The Lotus Years

Back in the early 1950s I was racing my own Cooper 500 fairly successfully. I managed to beat the works team a couple of times, and I got noticed. Colin Chapman was looking for another driver. The people who did most of the sponsorship in those days, probably the only sponsorship then, were the fuel companies. I was already signed up with Esso and so was Colin. Colin made it known that he wanted another driver to Reg Tanner who was the Esso competitions manager. I was racing my own car at Snetterton and Colin asked if I wanted to drive a Lotus around. He said, “How do you like it?” and I said it was very nice. He asked if I thought I could go a little quicker and I said I could go a lot quicker. He then said, “But don’t bend it, it’s the only one we’ve got!”

So, I went round quicker, and when I went home a few days later, there was a contract to drive for Lotus on my desk. In a nutshell, that’s how it happened. It was as simple as that. Part of this contract was a retainer from Esso to drive for Lotus, and that was for £2000. In today’s terms, that doesn’t seem like much but a friend of mine worked it out, and that would be about £30,000 now. That was quite a lot of money, enough to keep my family without having to do any other extra work at all, and it left me free to do a bit more racing.