Greatest Racecar? Austin-Healey 3000 MkIII

I have raced and rallied all over the world during my long career and am still actively involved in motorsport, but with historic cars now.

Looking back, the rally that gave me the most personal satisfaction was the Spa-Sofia-Liege Rally in 1964, when I was paired with Tony Ambrose. I was driving what I believe to be one of the great cars of all time, an Austin-Healey 3000 MkIII. The rally was run in very difficult circumstances, the weather was hot, the roads were little better than hostile and the pace was brutal for four days and nights of the most intensive high-speed competition in the world. It took us from Belgium through to the Black Sea and back. There was just the one rest halt and that was in Sofia, for just one hour. It was a pure road race on dirt. We won it by a rather big margin and, despite problems, the Austin-Healey 3000 never missed a beat. Along the way there was a jump—an unexpected jump—we took off and landed with a great jolt. It was so bad, I lost all my fog lamps fixed to the front of the car, so it was lights out almost immediately. The bottom of the Healey took a bashing too, so much so that we couldn’t operate the doors properly anymore. I stopped at a special stage, cut some fence wire from a nearby field and tied the doors up so they wouldn’t flap open.