So, I went over to Porsche to discuss the installation, but they were very unhelpful and wouldn’t give us any drawings or advice – nothing. Al got an engine and gearbox unit sent to March, so we carefully measured it up and created our own drawings of it, then redesigned the back of the chassis and the rear suspension to suit.
By May it was ready and flown straight to Charlotte, a racetrack in North Carolina for two days of testing, and then its first race. I flew out with it and met Al and his team for the first time.
Charlotte in the summer is a hot dustbowl of a place and initial testing immediately revealed an Achilles’ heel in the installation: the charge air cooler, which cools the very hot air exiting the turbo compressor, was not doing its job. The ducting I had designed was clearly not working, with the result that the charge air entering the engine was way above Porsche’s limit, causing concerns over reliability and costing us power.
For qualifying, Al turned up the boost for one lap and took a gratifying pole, but we all knew the race would expose us. In the event, Al drove brilliantly, keeping the boost as low as he could while maintaining just enough pace to lead from flag to flag.
Post-race, Al invited me back to stay at his house and use his workshops (next to his Porsche dealership in Philadelphia) in order to find a solution.
During the wind tunnel tests we had done a run with the model painted in Flow Vis paint. This is a solution made from a fluorescent powder (originally used to track water flow in sewers) mixed into a witch’s brew of paraffin and oil. When the wind blows over this, it forms streaks, with the paraffin evaporating to reveal patterns that indicate the direction and strength of the air flow over the body surface. Fortunately I had brought with me the photographs from the test and, looking carefully again, I noticed that the flow on the sides of the body (where I had positioned the duct inlet) looked weak while that on the top of the engine cover behind the roof looked strong.
So, working with Al’s mechanics, we cut out the back of the roof and engine cover and created a new set of ducting to feed the cooler from above (instead of below). It was a little risky, as the time to the next race, at Lime Rock, was short, and we had no spare roof of the original design, so it was a one-way ticket as far as the next race was concerned.
Lime Rock is a tight, bumpy little track set in picturesque woodlands in Connecticut, not quite as hot as Charlotte but the slow tight nature would make it every bit as demanding on charge air cooling requirements. So it was quite some relief that not only were we straightaway the pacesetters in first practice but also the charge temperature was now well within Porsche’s limits. The car ran like clockwork all weekend and Al duly took pole.
Al went on to win every remaining race of the season and hence the championship, an amazing year from a humble start.
Our championship win drew to a close that chapter of my career, as Al moved to IndyCar for the following season. However, a tragic postscript is that he died in 1988. He was piloting his Piper aircraft in Ohio and had just taken off when a door came open and the plane started behaving erratically. Rather heroically, Al managed to steer the Piper away from some houses, no doubt saving many lives before it crashed, killing him instantly. He was just 41.
I was devastated to hear of it. Al was a good friend and a great driver, and to live that month in America as his guest and travel the country with him was a tremendous experience. For that, and for his being so good to me, I’m eternally grateful.
It’s funny. I had difficulty making myself understood in America. My Midlands accent, developed at college, would get in the way of simple things like ordering breakfast. Those tiny things aside, I was aware how fortunate I was to be gathering so much experience at such an early age: Europe with Formula Two and the United States with IMSA (International Motor Sports Association). I was seeing the world and I loved that aspect of the job.
On my return from the States, I was given various design tasks on March’s Formula Two and Indy cars for 1984, which took me through summer into autumn. With those completed, Robin told me his plans. Or should I say, he told me my plans: I was to join an IndyCar team called Truesports, in order to race engineer their driver Bobby Rahal in the March 84C. Back in the USA.
In 1981, my friend Dave McRobert introduced me to a new pastime: hang-gliding. Dave was going out with a nurse from Bath Hospital, and through her I met another nurse, Amanda.
Throughout 1982 I saw her whenever I could. From Bath, where she lived, to Bicester, a town to the north of Oxford where March was based, was a bit of a slog. I used to travel up and down on my Ducati and stay with her at weekends. In the spring of 1983 we bought a cottage in Pickwick, a little village near Chippenham in Wiltshire.
In the summer of 1983 we were married. My dad gave me his yellow Lotus Elan (GWD 214K) as a wedding present, and we took it on our honeymoon in the South of France before beginning life as a married couple in our Pickwick cottage. Between my dad and I, we did 170,000 miles in that car.
All was great until 1984, when Robin sent me to join Truesports to race engineer for Bobby Rahal in the States. The idea was for Amanda to accompany me. She was a nurse and was officially allowed to work in the States, but when we got there we found that there were no jobs available. The team owner, Jim Trueman, also owned a chain of budget hotels, Red Roof Inns, and he promised to give her a job, which he did, in sales.
I left for Columbus in February. Amanda resigned and joined me around March or April time. But she didn’t make any friends at Red Roof, our rented condo was soulless and she was homesick. Amanda had two very delineated modes: when she was in a good mood – ‘up’ – she was great fun. But when she was down she could be hard work, and I suppose you’d have to say that America brought out that latter side. She was back in Blighty by July.
I consoled myself with the racing, which I enjoyed – especially as I had a lot to learn. I came billed by Robin as ‘a promising young engineer’, replacing their previous, highly experienced engineer, Lee Dykstra. And while I now had some race-engineering experience from Formula Two and GTP, I had no experience of the oval tracks that make up much of the IndyCar circuit.
The ‘ovals’ are more like a rounded rectangle, all four corners often very similar in speed. So if the driver says the car’s understeering (i.e. that it’s tending to under-rotate and carry straight on, what the Americans call ‘push’) then there are all sorts of things you can do to try to solve that: you might add more front wing to increase front downforce; you might soften the front anti-roll bar, so there’s not as much weight transfer across the front tyres; you might change what the Americans call the ‘stagger’, the difference in diameter between the inside rear tyre and the outside rear tyre; you might alter the cross-weight, which is how weight is carried diagonally across the car, analogous to a wobbly bar table. You have all these and more variables, many of them not present on a standard road-racing car, because an oval-track car only has to turn left.
This was a big challenge