Sir Jackie Stewart: The Champion Who Couldn't Spell His Own Name — How Dyslexia Drove F1's 'Master of Going Faster'

He is a three-time Formula 1 World Champion who worked incredibly hard to make his name — but could not spell it. In his racing years, J-A-C-K-I-E S-T-E-W-A-R-T became synonymous with high-speed daring, glamorous globetrotting and charismatic celebrity: twenty-seven Grand Prix victories, a knighthood, a reputation as perhaps the most driven driver of all time. But few knew what drove him. It was the one thing "the master of going faster" could not outpace, even at 170 miles per hour — the shame of his dyslexia. "For as long as I can remember, I have been driven by this need to prove over and over again that I am not as thick as I was made to feel at school," he has said. "I had the idea that everyone was better than me. I am still ashamed I can't recite the alphabet beyond the letter 'P.'"

Shame is learned, and it seems to be the only thing young Jackie picked up at school. The lesson began the first time he was asked to read aloud. He was nine, and he would forever remember it as torture. He stared down at the page, begging it to make sense, but all he saw was "a jungle of letters, impossible letters." His blushing gave way to the sting of unwelcome tears as his classmates began to snicker. He couldn't find a single word, but the teacher found hers, and loudly: "Stop playing the fool, Stewart. You're a lazy boy. Get back to your desk!" By the time he sat down, the class was howling. "I cannot exaggerate the pain and humiliation I felt that day," he says. "This pitiless torture was repeated every time I had to read in front of a class. I couldn't do it and I didn't understand why. Everyone was saying I was dumb, stupid and thick, and in the absence of another explanation, I started to believe they must be right."

Before that day, Stewart had been a "wee boy with a twinkle in his eye," growing up happily in small-town Scotland. After it, he became a child so deeply scarred that he would spend the bulk of his life afraid people would discover he was dumb. There was no kind understanding on offer. The teachers' bleak judgments spread to the playground, where classmates ostracized him. Even his parents wrote him off as a disappointing student and son. He developed what he calls an inferiority complex, and his difficulties at school deepened as his self-esteem disappeared. First he was demoted to the town's lesser elementary school, then downshifted again to the lowest possible educational track, alongside those judged to have no potential.

His entire young life felt, in his words, "circumscribed by this so-called lack of intelligence." He limited his friendships to the kids he could count on not to make a fool of him. He didn't date the girl who caught his eye because he felt she was above him. By fifteen he had scraped bottom, dead-ended in the town pool hall, and he dropped out of school entirely, quite certain he had been "consigned to the scrap heap." What salvaged his life was, oddly enough, a beating. Assaulted one night at a bus stop by town toughs, Stewart suffered a broken collarbone, ribs and nose — which he proudly never fixed. His blackened eyes were opened that night to a simple fact: his teenage life was going nowhere, and even if he really was inadequate, his future still depended on him. It was time to get good at something.

That remains his best advice to anyone with dyslexia: "Find something you can be the best at. Anything. There is always something you can do no matter how small or unusual. And find other ways of doing things. It can be a more successful route. Dyslexics don't do things like the clever folk. Even in business I have never taken the interstate. I take the winding rural road instead and see opportunities other people don't. And I pay attention to detail. I am still the President of the Menial Tasks Division." Stewart found his something almost at random: he picked up a rifle and entered skeet-shooting contests. Working full-time managing his family's car garage, he trained obsessively on the side and competed himself into an Olympic-class sport shooter. Of all his championships, he still calls that first one his biggest victory — because for the first time in his life he was taking aim at the shame, focusing on something he could do instead of the things he couldn't.

While shooting competitively, Stewart bought his first car — before he was old enough to drive it — and used his ferocious attention to detail to build a niche at the family garage, maintaining other people's cars to perfection. He was twenty-one when he was first recruited to race. His mother was terrified of the track and would never have given permission, so he didn't ask: he entered under the pseudonym "A.N. Other." When that "Other" fellow started winning, the truth came out in Stewart's wedding announcement. His angry mother refused to speak to him about driving ever again. The rest of the world, however, was very soon talking about Jackie Stewart behind a wheel. He was a world champion well before thirty.

In a sport so dangerous that death was the more likely outcome — fiery crashes claimed the lives of many of his colleagues — Stewart credits his survival, and his twenty-seven Grand Prix wins, to dyslexic overcompensation. People assume, he says, that a high-speed sport is about lightning reflexes and rapid-fire decisions. He attributes his wins to being the most careful man on the course. He walked every single track before every single race, always assuming he had to do more than every other driver, deploying a selective photographic memory. "No, I can't recite the alphabet," he says, "but I know every single gear change and braking distance required to negotiate the 187 corners around the 14.7 miles of the circuit in Germany. And all that information remains banked in my head to this day. Now is that stupid or clever? I may never know."

Yet even the exhilaration of winning was tinged with fear. The dread attached to victory was not about crashes — Stewart compartmentalized that pain. It was that winning meant standing on the podium while they played "God Save the Queen." "I couldn't sing my own national anthem. I can't memorize the words, and it is particularly embarrassing when you are standing next to the Queen!" he confesses. "So I devised a method of copying the others' mouths a millisecond later. That way I could sing along and no one realized I was reading lips." It is an image that captures his whole first forty years: a champion at the summit of his sport, privately deploying a workaround to hide what he still believed was stupidity.

The explanation finally arrived when Stewart was forty-one years old, at his son's Swiss school. He went for a parent conference and stayed for testing. The word he was given — dyslexia — was, he says, like someone extending an arm to a drowning man. At last he had an explanation other than stupidity by which to understand himself. Both of his sons would turn out to be dyslexic as well, and later six of his nine grandchildren. As his career moved on to endorsements, his own racing business and sportscasting for ABC, the newly knighted Sir Jackie also found a second calling: activism on behalf of Dyslexia Scotland, determined that other children should not spend forty-one years believing what he believed.

Through Dyslexia Scotland, Sir Jackie has proudly put his country at the forefront of education for children with dyslexia: Scotland became the first country in the world to demand training in learning disabilities as part of every new teacher's training. He finds it ridiculous that systemic change took so long, and admits he had to knock some heads together to get it, because even in education, "old dogs just don't want to learn new tricks. Some people still don't see the potential in learning-disabled students and would just as soon write them off." For all his success — eight honorary doctorates, a professorship, the knighthood — Sir Jackie still calls his own education his biggest loss. Sixty-five years after the first of his many teachers conspired to destroy a young Scot's fragile confidence, the bruises have never completely healed. His answer has been to use his extraordinary success to shield future generations of young dyslexic Scots from that kind of ignorance — a signature achievement in an extraordinary life, even if, as he jokes, someone else sometimes has to whisper in his ear how to sign it.

--- Source: Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity, "Sir Jackie Stewart, World-Champion Race Car Driver" by Jane Wallace (dyslexia.yale.edu/story/sir-jackie-stewart/).