I had been naive in the extreme. There was far more to preparing a kart than I had imagined. That first race gave me a shocking lesson in the school of karting set-up. The other childrenâs karts had both of the rear wheels driven, whereas ours only had drive to one wheel. Not only that but they had a box of different sized sprockets, so they always had the right gearing for each track, whether it was slow and twisty or fast and sweeping. Also I knew nothing at the time about minimum weights. The power to weight ratio of a kart is critical and so the trick was to get the kart down to the minimum weight permissable in the rules, while tuning the engine to give maximum power. Our poor underpowered kart was 40lbs overweight, so we really didnât have a prayer.
Most of the children were much older than me; some were as old as sixteen and I felt upset and humiliated by the sharp shock I had received. I went away at the end of that day a much wiser ten year old. I knew that I had a burning desire to race karts and my desire to beat everybody had been heightened by the experience. I was down, but I was determined to fight back.
I knew that we would never be competitive with the equipment we had so I put a lot of pressure on my father to get a newer and faster kart. Because karting was still uncommercialised, the cost of upgrading our equipment was not prohibitive. Looking back, Iâm glad I was racing karts when I was. I shudder to think what it would cost today to buy competitive equipment.
My father was not rich and I had to justify the cost to him. I think he could see that I was very determined to race and that we needed better gear if we were to compete.
I knew even at that age that I was very competitive. No matter what field you compete in and no matter at what level, if you are born with the will to win then you know it from a very early age. At school you can see people around you who win and enjoy it, they really thrive on it. I was like that for me from the word go. By contrast you see other people who win or lose and it doesnât really matter much to them either way. That is an admirable quality to have, but if you are a racer and you want to be successful as a driver, then it is completely the wrong attitude.
Winning is pretty much everything. Once youâve realised that, it dictates the whole way you look at competition. If your equipment isnât up to scratch, you do everything you can to upgrade it. No-one in our family was wealthy, but my grandparents used to give me equipment for my birthday and at Christmas. I remember putting pressure on them one year to give me a new engine.
Although winning is everything, that is not to say that you have to be a bad loser. I think you can be a good sportsman and be a gentleman and lose gracefully without losing your competitive edge. Itâs a subtle difference, but an important one. Psychologically you approach competition believing only that winning is everything and losing doesnât exist.
If you lose, there are always reasons why you have lost. This is where youâve got to be honest with yourself and think, âThis is the reason why I lost todayâ, rather than âThe car, or the engine, let me down.â It is important to be positive and to look for constructive reasons why you failed to win, but above all it is important to be honest with yourself. This is something I learned very early on in my competitive career. One of my strengths and probably at the same time one of my weaknesses is that I am very straightforward. I am honest with myself and with other people. I call things as I see them and sometimes that upsets a few people, as I would discover later in my career.
I won with my new kart and as the years progressed I moved up through the different junior karting categories. It was a thrilling time for me. The competition was fierce, but the atmosphere in the paddock was friendly. If you were short of a piece of equipment, you could always rely on someone in the paddock lending it to you.
All of my spare time and my school holidays were spent working on my kart and racing it. I can remember putting the kart in the boot of the car and going off to the little track at Chasewater testing. My father and I used to make dozens of trips like this. We would test engines and pistons and run bits in at Chasewater, then go back home and rub the pistons down and hone the barrels, then go back to the track to try it again. My father and I were extremely close in those days and I think in a way he was re-living his childhood through me, because he had a very bad time in the Second World War.
The karting became pretty serious as I began to race further and further afield. To start with it was the length and breadth of Britain, then when I was picked for the English team we began travelling to the continent and across the North Sea to Scandinavia. I was doing what I wanted to do, satisfying my competitive urge and loving every second of it.
Unfortunately, things were not quite so straightforward at school. Although the teachers did not object to me missing school to represent the country in international races, some of the other children at the school didnât like it at all. They were jealous and resented my success. One morning the headmaster announced in morning assembly that I would be going to Holland for two weeks to race for England. I was to be given a special two-week leave of absence from classes. The school hall buzzed with an uncomfortable mix of approval and resentment.
Although the trip sounded pretty exotic, in reality it meant that I would be well behind with my schoolwork when I got back and would have to put in many extra hours. Some of the other children didnât see it that way. They were jealous and they wanted me to know that I shouldnât consider myself special. There was an uneasy atmosphere in the playground later that morning and then suddenly I got hit on the back of the legs with a cricket bat. I went down and when several others joined in I was beaten up quite badly.
So I learned another important lesson: that no matter what you do you cannot please everybody and there will always be some who want to undermine your success. Their attacks, whether they be with a cricket bat in the school playground or, later on, with words in the press, always hurt. They are motivated by jealousy; people who said that you would never be any good and who are forced to eat their words when you go out and prove them wrong. It is a reaction against success achieved against the odds, a denial that somebody from within their midst could be successful and get the attention and the rewards that success brings. This is a negative side of human nature which I have run up against many times in my life, but which I donât believe I will ever understand. Sadly it is one of the prices you have to pay if you single-mindedly pursue your goal. It comes with the territory.
The karting trips abroad were great fun and often my father and I would be accompanied by my sisters Sandra and Gail. We would pack the car onto the ferry and set off on another adventure. I enjoyed meeting and racing against children from other countries, although it was always nice to come home once the job was done. The races were enjoyable and we had our fair share of successes. I had a few accidents too, but mostly these were harmless spills. Because the karts didnât travel terribly fast, parents were never too worried about their children getting hurt. I had one accident where I took off and flew into the branches of a tree. The chassis buckled under the impact, but I was perfectly alright. Not long afterwards I had my first serious accident.
It was an accident that shouldnât have happened, but in those days in kart racing there wasnât the quality control in the manufacture of components which there is today. Also the thoroughness of scrutineering and inspection was way behind todayâs standards. Unbeknown to me, the steering column on my kart was cracked when I started the race. I was coming down the hill on the fast kart track at Morecambe, travelling at probably 100mph and approaching a slight left-hander. I turned the wheel and the steering just snapped. I realised that I had no steering and at that speed there is no time to scrub off speed before you go off. I was in big trouble. I took off over a kerb