“Agriculture, Furniture & Marmalade”
This must be the most ridiculous title ever for a motor racing book but remember it and buy it. South African author Greg Mills has quoted the words the very junior Jody Scheckter was told to mention frequently when he arrived in Britain to start his racing career, to impress with his knowledge of big English words!
That won’t help sell the book to people who don’t understand the title, but it’s a great way to find out the backgrounds to drivers like John Love, Tony Maggs, Jody Scheckter and others. The complicated words seemed to work for the junior Jody who would win the 1979 world title in a works Ferrari. A few summers later he would walk away from the racing world and become a millionaire from a business he created in the USA building firearms training simulators for military, law enforcement and security organisations, and in the UK he set up a mammoth organic farm. He should have added Diversification to his first three big words!
Mills may regret the ‘insiderness’ of his book title because the book will only sell to people who know what it means beforehand. When I had written my first autobiography I could NOT think of a title. Plenty of friends suggested titles but none appealed. It was seeming to be impossible. Then in the early hours of one morning, an eastEuropean taxi driver who couldn’t stop talking, was taking me to a red-eye flight to London after a Grand Prix in Adelaide. He wanted to know where I was going, who I was, what I did for a job. When I told him I flew round the world writing about GP racing, there was blissful silence while he thought about that and then said. “Gee. That beats working, doesn’t it!” Instant book title! Great! Problem was that when I wrote a second autobiography, we called it It Still beats Working but people thought it was the same book as the first! The title is a very important part of a book.
Maggs gives great insight into his time in Formula 1 in the early 1960s. “Motorsport then was not a way to get rich. Jimmy Clark told me that he calculated his first World Championship was worth just £8,000 at the time, and then you had to deal with all the public events that went with it, from the opening of supermarkets, giving speeches and so on. In those days you signed up with a fuel company from which you could make £3000-4000 annually to use their products in return for which, they could use your name to promote them. Then you received a percentage of the start money and usually 50% of the prize money. We normally had to pay our own flights and hotels with the F1 team, though we sometimes had a bit of assistance with the long distance travel. There was a tremendous closeness between the drivers. Jimmy Clark and Trevor Taylor might have been enemies on the track, but off the track we held fantastic parties and did other things such as going water skiing together. There was a tremendous bond, not unlike the bond, I suppose, between World War Two fighter pilots.
“I remember one time at Reims when we retreated to Brigitte’s Bar as usual after dinner and a few drinks developed into a food fight with pot-plants being tossed about. The police were called but in the meantime the mechanics responsible for much of the carnage had left. We pleaded ignorance and the police departed. But they did not get far. The mechanics, led by John Cooper, had unscrewed the wheel-nuts on the police vans and they only made it a few metres when their wheels fell off!”
The old tracks were a challenge too. “I remember racing with David Piper on the old banked circuit at Montlhéry in France. The problem was that the banking had been designed for much slower speeds. We were coming through the banking so fast that we were sideways up there on the rough corrugations and then had to somehow get the car straightened out as we came off the banking at more than 140mph...”
South African F1 mechanic Al Gibson remembers working with BAR (British American Tobacco) when they took over the Tyrrell team in 1999 and told how the first car they built was called the ‘Barrel’ – because it was back end of a BAR and the front end of a Tyrrell!
I’ve always thought designer Gordon Murray a typical laid-back South African and I was intrigued to read his reasons for coming to Britain in 1969. “Firstly, motor racing was in my blood.” His father was a mechanic and a racer on two wheels and four. “Second, it was the late-’60s, I was interested in music, and England was the centre of the music world then. Thirdly, I also felt that I did not really fit into South Africa at the time. I had long hair and quite a few of my friends and workmates were not white. I thought that the UK might be more enlightened...”