In the English countryside, Jody Scheckter is an entrepreneur, organic farmer and a millionaire. No matter how many chickens he raises, his name will always be known for Formula One (F1) motor racing. The African racing legend won 10 Grand Prix.
Scheckter is a direct, likeable, deeply understated man with a dry wit. Life has taken the 64-year-old on a long journey from South Africa and motor racing. But racing forged his personality and battles on the track steeled him for building two businesses from scratch.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3088" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Scheckter-26-of-36-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
For most, winning the F1 world championship with Ferrari in 1979 would be a highlight of their lives. Not for Scheckter.
“It was really an anti-climax,” he says.
“You have spent eight years dedicated completely to winning and then nothing seemed to change much. I think it has changed more in the latter years of my life, where being World Champion means something to some people.”
He does look back at his achievements with satisfaction however. As he puts it, he earned good bucks for the time and is the only South African to win a Grand Prix and remains the only South African to win the F1 World Championship.
So, what does he make of the sale of Kyalami, where he won a grand prix on home soil?
“Kyalami is not what it was. It was a wonderful circuit and has already had the heart taken out of it, which is a great shame. Kyalami means racing and was an icon in Formula One.”
Scheckter rode his luck at Kyalami.
“I crashed my car in practice and it was written off. We rebuilt the car, had a warm up in the morning and the engine blew up after one lap. I was on the front row, I got into the lead after the second lap and then won the race,” he says.
Several drivers died at Kyalami and Scheckter says he is grateful to be alive. Racing in the 1970s could hardly have been more dangerous.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3089" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Scheckter-28-of-36-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
“Each year, one or two drivers from the starting 25 were killed.”
By drivers, he means his contemporaries. Scheckter raced against legendary racers of the 1970s; Niki Lauda, James Hunt, Emerson Fittipaldi, Nelson Piquet and Alain Prost.
Glamour a million miles from where Scheckter grew up in East London in the Eastern Cape, repairing motorbikes and cars.
“It’s a little coastal town, my dad had several garages there and I wasn’t very good at school.”
East London had a famous racing track, the Prince George Circuit, where Scheckter’s uncle raced and his father invited the racing drivers to his garage.
“Racing was all around me growing up. Racing drivers even used to stay over at our house.”
Life after motor racing meant a move away from the sport. Scheckter went to the United States and became a successful entrepreneur, setting up a business called FATS, Inc. in 1984.
“We sold simulators and trained police and then military on how to use guns safely.”
“In 12 years, we went from the kitchen table to sales in 35 countries and 95% of the world market. We turned over $100 million in sales the year we sold,” he says.
Then his life took a handbrake turn. Thirteen years ago, Scheckter put some of his earnings from selling FATS, Inc. into starting an organic farm in Hampshire.
He bought 500 acres at Laverstoke Park Farm, 40 miles west of London. It started as a hobby, to make the healthiest and tastiest food for himself and his six children. His racing driver son, Tomas, has recently joined the business.
Today, Scheckter owns 2,500 acres and farms a further 2,000. He says it has all got out of hand.
“It’s a monster, but a lovely monster.”
Now, Scheckter is championing biodiversity as he competes to make the finest organic products in the world.
“I don’t mind not winning, but I hate to lose,” he says.
With two of Britain’s most upmarket food suppliers, Ocado and Waitrose, as their biggest customers, the Laverstoke Park Farm brand is on the way up.
The farm has seven small factories clustered around a farm house from which the operation is run from. It employs 166 people and turns over $23.7 million a year.
Despite winning countless awards and being run as a model of organic farming techniques, Laverstoke Park Farm doesn’t yet make money. Scheckter has given himself a year to make the business profitable. For a born winner, this feels like losing.
Scheckter is refreshingly honest and feels like a man who knows he has reached his limitations.
“Meat is fiendishly complicated and I’ve just hired an expert from one of the top meat companies to run that side of the business for me. Profitability is all in the cut, and although we’re getting better we haven’t quite got there yet. I’ve learned the hard way. ”
It’s a long way from the track.
“With a car factory, you bring in a thousand pieces, you make one and you sell it. We bring in one, cut it into a thousand pieces and you have got to sell them all. And remember, some of it goes bad within three days.”
“We have too many products and we have to rationalize.”
He sells 120 items to Ocado and produces a range of products from organic beef, lamb and chicken to champagne grapes and cooked pies. One of the stranger animals on his farm is water buffalo, from which come mozzarella cheese and ice cream. Almost everything that comes from the farm is award winning. It just doesn’t all make money.
Scheckter follows traditional biodynamic farming techniques and sows according to the moon cycles.
“It’s very, very powerful. It makes seas go up and down and it makes the liquids in plants go up and down. We use modern versions of those techniques,” he says.
“After all my research, we follow nature very strictly and we have two main keys. One is slow growing animals and plants are generally healthy and taste better, and secondly, biodiversity is key to a natural, healthy environment.”
He believes that to produce great food you have got to have great soil, which comes from farming naturally and means no chemicals are used. To study the soil, Laverstoke has its own laboratory run by a doctor in microbiology and a doctor in chemistry.
Scheckter is a bit of a soil expert himself, with a library of over 500 books on soil types going back through the centuries.
“The animals at Laverstock don’t eat grass but a mix of 31 herbs, clovers and grasses in the fields. Our animals are eating salad!”
As he gives us a tour of the farm, it’s hard not to smile at his enthusiasm.
“My ice-cream is made from buffalo milk and I genuinely believe it’s the best in the world and my mozzarella tastes better than Italian mozzarella because it’s fresher.”
From fast cars to slow food, with an emphasis on the best farming techniques, Scheckter may not yet have found a successful business model for his enterprise, but you know he wants to win.

From Racing Car To A Tractor

Formula One is arguably one of the most technologically demanding sports on the planet. Obscene amounts of money are poured into vehicles that are the pinnacle of design and performance engineering; vehicles piloted by drivers whose talents seem superhuman. Even to the most ardent enthusiast, the complexities of these vehicles is mind-numbing.
A Formula One car is broken down into the following components: the nose, front wing, push/pull rod suspension, sidepods, rear end, exhaust system and rear wing. The grotesque-looking nose channels airflow and serves as a safety mechanism. According to 2012 regulations, the nose must sit 550mm above the base of the car to prevent major trauma to drivers in cases where the side of a vehicle is hit. Configuring airflow over most of the vehicle is the job of the front wing. It creates the aerodynamic down force needed to keep the car in contact with the track—essential when traveling at close to 400km/h. Airflow is a major consideration in the design of Formula One cars, and the suspension is of particular concern as these are areas of great turbulence. The push/pull rods allow for increased suspension geometry and decreased air resistance.
The sidepods of a Formula One car house many of the crucial components such as the GPS locator, oil-cooling radiators, batteries and clutch disengage systems (which marshals can use in emergencies). As they can be obtrusive, many manufacturers use deep undercuts to assist with airflow. The rear end ensures optimal airflow at the back of the car. Tighter paneling and smaller gearboxes are naturally advantageous.
Last year, teams made use of engine mapping that allowed engines to blow “off throttle” which created extra down force in corners. However, this year, the use of “blown diffusers” has been banned. Teams are looking at alternatives, with some directing their exhaust gasses over the rear beam wing (which has proven to be less effective).
Drivers are able to control the amount of drag using the Drag Reduction System (DRS), which in turn equates to greater or less speed, as required. In practice and qualifying, DRS can be used at any time. Mid-competition though, a car must be less than a second behind another vehicle to be activated (the system shuts down when the driver brakes).
Formula One cars are capable of changing gears in only 0.05 seconds. During a race season, each team is allowed up to 30 pairs of gear ratios, but these must be openly declared to the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile). Tolerances within the Formula One engine are in the realm of mere microns (i.e. thousandths of a millimeter) and most engines are normally aspirated 2.4-liter V8s.
Formula One cars use the Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems technology we are now seeing in production vehicles. It harnesses heat energy produced by normal braking, which is stored and used to boost acceleration. Lap times can be decreased by anything from 0.1 to 0.4 seconds.
Typically, a Formula One car weighs just 550kg and is 85% carbon fiber. It can speed up from zero to 160km/h and back down to zero in only four seconds. Drivers can be subjected to as much as 5Gs (G-force); that means their bodies weigh five times more than normal. Some drivers have even said that under extreme braking, their tear ducts squirt water onto their visors!
Formula One is a spectacularly expensive sport to engage in, either as a host country or as a constructor team (constructor countries comprise the United States, Italy, India, Spain, Great Britain, Russia, Germany, Austria and Switzerland). Countries hosting circuits are Australia, Malaysia, China, Bahrain, Spain, Monte Carlo, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Hungary, Belgium, Italy, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Dubai, the United States and Brazil. In 2010, Austin-based company Full Throttle Productions submitted data that helped secure a track in Texas. They claimed that a race weekend would have a direct economic impact of $300 million for that area and produce $26.6 million in new tax revenue for the state.
But such profits would come at a cost. Full Throttle Productions needed $25 million for the next decade, in the form of state financial support—not an easy task for most African states to pull off. The GDPs of countries that host Formula One circuits are in the trillions of dollars, with the exception of Hungary, which raked in a paltry $147 billion last year. Selecting an African country, Uganda say, we can determine from their GDP—$42 billion—that such an investment would be ludicrous when so many other vital aspects demand the state’s attention.
South Africa held the National Formula One Championship series from 1960 to 1975. The death knell was sounded due to spiraling costs and objections to the country’s apartheid policy. Still, there have been two races since—one in 1992 and one in 1993 (won by Alain Prost in his Williams).
If South Africa entered the fray, it would be the only country on the continent to do so—other nations being too poor or embroiled in political turmoil. Rallying has traditionally been more successful here (the Safari, Ivory Coast and Paris-Dakar races). There was some racing undertaken in North Africa where French and Italian influences were felt, and most of these were held in city streets. There was the Tripoli Grand Prix, the Moroccan Grand Prix and the Algerian Grand Prix—the latter cut short by an uprising in 1954. Racing featured in Portuguese-influenced territories in the 1960s, such as Mozambique and Angola. Excessive heat sometimes saw the majority of cars simply failing.
There is talk however, that F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone will be bringing the sport to South Africa. A proposed location for a Monaco-styled course has been suggested along Mouille Point in Cape Town. But, says Francois Pretorius, CEO of Motorsport South Africa: “We have not received any confirmation in this regard.” Despite Ecclestone alluding to the proposal being close to conclusion, environmental impact studies would still need to be done, and the substantial costs would need to be offset against any potential benefits. Hopefully, South Africa will be able to champion the cause for its brothers.

Tag: Grand Prix

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

From Racing Car To A Tractor

Gearing Up For An African F1