My Time as a Driver

I made my first visit to the Silverstone circuit in the 1960s. It was just a mission of curiosity at first but I was soon bitten hard by the racing bug, and club racing was my staple diet for the first few years. I was particularly involved with the embryonic Clubman’s formula at the time, where the racing was good and there was a lot of interesting machinery and people. At the start, the cars for that series were either the Lotus Seven, or bore at least a resemblance to the Lotus Seven. It was widely believed that if a “constructor” sent a picture of his creation to the club and it looked like a Lotus Seven, it was in!

I spent some time in Clubman racing, which was very enjoyable and friendly. There were a number of creative people there, but then Formula 2 seemed to beckon. I had decided to move up a step and I formed the London Racing Team with Chris Lambert who I was racing with. We were friends and we thought we could do well in F2. That was in 1968 and Chris had already been doing some F2 races. We started with a Brabham BT23C-FVA and then got a second one. We failed to start at the first 1968 race at Barcelona and then we were at Hockenheim on April 7 where it was wet and gray. That, of course, was the terrible race when Jim Clark was killed, and that overshadowed everything. Chris was 3rd in the first heat and 5th in the second, while I finished 11th and 9th. He ended up 5th overall and I was 9th which would have been quite a good result if it hadn’t been for Clark’s accident.