BITTEN BY THE RACING BUG – Article by Frank Barnard

There is something odd, or unexpected, about a novelist, particularly one in his seventies, racing cars. Or so it seems from the reaction I get from encounters at book launches, literary festivals and various media junkets. Fiction writers, it appears, are meant to exist in an internal, cerebral world, shut away in a fusty den, battling to find the perfect form of words, not fighting wheel-to-wheel in a single-seater at Brands Hatch.

In my case it is, perhaps, more easily explained because I write about fighter pilots. And the pilot and the racing driver share certain emotions before a sortie or a race; a pulse of excitement mixed with rising apprehension, that distant, murmuring voice asking ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ And beyond that a sense of fatalism that, yes, bad things happen and they have happened to me but not this time, as well as satisfaction that in an often mundane and predictable world you are about to experience raw adventure and equally raw emotions. It is primitive, immediate and addictive.

This analogy needs qualifying, however. At Brands Hatch you certainly have to watch your tail, but the opponent is not coming at you out of the sun with cannon blazing. And these days, with stringent modern safety regulations, even the risk of serious injury or death on the race track has been dramatically reduced.

It was not always so. When I started racing, in the early 1960s, fatalities were common and it was by no means rare to talk shop with another competitor in the paddock only to learn that, later, he had not walked away from his accident. Somehow, and this is harder to understand, it was part of the deadly game, made the gamble more serious, ‘sorted out the men from the boys’ as the cliché went, although, even so, you always thought it could happen to the other fellow, never to you. This brutal philosophy was valued and, for years, protected from what, these days, would be called the health and safety brigade. For decades, particularly before the war, drivers raced in linen helmets and cotton polo-shirts. They drove without seat-belts preferring to be thrown clear because cars could quickly turn into fire-bombs. Sophistications like roll-cages were resisted as fey innovations, full-face helmets and fire-proof overalls as fads for those who lacked nerve and guts. If you wanted the sport to be safe, do something else...
Today, countless drivers, professional and amateur, owe their lives to the pioneers of commonsense, prepared to brush aside the scorn of the old regime; drivers who had seen one death too many; one more friend lost in a blazing, upturned wreck, or thrown into the trees along the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans, or sprawled in the centre of the track and crushed by the pursuing pack, or compressed under the control panel of a Grand Prix car in a head-on impact. Such a man was Jackie Stewart and to him, above all, weekend amateurs like me can play our game in something like security, although (and this is necessary) it will never be a sport that is wholly safe.

So why do it? Why take even the slight risk of it all going wrong; of breaking a leg and being laid up for months, or breaking a neck and being laid up for good when, before the start, you are in full and rude health?

Here, I should own up. I have only, ever played at racing; never driven professionally, merely acted the role, an able competition driver but never aspiring to more than that, although a high point came when a professional named Tony Lanfranchi, hero in big single-seaters and formidable sportscars, said I might make a modest living from it if I didn’t have a family. But I did. I had a wife, two daughters, a mortgage and a demanding job in public relations, none of which left much time or money to play expensive games. So I dabbled; a backwater of motor-racing called autocross, throwing stripped-out Minis round fields, a few sprints and hill-climbs in real racing machines but only against the clock, some race-driving courses at Silverstone and Brands Hatch to learn how to do it properly. To discover that it is not, as many people think, simply about speed, but also precision of line through corners, the use of throttle and gears and brakes to achieve balance and optimum performance, to acquire a knowledge of tactics, how to overtake, how to be overtaken, how to behave in a pack; how to finish, the concentration and sustained physical effort it takes to finish, remembering an old racing maxim: ‘ To finish first, first you must finish.’ And, very important, how to lose and-unfashionable these days-how to lose with grace. Because only one car can win.

Remembering all this, my helmet, from those early days, has always borne the words ‘W.Mitty’, a little private irony for myself to acknowledge that I am acting the hero and not the real thing. Because it was a role I saw for myself as a schoolboy, as unreal and unattainable as wanting to be the first man on the moon or a famous film star or a Spitfire pilot or even a writer, and it is still hard to believe that I achieved this ambition, though in a small enough way.
And here we come full circle. As a boy in Kent I lived through the Battle of Britain. Spitfires were a frequent sight over our town, dipping down from the tangled web of contrails hanging in the clear sky. I knew nothing of the tension and horror of a fighter pilot’s life, or its shortness, only the glamour of it and the adulation; the glances of pretty women, the respect
of men. It was exciting, set beside the humdrum routine of the hated school. Later, soon after the war, it seemed that many pilots who survived shared my view. They missed the action, the camaraderie, the living from day-to-day, looking ahead to the next sortie or grand prix. So many of them raced cars, and raced well, the hazards of the track often achieving what the Luftwaffe had failed to do.

It was about this time that I saw photographs of pre-war racing; Bentleys, Rileys, ERAs at Brooklands; Maseratis and Alfa-Romeos at Monza, Montlhery, Pau; most of all, and everywhere, the thunderous Mercedes-Benz and Auto-Union Grand Prix cars that beat all-comers and, confusingly, carried the Nazi swastika.

It was, as they say, a formative moment. To fly a Spitfire in anger, well, that was no longer possible. I was too late for the war. But to race a car! One day that might be achievable, if I held the dream long enough.

It was, however, a long time before I found myself on a starting grid, waiting for the red lights to go out. For years I wrote about motor-racing while still at school, filing reports for local newspapers. I interviewed Stirling Moss (SEVENOAKS SCHOOLBOY MEETS FAMOUS RACING DRIVER); oh, the shame of it. I stood on the banks at racing circuits and tried to learn from what I saw. Until, at last, there I was, on a proper circuit in a real racing car, strapped into my Formula Ford single-seater, visor misting, the engine revs mounting from the thirty-odd cars around me, left foot trembling on the clutch pedal, right foot blipping the throttle, right hand twitching on the gear-lever, watching the instruments, watching for the lights, planning my move to the inside of the track for the first corner because you don’t want to get taken out by spinners when the race has hardly begun (to finish first, first you must finish). And so it went (I finished ninth) and so it goes on. I’ve dabbled, and I continue to dabble. I don’t need to race as often as I used to. At 71, I snooze in the car between qualifying and the race, listening to Radio Three and woken by my grandson Jack with a cheeseburger and a can of Dr Pepper, a combination I never imagined and only consume at racing circuits. But once behind the wheel, the familiar sensations of excitement and fear overwhelm me. I am ageless and think of nothing except what I might face over the next thirty minutes. And afterwards, the euphoria, the re-living of narrow squeaks and smart moves, the spinning of tall-tales and tales about spinning, the sense of accomplishment of doing something that few choose to do and doing it quite well, the knowledge that you have put yourself at risk and come through it, grinning, unscathed, and wanting to do it all over again, very, very soon; well, it’s heady stuff.

 All of this, plus I hope some imagination, I have sought to bring to my novels about fighter pilots. Flying and driving racing cars are different disciplines but they do share similarities; not least the men and women who indulge in them. There is an overlap, although ironically I do not fly myself; too expensive and I can’t do both.
But talking to veteran pilots who flew the Spitfires and Hurricanes, I detect many of the traits of the racing driver. Fighter pilots were characterised as the Brylcreem Boys, hard-drinking, womanising, devil-may-care characters leading a short life but a proverbially merry one. True, perhaps of some (‘There are bold pilots and there are old pilots, but there are no bold, old pilots.’). The reality is different. Flying in combat was, and still is, technical, involves finesse, knowledge, experience and cool-head in a hot situation. So it is with motor-racing. In discussion with these men, I do not measure myself against them, to the slightest degree. But from the need to understand your machine, to extract the maximum from its engine and gearbox and chassis by using the skills you have honed over many seasons, by experiencing the stress and tension and occasional exhilaration of motor-racing I believe I detect just a glimmer of what it might have been, in the cockpit of a British fighter more than sixty years ago, and I hope it brings a certain veracity to my novels.

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Bitten by the Racing Bug - An Article by Frank Barnard

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