I remember you saying that you felt liable to be painted dark green and stood on end in the workshops over the winter!
I’m
sure if I hadn’t moved I would have been painted over, yes. I was definitely
part of the scene, and I think one becomes a little less effective as part of the scene. Now, I was beginning to
feel this . . . and this offer came along
from Lotus. I’ll
say straightaway,
financially it was a good offer: but this isn’t all that matters. You consider
it, but it's not the main consideration. It was also a very good package deal:
it meant that I had a Formula One drive, a Formula Two drive, an Indianapolis
drive and a
saloon car drive
all nicely sewn
up and I didn't have to go and look for them. In my case I would otherwise have had to go looking for an Indianapolis drive and a
saloon car
drive.
Do
you in fact enjoy saloon-car driving, then? I thought perhaps this was
something you were stuck with as a result of being with Lotus?
I’m
pretty sure I would not have been doing
anything with a saloon car if I had not joined Lotus, because we were quite busy and had
quite a lot on our plate. But I must admit that I have driven now in three saloon-car races and I have quite enjoyed it. I used to0 drive saloons, of course, for John
Coombs: you
know, 3.8
Jaguars. Then they messed saloons up and the Jaguar wasn't competitive any more.
I
remember you running round Silverstone in that Sprinzel A35. . .
It
was a Speedwell A35 actually, which my mother still has to this day, in fact. Anyway, this package deal was very attractive, and the more I thought about it the more it
appealed to me, because it meant taking on a fresh challenge. At the same time, I was sad about leaving BRM, having been there so many years and made so many friends; but I felt that I had to do this, that
I was at a sort of crossroods - and I’m pretty sure that if I hadn't moved then, I would have finished my racing days at BRM. So I thought, Okay, let’s take a gamble, let’s make a changer - but I did stipulate that I would be joint number one; I wouldn’t have gone there under any other conditions, going as number two would
have been
stupid. This was accepted. You know I was at Lotus before – it’s the turn of the wheel if you like. I'm back there now - but conditions
have changed
and it is vastly different
from when I left.
How
did you get on with Chapman in the old days when you were
there?
Very
well: I had no
– well I was
going to say I had no trouble with him, but that's not really the way to put I! I liked his approach to motor racing and I got along with him very
well. At that time, unfortunately, he was extremely busy with the Lotus Elite, and he wasn't spending much time with the motor racing project at all. Consequently, it suffered father badly, and that's why we did so badly, or so I thought. Since then he is
spending much more time with motor racing, in fact he spends
most of his time motor racing and lets the commercial side
be looked after
by commercial men that he has employed. So the setup is completely different from the one I remember, and it's a
much more professional unit.
Back
in those early days you had quite a reputation as a suspension tuner and a setter-up of motor cars that people had put
together but weren’t quite certain how to make to go. You helped Lotus a lot with this, you helped BRM a lot in their early days; subsequently, I
get the impression
there
has been less
of this sort of work for you to do. Is this in fact so? You have also a reputation for having your cars set up in a very
idiosyncratic way. I noticed, for example, that in the two Formula Two Loti at Snetterton you could see the
differences in the suspension set-up: it stood out a mile. You are a hard springs man, shall we
say, and
Chapman is a soft springs man, if you take these things down to basic principles. Are you
doing much of this sort of thing again?
Well,
I can only point out about the Snetterton cars – oh, and I wouldn’t have thought idiosyncrasy was the word to use - you can see the proof
of the pudding.
At Snetterton, there was no doubt about it; to my mind I had the best-handling
car on the circuit in the final, although in the two heats it wasn’t handling
so well. The car was altered after each heat, was altered for the final, and it's not real1y the way
to go motor racing, but it was a necessity - and the fact that it paid off was
because of the
experience I've had in the past with suspension and cars, and
it enabled us to make the right decision for the final. You can see well it paid off: the car was not very quick down the straight, but
it was undoubtedly quick through the corners, and there's just no argument
against that. Now Chapman
I think is one of
the finest designers of racing cars in the world today, and as you say that leaves us
relatively little of
this sort of tuning to be done. But I've already found
that we’ve been tuning the chassis wherever we go, and nowadays the competition is so severe that you’ve got to tune the chassis to
the particular
circuit; and really you tune it to suit your particu1ar driving
technique. Now every driver drives in a different
fashion and requires
a different setup, so it doesn't matter if one driver wants soft springs and
another wants hard ones. It’s the times round the circuit that matter, and as I'm being paid to drive and win races, I consider it my duty to myself and to the bloke who’s paying me to get the best I can out of the car.
You get on well with the mechanics in development work as well do you? You get a fair share of development driving?
Nobody minds changing
something on a car if it shows results. You've only got to look at the amount of
work we did at Si1verstone between heats, when we had trouble with the chassis
in the first race. Now they could have put the car away, patched it up and got
it ready for Pau. I mean, we didn't stand a chance of winning because we didn’t finish the first heat. But we sat to and got the car welded and brazed
and finally completed a minute before the start, and started in the race, and it went extremely well. If the mechanics can see that and if I can
see that they
have worked hard, and they can see that I’ve worked hard, and the whole thing has paid off, everyone goes away in high spirits - whereas if we’d packed it up we’d all
have been a bit
down-hearted.
So it is a good morale- booster.
Still
talking of handling; as you say,
nowadays every
driver
has his car set up to suit himself, but if we go back a few years, say to the
early
days of the 1.5 1itre formula, most of the cars seemed to
be set up in what was superficially a similar way. They didn't have a lot of power to
spare, and they seemed to be cars that had to be driven to the edge of a very
precious limit, and once they'd gone over that they were more or less
completely lost. Nowadays, with a lot more power available, drivers seem to be a lot happier about hanging
the tail out, and generally throw the cars around very much more than they seemed at liberty to do in the old days.
This makes me think that perhaps the amount of power the cars have today
makes driving very much safer than it was then, when you didn’t always have enough power to get
you out of trouble. Wouldn’t you agree?
No.
In a way, yes – but you see, the more power you have to cope with, the more
difficult driving the car becomes, the more skillful you have to be. You have
to exercise a lot more skill in throttle control. Now if you are having to be
more skilful, it means that fewer people are going to be able to do it, so it’s
bound to be more dangerous. It’s better not to call it danger; the car becomes
more difficult to drive. I don’t know how you measure danger: but with more
power you have to exercise more control, more skill, so there’s more room for making mistakes. If
there are more mistakes being made, then it’s going to be a little bit more
dangerous.
And yet, when the
cars have less power so that they lack the excess to disturb the drivers, we
find that racing becomes very much closer and this involves problems of
high-speed traffic driving that we don’t get when the cars are more strung out,
as they are in the more high-powered formula. Look at these Formula two
affairs, for example.
Yes,
Formula two is the classic example. Everyone has roughly the same power; there
is a variance in the engines, but they are all roughly the same and there is not too much difference
between the cars and the tyres. And the
racing is
extremely close.
But what is motor racing? You’ve got
to have competition,
you’ve got to have close racing, and I think this is shot in the arm for motor racing. It is more dangerous, close racing, but that’s what people want to see, and I want to
give value for money . . . and
there’s no doubt about it a close-fought battle is the
highlight of any motor race. That’s just the way it
is.
So
that really the emphasis is on the racing rather than on the motor.
I personally think that If we
want motor racing to survive – there’s no question of survival, its growing,
it’s mushrooming throughout the world – but if we want it to get bigger and
better you’ve got
to have close racing and you’ve got to have the lead being contested. It’s no use
having one chap out
in front walking away with the race
and a good scrap going on in midfield – it’s all very well, but people want to
see the lead being fought for, and I’m all for that. I’d much rather win a race having a nice comfortable 30 seconds lead, but
this is going to be very difficult! Neverthe1ess, there is nothing I enjoy more than a good
scrap, and if I come out on top after a good scrap then that’s even more
satisfying than just walking away with the race. Not only that, but everyone
has had value for money, they've enjoyed it, it’s been exciting, and that’s the
way to get people, to come and watch.
So
you
don’t feel any particular sorrow at the way motor racing has gone, at the way
it has become very much bigger and more commercial, and less of a simple
motoring exercise?
Certainly
not. I think motor racing is getting better and better, and I must say I don’t
hold any sort of nostalgia for the past at all. That’s looking backwards:
you’ve got to look forwards. Motor racing is progressing: I mean, it’s no good
reminiscing and saying how much better it was in the old days; that’s daft,
it’s not going to get you anywhere. I’d like to see motor racing becoming
bigger and better, and the only way to do that is to make it more commercial.
People look down their noses at this, but more and more manufacturers of parts
and cars are seeing it as a good vehicle for publicity, and because of this
we’re getting more people racing, more cars, better cars, motor racing is going
from strength to strength, and I can only think of it as an ostrich attitude
for people to frown upon it as getting too commercial. It might be that there’s
a lot of money behind manufacturers and behind cars, with oil companies putting
a lot in, but there’s a lot of people. That money filters right down to the
base of the pyramid and there’s a lot of people benefiting from it. It’s more
or less the same people as are benefiting who moan about it, and I don’t
understand that attitude at all: it seems that they can’t see farther than the
ends of their noses. And when the flag drops on the start of a motor race, and
commercial interests that has been put into the sport up to that moment is
completely forgotten. Then we have the sport, the moment that flag drops. The
drivers out there aren’t racing for money, they are racing for. . .
Their
own personal satisfaction?
Their
own personal
satisfaction. They want to win: and that’s what motor racing is about. The money
counts only up to that point; and it certainly hasn't fouled the sport up.
There is no question of dirty play, there is no bribing, nothing of that sort
that one meets in other sports where the commercial interests are heavy. I think we have one of the
cleanest sports in the world, despite the heavy commercial emphasis that we
have in it, and I think that says a tot for motor racing.
If motor racing
is going this way, versions of it such as saloon-car racing are going to
flourish even more. Now, when you were racing saloons back in the Jaguar days
they were a lot more like the production cars than they are today in Group
Five. I imagine Group Five is much more satisfying as an exercise from the
driver’s point of view, and obviously vastly more entertaining from the public’s;
do you get the impression, though, that saloon racing the way it is now is
going to continue to lead to improvement in production cars in the same way
that it once did? Or do you think that it has become too remote?
I
think you mentioned the most important part in your question: the fact that the
spectators get more interest out of it now. There’s no doubt that whatever we
do in motor racing, the first thing required is that we satisfy the spectators.
Before anything else, what we’ve got to do is to put on a good show. Car design
– progress, if you like – comes after that. Very often a lot of people do tend
to think of it the other way about: they think it is a technical exercise,
first and that spectators are only incidental: but we must first and foremost
think of giving value for money, because it’s a spectator sport and must remain
so – otherwise it would wither away and die. The fact that we’ve got Group Five
cars now – and I’m not sure what that means exactly, but I know they’re not
standard.
That’s
just
what it means!
Well,
I don’t think it matters a damn. What we’ve got now is much better racing than
we ever had, different types of cars competing – we haven’t got a one class dominance
like we’ve had in the past when one manufacturer sets out to build a standard
car which is obviously to a much better standard than another manufacturer.
Then everyone buys that kind of car, and you get one make dominating that class
of races, which is a bore. Now we have all sorts of different types and shapes
in saloon car racing, because people are allowed to mess around with them. Now,
obviously, out of this is going to come a lot of knowledge, and obviously
manufacturers are going to use it. People are going to experiment more than
would have been allowed to do with standard cars, and the fact that more power
is being put through the transmissions and the gearboxes and axles and springs,
and the cars are being cornered harder and faster, means that you’re going to
find out a lot more quickly, than if the car was not allowed to be touched. And
if it couldn’t be touched, the racing wouldn’t be so exciting. It’s important
to get the perspective right: the first thing is to provide a spectacle.
If you feel that,
how do you feel about the big-banger sports/racing cars that you drove last
year but which seem to have gone to the wall since?
Well, I think that’s a shame:
I think they provide a very good spectacle. You see, you can’t have a racing
programme made up of cars all looking the same: you’ve got to have them looking
different, and that’s where saloon cars fit so well into today’s programme. To
have a programme of six saloon races would be boring, but to have one is a
must: and likewise a sports-car race too. These cars look different and make an
interesting spectacle; the same with GT cars. I’m amazed that the Group Seven
formula died out: I think one of the reasons was that it didn’t prove too
reliable. Although it’s the main formula for racing in the States, and it
provides a very good spectacle, the cars were not reliable.
Did you enjoy
driving them as much as you enjoy driving other things?
Oh
yes; I enjoy motor racing. But I really don’t care what I drive – though some
of those cars were really fun to drive. They were a little crude: they had
four-speed gearboxes, a great big lorry-type gearchange, and an old thumping
engine that didn’t seem to rev and sounded like a flat motorboat - sort of
brute force and ignorance, if you like.
I remember you
telling me at Brands last year, when you had been driving a Lola around, that
although your cut-of and power-on points were much the same as with a Formula
One car, you couldn’t turn the power on in the same way.
That’s
not strictly true. The technique is very similar, but the car is less
responsive, less – the French have a good word for it, less nervous –
and it doesn’t require the same amount of feel, accuracy, delicacy, that a
Formula car does. A Formula car without a doubt extracts the maximum from a
driver and is a more accurate and responsive and delicate and sensitive car
that a big sporst-car. When you come right down to the scale you come to the
saloon car, which is of course even less responsive and sensitive; and then the
difference between a good driver and a mediocre driver is much less. But the
good driver will always win because he’s consistent.
You were saying a
little while ago that fundamentally your delight is in motor racing and you
don’t very much mind what you drive. Obviously, all other things being equal,
you prefer the ones that are most responsive.
I
prefer a Formula One race. It is the car for me to drive.
Does this carry
through to your feeling about cars on the roads. In your everyday driving
about? Or do you think that motoring has reached the stage now where the type
of car you drive matters less?
No
I don’t. I am extremely fortunate
because my hobby is my job and I get paid for it. I get a lot of satisfaction
out of driving, more than my fair share. When it comes to driving on the road,
I have a Mini-Cooper S (fully Speedwellised, of course) which I use around
town, for which I think it is ideal. I thoroughly enjoy driving it around
London; I’ve taken it on one or two long journeys, it’s not quite so
comfortable then, but it’s a magnificent car for driving around a city and I
get a lot of fun out of it even in today’s traffic. I also have a Ford Zodiac
which Fords very kindly lend me; and I must say that though it’s an automatic,
and much bigger, and less manoeuvrable, I even enjoy driving that. It sounds
peculiar, but again it doesn’t seem to matter too much what I drive. If I had a
4.2 E-type I would prefer to drive that, and I would much prefer it on a long
journeys; I did think about having an E-type or, say, and Aston Martin or
something like that; but it’s a fairly expensive car, and I have bought an
aeropalne. Now for my longer trips – when the weather’s not too bad – I jump
into my aeroplane. The little car is for town, and I use the Ford mainly for
family outings and when I’m feeling a bit lazy.
Basically, if
your approach to driving is right you can enjoy driving anything because you
enjoy getting the best out of it?
Absolutely.
You’ve got a controllable machine; I enjoy controlling it and myself, and it gives
me a great deal of pleasure to be able to do something with a piece of
machinery and to do it properly. When I take corners, even it I’m not going
quickly – you know, just toddling around town – I want to do it properly. It’s
automatic, not a question of forcing myself to take this attitude. If I make a
balls-up of a corner, even a small one, you know, it irritates me. I want to do
it properly all the time. I drive reasonably quickly, but well within myself,
and I want to give a nice flowing movement around town – no rolling on-off
braking and jerkiness – and if I want to get through traffic I want to get
through unnoticed, so that I haven’t really bothered anybody but I’ve got
through very quickly.
Earlier, we were
talking about variety, and the different classes that might make up a
programme, such as saloons and Group Seven. If we are to have that sort of
programme the day must be made up of short races, whereas in the old days your
Grand Prix was so long that there was no time for anything else, except it be a
short curtain-raiser or something like that. Are you happy with shorter races?
Do you enjoy the long ones, or feel that they prove little more save that
people can keep going for longer?
I
think the days of the three-hour Grand Prix are obviously out. I think a Grand
Prix should be over two hours. We are always hoping that each of these will be
a good race, and if it is for the full two hours, then you’ve got good value
for money. It doesn’t always happen, and when it doesn’t it’s a great shame for
the people who have paid to come and see it. But if you take this receipt race
at Brands Hatch, for instance, they had two 10-lap heats, which I thought was
ridiculous; I couldn’t see the point, for they didn’t count, as far as I could
make out. The same at Snertterton: Rindt at Snetterton just pulled out of the
second heat after the first lap, because it didn’t do anything – it didn’t
count for the final, he was already on the front row of the grid from his
position in the first heat. It seems ridiculous to me, it’s puzzling to the
drivers and equally puzzling for the public. One 20-lap heat and a 40-lap final
would have been a better arrangement. Actually, in the final we had a good
race, because I started on the back of the grid somewhere; and it was the same
at Silverstone, where I had to start on the back of the grid. IF it had been a
short race, we wouldn’t have seen any driving through. The same happened at
Brands Hatch when they had the final with Bandini nearly catching Dan Gurney;
with a shorter race you’d never have seen this drama. The drama rises and falls
all the time in a race, and we always hope for an exciting finish; but you’ve
got to have a longish race for this. Also you’ve got to put cars to the test,
and you can’t do this with little short-lappers. I think that to reduce Formula
One and Two races to circus-type events is a retrograde step. I would like to
see Grands Prix remain as they are at two hours: I think this is a proper test
of driver and a car and designer. For supporting races and minor events it’s
probably a good idea to have two starts: say, a heat and a final. But the heat
has to mean something; and 10-lappers, I don’t see the point of those.
Do you think
Formula Two is going to endanger Formula One this year or next?
No.
You see, Formula Two fills a gap: it is less expensive to put on, the cars are
less expensive, Formula One carries the World Championship, it attracts the
press, the cars don’t appear quite so often – they are much more expensive to
put on – and Formula two will definitely not knock that.
We’ve seen it
happen before, you know, back in the early 50’s, when much the same sort of
thing was going on. Formula Two was much cheaper to stage, and when people got
bored with the way Formula One was going all of a sudden Championship events
became Formula Two.
I
don’t really know what happened then, but I’m sure the structure of motor
racing then was vastly different from what it is today. I don’t see that
happening at the moment: there are all these manufacturers with sacks of money
and vast investments in Formula One, and they are not going to see it go down.
That leaves us
now with the long-distance sports-car races, things like Le Mans and the Targa
Florio. You said at Le Mans last year that drivers keep saying that they’ll
never come again because it is so dicey a proposition, with very fast cars and
cars that are relatively much slower racing together. Do you get the impression
that the smaller cars are now so fast that this differential is less dangerous?
Well,
the bigger cars are faster too, so you’ve still got the same differential. It’s
just higher up the scale, so it’s more dangerous, if anything. Cars are doing
over 200mph, and there are still cars doing say 140, so there is still a 60mph
differential, and a 60mph difference at 200 is a lot worse than the same thing
at 180. But Le Mans wouldn’t be Le Mans unless you had 55 cars in it. You can’t
keep talking about how dangerous it is; that’s what the race is, and everybody
knows it. No use going there and doing it and then complaining. I’ve been going
there for many years; in fact, this year looks like the first year I’m going to
miss it, for I haven’t done anything about getting a drive there. This is the
first time for many years that I’ve missed Sebring, too 0 I was racing at Pay
anyway, in Formula Two – and then last month I had to miss the Targa, and I
shan’t be doing the Thousand Ks, and I’m pretty sure I shan’t be doing Le Mans.
It’ll be the first time I’ve missed going there since 1956 - mark you, the
first years I went there as a mechanic and reserve driver.
When you were
talking about length of races you said two hours was about right for Formula
One. For these very long sports-car races, do you think that some confusion is
caused by the fact that the results depend as much on the stamina of the
drivers as on that of the cars, and that one is liable to draw the wrong
conclusions from the results because of this? How important do you think is the
performance of the driver as a person in a race like that? Do you think the
importance should centre in the cars?
I
really don’t see why you want to differentiate between a car and a driver. I
have noticed this theme running through all your questions, that you want to
see more accent on the cars. But I don’t see that it matters. In a 24hour race
there is no doubt about it, the car plays a more important part than the
driver, if you want to put it that way; but you can’t do without one or the
other. I’m against viewing the car and driver as two different things to be
compared. They are a unit. The car that finishes at Le Mans is seen to have a
lot of stamina, which wouldn’t show up in a Brands 20-lapper, The driver who
finishes at Le Mans is seen to have a certain amount of common sense, good
feeling for the car, and he hasn’t overstressed it, he hasn’t fallen asleep or
pranged it or suffered from fatigue that cause him to make mistakes. In other
words he has put up a good consistent performance, and that is what is required
in an endurance race: you’ve got to have people who can control themselves,
which some drivers find very difficult in a 24 hour race, You can do some
damage in the first few laps that can show up 12hours later. You’ll find that
the public are always more interested in people, because they are people
themselves. They haven’t all got GT40s or Formula One BRMs or Lotuses, but they
all have a body and a brain and a mind, and that’s what a driver has. So they
see somebody like themselves driving one of these machines that they will never
have, and the more the public can get interested in the drivers the better it
will be for motor racing. In a way I’m talking about myself, and I don’t want
to become a false hero or anything like that, but the personal interest in
motor racing is without a doubt the way to get people to come and watch.
Organisers and racing would benefit a lot more if the drivers would promote
themselves more, but most drivers don’t do anything of the sort. I mean, I
don’t want to go out promoting myself; but if you were to make racing drivers
slightly larger than life, it would draw a lot more people in at the gate. The
cars will never have the same glamour as the drivers. I know quite a few people
resent this – journalists, designers, and organizers – and they will say people
come to see the cars. Well really, I think they are being a little bit blind.
In that film Grand Prix the cars are the stars of the film because a lot
of the stars of the film didn’t appear to be racing drivers. The story wasn’t
real enough for some people, but I think the film is going to do a lot of good
for motor racing. The photography is brilliant, we’ll never see anything like
it again, and if we do we’ll be lucky; the story might be weak and a bit
morbid, and it lacks a lot of the humor we get in motor racing; but,
nevertheless, it will do motor racing a lot of good and anybody connected with
motor racing. Anybody who runs a magazine or who writes for a magazine for
instance. There will be more people interested in motor racing because of this,
so there will be more money coming into motor racing, so when you ask for a
raise you are more likely to get it because more people have bought your
magazine.
What
a splendid thought!
(Ends,
the two discussants having at last agreed upon an ideal!)