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"I WAS TOLD I WAS THE HIGHEST PAID F1 DRIVER... BUT I THINK LAUDA WAS GETTING MORE AT BRABHAM"
Motor Sport Magazine
|July 2025
In just eight years, Jody Scheckter went from sharing a flat with Motor Sport writers to winning the F1 world championship. Now in his seventies he looks back at his rapid advancement from slumming it to riding high

When you consider that Jody Scheckter's driving style earned him the nickname 'Sideways Scheckter' in his early days, that he continued to drive racing cars that way right up to and throughout his Formula 1 career, that he won 10 F1 grands prix out of 112 starts, and that he became F1 world champion in a Ferrari - the seventh of only nine drivers to have done that in the Scuderia's 76-year F1 roll of honour - it is surprising to me that he tends to feature so low on most 'best ever F1 driver' rankings. Perhaps it is because, unlike some of his now more-lauded contemporaries - Gilles Villeneuve and Ronnie Peterson for example - he survived his F1 career with nary a scratch. Or maybe it is because, unlike others - Niki Lauda and James Hunt spring to mind - he did not hang around once he had decided to retire. No, while they continued to earn a crust in and around F1Hunt in the commentary box and Lauda in various highly paid consultancies for a number of F1 teams - Scheckter exited stage left and made a ton of money in a business entirely unrelated to motor sport.
But, before we talk about FATS (Firearms Training Simulation), which he founded in Atlanta, Georgia in 1984, let's go back to his early days, in East London, Eastern Cape province, on the south-eastern coast of South Africa. “I was useless at school, but I loved hanging out in my dad’s workshop,” he remembers. “Racing was big in South Africa back then, especially around the East London area. My uncle had raced at the what’s-name [Prince George] circuit in East London as long ago as 1937. It hosted the South African Grand Prix in the 1960s [non-championship F1 races in 1960, 1961 and 1966, and world championship-status grands prix in 1962, 1963 and 1965] and some of the F1 drivers used to stay at our house, which was cool.”

“Oh I dunno.”
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