GOING IT ALONE
“That was a horrific year, on and off the track, and at the end I thought, ‘I won’t be beholden to this, we’ll do it ourselves,’” said Surtees. “We bought a Mclaren, modified it, put it in team colours, and nearly got points in South Africa. Then for the British GP, we built the TS7.”
Though Surtees’ spell as a manufacturer would end in failure, with the team being forced to fold in 1978, it was a period he looked back on fondly.
“I hadn’t intended to be a constructor. Perhaps as ‘John Surtees racing driver’ I should have turned round and gone back to Colin, or even Enzo, and said: ‘Right, let’s pick up where we left off’, but I chose this little team instead.
“For three years we made a go of it. The period through to 1972, building a Formula 2 car and winning the European Championship, winning the Gold Cup at Imola, the Japanese GP at Fuji in Formula 2 with the little TS10. And then the second year in Formula 2 when we came second in the championship with Jochen Mass. That’s where things started to go wrong. In ’74 we thought we had a big sponsor lined up and invested in a new factory in Edenbridge. We got in extra engines and the sponsorship failed. We never moved into the new factory; we couldn’t keep the engines. And we struggled to get satisfaction in court. I called it a day in 1978.” Was it, in the end, a relief? “It’s sad because you hate to go out like that. I was determined to make sure we didn’t leave anybody unpaid. It took two years, but we did it.
“I turned my mind off then. I was so upset. I went back to the garage, dug out all my old bike bits and I put bikes together. I rode in motorcycle classic events in New Zealand and Australia, just turning my mind off.”
Surtees would return to the cockpit in later years, demonstrating a multitude of racing machinery right up until the year before his death, but the burning desire to compete was never extinguished.
“I think the biggest thing I learned about myself is the competitive spirit that exists within me both on and off the track,” he says. “The motivation has always come from within and my pure enthusiasm. That has perhaps been my downfall – making slightly irrational decisions
“THE BIGGEST THING I LEARNED ABOUT MYSELF IS THE COMPETITIVE SPIRIT THAT EXISTS WITHIN ME ON AND OFF THE TRACK”
– but I’ve been lucky to work with and compete against some really fantastic people.”
It was a spark struck 60 years previously in a corner of the Welsh Valleys, a moment, Surtees recalled, of sublime communion.
“It goes back to the first race I won. Having built up the Vincent motorcycle, the Grey Flash, I went to that circuit in Aberdare and struck up a communication with the bike and we became as one. It talked to me and I talked to it and from then on I was on a winning streak, purely because of that relationship with a piece of machinery I’d created. Now that’s important.”