How to Build a Car

The financial offer was good, and I was out of work, so the chances are I would have signed there and then if he’d pushed me. But he didn’t, and I sat on the contract for a couple of days, being about to add my signature when the phone rang again.

It was Bernie. ‘I’m selling the team. I’ve found a buyer, all set up, and if you want to still join, that’s up to you, but please be aware that I won’t be involved any more.’

That gave me some thinking to do. After all, Bernie was one of the main attractions. With Bernie on board I knew the team would be well funded and run. Without him I might be staring down the barrel of another Beatrice situation.

I decided to err on the side of caution and declined the offer in light of the new development. Once bitten, twice shy and all that. But I remain grateful to Bernie for his honesty and transparency.

That left me at a loose end once again. Fortunately I then heard from Carl Haas, who since 1983 had been partnered with the actor Paul Newman as Newman/Haas Racing. Carl wanted me to join as Mario Andretti’s race engineer. Not only that, but he offered me what was an enormous sum of money: $400,000 a year. To give you an idea of just what a rise that was, I’d been earning about $60,000 a year with March/Kraco. Needless to say, I accepted.

Now, it might sound slightly odd that Carl planned to make me the world’s highest-paid race engineer (I imagine that must still be the record) when thus far I hadn’t actually crossed anyone’s palm with the drivers’ championship silverware – not Bobby and not Michael Andretti.

But Carl is a shrewd businessman. Carl was the Lola importer for North America and March were Lola’s only serious rival at the time. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I guess he figured that if he could stop me returning to March to work on their 1987 IndyCar, and instead contribute to the development of Lola’s 1987 car, then he would weaken the enemy and hence strengthen his sales. As a designer, my stock in IndyCar was high. After all, my cars had won the Indy 500 twice: the March 85C in 1985, the 86C the following year. In USA sporting terms, that’s a bit like coaching two successive Super Bowl-winning teams.

And then there was Carl. He was a real character, always, but always with a huge cigar clamped between his lips. I’m not sure how often it was lit, but it was certainly a permanent fixture, to the extent that on the odd occasion he removed it, you could see where it had left a permanent indent.

He was very superstitious. I remember in Mid-Ohio in 1985, Bobby was on pole, Mario second. Carl always had this thing where he’d make a big performance of blessing his car on the grid – so he’d come up to it and walk around it, touching it while muttering Hebrew under his breath.

That day, he’d gone through the whole rigmarole before he realised he was blessing the wrong car. He was blessing Bobby’s car, not Mario’s. So great was his indignation that he removed the cigar, actually took it out of his mouth, and tossed it in fury across the track. He marched to Mario’s car for a hurried blessing.

It didn’t work. Or, you might say, it did work. Because Bobby dominated.

Carl was a likeable guy though. The team was based in Chicago and the first time he picked me up from the airport ready for the first test – early 1987 – we walked back to the car park, got in his car, a brand new BMW, and it wouldn’t start.

‘This goddamned car,’ he growled, ‘it’s got a security code.’ But he’d forgotten it. We tried every significant combination of numbers he could think of – his birthday, his mother’s birthday, etc. – until at last I said, ‘How about 0000? Isn’t that the factory setting?’ And that was it.

Carl always had lots of change in his pocket. I can’t remember how it happened, but he fell over outside a restaurant one day, and all his quarters and nickels and dimes rolled off down the street. Being so superstitious he assumed it was an omen of bad luck and we had to help him pick up every single dime.

He and his wife, Bernie, both looked after me. The Lola T87 had been designed for the Cosworth DFX engine, which every IndyCar team used up until that point, but my first job was to install a new Chevrolet engine made by Ilmor, a company based in Brixworth, Northamptonshire, and run by their chief designer, Mario Illien and his business partner, Paul Morgan. It marked the beginning of an ongoing and very fruitful relationship with Ilmor.

It also meant I had to design a new front end to the gearbox and a new oil tank for the Lola, so I got stuck in.

Meanwhile there was the job of forging a relationship with another Mario – Andretti – for whom I was to be race engineer. I’d met him previously during my three seasons in IndyCar, but only briefly, so the opening test of the season at Laguna was the first time I was properly introduced to him.

We took seats in a little restaurant in Monterey. The waiter brought the menus and I watched as Mario looked at his, squinted a bit and then stretched his arm right out, trying to find a bit of light from the table lamp to read it.

I thought, What have I done? This guy needs reading glasses!

Thankfully my fears would turn out to be groundless. As with many people, his eyesight had started to deteriorate in his mid-forties (I’ve been extremely lucky in that regard, so far), but while Mario sometimes found it difficult to focus in low light, he was fine in daylight.

I wondered whether he’d asked Michael about me. Or whether Michael had volunteered his opinion. It was by no means certain either way. They had a very strange relationship. On one occasion I remember being with Mario at his house in snowy Pennsylvania. He’d ploughed a circuit for snowmobiles, the idea being that he and Michael would take it in turns to see who could clock the fastest time.

As we stood and watched, Michael went first but tried too hard and ran out of talent. His snowmobile flew up in the air, huge clouds of white temporarily obscuring our view until they cleared to reveal Michael lying winded on his side. Most parents would be concerned for their child’s well-being after such a big accident, but not Mario, who simply rolled his eyes and muttered, ‘Stupid kid’. They were always very competitive with each other. There was more than one incident on the track in which they took each other out, and I bet Mario rolled his eyes and said, ‘Stupid kid’, each time.

Anyway, back to that first meeting. We had a pleasant enough dinner, chatting about the usual stuff. I already respected Mario enormously as a driver. It was good to discover that we seemed to get on.

The next morning we began testing the Lola, which ran well. Because everything had been done in such a rush, we hadn’t had time to install a radio in the car. In hindsight that was a huge mistake, because towards the end of the day, with testing almost over, we stood in the pit lane watching as the car came round the track and were horrified to see the rear wing tilted over to one side.

Mario wasn’t aware of it, and without a radio we couldn’t warn him to slow down. He disappeared off through turn one and two, a pair of flat-out left-hand corners at Laguna, and then we heard this huge boom boom boom.

It was a sickening sound. We scrambled into the hire cars, me knowing full well that the crash was partly my mistake. I should have insisted we put a radio in the car before we started testing.

The first thing we spotted was some bodywork. Then we got to the complete back end, gearbox and rear wheels lying in the middle of the track. Finally we arrived at the tub, the chassis. It lay on its side where rain had washed away the banking to form a ditch. One wheel was still attached. It was like a light aircraft crash, wreckage everywhere, and there, standing among it all, was Mario, looking in puzzlement at his watch.

‘Are you okay?’ we said breathlessly.

He tapped at his watch. ‘Goddamned watch has stopped,’ he said.

That was Mario. A brilliant driver and a real tough cookie.

CHAPTER 21

By the time we got to the first race of the season at Long Beach, we were about three weeks behind schedule. Even so, Mario dominated the race and won. I remember it with some fondness. Not just because we won, but because Amanda brought Charlotte along, who by then was six or seven months old. We were having dinner with Paul Newman that night, and there was a great picture – since lost, sadly – of Paul bouncing Charlotte on his knee.

It was nice to get to know Paul. In addition to our end-of-term concert at Repton, we had end-of-term films, and though most of them were pretty boring, two stood out: If … starring Malcolm McDowell – memorable for reasons that will be obvious if you’ve seen the film – and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which of course starred Paul.

Paul turned out to be a lovely chap, and we often spoke about films and motor racing. I’m strangely immune to celebrities, perhaps in part because motor racing attracts many musicians and actors to race days, often as guests of the teams. In my experience they tend to fall into two distinct categories: those who remain unaffected by their fame, and those who think that being famous entitles them to act like a prima donna. Paul was in the former camp. Down-to-earth, charming and pragmatic to the point that he’d take the stairs rather than a lift, claiming that the exercise helped him cut down on gym fees.

He didn’t like being interrupted by fans when he was eating, which having also experienced I can fully understand, and he used to charge people for an autograph, which tended to take people aback until they discovered he wanted them to donate the money to the Scott Newman Centre in remembrance of his son, Scott, who had died of a drug overdose in 1978.

The next race was Phoenix, where Mario put it on pole. However, as the race went on, the car became progressively more ‘loose’, which is an American way of saying that it was oversteering. We had a radio in the car by now, and Mario was reporting horrendous amounts of oversteer. It wasn’t until later that we discovered the car had a broken engine mount.

Thanks to Mario’s commitment and skill, we somehow came third, despite a back end that was flexing all over the place. For me, that has to be one of the greatest unsung drives ever, because the car must have been truly evil to drive.

Meanwhile, the team was still getting to grips with some of the modifications we’d made to the car. We’d also developed a new system for pit-stops. Nowadays, in Formula One, mechanics use jacks at the front and rear when the car comes in for a pit-stop, but in IndyCar we had pneumatically powered air jacks on board.

Race engineering Mario with my clipboard, ’87.

We also had a relatively small fuel tank, so needed to refuel several times each race. At the pit-stops you could then change tyres, depending on your strategy. There would be a low wall in the pit lane, and behind that was kept the fuel rig, wheels for the next pit-stop and whatever other bits might be needed.

Only five people were allowed on the pit side of the low wall. Two of those were for refuelling, one on the filling pipe and one on the ventilation pipe. The ventilation-pipe guy would also operate the air jacks.

The reason the IndyCars have jacks on board is because of this limitation on how many people are allowed in the pit lane. A front and rear jack man would mean two extra people.

So, at a pit-stop, you’d have all five people waiting for the car to arrive. Your refuelling and jack man would start refuelling and lifting the car. Typically, you’d have two people, one to change each rear wheel, after which you had a choice of what to do with your front wheels. If you wanted to change both of them, the front-wheel guy had to change the outside front wheel, then run across the front of the car and change the inside front wheel. Three wheels could be changed in the time it took to refuel, but to change all four would add an extra 4sec or so to the pit-stop time.

As race engineer I would make the call on whether we would change that extra tyre and also on what we should adjust on the set-up of the car to keep it balanced for the remainder of the race. It was up to the driver to adjust the car’s balance using the anti-roll bars front and rear. Some drivers knew what to do for themselves; others would prefer to radio in, tell you what the car was doing and wait for adjustment advice. The car tends towards oversteer as the race goes on because it loses more rear grip than it does front grip – not always the case, it depends on factors like the ambient temperature, the track temperature, the layout of the circuit, the characteristics of the tyres and so on – but as a rule of thumb, it loses more rear grip as the tyres degrade, so the driver would typically soften the rear bar and stiffen the front bar to maintain balance as the tyres degraded through a stint.