AT ALMOST 80, BOB BEAN IS AN ICON OF RALLYING
In the close-knit fraternity of historic rallying, bob bean is a figure head. by Paul lawrence
In equal part a proper gentleman and a fierce competitor, he’s been rallying for over 55 years and will mark his 80th birthday next March. But the Yorkshireman is not for slowing down or stopping any time soon.
It all started in 1960. “I’d been messing about in cars for a while and there was a rally called the Yorkshire Rally running and I thought ‘I’d love to do something like that,’” he says. “So I got an entry and we started in Ilkley market place. It was a road rally with people like Peter Procter and Pat Moss and it snowed like hell. It went all through Friday night and finished on Saturday afternoon and three of us were in a Hillman Minx. I think we finished 29th overall. I’d not got a clue but I was hooked from that point.”
Bean was soon competing regularly on road rallies, usually in Fords, and gradually migrated across to special stage rallies into the 1970s. He took eight overall wins on Motoring News road rallies and another eight podiums at the height of the road rally boom.
In the early 1970s he did the hugely competitive Escort Mexico Challenge: “I believe I was the first person to win a round of the Mexico championship, the Mini Miglia Road Rally, which was also an MN round. I won it three times in a row in all.”
However, by then he’d already been successful on special stages as well. “I did the RAC Rally many times, probably more than 30 times,” he says. “My best finish was in 1968 in my Cortina GT when we did 92 stages, with 17 stages in Yorkshire and I was fastest on 12 of them.”
On stage times he finished third overall, but a late change of engine prompted an issue when log books were checked at documentation and clouded the result.
“I did the World Cup Rally in 1974 with Eric Jackson in a Mk1 Escort,” he adds. “That was a hell of an adventure and the toughest rally I’d ever done as we crossed the Sahara Desert twice. Shekhar Mehta saw that we’d done well and asked if I’d like to share a works Datsun with him and we finished third in Morocco.”
For a Yorkshire painter and decorator it was a huge achievement.
However, back home the Gulf London Rally of the late 1960s was one of the hardest events. “It just kept going and going with no sleep and no food,” he says. “We finished ninth overall and first private entrant. I do like the longer events.”
Although Bob has rallied something in every one of his 58 years in the sport, it nearly all came to an end in the late 1970s.
“I had a bad road accident in France while on holiday when I was stood in front of the car when a mobile crane ran into it,” he says. “There’s a lot of steel in one of my legs!”
He was fortunate not to lose the leg, such was the severity of the injury. “It was a slow recovery. I didn’t do much for three years, but I rallied an automatic Granada and came second on the Mini Miglia.”
In 1977, co-driven by Nigel Raeburn, he won the Tour of Mull. Sadly, almost 40 years later to the day, he was at Raeburn’s funeral for a poignant reminder of the passing of four decades. “That was a fantastic rally to win and Nigel did a great job.”
For the last 20 years Bob has been active in historics and usually in a Lotus Cortina, where he has found a place as a Category 1 pacesetter and a hugely popular member of the historic rallying community. The car was re-shelled this summer in time for the recent Roger Albert Clark Rally when he took Category 1 victory in an impressive 23rd place overall. Now classing himself as semi-retired from the building trade, Bob still renovates period properties and also does a bit of farming by breeding highland cattle from his base near Cleckheaton, Yorkshire, supported as ever by his wife, Jenny.
As his 80th birthday approaches, there is absolutely no talk of stopping. After all, the fresh Lotus Cortina is but one rally old and the plan is that it will be used regularly in 2018. “I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of rallies,” admits Bob, although he has never bothered to stop and count. “I love the competition and I don’t just go for the ride. I hope I can keep going and I’ve no plans to stop!” ■