, in a way. And he was 100% in the right place at the right time.

6 Gilles Villeneuve

He was the greatest misuse of God-given talent. He was gifted, precocious, whatever, but my conclusion is he didn't have the discipline to fulfil his talent. One thing he could do was drag a performance out of a poor car, which Didier Pironi didn't do very well [in 1981].

In 1982, when they got a better car, it didn't lift Gilles but it drew Pironi up. When Pironi got his feet under the table at Ferrari, the politicking that went on with Pironi and Marco Piccinini [team manager, with whom Pironi allied] was poisonous. To me that sucks. I think there was a clear decision made by Piccinini and other people - possibly Philip Morris [sponsor] - that they'd throw their weight behind Pironi.

Gilles wanted to be the quickest guy in the world, and he didn't get that to be world champion you have to be prepared to finish second. Had Villeneuve been at a British team, we'd have seen him managed in a way that fulfilled his ability and how to achieve it on a consistent basis. He'd have won the world championship and he wouldn't have died in the manner he did.

The Ferrari ethos was to have a driver of Villeneuve's manner, like in the old days when Enzo Ferrari ran the team himself and pitted drivers against each other, with the loss of Eugenio Castellotti, Luigi Musso and whoever else.

I don't think Ferrari had a clue how to nurture his talent. Gilles was the ultimate hot-rod F1 driver and, unfortunately, it got out of control in 1982. For me, the ultimate sadness was that it was four and a half wasted years in F1. People bang on about him being 14 seconds quicker than everyone in a wet practice at Watkins Glen, but that means fuck all. Smart guys know when to perform and when not to perform. He was exciting and courageous, but he died behind the wheel unnecessarily.

5 Ronnie Peterson

Ronnie was a huge natural talent, embodied in a really lovely person. He was an uncomplicated, straightforward guy who did one thing: drive a racing car quickly. He wasn't a politician, he wasn't a manipulator.

When he went back to Lotus in 1978, if his contract hadn't said he couldn't beat Mario Andretti, I'd have no hesitation in believing Ronnie would have won the world championship.

He had 'world champion' written all over him, but Ronnie wasn't the sharpest in terms of understanding and communicating to a team principal, engineer or technical director. When left to his own devices, he would drive around problems because he had the ability to do it.

There was no doubt in 1973 at Lotus he was quicker than Emerson Fittipaldi, but Emerson is a smart guy and knew where his bread was buttered with Colin Chapman [Lotus boss]. Peter Warr [team manager] was all over Ronnie like a rash, but Colin couldn't have given a flying fuck. All he wanted was a Lotus to win.

Jackie Stewart won the championship that year in a Tyrrell that was inferior to the Lotus 72, because he had a team-mate who was subservient, voluntarily so. He got the points, and he understood that you've got to finish races.

Ronnie was quick in the March, and then went to Tyrrell in 1977. There was a commercial aspect involved in that because he was backed by Count Zanon. To some extent, you'd have said that was the place to go, but the outcome wasn't as successful as the 1976 Tyrrell, which was essentially the same car with sexier bodywork, and other teams were progressing. Other drivers were able to see beyond what's the quickest car out there at the time.

4 James Hunt

James wasn't a racing driver - he was a competitor. He wasn't interested in anything about motor racing other than winning. Being a racing driver was my passion, but James had a different mentality.

It was good fortune when Emerson Fittipaldi made that decision [to leave McLaren at the end of 1975]. In James, here was a quick, talented driver, a little bit off the wall in certain areas, but they brought him into McLaren and did a bit of a Dr Frankenstein on him, and gave him a very good platform to work on in the M23. Particularly following Niki Lauda's accident, James drove some sublime races. He utterly and ruthlessly used every sinew of what McLaren could do.

I raced against him wheel to wheel at Zandvoort in 1976, and he was pretty hard on the race track. He said, "I knew if you got ahead of me you were gone". I was quicker round the back of the circuit, he was faster on the straight, so he worked out what he needed to do to stop me finding a way past. He would hug the inside of the Tarzan hairpin and as I tried to go around the outside he would wash me off the track. A year later he tried to do exactly the same thing with Andretti and they ended up colliding.

My reaction was, 'I'm not going to have an accident, I'll find another way', but Mario was accustomed to drivers giving you working room. 'Working room' didn't exist in James's catalogue of etiquette!

When Hunt finished at McLaren and went to Wolf in 1979, he quickly realised he was never going to be world champion again and his desire left him almost as quickly as it had arrived. He had a meteoric career in 1973-77, and in 1978 all those things were beginning to back up - his notoriety, his lifestyle - and that's why McLaren dumped him. But in those five years, he was a formidable competitor - intelligent, fit, strong.

3 Emerson Fittipaldi

He could have been a contender for best of his generation, but he made a judgement [to switch to his brother's Copersucar Fittipaldi team for 1976] and his career just switched off in effect. He got a shedload of money I suspect!

But you have to recognise that he was the youngest world champion [to date, in 1972], won it again at McLaren [in 1974], came second in 1975. That was his purple patch. He was a guy in a hurry, one looking to take over from the Stewarts and the Hills.

What destroyed much of what he had built was his decision to go to Copersucar, and that's one that no rational racing driver would have made. It undermined his credibility. You have to think of the process of where you want to get to, how to go about it. And what Emerson did was cut that out, like he went and had his balls cut off, frankly.

When Emerson arrived at McLaren, they had the M23, which was introduced in 1973 - Denny Hulme was at the back end of his career, and you wouldn't put Peter Revson in the same tier as Emerson. He'd come out of Lotus having had head-to-head battles with Ronnie Peterson.

Now he had an evolution of the M23, a car that carried on until 1977 with a few aero changes, suspension geometry changes, pretty small stuff. With its long wheelbase and wide track, it seemed to adapt pretty well to every race track except one: it was crap at Monaco. But Emerson made good use of it.

When he went to the Fittipaldi team, he made a call that was masked in nationalism. He is far from a stupid man, so I have to be cynical, that the only purpose was commercial.

2 Jody Scheckter

When Jody left Ken Tyrrell's team, I could understand why he would do that, but he took a big punt to go to a new team at Wolf - albeit comprising Harvey Postlethwaite [designer] and Peter Warr [team manager], eased by a substantial cheque! You'd have said, "What's he doing? He must be nuts."

But Jody had the focus and single-mindedness, that bloody-minded South African personality.

When Jody went to Ferrari, Villeneuve on a single lap was almost always quicker, but Jody had been at Tyrrell and he understood that you win a championship by finishing races in the points. Jody didn't allow himself to be drawn into that battle because of his intelligence and approach.

Before he got to Tyrrell he was an enfant terrible in 1973 - he was a bloody menace at times. But at Watkins Glen, he came upon the scene of Francois Cevert's accident, which I didn't see but gather was extremely grisly, and he saw something that shocked him so deeply that he went down the Road to Damascus of realising he could get killed. And he reassessed and redefined his approach to safety - drivers, cars, circuits, every element.

He's a difficult animal to quantify because he's not the most comfortable person to have a conversation with, but he applied a lot of logic and common sense. At Tyrrell, he no doubt benefited from working with Ken, who was like a school headteacher. I don't want to overegg what Ken did, and I'm sure Jody would say, "That's a load of bollocks, I did it myself", but Ken seemed to have a manner of letting you evolve to get the best out of yourself.

He had one shot at the championship, with Ferrari in 1979. And remember, if you won three or four races out of 15 in those days that was a lot. He worked out what he had to do to get where he wanted. It's not simply about getting in and driving the wheels off the car as Villeneuve did.

1 Niki Lauda

The personality, the intelligence... Niki was astute and understood how to build things around him. All these drivers were top drivers of their generation, capable of winning a grand prix on pace. But Niki was special for two reasons.

The first aspect was I had never seen an operator like Niki. He was clever; I was naive. He went to Brabham [where Lauda partnered Watson in 1978] partly to piss off Ferrari, and maybe he thought he could do something there - had it not been for the Lotus 79, maybe he could have won the world championship.

Because of Niki's commercial attachment to Parmalat, he brought it to Brabham as a team sponsor as well as his personal sponsor, and that allowed him to have a significant amount of influence above and beyond the fact that he'd just become a two-time world champion. He was not just dealing with Bernie [Ecclestone, then the Brabham boss] as a driver, but also as a commercial partner. I didn't understand what was going on really.

The second element is he's very concise in describing things in an engineer's language - ironically because English wasn't his first language. Also, he'd learned a lot at Ferrari with all the running he had at Fiorano. He understood that you've got to get the right people working for you, not your team-mate, and he was clever at implementing that.

Getting into certain places isn't good fortune - it's because you make them happen. When he got his feet under the table at Ferrari, his incorporation with Mauro Forghieri [designer] and Luca Montezemolo [team chief] made it a three-part team - it's like what Michael Schumacher did with Ross Brawn and Jean Todt. He is the one of that era who really saw the big picture.

When he came to McLaren [in 1982 as Watson's team-mate], he was finding me a lot more awkward because some of my strengths were better than his. In Las Vegas [for the finale] I was the best-placed to beat Rosberg to the title, and on Saturday night Ron Dennis said, "If John is behind you let him past".

He'd never been asked that and he checked out - the way he drove in the race he might as well have been back in Vienna!

Missing out: Prost and Piquet peaked in the next era...

Nelson Piquet won the world championship in 1981, but that was Carlos Reutemann's to lose, and Reutemann lost it. Nelson had arrived at Brabham alongside Niki Lauda and me at the end of 1978, and Bernie Ecclestone [team boss] loved him.

He's one of the smartest guys, but I'm not a fan of him because I don't like what I would call his values. From Formula 3 he knew that if you could test non-stop and work at it, you could win the championship from getting the mileage and knowledge on car set-up.

He was able to see what Niki did [as a team-mate in 1979] and combine his own intelligence and expertise. No one else at Brabham ever got a sniff - that was Nelson's team.

When Alain Prost came to McLaren [as Watson's team-mate in 1980], by the time he'd left the pitlane on his first test it was abundantly clear he knew what F1 was about. He was an excellent driver with a phenomenal feel. He managed to make that McLaren M29 work better in the earlier phase of the season than me.

There were threats that Marlboro might leave and go to Ferrari, and the team looked at Alain as its saviour, and I became the second driver. McLaren introduced the M30, which had the same core problems as the M29.

By the Canadian Grand Prix, we knew Ron Dennis and John Barnard were going to be part of the team. John started to work on the M29 and made a fundamental change. "What are you doing?" I said. He said to go out and drive the car and tell him what it's doing after I'd driven it, not what it might do before I'd driven it. It was a born-again race car and, while Alain and the team were dicking around with the M30, it resurrected my career.

The racers who were gone too soon

Carlos Pace was a lovely guy who loved life. He had the ability, bundles of charm, and on his day he could be an unquestionably competitive challenger, but I would put Carlos Reutemann ahead of him [in a ranking].

When he signed for Bernie [Ecclestone at Brabham], I think he was left in debt because his credit card bills exceeded what he got paid! Carlos loved life at every level - that's why he was a lovely guy. Bernie loved him to bits.

Tony Brise, Tom Pryce and Gunnar Nilsson - let's say they all had level abilities, but it was the character of Tony that stood out. He had this clarity of ambition and thought. He wouldn't have been hanging around with Graham Hill's team for long because somebody was going to pick him up. He had this other dimension, and he would have been a big threat.

Tom was a lovely person but didn't have that hard nose Tony had and stayed perhaps a bit too long at Shadow. He enjoyed being in a team where he felt part of the family. Tom's was a quiet determination, and Tony's was noisy. His self-confidence was unbelievable, and he had bags of talent.