Tom Walkinshaw

I met Emerson Fittipaldi and Tom Walkinshaw on a series of races in Brazil 40 years ago. Emerson went on to win two world championships and two Indianapolis 500s. Tom won the 1984 European Touring Car Championship in a Jaguar XJ-S, setting up Tom Walkinshaw Racing (TWR) as the basis for a business empire in Britain and Australia. In the space of six years his Jaguars won three World Sports Car Championships and two Le Mans 24 Hours’ races. He married my sister-in-law. Tom died yesterday Sunday 12 December 2010. Emerson, happily, is still with us.

Both were born within months of one another in 1946; Emerson in São Paulo, Brazil, Tom at Mauldslie Farm, near Carluke, Scotland. Both had turbulent careers. Emerson catapulted to fame through Formula 2 and Formula 1 with Team Lotus, relatively safe in a racing car until the 1990s, when he had a big accident at Michigan International Speedway. Barely recovered, he then crashed his aeroplane, from which he was fortunate to escape with his life although suffering severe back injuries. When I knew him first he was married to Maria Helena, then came Teresa, later still Rossana.

Tom moved into Formula 3, driving a Lotus, then broke his left ankle in a works March. He had a lot of accidents and recuperating in my Putney flat met Elizabeth, still a 17 year old schoolgirl. He was a gritty determined driver in Formula 2 and Formula 5000, and shone brilliantly at the wheel of a Capri in the British Touring Car Championship. In 1976 he formed TWR and won the European Touring Car Championship. His ascent in team management was swift and lucrative. Tom drove hard bargains but you got your money’s worth. He ran squads for several manufacturers, sometimes simultaneously, building up an impressive business empire despite a broad-minded view of racing regulations. In 1983 his Rover Vitesses won all eleven races, only to be deprived of the British Saloon Car Championship for what were either technical infringements or flagrant breaches of the regulations, depending how you read them. Tom read them with the utmost care.

TWR’s crowning achievements were with Jaguar, first with XJ-S in the European Touring Car Championship, followed by the triumphs at Le Mans and the World Sports Car Championships. Tom had a sure touch with people, not only in securing the services of engineers such as Tony Southgate and Ross Brawn, but also when he moved into Formula 1 with drivers Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill. TWR consultancy accomplished production runs of cars for Volvo and created the Bloxham factory that Ford took on for making the Aston Martin DB7.

Tom’s ambitions were boundless but Formula 1 proved his undoing. As engineering director of Jordan he was again scrutinised for technical infringements in 1994. His electronic aids were suspect. Adventures with the Arrows team led to more trouble and the liquidation of TWR. Tom made friends on his way to the top then lost them on the way down. He had set up a number of car dealerships and as chairman of the British Racing Drivers’ Club persuaded it to invest in the Silverstone Motor Group. Innes Ireland and Sir Jackie Stewart were among his severest critics.

Tom is mourned affectionately by Gloucester Rugby Club, which he owned. He was divorced from Elizabeth, with whom he had a son and was married to a Belgian girl. Tomorrow’s obituarists will have a field day. Apologists will claim he was much misunderstood, which is true. He was uncompromising and tough yet capable of surprising generosity of spirit. When Craig married Emma, Aunt Elizabeth flew the newlyweds off in Tom’s helicopter. Craig paid tribute. “I was one of his biggest fans. But you could see how difficult he could be if you weren’t family.”

Aunt Elizabeth Walkinshaw - pilot

Hitler's Mille Miglia

BMW Car has done a good layout for my feature on The 1940 Mille Miglia BMW 328. This was the car that took part in what has, perhaps unkindly, been called Hitler’s Mille Miglia. It wasn’t. It was Mussolini’s. BMW Car has unearthed a poster for what the Italians called the First Gran Premio Brescia delle Millia Miglia. Maybe they changed the name because they thought the Germans might win. Which they duly did. Top: A Sunday Times column featuring the exquisite 2-seater I drove in 1993. No wonder Sir William (as he became) Lyons cribbed the style for the XK120. Below: I photographed the 328 in front of one of my favourite hotels, Turnberry, Ayrshire, where in 1952 I saw it win, driven by Gillie Tyrer. I was quite young and impressionable.

An Old Friend

Rediscovered an old friend at the Goodwood Revival meeting. Cooper MG NKC195 lined up for the Stirling Moss 80th birthday tribute and I confirmed with owner George Cooper that it belonged to Frank D Dundas, for whom I navigated many times on his local South of Scotland Car Club and my local Lanarkshire Car Club rallies in the 1950s. Most memorably we scored third in class on the 1955 Scottish Rally in Frank’s Morgan Plus 4, one of the first with the Triumph TR2 engine. I only did one event in the Cooper, as replacement for his regular navigator Jimmy Bogie, one of a rallying family still to the fore. The Cooper had minimal weather protection; it wasn’t suitable for the “plot and bash” events of the time. It was all right for the bash, but a bit inconvenient for plotting. It had a hood of sorts, and a proper windscreen not the aero screens it has now, but OS maps blew about a lot.

After Frank started rallying the Morgan PSM 508, the Cooper was consigned to the roof of his Dumfries agricultural building. I never knew at the time that Stirling Moss had driven it.

I came across the Cooper at service area on the M5 some years ago. It had been splendidly restored and repainted blue instead of bronze (maybe it was green). I had to look up Doug Nye’s Cooper Cars (Osprey 1983) for more detail. Cooper had been making 500cc racing single seaters, then in 1948-1949 John Cooper put a Vauxhall Ten engine into the front of a chassis, engineered much like one of the racers. It had box-section longerons and independent transverse leaf springing front and back.

Encouraged perhaps by George Phillips’s 1949 Le Mans MG, Cooper built another, like the Vauxhall, with an MG TC engine developed by Barwell Engineering to give 75bhp, against the standard car’s 55bhp. This became the works racing car and was driven by John Cooper to a second place at Goodwood in May 1950. In June, Nye says, Moss was available to drive the car at Goodwood, “but it proved fractious and he was only fifth. John took over – actually wearing Stirling’s helmet – in a five-lap handicap and finished second, setting fastest lap at 73.56mph. In the final members’ meeting of the year he at last achieved that elusive win, averaging 71.74mph for the five laps and topping 100mph along Lavant Straight.”

John Bolster road-tested the car afterwards, deciding the suspension was on the hard side but the ride still good on bad surfaces. “In cornering the machine really excels.” JV Bolster was almost as much of a hero as Stirling Moss. In the 1950s I had admired them both at a distance. Getting to know them later only enhanced the respect. Boisterous Bolster, melodramatic Moss. National Treasures and they both drove this astonishing little car, Frank Dundas’s Cooper MG and he either didn’t tell me or he didn’t know. Most likely he thought it didn’t much matter.

What a treat to see it at Goodwood and re-live a piece of history. That’s George Cooper and his lady wife Carol: "...social secretary, without her I would not be able to go anywhere," in the picture above. The one on the left in the vintage dress is number one Dymock daughter Charlotte. Frank Dundas, generous, engaging, warm-hearted to a Dumfries fault and a gifted driver, would have enjoyed the occasion.