SIR ANTHONY McCOY
The 20-time Champion Jockey on his love of horsepower
“WE’D DO ABOUT 75,000 MILES A YEAR”
Istarted learning to drive pretty much straight after my 17th birthday, but I broke my left leg on the gallops not long after. That meant I wasn’t long out of plaster when I took my test. In fact, I was only just able to walk so it was quite a task to press the clutch on the Toyota Corolla.
I passed first time, though, and got a second-hand Peugeot 205. It lasted about three weeks before I wrote it off. I was going too fast, but it was a good lesson to learn at the time. After that I actually got a little Peugeot 205 van. Don’t ask me why, I think it was something to do with my dad’s work, but I ended up with it.
My next car would have been in 1994. That was a Volkswagen Jetta. I had it for a year, which ended up being my first year of riding in England. Then in my second year I got a BMW 3-Series – an E36 316i.
By the following year I was Champion Jockey and, because Saab were sponsors of the championship, that came with a car. So, I had a few of them in a row – a little
one and then a big one. They were OK cars, very comfortable.
Throughout a lot of my career, cars were all about comfort. I was lucky enough to have a driver most of the time, but it wasn’t a flash thing. I wasn’t being a big-time Charlie or whatever. We just did so many miles and to do my job you needed someone to get you from one racecourse to another during a day. We’d do around 75k miles a year – I probably drove around 10k of them. I hated driving to work, but after a day of racing I was often so high on adrenaline that I’d jump in the car and drive home.
I’ve had so many cars because I changed them every year. I went from the Saabs to a BMW 5-Series, then a Mercedes E-Class, then to a BMW 7-Series and an Audi A8. The good thing about the Audi was that, because it was 4WD, when I was racing we could park it in the middle of a field and always get out – that wasn’t the case with the Bee Em.
I’ve got a Porsche Panamera at the moment, and my wife has a Cayenne.
When I finished racing and went from being driven around all the time to driving myself I wanted something a bit sportier. Obviously, I’ve got two kids and I like playing golf, though, so the Panamera is a good compromise.
I got it pretty much as soon as I retired in 2015. I was thinking of changing it and getting an Aston Martin or something, but then a fella who was driving in front of me fell asleep at the wheel of his van on the M4 one Monday morning. He hit the central reservation and ended up in the middle of the road, then a Mercedes SUV hit him and the both of them ended up in the outside lane where I was.
I was coming along, doing the 70mph speed limit, and I had no time to react so ploughed into them. Somehow nobody was injured, but the van ended up 50 yards down the road on its roof, the Mercedes was mangled and my Panamera was written off. I couldn’t believe how well it took the impact, though, so I bought the exact same car again that very evening.