Motoring Mags

I have just marked my half-century of being a motor racing enthusiast. On February 1, 1957, I bought a copy of Motor Sport. Many years later, I was chatting with James Weaver at Silverstone, who said, “Bloody Denis Jenkinson, it’s thanks to him I’m in my current mess.” In 1957, I lived in a place so sparsely populated that we kids could not even get up a scratch game of cricket. Batsman, bowler, wicket keeper and a fielder on either side, there weren’t five of us. Nobody else was interested in motor racing, and I have no idea why the bug bit me. It didn’t infect my son, and he grew up with the sport.

Motor racing was a minority interest which merited little coverage in the national press. There were race reports, not news or interviews. The exception was if there was a fatality or a British win, and there tended to be more deaths than success in those days. The BBC televised about three meetings a year. It was so complicated to set up an outside broadcast that the Beeb covered support races to make the exercise worthwhile. So I saw Archie Scott Brown in the works Lister-Jaguar, and 1957 was also the year that saloon car racing took off, with people like Mike Hawthorn.