JACKY ICKX: THE ART OF MOTOR RACING
You do not interview Jacky Ickx in any traditional sense. Questions and answers go out of the window from the moment that the genial Belgian gives you a Covidfriendly fist bump.
Perhaps this trait is the result of being one of the handful of drivers who proved that there were no parameters to their gifts. Perhaps it is the fact that now, at 77 years of age, he wants to put his life into perspective. It is certainly driven by a quest for meaning from a what the man himself calls a ‘selfish’occupation.
Before we sat down, Jacky sent me a single sheet of his achievements – career stats that are worth killing for to some. It’s neither false humility nor boastfulness that inspired him to do this, but a roadmap for journalists to take as try to survey the landscape through the eyes of someone who took part in 555 races, and won everywhere from Bathurst to the Sahara, including eight F1 wins, 13 poles and 13 fastest laps let alone the six Le Mans wins and two World Sportsacar Championship titles for which he is best known.
Question: How much of an influence on you was it to have a motoring journalist for a father, did he seek to encourage or discourage you from racing?
Brenda Reilly Via Twitter Jacky Ickx: “I wanted to be a gardener or maybe a gamekeeper. I loved at that age the nature, the silence, and as a child at 10 or 12 years old I would go off without my parents knowing where I had gone to explore in the forests, in the rivers… OK, this was 1955 and not 2022!
“There was not the permanent motorways, you maybe saw 15 cars a day in those years, but I loved nature. At school I always sat on the last bench near the window, preferably near the radiator in winter time, and if you sat quietly nobody would disturb you. But then when the teacher says to your parents that you are very intelligent but very lazy you have a problem.
“I never felt pressure from Enzo Ferrari, he was lovely” Jacky Ickx
“The difficulty is to live with the parents when you get a report at the end of the year with the result of always being last or one before last in exams. What is the first question that the parents are always asking? ‘What are we going to do with that guy?’ “I think the first thing, when you have the inspiration to become a racing driver, is to have the agreement of the parents. The difficulty is that I doubt many parents say: ‘yes of course, what a good idea, how much money do you want?’ “In my case it was my good fortune that the worse my results got the nicer the gifts they offered to make me change my view on
