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Chapter 8

With Just a Spanner and a Hammer

Being tall, I’d always carried 4–5 kilos more than my rivals and, even in those early days, the extra weight could cost a couple of tenths of a second and make all the difference between winning and coming second. With the 1969 European Championships coming up, I was determined to overcome this hurdle and started to diet and exercise. Losing a few pounds made a big difference and the concentration I put into getting superfit made me much sharper mentally.

The championship was a team affair but everyone thought of the leading points scorer as the individual European champion, and I was determined I was going to be it. After the first two rounds in Jesolo, just outside Venice, and Copenhagen, the English team – Dave Ferris, Paul Fletcher, Roy Mortara and I – were three slender points ahead of Germany with the rest already out of sight. That didn’t mean that some of the individual drivers, such as Keke Rosberg and François Goldstein, couldn’t take valuable points off us in the final round. We also knew the Germans would have an advantage because we would be racing on their home territory and on a new track at Fulda, on which they had practised but which we hadn’t seen before. We needed to put down an early marker and Dave Ferris and I sent out a clear message when we set the fastest times in practice.

I was on pole position in my first heat next to Hans Heyer. He was a brilliant driver who later became a folk hero in Germany when he won the Supercar World Championship for Porsche. He and I had several great tussles and, wearing his trademark Bavarian hat with a feather in the band, he still seems pleased to see me when I bump into him at GT championships. I managed to get ahead from the start but Hans and his teammate Wolfgang Kromer managed to trap me at a tight bend and I had to settle for second place. It was a similar story in the next two heats with the Germans working as a team trying to cut me out but I hung on to Hans’s tail and took second again.

By the time of the final it had started to rain and the circuit was very slippery. This was going to be much trickier and the Germans would have even more advantage, having driven the circuit in the wet before. Dave Ferris and I were on the second row of the grid behind Goldstein and Heyer, with Kromer and another German, Karl-Heinz Peters, just behind us. If we could keep it like that, England would win the championship for the first time.

We all took it pretty carefully over the first few laps, then, with no team pressures on him, François showed his mastery of the conditions and began to put daylight between him and the rest of the field. It was tempting to chase him but it was more important to make sure we got round safely in front of at least one of the Germans. It was not to be. Dave’s engine began to slow, allowing Kromer and Peters to sweep past him, and, even though I managed to keep them behind me for a few more laps, without Dave’s help it was impossible and they eventually went past.

François won the race by some distance but, with Roy Mortara and Paul Fletcher having made up some places from their start, we still weren’t sure who had won the title. Some of the Germans came over to congratulate us but when the results were finally totted up they had pipped us by just six points. Switzerland and Denmark were joint third, ninety-eight points further back. I was disappointed that we had lost the team event but chuffed that, when they added up the individual points, I was the top driver in Europe ahead of a number of guys I really admired.

The European Championships were Doug Jest’s last event as team manager. He had done a lot for the sport, including building Rye House, and we were sad to see him go, although we still used to meet him around the circuits until he died a few years ago. My dad took over as junior team manager with Frank Jones in charge of the senior teams. Of our team, Roy Mortara died in a road accident a few years later; Paul Fletcher is still in the kart business and has his own track in Lincolnshire; and Dave Ferris went on to race Formula Ford and Formula Three. I believe he was destined to end up in F1 but he was involved in an accident at Snetterton when a stone went through the front of his helmet and injured him badly. He recovered but never appeared on the scene again.

It was a great team with terrific camaraderie, except of course when we were competing against each other, as Dave showed when we were rivals in the World Championships in Paris. I was driving a kart with fantastic BM engines, tuned by Franco Baroni, the number-one engine tuner in the world. I turned up in Paris ready to test and Franco said, ‘What are you doing here? David’s father told me you are sick and not coming, so I gave him the best engines.’

Even with second best, I still ended up on the front of the grid alongside Keke Rosberg in the final and thought I was in with a good chance until one of my Italian mechanics screwed up. There’s something about Italians that makes them very jumpy when they are in with a chance of winning. We all have nerves but the Scandinavians and the English handle them better, which is probably why we have more world champions. This guy decided to change my spark plugs, ‘just in case’, even though we’d never had a problem with the plugs and, Sod’s Law, this time we had a dud and the kart wouldn’t start. We had to push it to one side, fix another plug, and, by the time I got away, I was already 200 yards behind the rest. I gave it a charge but there was too much ground to make up. After about ten laps my engine blew up, and so did my title hopes.

Despite that disappointment, 1969 had still been a very special year for me. Racing was very different back then from today and the times slower, but I still believe it was much harder. I remember talking to Keke Rosberg’s son Niko and my son Luke when they were racing against each other a few years ago and the cheeky little sods were laughing at our era, saying it wasn’t anything like as good as theirs.

I countered, ‘When you look at the equipment we had, the driving was far better than now. We had a spanner and a hammer and that was it, none of your computer wizardry, yet races were still decided by tenths of seconds. And look at the tyres – you’re going out with eight-inch tyres on the back and five-inch on the front, enough to hold a bloody jumbo jet on the track. Ours were four inches and three. If you two had been in those machines, Keke and I would have lapped you, maybe even twice.’ They weren’t convinced and we’ll never know for sure, but you can bet Keke agrees with me.

The only regret I have about 1969 is that I lost a medal presented to me by the head of BM for being top driver in Europe. It was a silver shield with the letters BM in gold and red flashes on the B, and I was very proud of it. Somehow I lost it in a swimming pool and, even though I spent ages diving to try to recover it and asked the attendant to check the filters, it was never found.

After the year I’d had, I looked set to be one of the top drivers for some time to come but in fact that was the end of my 100cc career. I’d discovered gearbox karting and realised this was where I was most at home.