[3] In late 1970, Jones signed with a firm for whom McGuire was working, designed to promote drivers' interests and was selected to compete in a series of races in Brazil.

[5] For 1971, Jones campaigned a Brabham BT 28 converted to BT35 specification,[5] in Formula Three and had a moderately successful season which led to a series of tests for March at Silverstone.

[6] Jones did enough that season to be kept on by GRD for the next year with a new sponsor and only lost the 1973 championship due to a misfiring engine in the last round at Brands Hatch.

[7] In 1974, Jones began the season in Formula Atlantic but felt it was a very amateurish effort, but a chance meeting with Harry Stiller led to a drive in the latter's March 74.

At the end of the season, Jones made his F5000 debut for Stiller in the final round of the European Championship at Brands Hatch in a Chevron B24/28 owned by John MacDonald.

[9] His first race was the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix at the fast Montjuïc circuit in the purchased Hesketh although the weekend turned out to be one of the most tragic in Formula One history when Rolf Stommelen's crash caused the death of five spectators.

Stand-in Brian Redman finished twelfth in that race after the kill wire was crimped under a valve cover, resulting in intermittent ignition.

He finished second to Elliot Forbes-Robinson at Charlotte after hitting a chicane and losing a spark plug wire, retired through accident at St Jovite and lost a radiator at Watkins Glen.

During a 2012 Grand Prix Legends interview, Jones revealed that he had been contacted by Ferrari to drive for the team from mid-1982 after the death of Gilles Villeneuve and the injury forced retirement of Didier Pironi.

[13] As he was enjoying life back in Australia at the time, Jones did not give them an answer straight away and basically gave them the run around, a move he regrets as it was possible that, as the 1980 World Champion, Ferrari would have wanted to keep him for 1983 when he was looking to make a comeback, which would have seen him drive the car which won the Constructors' Championship in 1983.

After taking too long to give them an answer, the Scuderia instead offered the drive to 1978 World Champion Mario Andretti who drove the last two races of the 1982 season at Monza and Caesars Palace.

Jones qualified the new Lola THL1 9.851 seconds slower than pole man Ayrton Senna in his Lotus-Renault and retired after only 6 laps with a blown engine.

At the end of the 1986 season after the Haas team lost its sponsorship and ran out of money, Jones retired from Formula One for good having won 12 races, 6 pole positions and one World Championship.

This championship included races against local touring car ace Peter Brock driving Bob Jane's 6.0 litre Chevrolet Monza.

Cullen and Jones, who drove the final stint in the race and required pain killing injections after having the steering wheel wrench out of his hands during practice which damaged ligaments in his elbow, were unlucky not to finish 2nd, but a brake problem with the car saw him forced to use more fuel than normal and a late race stop for fuel allowed the Holden Dealer Team VK Commodore of David Parsons and John Harvey to sneak into 2nd and the Mazda RX-7 of Allan Moffat and Gregg Hansford to claim 3rd.

After some giant killing performances in the early rounds of the championship, Jones abandoned his first serious ATCC campaign to make his second Formula One comeback with the Haas Lola team.

After dicing for the lead with the pole sitting Lancia LC2 of Bob Wollek and Alessandro Nannini for the first third of the race, damage caused when Schuppan was the innocent victim of a spinning Roger Dorchy, and finally a broken conrod, saw Jones finish his first 24 Hours of Le Mans start in 6th place.

Unfortunately the factory backed Supra could not compete, even with the Private Ford Sierras, thus for the remaining two JGTC races he scored only one additional podium on 6 December at Suzuka where he finished 3rd.

Jones' reputation as a hard charger was shown in the 1993 ATCC when he was involved in a number of incidents, most notably pushing the Holden Commodore of Mark Skaife off the track at Symmons Plains Raceway before also doing the same to the Holden Racing Team's Commodore driven by Australia's 1987 500cc Grand Prix motorcycle World Champion Wayne Gardner less than half a lap later.

By this point the team was sundering apart and Jones took the major sponsor (Philip Morris International) to form a new team with engineering brothers Ross and Jim Stone as partners, known commercially as Pack Leader Racing (the Pack Leader name came about as the use of the Peter Jackson cigarette brand was banned following the Australian Government's blanket ban on all cigarette advertising from 1 January 1996).

He attempted to race in the Grand Prix Masters World Series at Kyalami in November 2005 but had to pull out before qualifying due to neck pains.

In March 2013, Jones signed with Network Ten as a commentator for their Formula One coverage where he joins regular hosts Matthew White and former MotoGP rider Daryl Beattie.

His autobiography AJ: How Alan Jones Climbed to the top of Formula One has been co-authored with motorsport writer Andrew Clarke was released in August 2017 by Penguin Random House.

Jones was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1980 for "service to motor racing" and was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 1989.

[14][15] Jones and his father Stan, along with Graham and Damon Hill, and Keke and Nico Rosberg, are the only father/son combinations to ever win the Australian Grand Prix.