JOHN CLELAND
He won races at weekends and sold cars during the week. Since then he has tried, and failed, to find time to enjoy his DB6 Vantage
YOU PROBABLY KNOW there’s a tradition of motor sport in the Scottish Borders. Jim Clark, the Border Reivers, Andrew Cowan, Louise Aitken-Walker, Charterhall circuit and so on. Head west into Dumfries and Galloway and you could include Allan McNish, David Coulthard, David Leslie and Innes Ireland.
The thing is, it’s all still alive up here. Famous names are familiar names to locals: David Coulthard’s family still runs a haulage company in Twynholm, the AitkenWalkers have a garage outside Duns, and British Touring Car legend John Cleland is the Volvo dealer in Galashiels.
Despite Cleland’s two BTCC titles he’s probably best known for that tumultuous day in ’92 when he, Tim Harvey and Steve Soper had a series of comings-together at Silverstone that ended with Cleland and Soper in the tyre barrier, and the title – which Cleland had almost sewn-up – handed to Harvey. With a quarter of a century to get over it, John is able to be philosophical.
‘It put us on the front page. It all got legal and Steve and I hired barristers. The MSA wanted to blame somebody. But it made people sit up and say, “Hey, what’s happening here?” From then on, wherever I went in the world, people seemed to know about the BTCC.’
We still associate his name with the most watchable era in tin-top racing since the 1960s. It was a time of big budgets (and salaries for the best drivers), yet Cleland never relinquished his day job. While his rivals would be in the gym or on the golf course, he would be back at his desk in Scotland, selling cars and running a business. We’re here to find out how he made it work, but we’re also here to meet John Cleland the classic car fan. And to exercise his lovely Aston Martin DB6 Mk2 Vantage.
‘I guess I grew up around classic cars, though we didn’t think anything of it at the time,’ he says. ‘My father was a Jaguar dealer, and had some amazing cars pass through his hands. I remember a beautiful silver Mercedes Gullwing which I think he bought in the pub. There was a bright orange Jensen Interceptor, too.’
Both, Cleland says, would have been turned over for a few hundred quid profit. Other tales come up through the course of the day – the unlikely swapping of a Vauxhall VX 4/90 for a yellow Ferrari Dino, or an Alfa Spider that was traded for a Lotus Cortina like the one his hero Jim Clark raced, but which was so disappointing (‘just a rattly old Cortina!’) that it was soon swapped for a bus that could be turned into a race transporter. Cleland shakes his head, wondering aloud why they didn’t put a few cars away, rather than flipping them all. ‘But we were car dealers… it’s what we did.’ Decades later, being a car dealer as well as a massively successful racing driver put Cleland in the position to start correcting those old mistakes.
‘My father had DB6s,’ he says. ‘I remember bouncing about in the back of Jaguar Mk10s and S-types when we went away on holiday, so they were normal, but an Aston Martin was something else.’ With that, he nips into the driver’s seat and turns the key. Exactly the right amount of throttle and choke stimulates those three large Webers and the Aston’s big six bursts into life. He pulls the car out of the stable to pose it for a few photos, revving the engine gently before we set off.
‘You have to let it warm up a little. If you’re clumsy with the choke when starting it, you might foul a plug.’
Once we’re on the move, I’m keen to know if Cleland sought out the sportiest DB6 – manual gearbox, Vantage engine – because he wanted to enjoy a classic with some real performance.
‘I never bought it with speed in mind,’ he says, before he checks himself as he recalls the purchase. ‘Having said that, when someone offered me the car and I said I was interested, I opened the first picture and I saw the Vantage badge, and then another one with all those Webers, then one of the interior with the manual gearchange… so all that definitely helped.’
It’s a fair step up from Cleland’s first car, which he recalls with a smile. ‘It was a Triumph Herald. I fitted all
‘MY FATHER BOUGHT ME A CHEVRON B8 FOR £1600. I DID HILLCLIMBS, SPRINTS AND ONE RACE, AND SOLD IT FOR £2000’
the go-faster bits until it became a Spitfire with a different body, but that suspension was scary. It wouldn’t go round corners properly without a flagstone in the boot.’
From learning about speed on public roads, it was a short step into competition. ‘I grew up in motor sport. My father was a scrutineer and I would go along with him to all kinds of events. It was inevitable that I’d get involved,’ he says.
Night rallies, autocross, sprints and hillclimbs followed, and by 1973 the Clelands had worked out an excellent principle on which to continue. John’s father, Bill, agreed to buy his son a proper competition car if John covered the running expenses and then sold the car at the end of the season for a profit. Have no doubt: that last bit was important.
‘It was very good for discipline, for organisation,’ says Cleland. ‘In 1973 my father bought me a Chevron B8 with a trailer for £1600. I did a season of hillclimbs and sprints and one race, and sold it for £2000.’
Much more recently, he discovered the same car for sale with Gregor Fisken – for £285,000. More rueful head-shaking. The B8 was replaced by a B23 on the same principle but, in the best tradition of all-round Borders racing drivers, Cleland turned his hand to rallying a couple of years later and won his class in the 1976 Scottish Rally Championship in, of all things, a Colt Lancer 1600.
‘We were Colt dealers,’ he says. ‘Before we went over to Vauxhall/Opel, we entered this championship and I’d share entry costs with my co-driver. We’d call up the Colt dealer closest to wherever each rally was and beg a few hundred quid of sponsorship off them for tyres or fuel.’
Through the first half of the 1980s, Cleland’s business was growing faster than his motor sport career and he now admits to a little regret about not getting serious a little earlier than he did. What about the other path – didn’t he yearn to find out if he could emulate Clark’s ability in single-seaters?
‘I did the odd test and a couple of sprints in singleseaters, but I was too old by the time it seemed possible. I never did any karting and that meant I never went down that single-seater route. Plus I loved saloon cars, I absolutely loved it. By 1989 I was getting paid to do something I thoroughly enjoyed.’
Even so, that deal could have died soon after it began, as Cleland’s business ambitions – a wish to move his Vauxhall dealership from Peebles to Galashiels – ended up taking priority.
‘Vauxhall said no. So we moved anyway and looked for other manufacturers. It was between BMW and Volvo. I’d just signed a contract and here I was, terminating them from our business. Was I shooting myself in the foot?’
In the end, the racing relationship survived and Cleland remained with Vauxhall despite offers from other teams on the grid, including (for the 1994 season) Volvo.
‘Racing that 850 T5 estate on a Sunday, then selling them on the Monday. That would have been interesting.’
It doesn’t take much to get Cleland thinking about the