Motor Racing, My Education

My motor racing career started with the most basic form of car, a 1952 Ford Anglia E93A, which I towed to stock car meetings at a track near my home in Dublin City, Ireland. I crashed it, bashed it, took it home after the race and fixed it, so I could do it all over again another day. I was 16 years old and passionate about driving and racing. It wasn’t until 1973, aged 21, when I got into Formula Ford. The following year I got a £1,000 bank loan, signed by my Dad, on the pretext of starting a used car business—what the bank manager didn’t know was the used car was a second-hand Lotus 61 Formula Ford. At the end of that year, I’d obviously spent all the money, and had no way of paying it back, so I needed to get some cash quickly to buy another car and to service the loan I already had. My girlfriend at the time had a brother who had just returned from the iron ore mines in Australia. He told me I could go and earn over £5,000 in just six months. I’d never seen that much money before. Ten days later, I was in the bush somewhere in Northwest Australia signing on at the single-man’s quarters ready for my first shift. It was the hottest, hardest, dirtiest, and most enjoyable six months of my life. Fortunately, I wasn’t alone, as my friend David Kennedy had travelled with me. The place was full of drug addicts, felons, and jailbirds—it would be nothing for an argument to be settled in the mess hall with a gun or a knife, in fact it was a regular occurrence. People there were on a mission, to buy a house, a yacht, or whatever. My mission was to buy a racing car.

On my return to Ireland I bought a Crosslé Formula Ford. It was good enough for 2nd and 3rd places, I could even lead races, but it just hadn’t quite got the edge to give me a win. In the middle of the Irish Championship we had a Formula Ford Festival at Mondello Park. In the race, I hit Bernard Devaney, who was driving a factory Hawke; it was the first corner—the car tipped upside down and finished as a pile of scrap in the middle of the racetrack. I got out unhurt, recovered the bits of the car that were left, loaded it onto a trailer and that was it. All the money had gone, the car was in bits and pieces and the dream was over. At that point of despair, a man dressed in a dirty green oil stained jacket approached me, he said, “If you can find enough money to buy an engine I’ll make sure you have a brand-new Crosslé.” The man was John Crosslé. I borrowed money from David Kennedy to buy the engine, and John was true to his word with the car. There were 11 races left in the championship, I got 11 pole positions, nine wins, two 2nds, set three lap records and won the championship.