Our family ran a scrapyard and Dad would buy and sell cars. I remember one time he took in a Ford Capri and had it resprayed. I cleaned it and when I had finished, this car looked like new, it really did. It was worth £800 and we swapped it for a Crossle 32F single-seater. It was a brilliant deal for us because the guy wanted £1,400 for the Crossle. That was a reasonable price for a 32F. Suddenly, we had a racing car in return for a Ford Capri.
The previous owner had only done a couple of races in the Crossle. He had put in new brake pads just before the start of the second race, got to the first corner – and went straight on. The radiator was damaged, but very little else.
I had a driving license as soon as I reached seventeen. I drove the Crossle a few times but, before I had the chance to race it, we switched to a 50F. This car, which was newer than the 32F, looked a lot better, but it was actually a load of rubbish. I went slower in the 50F than in the 32F. It may have been a very good deal, but to be honest it wasn’t the best career move.
Mondiale, a company based in Bangor, my local town, had brought out new cars for the 1984 season. Wealthy Irish businessmen were either driving or running these Formula Fords. There was a major Championship meeting at Mondello Park, near Dublin, and I qualified fourth or fifth, ahead of all the Mondiales and just behind the Irish Champion. So Mondiale approached me and said they would like to do a special deal!
The plan was to use my engine, gearbox and other bits and pieces, and they would supply the chassis. I put my new car on pole for the next race but Alan McGarrity, a local driver, and I had an accident at the first corner. I went to the next race, won pole position again and led all but two laps. McGarrity had been punting me up the backside every time I braked. Eventually he got past me and I finished second. I would have liked to have won but, I must admit, I was pleased with the result. At that stage, I had no thoughts about going into motor racing full time. It was out of the question because we had no money. I was racing purely for fun – or the ‘crack’, as they say in Ireland.
When I left school, I had started dismantling cars in the scrapyard. On a Sunday, the place would be closed, but I would go in and mess about with starter motors. If three didn’t work, I would make one good one out of the three. It was my business in effect because I looked upon it as my Dad’s ‘factory’. I really enjoyed it.
I worked hard when I was there. My grandfather, who was still involved with the business at the time, said I was the best worker in the place. He would try to wind me up, but I was just as bad as him and I knew what he was doing. Unfortunately my cousin Stephen, who also worked in the yard, took Grandad too seriously and allowed himself to be wound up very easily. Grandad would be giving Stephen a hard time – telling him he was a lazy so-and-so – and winking at me at the same time.
It was good fun, except in the winter when it tended to be very cold and wet. You could bet it would be a day like that when someone would ask for a starter motor from a car which was under four or five other cars. I would have to get the crane and lift everything off.
I worked with Stephen and a friend, Derek, who lived down the road. The crack was great. When stacking cars we would save time by having Derek, who hooked up the cars, take a lift across on the crane’s hook rather than climb down one pile of cars and then clamber up the other. I remember walking down the road one day with a couple of friends and seeing Derek swinging above the rooftops. It was a big crane and Stephen had Derek hanging onto the hook. He was being swung from side to side and then Stephen would lower the jib, but not before jamming on the brake and jerking the line. If Derek had fallen off, he would have broken his neck. But we were laughing our heads off at the time.
The procedure in the scrapyard was that all the good bits would be removed from the car. Then we would throw in some old tyres and put a match to them. You wouldn’t get away with that now. It was like the oil fires in Kuwait at the time of the Gulf War. We would wait until the wind was blowing away from the neighbouring clothes lines, and up she would go. Sometimes the wind would turn. But once tyres start burning, you can’t put them out. The neighbours would be up in arms.
Then my job would be to crush what was left – but I had to be careful. Grandad would rip all the copper wire out of the cars once they had been burned, but he made a habit of not saying when he was coming in to work! I was up in the crane one day when I caught sight of Grandad’s dog running round the outside of a car I was about to crush with a three-ton weight. He was inside, doing his bit by removing the copper wire...
There was a very good market for the bits and pieces we removed but, even so, we didn’t have enough spare cash to go motor racing properly. The most we ever spent in a year was £7,000. Mondiale put forward a deal for me to race in England with Murray Taylor, a New Zealander and former journalist who ran a team. Mondiale asked for £7,000 on the understanding that they would pay the rest. My father and I thought this was the way to go.
Dad arranged an overdraft and paid the money. I finished third in my first event and everything was fine for about three or four races. But then I started slipping back. Reflecting on it now, the Mondiale just wasn’t good enough and the engines were poor. The chassis probably wasn’t stiff enough and that affected the engine. I’m pretty sure that’s what caused the drop-off in performance; the chassis loads up the engine, which means the engine can’t work.
It is a terrible feeling knowing that you are going to a race and the car isn’t going to be competitive, no matter what you do. It doesn’t matter if it is a Formula Ford or a Ferrari. I was to be reminded of that struggle when I went to Argentina for the third round of the 1996 World Championship.
The only way to remember the weekend in Buenos Aires is to talk about the two points I collected for finishing fifth. Everything else was a bit of a disaster – starting with qualifying. The car was awful. It was badly affected by the bumps on the track and wouldn’t turn in to the corners. I didn’t know what the F310 was going to do next because it depended on whether I hit the bump with the front or the rear of the car. It was on a knife-edge all the time. I was to discover that such problems do not seem to affect Michael Schumacher as much as everyone else, and that didn’t make me feel any better.
I had been really looking forward to racing in Buenos Aires. I like the city; it’s a brilliant place, really beautiful. The girls are perhaps not as pretty as everyone claims, but they definitely have a certain something. They’re very attractive, and they add to the warmth generated by a city which is very cosmopolitan; ‘Italians who speak Spanish and think they’re British’ was one interesting interpretation which is probably quite close to the truth.
On the Wednesday evening, a few of us were invited to President Menem’s residence. He had some lovely paintings from artists no one had heard of, but they were very nice works of art. I thought Carlos Menem was a bit of a cool dude. His daughter is a ‘babe’, very warm and happy, quite laid back. We had pizza and Coke, which was a nice way to do it; very informal and relaxed. President Menem is a motor racing nut. He’s been there and done it; he knows what he is talking about. His daughter is the same, and they’ve both got a sense of humour, unlike most politicians and dignitaries you meet.
Michael was there, as were people from Shell and Marlboro who support the Ferrari team. There were a number of Argentinian businessmen present and one of them was the country’s biggest wine exporter. He said he had an agent in Oxford and promised to send me samples of their best wine. I said I would be only too pleased to do my bit for Argentinian exports. In fact, by the time practice and qualifying had finished three days later, I was ready for a bottle of something pretty potent.
The Buenos Aires autodrome is a circuit I like; I had qualified fourth for the previous year’s Grand Prix. But now, because of all the problems associated with the Ferrari, I was afraid of the car. I was almost scared to turn the wheel.
That’s the difference between a good car and a bad car, it doesn’t matter what Formula we are talking about. When you can arrive at a corner and just turn