The Stewarts and their cancers

Sir Jackie Stewart lightly traces with his forefinger the three-inch-long scar on his left cheek, a slightly jagged - but by no means disfiguring - legacy of recent surgery to remove a cancerous "sun-spot". "Good job, isn't it?" he asks rhetorically. "I still know it's there, but I've also forgotten about it. If you see what I mean. They got it out so early, it hadn't time to rumble around or spread anywhere. Then they tidied me up and put in 35 stitches."

There are two very good reasons for Sir Jackie's apparently casual attitude towards his brush with skin cancer - reasons beyond the natural optimism, and canny evaluation of risk, that allowed him to race extremely fast cars at a time when Formula One was the most dangerous sport on earth.

A year ago, his wife of nearly 40 years, 61-year-old Helen, was diagnosed with breast cancer during an annual health check and underwent successful, but traumatic, radiotherapy treatment to zap the lump. Their 37-year-old son Paul, meanwhile, has waged a long battle for the past few years against a seriously life-threatening and very rare form of cancer affecting the colon. Under these circumstances, says Sir Jackie, when two of the people he loves the most have suffered so much, he's hardly going to shout and wail about a wee scar on his left cheek, which partly explains why he rarely agrees to be interviewed on such sensitive family matters.

"My cancer was so insignificant compared to what Paul went through, and far less dramatic than Helen's experience. Breast cancer is always particularly difficult for women, I think. So I haven't had to cope with much personally."

It's perhaps characteristic bravery in the face of shortened odds. Three times World Champion in the 1960s, Sir Jackie retired from motor racing on the eve of his 100th grand prix in 1973, and quickly turned himself into an astute and ambitious businessman. In 1996 he and Paul founded Jaguar Racing, built it up for two years, and then sold the team to Ford for a reported £100 million. It's a difficult irony that a man who survived the then intense hazards of Formula One, who has spent much of his working life managing and minimising its risks, should now find his health-conscious family besieged by an illness that no one can truly control.

"I always saw myself as taking very calculated risks as a driver," he says. "But as far as health is concerned, you're always vulnerable, and the Big C, well, it's just not a word you ever want to hear. With Helen and I, it didn't seem so unlikely: we're maturing, getting older, we've lived a good life. It's a bit like a car, the tyres go, the transmission goes, or the engine. But with Paul, he was 34 years old then - it made no sense.

He was extraordinarily fit and healthy and, yes, it was an enormous shock to me. I think it affected me more than Helen because I think women, funnily enough, can be stronger than men, and perhaps are able to block out things that men are more exposed to feel. All I can say is that Helen was extraordinarily supportive to me, when it happened to Paul. All my life, I've tried to protect my family and put them first, and suddenly - it was like getting hit by a sledgehammer."

Both Helen and Sir Jackie discovered their cancers during health checks at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota - a cuttingedge medical institution employing 750 of the world's leading specialists - and it was here that Paul underwent extremely aggressive chemotherapy of the kind rarely prescribed in Britain.

Indeed, after months of puzzled investigation in this country, it was the Mayo in 1999 that first diagnosed Paul's non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a particularly nasty form of cancer. Of course, none of the treatment came free.

"It was a great comfort to me, and enormously important as a strategy for coping to know that he was being treated by the very best people and with the very latest kinds of technique," says Sir Jackie. "That's one of the privileges I've got, and a benefit I've been able to secure for my family, and I understand that it's not available to everyone."

You get the feeling that Sir Jackie Stewart isn't the kind of man who readily admits fear. Perfectionist, obsessive, no sufferer of fools, control freak even - this is how he's most often described. But for all his coolness and wiry brilliance, Sir Jackie found himself utterly defenceless in the face of Paul's serious illness. "At the time I have to admit I was horribly frightened, yes, and I don't mind saying it.

"When I was a racing driver and someone had a big accident - and there were lots of them, some fatal - the one thing I asked as soon as I got out of the car was, 'Is he all right?' Now, in my language, that means, 'Is he going to live?' He could have broken bones, or be burned, or any number of things, but if it wasn't life-threatening, then in a sense nothing else mattered. I could go to his wife, or his girlfriend, or his parents, and say, 'Listen, he's had a big shunt, and you're not going to like it, but he's going to be all right.'

"Now, Helen and I could both say that about ourselves when we were diagnosed. We were both 'all right'. They'd caught the cancer early enough to put us in a comfort zone. Very quickly, Helen found out she wouldn't have to lose a breast - but even if she had, there was no question of her not having a future. We'd have found the best reconstruction techniques and started to look ahead, to get well. But with Paul, we just couldn't say it. And that's why it was so difficult: we simply didn't know for a while whether he'd be okay."

Thankfully, Paul is now in remission. Having lost some 22lb during treatment, he's rebuilt his strength with the support of his wife, Victoria, and their four children. "He's in terrific shape," says Sir Jackie, "travelling a lot and playing his guitar. He was still at Jaguar when the cancer problem happened and, of course, the doctors told him not to work for a while. But he'll find something else to do in due course."

Not a day passes when Sir Jackie doesn't think about what's happened to his wife, and to Paul, and to him - though his thoughts are always positive, he insists. "You never forget the experience. No question, it brings your family closer together because you realise your vulnerability."

His younger son, Mark, jokes that the Stewarts are "a bunch of sickies". "But we're all very healthy, actually. We're lucky, we've always been pretty happy with each other. I keep calling them children - Paul's 37 and Mark's 35. But I can't meet them without kissing them, or stand beside them without holding their hand. You might think I'm a real pansy, but it's just a need. It's always been there."

As for Sir Jackie himself, he's itching to get back to his rigorous fitness regime. At 63, he still gets up at 5am and goes to the gym three times a week, though doctors have told him to lay off the weights recently for fear he'll split his stitches.

But has he never, in the past 18 months, asked, 'Why us?' So many of his friends, too, have succumbed to this cruel disease: George Harrison was a good friend, the Formula One mogul Ken Tyrell, for whom Stewart won 25 grand prix, lost his life to cancer; he tells me of others currently undergoing treatment.

"I haven't ever asked that question, no. That's not the way I look at things. I think we all have cancer inside us, and it's simply a matter of whether or not we trigger it. The older I get, the more I'm prepared to admit that I don't understand or know things, and this is one of them."

Instead, his diary is as full and tightly packed as a Cabinet minister's.

Sir Jackie's world still turns at a faster pace than average - there's just no time to complain about Fate.