Sir John Whitmore 1937-2017
Racer who gave it all up at the peak of his career to become, eventually, a life-skills guru
WHEN ASKED why he raced, Sir John Whitmore always explained it as a form of self-expression. It was something he found he could do, and do well. As to why he retired in 1966, when still only in his 20s, he’d say he wanted to distance himself from his aristocratic past and craved a life of self-improvement. There is no doubt that Sir John Whitmore was among the more cerebral drivers to steer a Touring Car on its bump stops.
The racing baronet, who died on 28 April following a massive stroke, certainly packed a lot into his 79 years. Born in 1937, he was educated at Eton, Sandhurst and Cirencester Agricultural College, his father having been a decorated solider during the Great War who later became Lord Lieutenant of Essex. ‘My father didn’t drive, hated cars,’ Whitmore claimed. ‘He wouldn’t even use the term “motor racing”. To him, it was the eighth deadly sin.’
Whether his participation in the sport was a form of youthful rebellion is open to conjecture, but Whitmore began competing in August 1958 aboard a Lotus MkVI with a little help from a close friend, Team Lotus driver Alan Stacey. He upgraded to a Lotus Elite and in 1959 claimed 12 wins from 15 starts. He also raced a works car at Le Mans alongside Jim Clark; they finished second in class. At the end of the season, he drove the newly introduced Mini at the Brands Hatch Boxing Day meeting.
Two years later he steered a Mini to victory in the British Saloon Car Championship, meanwhile racing everything from Formula Junior single-seaters to John Ogier’s Aston Martin DB4 GT Zagato. On the strength of his BSCC class honours in 1963 with the factory Cooper equipe, Ford offered Whitmore a Lotus Cortina drive for 1964 with either Team Lotus, Race Proved by Willment or Alan Mann Racing.
He plumped for the last of these and, after missing out on the driver’s title in the 1964 European Touring Car Championship, he went one better for 1965. His season included outings in assorted Cobras, his classwinning drive in the ’65 TT at Oulton Park memorable not least for him needing oxygen in the hospital ‘tent’ between heats, after he was overcome by exhaust fumes.
That year also saw Whitmore testing and racing the GT40, the car in which he suffered his biggest-ever shunt, early in the season. ‘It was during winter testing at Monza,’ he recalled in Octane in 2006. ‘Richard Attwood and Roy Salvadori were the other drivers. Early one morning, while the track was still greasy, I went
past the pits and, at the long curve at the end of the pit straight, lifted off from about 160mph and the car just seemed to accelerate.
‘The brakes were relatively ineffectual so I went straight on into the forest, just managing to miss pole-axeing myself on the first guardrail. The young trees destroyed the car but also broke off, so it retarded at a reasonably safe rate. I got out with no damage other than slight seatbelt bruising.
‘[Team manager] John Wyer was a bit pissed off and said that Salvadori would have been able to save the car, which I don’t believe. He didn’t seem to care much about the fact that I had just survived a crash that could easily have killed me. Later on, he discovered that the throttle was still stuck open due to a stupid mistake by a mechanic. He apologised profusely, which was not something he was accustomed to doing. He was a tyrant but I still liked him.’
Whitmore, who inherited his title following the death of his father in 1962, ran the family estate after he stopped racing. He also bought a Ford dealership in Essex, only to sell everything in 1969 and enjoy the playboy lifestyle. He bought a boat on Lake Geneva and a house in the Bahamas. Then meningitis struck.
While recuperating, he read an article in Time magazine about the Esalen Institute in California and its psychology work. His imagination fired, he went to several seminars and adopted a hippy lifestyle while burning through his fortune, promoting his growing interests in sciences and alternative medicine.
It all came to a juddering halt in 1975. Whitmore’s business manager had been stealing from him and the coffers were dry, but he bounced back, became evangelical about the Centre for International Peace Building and grew active in the antinuclear movement. He even made a return to racing in the late ’80s, campaigning a McLaren M8F. In later years he became an authority on coaching and leadership skills, and wrote on motoring matters for The Daily Telegraph.
Whitmore’s praises as a driver were never sung as loudly as they might have been. When asked if he regretted ending his racing career so early, he would cite the number of friends and colleagues who perished in accidents in period, and how lucky he was to walk away and enjoy life away from the circuits. If motor sport was an early form of selfexpression, it paid off handsomely.