Unsung hero
Having read the Bristol 450 feature in January’s C&SC, I concluded – yet again – that one of its regular drivers, Peter Wilson, gets less of the limelight than he deserves.
I knew Peter well – I worked for him for three years at Chrysler UK in the late ’60s – and found him to be not only an excellent driver, but also Rootes management’s only ‘one of us’, who loved motorsport and the cars associated with it.
He was an accomplished test pilot in the ’50s (which may explain his links with Bristol at first), and he competed in several Monte-carlo Rallies, but at Rootes/chrysler he was second in its entire engineering hierarchy in the 1960s and ’70s, under several technical directors.
Without Peter’s enthusiasm, I’m sure that cars such as the Sunbeam Tiger and Sunbeam Lotus would not have got beyond the ‘wouldn’t it be interesting if…’ stage, and he was motorsport boss Des O’dell’s biggest supporter. When I tell you that his “pension fund”, as he called it, was a beautifully maintained Ferrari 250GT Lusso, you may see why he was almost universally liked by his colleagues and peers.
When he was Executive Engineer, Product Proving, I was his deputy. He lived in Warwick, I in Barford, and it was amazing how often he and I, both in Sunbeam Rapier H120s, had cause to make the same commute to Coventry. And it simply wasn’t done for me to be slower than my boss, was it? Graham Robson
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