Mark Hughes: Alan Jones terrified rivals and was perfect for Williams
Strong like an ox, psychologically more airtight than anyone who's ever climbed into a race car, and the most aggressive wheel-to-wheel racer who scared the living daylights out of his rivals.
Little wonder Alan Jones - who has died, aged 80 - became an archetype of the perfect racing driver for Frank Williams and Patrick Head as they jointly put the Williams team on the map out of nowhere. It was a status they formalised by winning the 1980 drivers' and constructors' world titles together.
He wasn't particularly rated as an obvious world champion when he came over to the UK from Australia with £50 in his back pocket, to race in F3 in 1970.
But he was a hefty guy in an under-powered formula and still he was a frontrunner for a few seasons in British F3 and Formula Atlantic.
His first F1 chance came in 1975, with Graham Hill's team and a subsequent ride in Harry Stiller's privateer Hesketh.
He showed enough for John Surtees to take him on for the '76 season. At the non-championship Race of Champions he foreshadowed his later form by leading and dicing with James Hunt's McLaren but it was a low-key season and Jones and Surtees, as two hard-headed individuals dissatisfied with their situation, didn't hit it off. Jones left at the end of the season, prepared to walk out of F1 rather than stay in that environment.
Which made him available four races into the '77 season as a short-notice replacement at Shadow after Tom Pryce's fatal accident in the South African Grand Prix.
The Shadow DN8 was a little overweight but well-balanced enough for Jones' talent to become apparent. His victory in the wet Austrian Grand Prix was something of a shock result but he was quick, consistent and combative all year.
Frank Williams signed him for his single-car '78 team on the basis of "someone who could score us points regularly but we quickly realised we'd stumbled onto something rather better than that".
There were several giant-scaring performances that year, the prelude to a whole stream of victories in the latter half of '79. In combination, Jones and Williams were F1's gold standard from there, through their title 1980 season and even in their reliability-blighted '81. Jones and the ground effect Williams FW07 were made for each other.
He retired for the first time after trouncing the opposition in the season-ending '81 Las Vegas Grand Prix. He was persuaded back full time for '85-86 but the Newman Haas project didn't live up to its potential and Jones' second retirement duly followed.
Superficially polite and correct, Jones terrified his rivals when the helmet went on.
He was afraid of no one, was brilliantly adept at identifying what he needed from a car to go faster and he'd then race the wheels off it. For that he was deified at Williams and the team took on much of his character even after he'd left.
