Man with Two Careers

The first circuit I ever went to was Brands Hatch, in the ’50s, when I was still at school. That must have been 1953, when the circuit was one mile and went the other way around! I was hooked at an early age. My father had taught me to drive on our farm in Bedfordshire when I was six. I loved things mechanical and got a degree in mechanical engineering and that’s what I lived for. I got involved in all sorts of things.

The hill-climbing had started in the early ’60s with the Cooper-Daimler and then that engine went into the Felday 4WD, which I built. My family didn’t want me to go racing so I had professional drivers at first but they couldn’t feed back the information I wanted, so I start- ed driving that myself and found I was faster, which seemed ridiculous. Then I had the Ferguson 4WD in 1963, which was very successful. I continued hill-climbing but was spending a lot of time building up the Felday business. But the transition into Formula Three in 1967 was quite extraordinary. The first race was at Brands Hatch and the second at Snetterton and I was lapped…in a Formula Three race! But the 6th race I drove in was an international at Silverstone, and I won it, so I had had a very steep learning curve, even after all the hill-climb experience, but I had learned. Suddenly one day I realized how you could balance a car at 100 mph, and that the current racing tires would walk everywhere but as long as you followed them, you would be OK!