Eoin Young

Motor racing threw up some notable writers. SCH Davis, Bentley Boy of the 1920, sports editor ofThe Autocar over 40 years. Rodney Walkerley, his urbane, witty opposite number at The Motor. Bill Boddy, longest serving editor of Motor Sport; Denis Jenkinson its Continental Correspondent and co-pilot with Moss in the Mille Miglia. Gregor Grant, Autosport founder who never let the facts stand in the way of a good story. The engaging American Henry B Manney III, as funny in life as in print. Peter Garnier, Davis’s astute successor, so close to his subject they made him secretary of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association. Innes Ireland, amazingly articulate and perceptive at Autocar, paving the way for television punditry from James Hunt, Martin Brundle and David Coulthard. Elegant technicians, Laurence Pomeroy son of the gifted Vauxhall designer and LJK Setright, whose classical quotations were almost as good as Pom’s but whose engineering was no match. We had the well-informed David Phipps and nowadays Alan Henry and spirited prose from Maurice Hamilton and Peter Windsor.

Yet none of them were quite a match for the best news-gatherer the sport ever had. Ill-health has consigned Eoin Young to a hospice in his native New Zealand but his From The Grid column in Autocar was obligatory for anybody in the business or out of it. Well-connected ever since he came to Europe and worked with Bruce McLaren in 1961 Eoin had the biggest scoops. His was the best-informed commentary, nobody knew as much as he, nobody spilled as many secrets and above all his writing told readers he was the insider’s insider. It didn’t matter if you were an outsider, Eoin had a way of gaining your confidence.

Eoin Young knew who was going to drive for whom next year – sometimes before they did. He knew who was up-and-coming and who was going down-and-out. He would take notes and print it yet I don’t suppose he ever broke a single confidence. If you told Eoin anything he would take it that you were, in effect, telling the world. He was only the means to the printed page. His veracity seemed to encourage his informants, who told him things they’d confide to no-one else.

Maybe a little rancorous in later years - his personal life was turbulent – Eoin was competitive and neither gave nor expected anything less than determined bargaining in books. His Autocar columns will be a priceless resource to motor racing historians, his books perhaps less so. They were variable; he seemed to grow bored with research or writing at length or in depth. His forensic skills were best in his brief, punchy impertinent style.

Roger Crathorne and Land Rover

Roger Crathorne had already been with Land Rover 16 years when I met him on a windy hill in Kintyre. The best Land Rover driver in the world, he was there to endorse a full page advertisement in the Daily Telegraph claiming you could drive across the peninsula. I had failed. Crathorne’s assignment was to show how.
Roger now says he is retiring. It is surprising how much an individual can influence a company culture. Lotus had Colin Chapman. MG had Cecil Kimber. Rover had a handful of Wilkses; Jaguar Sir William Lyons and Bentley WO. Test and development driver, engineer, the cross-country pre-eminence of Land Rovers and Range Rovers owes everything to his skill and (I do not exaggerate) devotion. He has achieved it, furthermore, while remaining one of the most courteous approachable and unostentatious individuals in an industry where such virtues are rare. I was honoured when he agreed to a foreword in the 65th anniversary edition of my Land Rover book.

There are not many jobs-for-life these days, but it has been my luck to have had one of them. Land Rover has been my career; I have loved every minute of it, so I am delighted to introduce a new updated edition of a book that details what has been, in effect, my life’s work. Fittingly it celebrates 65 years of Land Rover and my 50 years with the company, describing every phase, every up-and-down and every important product to bear the name. The story of a stop-gap model that became a world wide success has been told in hundreds of books, some written not only about one model or series, but just about one particular car. The Land Rover File covers the entire span in one work of reference that answers most of the questions people ask. Departments and executives inside Land Rover rely on what Eric Dymock and his researchers have chronicled so as an independent author, we may not agree with him on absolutely everything. We use this book as a working document and I commend it as objective, truthful, packed with good pictures and down-to-earth detail. Roger Crathorne: Enthusiast and Technical PR Manager.
Retire? It is not in Roger’s nature. He will be fettling his own classic Land Rover. He will be advising, consulting in his quiet-mannered way. Royce was lucky to have Rolls for the practicalities, to perfect the imperfect, to work out ways and means. Land Rover was just as lucky to have Roger Crathorne.

Longest employee in the oldest Land Rover Roget Crathorne in HUE 166 (top) And with the Best 4x4s he created.

MG

More on MG history (TC above). Successive managements were probably right curbing MG works racing teams. Research recalled the follies of the British motorcycle industry of the 1950s, which believed all it had to do was win TT races to secure customer loyalty. Manufacturers like Norton were profligate on racing, penurious over developing new models, and while creating the best racing motorcycles in the world neglected road bikes. BSA, Triumph, AJS, Matchless and Norton made machines that vibrated and leaked oil. The Japanese produced better, faster, well-equipped designs that ran smoothly and looked great with oil-tight exquisitely cast engines. The British firms were bankrupted in the space of a few years.

The British refused to believe that the Japanese were ever going to make anything except small-capacity machines. A book by Bert Hopwood, “Whatever Happened to the British Motorcycle Industry?” published in 1981 by Haynes was a work of what seemed at the time an endangered species, an articulate motorcycle engineer. Hopwood spent a lifetime designing amongst other successful machines the Ariel Square Four and Norton Dominator. He recalled vividly how the management of Norton, Triumph, BSA, and Associated Motorcycles sat back complacently as their industry collapsed.

“By the early 1960s,” wrote Hopwood, “Honda and other Japanese manufacturers, having dominated world motorcycle markets in the small capacity classes, were adjusting their sights and marketing excellent machines of medium capacity. I shall never understand the attitude of Jack Sangster, chairman of BSA, and Edward Turner, the Triumph designer (Turner's great vertical twin, below), to the threat. They were sought after by the press for their reactions to the growing strength of our Japanese competitors. Turner made statements many times, that the British motorcycle industry could count itself fortunate in having the Japs selling large numbers of very small machines, for they were training young riders, many of whom would graduate to larger ones, which he made so well. They formed a lucrative market that had become the backbone of our industry. He said there would be no profit in very small motorcycles so there was no point in entering that market.”

Hopwood warned Turner, whom he disparaged, that any industry that could make small bikes profitably was clearly capable of making more money out of big ones. “I had bitter arguments with Turner. I could not understand why members of the Board did not challenge him.” Hopwood blamed the Triumph management for “foggy” product planning and a total failure to acknowledge the perils.

The analogy I was drawing was how the Japanese had been quick to spot a gap in the US sports car market when Lord Stokes rather stupidly axed the Austin-Healey (above), and refused to spend money at MG. Along came the Datsun 240Z and its successors to grab the dollars we seemed to be turning our backs on. The same went for the splendidly successful Mazda MX-5 following the collapse of MG.

Hopwood’s view on Turner was probably unfair. He was deeply admired by the astute Sir William Lyons, who proposed a partnership in 1944, and designed the V8 engine later adopted by Jaguar.

Four Wheel Drift

Pom liked analyses. This illustrated the forces working on a mid-engined Cooper-Climax

Road test cars in lurid skids are so 1950s. Only louts and motoring hacks drive cars sideways in clouds of smoke. Power slides, what Stirling Moss used to call four wheel drifts, went out with skinny tyres.  Jack Brabham was still “hanging the tail out” with the Cooper-Climax in 1960 but it now looks a quaint relic of a bygone age.

Up to about 1937 racing drivers tended to brake before a corner, go round on half throttle, and then accelerate. With more power they could spin the back wheels, skidding out the tail, keeping control by steering on opposite lock. When independent suspension came in wheels had more grip and for the first time understeered. In Design and Behaviour of the Racing Car (Kimber 1963) by Stirling Moss (left) and the late and much lamented Laurence Pomeroy, Moss says: “It was now possible to produce a halfway house between the trailing throttle and power slide techniques. At Rheims in 1938 spectators saw cars set up for right hand corners by turning the front wheels well to the right then feeding power into the rear wheels with such control that wheelspin, and a power slide, was avoided, but at the same time the cornering power of the tyres was so reduced that the tail came out without the wheels spinning. The car then went round, pointing well in-field, so that a photographer standing back might have it pointing straight at him. Thus was the four wheel drift initiated.”

Well, it’s different now. Any grand prix driver getting that far out of shape is either wasting time or having an accident. The fastest way through a corner is a precise line, yet surprisingly editors still like pictures of Ferraris, or any fast car it seems, in a tyre-screeching skid. It does not prove road testers are clever drivers. There’s no skill to it. But it makes me wary.  It looks as though motoring magazines are designed for juveniles and not for Ferrari-buying classes at all. Exemplary road test picture: Jaguar (right)

Sir Frank Williams

When Bernie was asked on the starting grid who he’d like to see win the Spanish Grand Prix, the hard-bitten old impresario said “Williams.” Winning for Sir Frank’s 70^th birthday party seemed a long shot. It had not won since 2004. Like Manchester City’s last-minute triumph you couldn’t make it up.

I thought the bubbly, slightly devious but thoroughly likeable keep-fit fanatic we used to call W**k*r (rhyme it with Franker) Williams older than that. He had been in grand prix racing, it seemed, for ever and certainly most of the 1960s to the 1980s, when it was my job to cover it. I knew him as a hustler, a bustler always seemingly on the brink of financial disaster, who could sell sponsorship from a red kiosk owing, it was said, to a temporary anomaly over his domestic phone bill.

What a hero. Fidgety, mercurial, wiry, wide-eyed; we followed him from crisis to crisis, with unlikely sponsors and unlikely cars. You had to admire his cheek. He was up against the engineering genius of Colin Chapman, the cunning of Enzo Ferrari, the pragmatism of John and Charles Cooper and the stolid practicality of Jack Brabham. Well funded and well organised grand prix teams had come, with smooth-talking PROs - yes even then – and ignominiously gone.

Frank Williams didn’t need a PRO. He was available, loquacious even, in the paddock winning or, as often as not, losing. He once stopped me in my tracks with: “That was a nice piece you wrote about us in The Guardian.” Hardly anybody else ever did that. Graham Hill was one. None of the others read, registered or understood.

Williams’ setbacks were cruel and colossal. He had to come back after the bright star of Piers Courage was snuffed out at Zandvoort in 1970. He endured Ayrton Senna’s accident at Imola in 1994 to say nothing of the Italian police scapegoating afterwards. Frank’s own accident in 1986 one felt sure would paralyse his career, as well as him.

Well, it didn’t. Awards, such as the well deserved Helen Rollason for outstanding achievement in the face of adversity, and national recognition acknowledge as much. Congratulations Sir Franker; one of the motor racing greats along with Chapman and Ferrari. And if, who knows, Bernie does manipulate Formula 1 like some super telemetry Scalextric set, he couldn’t have written a better scene than this one.

Except maybe for the fire.

Duncan Hamilton

Duncan Hamilton was not so much economical with the truth as reckless with it. Jaguar historians don’t believe his story of how he and Tony Rolt won Le Mans in 1953. It is always a shame to let the facts stand in the way of a good story, but it seems the infraction that caused all the trouble was during Thursday practice not, as Hamilton tells it, the day before the race.

The ever-trustworthy Andrew Whyte noted that Lofty England “doesn’t go along with Hamilton’s version … of the incident,” and published a photograph showing that there were indeed two Number 18s in front of the pits during practice, - no big deal but against the rules. Sir William Lyons had to pay a fine for the infringement.

Norman Dewis, the Jaguar test driver told biographer Paul Skilleter how Lyons summoned Jaguar public relations executive Bob Berry in the small hours after Thursday practice, to compose an apology to the Automobile Club de l’Ouest. Lofty spent Friday sorting things out. So whatever prompted Hamilton and Rolt to “go on a bender” the night before the race, it wasn’t the threat of disqualification, which had been lifted.

Nevertheless Hamilton’s version prompted a review of the reissued book, which I have included in the new ebook Eric Dymock on Cars 1991, available to purchase on Amazon at an introductory £1.27.

The Sunday Times 20 January 1991

Racer who lived in the fast lane

DUNCAN HAMILTON is not so much economical with the truth as reckless with it. In an introduction to Touch Wood, his father’s reissued autobiography, Adrian Hamilton cheerfully acknowledges that when first published in 1960, “it just didn’t matter if in places it might be less than nitpickingly accurate — it captured the flavour of a bygone age in which sporting achievement alone was never enough without fun along the way”.

Duncan Hamilton’s idea of fun might not have been everybody else’s even in 1960. Boisterous to the point of delinquency on his own admission during service in the Fleet Air Arm, his high-spirited, perilous career continued after the war in motor racing.

He drove Talbots, ERAs and HWMs with great vigour and his victory at Le Mans in 1953 became the stuff of legend. Partnered by Major A P R Rolt* in the official Jaguar team, his car was disqualified the night before the race on a technicality and, in Hamilton’s own words, they “went on a bender”.

Reinstated the next morning, their only cure for a substantial hangover was the “hair of the dog”. They not only survived one of the world’s most arduous motor races, but won at a record speed, nearly 10mph faster than the winning Mercedes- Benz the year before and for the first time more than 100mph.

On a more practical note, the AA’s books on guiding motorists around Britain have set their own high standards. The latest series, Britain on Country Roads, includes one that helps drivers avoid main roads and encourages them to explore places bypassed by motorways and trunk routes. It describes 96 mini-tours of 50 to 90 miles, illustrating places of interest, and includes careful route directions. The maps are clear and the quality of production is exemplary.

*Anthony Peter Roylance "Tony" Rolt, MC and Bar (1918 – 2008) was more than a motor racing hero. Awarded the MC as a Lieutenant in the Rifle Corps in the defence of Calais, he was taken prisoner and after a number of escape attempts was sent to Colditz, where he planned to escape by glider. Hamilton’s book gained collectors’ status, the AA books have not. Some second-hand bookshops refuse to stock them; they take up so much space. So many were sold and then languished, mostly unread, on bookshelves throughout the land to accumulate on house clearances