Читать книгу Every Split Second Counts - My Life with Fast Carts, Fast Women and F1 Superstars - Martin Hines - Страница 17

Elite kart drivers tended to be a bit sniffy about gearbox karting and I suppose I was, too, until the day I climbed into a machine with a 200cc Montessa engine. I’d done a bit with the Villiers engine but, when I took the Montessa out for a few laps, it was completely different.

I thought, ‘Whoa! I like this. This is a bit grunty.’

I loved the extra power, the ability to use the gears to prise the maximum out of the kart, and the longer tracks with straights where you could achieve some serious speed. I had a lot to learn but, in an odd way, it proved to be to my advantage that I was racing against guys who had driven only the bigger karts. They had always used the gears and the greater horsepower to obtain the speed they wanted but ignored some of the finer points I’d learned on the 100cc machines. With only 16bhp and no gears, I’d had to master the intricacies of teasing the final bit of power out of my setup and tyres, and the absolute importance of driving smoothly.

When you come down a straight at 120 m.p.h. with your bum half an inch off the floor and unable to see round corners, you’d better have good technique. I mastered the braking very quickly and it didn’t take long for me to realise I had to change my point of vision. On shorter courses you are never sitting back: you are fighting every split second for every inch of tarmac. There’s always someone alongside you or bumping you from behind, so all the time your eyes are on your front wheels. There’s never time to look up and see what’s coming. I realised that on tracks that were less tight and twisting, and one and a half times longer, I needed to look further ahead and not become fixated by the few inches immediately in front of me. I learned as I came out of one corner to look up the track to the next, and that gave me the shortest possible line.

I took all the lessons from seven years at the top of 100cc competition and applied them to the new discipline: how to position a kart, how to get the maximum speed to the middle of corners then let the wheels find their own straightness as quickly as they can. A kart going in a straight line is going fast. As soon as you turn the steering wheel, even slightly, you are putting drag on the tyres. After forty years of racing, I still use the same technique on every corner, still talk my way through as though it were my first time: ‘Brake here, get your entry right, turn in and set your front wheels where you want them before squeezing the power on, let it run loose on the way out, don’t pull the kart in too tight; OK, another near-perfect corner.’

The technique worked and I soon started to win a lot of races. There was still the general feeling that this was karting for old men but – having been brought up by a dad who was always thinking one step ahead of the rest and a mum whose slogan was ‘Nothing’s impossible; there’s no such word as can’t’ – I could see nothing but potential. I met a guy called Philip Hilton, who was playing about with a 250cc Suzuki two-cylinder engine on a kart, and it was stunningly quick, high-revving and sounded fantastic. This was a superkart and ideas tumbled in on each other faster than I could write them down about how we could make this the kart. If we put attractive bodywork on it and introduced some down force so it held the track better, this could be karting’s equivalent of F1. And why not race it on top circuits such as Brands Hatch and Silverstone? This was the future and I wanted a part in creating it. It was also a fantastic opportunity for the company.

The Hines family were now becoming major players in the industry, starting trends that others followed, even those who objected when we first came up with them. Back then karts were very basic and, partly to try to make them better aerodynamically and partly because I was a bit flash, I introduced some bodywork on the front of my kart. When I turned up with it at the old Crystal Palace track, I was told it was illegal and I couldn’t run with it.

I’d done my homework. ‘Show me in the regulations where it says I can’t have bodywork on my kart,’ I said.

They delayed the meeting for at least an hour while they scoured the rule books but in the end they had to admit they were wrong. That pissed them off but not as much as the fact that I won the race by a distance. Suddenly everyone wanted a nose cone for their kart and knew where to obtain them.

As we developed the idea of superkarts, more and more people started to realise the potential of long-circuit racing and I was invited to take our karts to demonstrate just how exciting it could be. This was publicity you couldn’t buy. All over the world the concept of gearbox karting was being linked with the name of Zip Karts. It was also monster fun for me and the team of drivers I took with me. We all paid our own way and we had a ball. It was amazing that we didn’t get locked up at times, but what can you expect when you have a dozen or so testosterone-fuelled (and sometimes alcohol-fuelled) young men, travelling together and taking part in a sport that has been known to attract women with high hormone levels? Sorry, Vicar, don’t think this is the weekend break for you.

The more traditional karting world was not entirely happy about our success but it also had an inkling it might work to its benefit. Ernest Buser, the Swiss guy at the top of karting’s governing body, the CIK, had a love–hate relationship with me. He relished being in the limelight and wasn’t entirely happy that, when superkarts were around, people wanted to talk to me as much as him. But he recognised that, while the media had shown little interest in what they considered go-karts, they quickly took notice when a madman started to hare round circuits at 150 m.p.h. on what was little more than a tea tray. That caught their imagination and we started to see plenty of photos in the papers and clips on TV.

I realised that if I was smart I could use this publicity to my advantage and managed to secure my first major sponsorship deal with Duckhams Oil. They had sponsored Van Diemen’s Formula Ford team for about twenty years and were one of the leading oil manufacturers in motorsport racing, so I approached their head of motor sport/racing, Ron Carnell, to see if he could help me. I showed him the kind of press coverage we were receiving, told him about the trips we were taking round the world and sold him the idea of how it could help promote Duckhams. Somewhat to my surprise, he quickly agreed. It wasn’t a deal that brought me in big bucks – most of the support was in the form of products – but you should have seen people’s faces when I turned up with my kart kitted out in distinctive blue and yellow with ‘Duckhams’ emblazoned all over it and wearing overalls to match. It was another first for Zip Karts and added to our growing reputation as the sport’s trendsetters.

My success at raising sponsorship has sometimes caused a bit of envy in other teams and I’ve been accused of being a bit hard-nosed and self-centred when it comes to business. But I learned early on that motorsport is a cut-throat business and the only person you can trust one hundred per cent is yourself. It was on one of our promotional trips to Finland that it was brought home to me that, no matter how much you think someone is your mate, you can never be quite sure.

Terry Donoghue was one of our regular drivers – never that competitive in a kart but good fun to be with and, like me, usually successful at finding female company to help pass the time when we weren’t driving. So it was on this trip. After testing, he and I went out on the town and hooked up with a couple of attractive girls, who helped warm the next couple of cold Finnish nights. Testing went well. There was plenty of media interest with Zip Karts given more than its fair share of attention. All seemed cool until Terry came to see me the day before we were due to start racing, looking concerned. He said, ‘I’ve got real trouble at home, mate. I need to fly back but I haven’t enough money for the ticket. Can you help me?’

He seemed really cut up so I told him not to worry, I’d sort out the cash. He caught his flight and we carried on with the racing.

It was only when I returned home a couple of days later that I discovered that the ‘real trouble’ he had concerned my wife Christine. I arrived to an empty house and a note saying that Terry had told her how I slept around when I was away and that she had therefore gone off with him. It seemed clear that Terry and Christine may have been having an affair for many months, as she was not the type just to drop everything and run. She was perhaps attracted to his playboy image and maybe Terry had used our escapades in Finland to tip her over the edge and persuade her to run away with him. I tried to track them down and at one stage there was a bit of a car chase through London, but I didn’t catch him, which was fortunate, because I’d probably have done something I would have regretted – such as throttling the two-faced bastard.

I was devastated that she had left me for Terry. Initially, I wanted to get her back and certainly sort Terry out. I was hurt that someone I’d thought of as a mate had let me down. And, worst of all, I’d lent him the money to do it. Was it love I’d lost or just that my pride had taken a severe battering? I certainly realised I had made a mistake when I hadn’t turned up at Heathrow Airport to meet Mary.

If I’m honest, the biggest blow was that I had recently moved to Roselands Avenue in Hoddesdon to be near work, so I was now living out in the sticks in what to me was relatively unknown ‘hunting’ territory, rattling round the house on my own, something I’m not particularly good at. My own company is OK for a few days but I prefer to have someone with me, preferably a beautiful woman.

I needed to get out and about and, after a bit of scouting, I discovered Woodside Country Club. From the outside it looked weird. It was an old mansion in the middle of nowhere, like something out of a 1960s, black-and-white, horror B-movie. It was dingy and dark with only a 60-watt light over the door to let you know where the entrance was. It wasn’t much brighter when you finally found your way to the bar, but the music was good, there was buzz about the place and, as your eyes adjusted to the gloom, it was clear that this was where the local talent hung out.

I perched myself on a stool and looked around. I quickly focused on a girl at the other end of the bar. She was about 5 foot 9 inches tall, a proper shape, with blonde hair that cascaded over her shoulders and down her back. She was a dead ringer for Charlie’s Angels star Farah Fawcett-Majors, whose photo in a red swimsuit sold 8 million posters and caused young boys all over the world to have disturbed sleep patterns. The lookalike in the Woodside was chatting to a fella but I also had the impression she kept glancing over at me. I wasn’t sure what signals she was sending out, so, when he went to the gents, I eased over and asked if she was with anyone.

She knew I knew, but still smiled and said, ‘Yes.’ Then after the briefest of significant pauses, added, ‘My brother.’

I want you to imagine for a moment how a guy manages to sit calmly sipping a drink, trying to look cool, while inside every fibre of his being he is punching the air and yelling ‘Yesss!’ It was fortunate that I was a professional athlete with nerves of steel and so managed to restrict my ecstatic reaction to a smile and a tinkling of the ice against my glass as I raised it slightly in a toast. Here’s to lust.

She told me her name was Lindy. We started to dance and Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’ found its way on to the Hines jukebox. She insisted on going home with her brother that night but agreed to meet me the following day at Chalk Farm station. It was a warm summer evening and she turned up wonderfully understated in sprayed-on pants and a lemon top that left nothing to the imagination. After a pleasant meal, she ended up back at Roselands Avenue and it was a long time before she moved out.

It was a fiery relationship almost from day one. We were either madly in love and couldn’t take our hands off each other or we hated each other with equal passion. Lindy came to many of the kart events but, as the success of the superkart roadshows grew, I spent more and more time away from home, so we were able to get a breather from each other.

We drove the karts all over Europe and we flew them to South Africa, Australia and America, where we raced round the magnificent Daytona track. Quite often, a few expats with karts would turn up and join in, so there were some quite crowded grids. We were driving on the same tracks as motorcycles and cars, and the fans who had thought karting was for kids were suddenly aware that this was a bit different. Superkarts could shift, and the competition was intense. This was real motorsport and they wanted more. The growth was phenomenal and everywhere we went I would be doing deals that ensured Zip Karts stayed at number one. I also honed my driving technique to make sure Martin Hines kept ahead of the rest.

I used my growing contacts book to ensure I got as much track time as possible. I’d become friendly with Colin Chapman and the Lotus guys and on their test days, I’d toss a few quid in the team’s drink fund and they would let me slip out between runs and put the kart through its paces, looking for anything that might save me a few tenths of a second. Hiring a track for a day can cost several grand, and, when you add the expense of mechanics, tyres and parts, it can soon become prohibitively expensive.

I didn’t have that kind of spare cash but wanted as much time behind the wheel as I could get, so I came up with the idea of the Central Kart Club. I would rent a track and then charge drivers £30 a day to test, hoping I’d attract a hundred or so along to cover my costs and give me free track time. It didn’t always work out. Often I was out of pocket, but I drove more miles in a superkart than anyone else and as with everything else in life, the more you do something, the better you become. I was soon to prove I was getting better than most of the rest.

There was one guy who could always give me a good race. Reg Gange had been 100cc British Champion in 1971 and won the blue-riband gearbox event, the World Cup, at Morecambe in 1973. We were always opponents, never enemies, but in 1976 we became fierce rivals for the British Championship. I was in good form, having won the open championship at Knockhill the previous weekend, but could take nothing for granted against Reg. It all came down to the last lap of the last race at Oulton Park. It was a case of winner take all.

Reg made his move as we went into Foster’s. He tried to dive under me. The karts locked for a split second and we were both in danger of crashing out. I gripped my steering wheel, determined to hold my line. It worked. He bounced off, bending his axle in the process and had to retire. I powered on, just managing to hold off a charge by Derek Rodgers, and took the chequered flag.

It was only when I got back into the parc fermé and on to the scales ready to be weighed that I realised just how lucky I’d been. As I climbed out of the kart there was a bang and the outside rim of the back wheel came off, taking all the air out of the tyre. It had split when Reg whacked me and normally you would have expected it to go within a couple of hundred yards but somehow it had hung on and I’d picked up my first major gearbox title. We filled the trophy with champagne and I called Reg over to share it.

My Goodyear Blue Streak tyres had played a big part in my first British Championship. They were the best in the business. Or they were until the following year, when I did a deal that put them in the shade.