DRIVEN – An Elegy To Cars, Roads & Motorsport Until the Eighties, even Car offered a slightly balanced diet and whilst there might not have been the roughage that Autocar ‘Industry News’ might offer (let alone the thin gruel of Motor Sport’s interminable ‘Wartime Diary of an RFC Officer’) the reader still often had to chomp through a Ford Corsair or Fiat 132, or chew on some Volvo 145 hard tack before getting down to some supercar action. But not anymore, as the menu offered in the mid-to- late Eighties became ever richer, meaning you could skip the starters and mains, and truffle your way through an endless indulgence of the sweet stuff. I loved it before the indigestion kicked in sometime in the Nineties, and nobody did it better than Car as they had invented not only the supercar story but even the word itself. That man Setright was to blame but he would have turned in his long and elegant grave if he had been around to witness how the term ‘supercar’ eventually became so devalued by overuse that it was superseded by ‘hypercar,’ a term that some might say would benefit from the removal of the first letter ‘r.’ Setright applied the term to the Lamborghini Miura that he helped drive to the UK from Sant’Agata in the autumn of 1967. In the 21st century a motoring journalist might take the early morning Ryanair from Stansted to Milan, thrash a Punto down to Maranello, get his 30-minute Fiorano slot with yet another variation of a mid-engined Ferrari V8, lunch at the Cavallino, and be back home to his new town semi in time for Newsnight, having written his copy on a laptop on the way home. Hadn’t the editor said 750 words max, as the pictures – smoky sideways stuff, right? – would take up the other four pages? But back in ‘67 LJK Setright was getting in tune with the Miura’s song on the 1000-mile drive home: ... a steady, mechanical mezzoforte made up of all the mumbling, thrashing, whining whirring, groaning and grumbling metallic obbligati that a race-bred engine furnishes to fill the octaves left unoccupied by that exuberant exhaust. It is a lovely noise, an expensive noise, but I suppose when all is said and done it is a noise. I would expect nothing less from Setright’s erudite pen, for wasn’t he also responsible for describing the exhaust note of the Jaguar E-type he had taken for a dawn drive as “... a great vortex of acoustic spume?” I will talk some more about the message soon but a final thought first on the motoring press medium. To put it bluntly, it’s fucked. Few of us buy magazines, and those of us who still do, grizzle about content and price because, like everything else in our lives, the internet and the smartphone have changed our habits forever. But I will concede that the classic car press will prosper for a few years yet, as each successive generation of 40 or 50-somethings with money to spend now wants to buy what they couldn’t afford as 20-year-olds. And, unlike the girl with the big brown eyes you yearned for when you were 22, that 1991 Porsche 911, or “964” if you must, has neither crows’ feet, nor a husband, nor a massive backside. It was somehow inevitable, that the original bench mark for classic car coverage came in the Car spinoff,Supercar Classics, which started off gloriously in the early Eighties before tailspinning to an ignominious demise a decade 256 DRIVEN – An Elegy To Cars, Roads & Motorsport Sunny after Davenport’s Focus had sheared an oil line, the ensuing slick had removed what little grip there had been. Reactions to the crash were mainly sober and mature, with Alan Gow, the BTCC supremo saying that “The accident ... couldn’t have been avoided ... it was the imperfect storm.” Quite a contrast to one of the comments on an internet forum, from somebody who didn’t allow his ignorance about which corner the accident had taken place on to prevent him from insisting that the circuit must be changed before the BTCC returned. Complacency is never a good thing in this sport, but having seen over 1000 individual races at Croft, with only one serious injury until today’s accident, I think I can fall back on Mario Andretti’s words after team-mate Ronnie Peterson’s death at Monza in 1978: “Unhappily, motor racing is also this.” Verdict 1. Summary – Terrific entertainment from fast, noisy, spectacular, and well driven cars. The support races now don’t include the luscious Porsche Carreras that used to feature. Alan Gow’s strategy is clearly to prevent the support acts from overshadowing the headline turn. The Ginetta Juniors were unremarkable: the Ginetta GT4s were quick and made a lovely V6 snarl, but weren’t a patch on series like the local Northern Saloons and Sports cars; the Clios were as exciting as you’d expect a field of identical hot hatches to be (ie not very); but at least the F4 single-seaters brought a bit of slicks and wings glamour to the party, even if they sound just like the cars the local yoof use to lap Thirsk Market Place. 2. Nature notes – The only sentient creatures stupid enough to brave the rain were BTCC spectators. 3. Catering – A bit more variety than usual but the Michelin Star will have to wait. 4. The programme was a glossy A5 job costing a fiver. It didn’t match the production values of programmes during peak Supertouring in the late Nineties but then neither did the cars. The PA had been turned down from 11 and the commentary team of Messrs Hyde and Hartley was slick, professional, and entertaining. It was good to see more women working for the race teams: a decade ago the only women you’d see were half naked, and usually shivering, grid girls. People like Claire Williams, Leena Gade, Susie Wolff, and Monisha Kaltenborn are helping to change the sport whose sexism and misogyny had left it marooned in 1974 for far too long. CADWELL PARK 17/18 JUNE HSCC 2017 Exactly 47 years ago, Richard Attwood was racing a Porsche 917 in the 24 hours of Le Mans. With his co-driver, Hans Herrmann, he won the race that formed the background of Steve McQueen’s film, Le Mans. This was the film that, even more than The Great Escape and Bullitt, triggered McQueen’s canonisation, and which was also responsible for the number of paunchy middle-aged blokes who wear Gulf-branded T-shirts. Attwood is as far removed from McQueen’s Hollywood glamour as you could imagine, but I am still slightly star struck 162 10 THE GLITTERING PRIZES No, there is no terrible way to win. There is only winning. Jean Pierre Sarti, Grand Prix (1966) 1971 was a good year for me, as there were some pretty major rites of passage to notch on my belt. Not only did I pass my driving test, I left the loathed Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, immediately burned my old school tie with its idiotic Latin maxim, ‘Turpe nescire,’ grew my hair, and (may the church bells ring out) left home to start the first year of my law degree at the University of Leeds. Spring blossomed like never before: in March I saw my first Formula 2 race and, only weeks later, I was at my first Formula 1 race at Oulton Park, four years after reading my first Grand Prix report inAutocar (Monaco, since you ask, won by Denny Hulme’s Repco Brabham in the very last Grand Prix before the Cosworth DFV changed the world as we used to know it). Club race meetings had now become part of the fabric of life, and I rarely missed a meeting at Croft or Rufforth. I loved it all, but I had now acclimatised to the usual recipe of battling Imps and Minis, a Formula Ford duel, a Clubmans’ race, and the statutory guest appearance by local hero Tony Dean, as often as not in his Can-Am winning Porsche 908. I still struggle to understand precisely what satisfaction AG Dean got out of beating a Formula Libre field of Mallock U2s and a pensioned off F3 car in his 375bhp Porsche sports racer, but the massacre was always a treat to witness. In 1970 I had also been exposed to the brave new world of big time, big buck, big bang single-seaters when I had marshalled the Good Friday Formula 5000 race at Oulton Park. Actually, hardly any racing per se went on, as in that stage of the Formula’s evolution, the cars were a ragbag selection ranging from budget ‘bitsa’ specials to serious machinery like the McLaren M10B, and the diversity of the cars was reflected in the motley crew of drivers, who ranged from the ‘coming men’ like Mike Walker and Peter Gethin, to club racing old stagers like John Myerscough and Fred Saunders. From the marshals’ post at Knickerbrook I don’t think I saw a single overtaking move apart from backmarkers being lapped. That happened rather a lot, as fifth on the grid Ulf Norinder might have been five seconds slower 90 Tracks ’n’ Hills ’n’ Hole Shots was near ecstatic. And Cadwell’s every prospect pleases; solve the problem of Charlies and then savour the brief respite as you watch the buzzards wheel high above the Park Straight before the big stop into Park itself.