Charlie agapiou
From Bedford truck apprentice to Daytona Coupe guru, from Los Angeles canyon racer to Rolls-royce dealer to the stars. Charlie Agapiou has lived the Life of Riley.
Amessage from beyond sent the London lad to US. And that led to storied work with racers Ken Miles, Carroll Shelby and a roster of notables from Mario Andretti to Sir Jack Brabham at circuits from Sebring to Le Mans. It led to workshop firecrackers, pranks and road racing workmates, even his own race teams. Plus, an unwelcome visit from the FBI, a US Army stint and work as a consultant to movie-makers.
‘I’ve had the time of my life,’ the urbane Charlie admits on a Saturday afternoon off from his Rolls and Bentley business on LA’S West Pico Boulevarde.
‘And I’m fortunate I still don’t act my age.’ A young Agapiou left school at 15 and started an apprenticeship working on trucks. He didn’t quite finish that, got bored, and then chased odd jobs around London, before he and mates asked a Ouija board to pick out the winner of the 1961 Cambridgeshire Handicap. ‘It spelt out a name not in the line up, but a week later the name showed up and we were all stunned. All of us bet every bit of money we could come up with. The horse won in a dead heat finish ... and that was when I decided to go to America with my brother Tony. London was a bit stodgy in those days, felt like everywhere you worked was dirty old garages and stuff. It seemed like a good time to leave.’ The teenager landed in Florida, worked in Fort Lauderdale for a few months, before heading west to LA.
Walking down a North Hollywood street looking for a job, Charlie spotted a sign in a small garage window: English mechanic wanted. He got that job in a shop owned by fellow expatriate Ken Miles – already a known racer in mid-62. Miles was running the Sunbeam Alpine for the Rootes Group and asked if Charlie wanted to come racing.
1956: Charlie with the No.13 Daytona coupe.
Admitting that he couldn’t pay the young mechanic, he promised plenty of fun. ‘That’s where I first got involved in motor racing. I didn’t know much about it, at the time, to be honest. When I left England, I was a truck mechanic, basically. But a car was a car in those days – not with all this exotic stuff. And if you knew one car, you knew them all. So, I was going OK there, weekends with Ken with the Alpine and it was a lot of fun – he was so good. It got to the point where the only time he’d lose a race was if it was bigger cars – or we puked. But that didn’t happen very often.’
Miles wasn’t the greatest businessman and was often busted-broke from racing expenses. So, the workshop moved. And moved again. It was in a back shed in Hollywood when Ken and the crew built the first Alpine Tiger – a Ford V8 slotted into the British roadster – in six weeks. Charlie said: ‘To me, that was unbelievable. The things we did and the things we learnt with him, in the short time I was with him, was incredible. Lots of fun and I couldn’t have asked for a better beginning in America.’ English cars were popular, too. Especially, British Motor Corporation machines. There were exotics as well, like Ferraris, in Miles’ workshops for Ken, who was something of a celebrity mechanic. That’s where Charlie first met Steve Mcqueen – working on the actor’s XK SS.
There was fun too when Charlie – in his
Austin Healey 3000 – and workmates raced each other across Tinsel Town. A few of the lads lived in the San Bernardino Valley and would race each other to Hollywood every day. ‘The whole city was like a grand prix circuit, through the canyons and stuff, there were no stop signs or street lights. Basically, racing from one side of the city to the other, it was fabulous.’ To settle arguments about who was quickest, and who got caught up worst when commuters pulled out in front of the street racers, Miles organised laps at the Riverside circuit for the mechanics. That ended when one of the lads rolled and up-ended the Alpine race car. Charlie said there’s still debate about who was fastest back in the day. Then, Ken Miles got a call from Carroll Shelby to race test a Cobra on a road circuit in and out of Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine. Miles did well and took up an offer to become Shelby’s competition manager – Shelby engineer Phil Remington had moved to England to supervise the 427 Cobra – and Miles could do with a solid job and decent pay to get his life back together. Charlie was now out of a job. But, two or three weeks later, Miles rang and asked whether his mate would like to work at Shelby’s. He said: ‘Yes, Ken, but I don’t know anything about those big race cars. Don’t think I’ve ever seen a Cobra.’ And Miles replied: ‘Don’t worry, you can bluff them. You bluffed me!’ So, at the beginning of 1963,
SHELBY, CHARLIE SAYS, WAS A GREAT BOSS, NEVER REALLY BUGGED THE WORKSHOP BOYS TOO MUCH.
Le Mans: Charlie with the GT40.
Sebring: Charlie and Carroll Shelby.
Charlie Agapiou became part of the Shelby crew, and slotted right in. He was a quick learner and his apprenticeship had given him more mechanical knowledge than LA street-rodders. Especially, when it came to setting up differentials and sorting them for acceleration or for speed. It was a tight mob: jokes, pranks, firecrackers and nicknames like ‘STP’, ‘Scatter-shit ’and ‘Charlie Who’ for Charlie Agapiou – his Greek-cypriot family name being too much of a mouthful for some. Miles was ‘the Hawk’ or ‘Sidebite’ after a stroke had left him talking out the side of his mouth. Shelby, Charlie says, was a great boss, never really bugged the workshop boys too much – ‘mostly he was out scrounging money’. He never got too upset about things. At the race track, he was always fun and appreciative of having everyone around. ‘He was definitely a visionary, knew what he was going after, that was for sure.’ Charlie loved this world and with the motor racing. He was at it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Soon, he began work on the new Daytona Coupe. ‘It was absolutely wonderful. I could never have believed when I left England what I was going to be involved in.’ His first race with the Shelby outfit, first time as pit crew, was the 1964 Daytona 24-Hour – when Charlie was a wide-eyed 20-year-old and the Coupe caught fire in the pits.
‘It was quite an education.’
Just weeks later, Charlie was co-crew chief for the Coupe’s next outing at the Sebring 12-Hours, where it won the GT class and beat the Ferrari home. He admits he got a little bit big-headed after that and today that, to him, remains his biggest motor sport achievement. Yet, he was still ‘absolutely flabbergasted’ when Shelby sent him off to England as technical advisor to the Alan Mann team and two Cobra Daytona Coupes for the 1965 European season; in US, Shelby was now in charge of the Ford GT40 program. By early 1966, Charlie was back working on the GT40S for the 1966 season. The Mark II version was lighter and, with the 427 aboard an absolute rocket. He crewed in the Le Mans pits for the famed Ford 1-2-3 victory over Ferrari – a result soured to some extent by team orders that saw Bruce Mclaren take the win over Miles.
Back in LA, the FBI came knocking at the Shelby workshop door. Charlie Agapiou, who hadn’t registered for the draft, was offered three choices: the army, deportation or gaol. He decamped to England for a week, returned and was drafted that August. The timing wasn’t great, the team was into preparing the J-cars, aka Mark IV GT40S, for the promising 1967 season. Plus, a week after joining the army, Miles was killed on Charlie's birthday. ‘This had a huge impact on my life. He taught me everything about racing, and I still miss him greatly. So, I just mucked around in the army a bit, but didn’t miss one race – Shelby flew me to every race. I’d get picked up from Fort Benning, Georgia, flown in a small plane to Atlanta and then off to wherever the race
AT THE BEGINNING OF 1963, CHARLIE AGAPIOU BECAME PART OF THE SHELBY CREW, AND SLOTTED RIGHT IN.
even to Le Mans for the 24-Hour in 1967.’ Through a communication mix-up, Charlie spent a month at Daytona for the ’67 race – the army didn’t even know he was gone. He even somehow avoided being shipped to the Vietnam conflict. By the time he came out of the army, that season was over and Ford had decided it did not want to spend any more racing money. Charlie went off to run a pair of Lolas in Can-am for a Chevrolet dealership for a season, before he and his older brother Kerry decided to set up their own team, leaning on well-established contacts to score a free Lola T70, some engines and a transport truck from Ford. ‘They were really very, very good to us, unbelievable. Then, we called someone at Goodyear and got all the tyres we needed, Valvoline for oils, Koni shocks – we basically set up our whole team with hand-outs.’ Ronnie Bucknam and George Follmer drove that first season for Agapiou Brothers Racing, with enough success that Ford helped out again in 1969 with a Group7a – a GT40 roadster – and five aluminium 427 engines for Can-am. But those engines would grenade trying to match the Chevrolets’ power.
Drivers Peter Revson, John Cannon and Follmer all had engine issues before Ford paid for Australian champ Jack Brabham to race one round – he lost a wheel and retired. The brothers returned to Can-am in 1970, with the Ford 429 engine. While more reliable, it was also heavier. Despite the efforts of the likes of Lee Roy Yarbrough and Vic Elford, the G7 never troubled the scorer. Agapiou Brothers then ran a couple of seasons in Formula 5000, before returning to Can-am with an M20 Mclaren fitted with a turbocharged 429. It flew with Mario Andretti at the wheel, before the energy crisis hit and racing monies dried up. So, in 1976 the brothers opened their Rolls-royce and Bentley business to put a dollar in the bank for racing.
Charlie said: ‘People kind of respected us more – because we had an English accent, we had to know a bit more than Joe Blow down the street.’
The partnership split in 1982 when Charlie’s brother wanted to continue with motor sport. Charlie admits he missed racing at the beginning, but it was his decision to stay away from it – unless someone else was footing the bills. The 2019 Ford v Ferrari movie brought back memories with Shelby crew reunions and a few laughs for Charlie. He was hired as a consultant to the production and enjoyed abusing the crew and Jack Mcmullen – a young actor from Liverpool, engaged to play Charlie in the film.
‘Matt Damon playing Shelby was really quite fun, Christian Bale did a great job as Miles and Jack did me proud. It came out pretty good, squashed all those years into a two-hour movie.’ But it’d take a fair bit more squashing to get Charlie Agapiou’s life into a two-hour movie.
IT’D TAKE A FAIR BIT MORE SQUASHING TO GET CHARLIE AGAPIOU’S LIFE INTO A TWOHOUR MOVIE.