Jo Ramirez
ANYONE WHO HAS BEEN TO THE Mexican Grand Prix or the Carrera Panamericana will have been infused with the nation’s passion for motor racing. Former McLaren International team co-ordinator Joaquin ‘Jo’ Ramirez dropped out of university in Mexico City to follow his friend Ricardo Rodriguez to Europe, starting as an apprentice mechanic at Scuderia Ferrari in 1962. When Rodriguez was killed at the Mexican Grand Prix, Jo moved to Maserati, and Lamborghini, coming to England in 1964 to work on the Ford GT40 project before joining Dan Gurney’s All American Racers team as Dan’s mechanic on the Eagle-Weslake.
During the 1960s and ’70s he went on to work with Ken Tyrrell, John Wyer, Shadow, ATS, Theodore and the Fittipaldi brothers at Copersucar before joining McLaren in 1984. After 40 years in the pitlane he retired in 2001 having managed, and refereed, Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna, Mika Häkkinen and David Coulthard through some of Formula 1’s fiercest rivalries.
From his hilltop home near Malaga he tells us about life alongside some of the greatest names in the sport.
Motor Sport: Your first job in Europe was with Ferrari, a dream come true. Was this always the plan when you left home in Mexico City?
“There was no plan, exactly, but Ricardo [Rodriguez] and I were close friends, we raced karts together, and when he signed for Ferrari in 1962 he knew how keen I was to get to Europe and said he would introduce me to Ferrari. Well, I couldn’t afford a flight to Italy but a friend of mine in the government got me a ticket as far as New York where I bought the cheapest ticket I could find to get across the Atlantic in tourist class on the . I shared a cabin with an Australian guy and we used to gatecrash the
