How to Build a Car

And second, it didn’t matter that I wasn’t cut out to be a driver, because although I enjoyed driving the kart it wasn’t where my true interest lay. What I really wanted to do – what I spent time thinking about, and what I thought I might conceivably be quite good at – was car design, making racing cars go faster.

So, much to my father’s relief, as the school fees were hefty, I decided to leave Repton for an OND course, equivalent to A-levels, at the Warwickshire College of Further Education in Leamington Spa.

I couldn’t wait. At Repton I’d been caught drinking in the local Burton-on-Trent pubs, which had earned me a troublemaker reputation that I was in no particular hurry to discard. My attitude to the school ranged from ambivalence all the way to apathy (with an occasional touch of anarchy) and the feeling was entirely mutual. We were never destined to part on good terms anyway. And so it proved.

At the end of each term, the sixth form would arrange a concert for the whole school. As usual, this was to be held in the Pears’ School, a venerable building boasting oak panelling and ornate stained-glass windows dating back to its construction in 1886. The survivor of two world wars and God knows how many other conflicts, the building was a justifiable source of great pride for the school, and it was in these historic surroundings that the prog rock band Greenslade had been booked to play.

Like many kids of the time, my tastes leaned towards the hippy end of things: long(ish) hair, voluminous Oxford bags, loon pants and psychedelic music: Santana, Genesis (Peter Gabriel’s Genesis, to be precise), Supertramp, Average White Band and of course Pink Floyd.

Repton disapproved. In an effort to stop the dangerous viral spread of platform shoes, the school had passed an edict banning any shoe under which you could pass a penny on its end. Being a smart Alec I’d used a piece of aluminium to bridge the gap between heel and sole, thus allowing me to wear my platform boots while still abiding by the letter of the law (no prizes for spotting the connection between that and what I do now). Unsurprisingly, the powers that be at Repton took a dim view of this particular act of rule-bending, but it enhanced my reputation in the teachers’ common room for being a troublemaker.

Anyway. I digress. The advantage of the fashion, in particular the forgiving trousers, was their suitability for hiding bottles of booze. Sure enough, what we fifth-formers did was tape half-bottles of gin, vodka and whatever other spirits we could purloin to our shins, then swish into the concert with the contraband safely hidden beneath our flapping trouser legs.

Greenslade began their performance. To be honest, you probably had to be on acid to enjoy it, but we settled for surreptitiously mixing our smuggled alcohol with innocent-looking glasses of Coke and getting slowly smashed.

It’s a dangerous and combustible combination: a hot summer, the end of term, lots of boys, booze and the pernicious, corrupting effects of dual-keyboard prog rock. Pretty soon, the atmosphere had turned rowdy. And no one was more rowdy than yours truly.

As with most concerts, the mixing desk was located in the middle of the auditorium. I sat close by and, seeing that the soundman had nipped off for a leak, I darted over to the mixer and slid all of the sliders to max.

The band played on. The noise, a mix of distortion, bass, shrieking keyboards and sheer, unexpected volume, was immense. Without a care for the tinnitus we would all suffer the following day, the hall erupted and for a moment, before the headmaster arrived and the soundman returned, absolute anarchy ruled.

Years later, Jeremy Clarkson said it was the loudest thing he’d ever heard. As we’ve already established, Jeremy is prone to exaggeration, but on this occasion he’s probably right. It was very, very loud.

My punishment? I was dragged to the school sanatorium and forced to endure a stomach pump. Completely unnecessary, of course, not even ethical. Simply a way of punishing me for what had happened.

The next day it was discovered that the loud noise had loosened the leading and cracked the ceramics holding the stained-glass windows in place. It was the last straw. My parents were contacted and summoned to the school.

My mother arrived in her Porsche (registration WME 94M). Quintessentially Mum: dressed in her usual white, with white boots and carrying a potted lily. She knew the headmaster had a taste for lilies and she was never one to pass up an opportunity to charm the birds from the trees. ‘Hello, Lloyd, how lovely to see you; here’s a gift,’ she said, placing it before him and taking a seat. ‘Is this about Adrian? He’s such a good boy, isn’t he?’

On this occasion her charms were wasted. ‘Indeed, this is about Adrian,’ she was told flatly. ‘But I’m afraid he hasn’t been a good boy. In fact, he has been a very bad boy. So bad, in fact, that I’m afraid you are going to have to take him away. He is no longer welcome at Repton.’

My mother looked from the headmaster to me and then back again. She raised her chin. ‘Well if that’s your attitude, Lloyd, I’ll have my plant back,’ she said. ‘Come on Adrian, let’s go.’

I know nothing about Jeremy’s expulsion, but that’s how I got my marching orders. I left Repton under a cloud, relieved to finally wave the place goodbye (flicking it the Vs at the same time).

I’ve been back since, mind you. Just the once, when my father and I competed in a ‘boys versus old Reptilians’ cross-country run. But other than that, it was a not-particularly-fond final farewell. The irony is that I am told photographs of Jeremy and me are among other noteworthy old Reptonians in their Hall of Fame.

CHAPTER 5

Post-Repton, life improved and things started to click into place: I finally raced the kart at Shenington, and though the kart and I didn’t exactly set the world alight, at least we could race towards the back of ‘the pack’, and were several seconds faster than we had been 12 months earlier.

By accident it turned out that the chopper blade I had made to go on the end of the crankshaft, to give the electronic ignition its signal to spark, happened to be of a width that meant it also gave about the right ignition timing if the engine ran backwards. And so the most notable feature of my race weekend was when I spun at the hairpin during practice and must have pressed the clutch while still going backwards. When I let the clutch back out I found I suddenly had four reverse gears instead of four forward! The look of disbelief from onlookers as I completed the rest of the lap into the paddock backwards, looking over my shoulder, still brings a smile to my face. The chief steward was less impressed with my efforts, however.

I also began work on a ‘special’, which was a road-going sports car that I planned to build from my own drawings. It was an ambitious project, and although it was one I ultimately abandoned, a couple of valuable things emerged from the experience. The first thing was that in the course of researching it, I read of a guy called Ian Reed of Delta Racing Cars in Surrey who’d built such a car, so – figuring he might be a useful source of information – I wrote to him.

One exchange of letters later and Ian invited me along to the factory, spent about half a day looking over my drawings, and gave me tips on how to develop and design the car, as well as a bit of useful careers advice.

Second, I was putting in the hours. Apparently, in order to attain expert status at any given activity, be it tennis, violin, cooking, whatever, you need to clock up at least 500 hours’ practice, ideally from the age of eight through your teens, when you’re much more receptive and can learn more quickly.

Me in my modified pedal go-kart.

Unknowingly, that’s exactly what I was doing. I was practising, just as I always had. For my combined eighth birthday-and-Christmas present (a dreaded combination familiar to anyone who has a birthday near Christmas), I’d received a pedal go-kart, and sure enough I customised it by adding on my own bodywork parts in order to make it look like a Formula One car. Later came my 10-speed Carlton bicycle that I lightened by drilling holes in it and swapping the supplied steel saddle post for my own aluminium design. I was very proud of that – until the day it snapped.

So even though my plans for ‘the special’ didn’t quite get off the ground, it was still a valuable exercise. And anyway, there’s only so much time you can spend in the workshop. The poor old special was competing with my new life of college, girlfriends and, most especially, as soon as I reached my seventeenth birthday, motorbikes.

For the first term at college I had cycled the three miles to the bus station in Stratford and then taken the bus to Leamington. Many of the guys on the course (about 15 of us in total, no girls) had Yamaha FS1E or Puch mopeds, while one of the guys, Andy, being slightly older, had a Norton Commando, making him supercool. Bikes were the main topic of interest between lessons and at lunch, and I immediately felt drawn. Luckily for me, it turned out my dad also had a passion for bikes, having ridden as a despatch rider in the army. Such was his enthusiasm, he offered to buy me a brand-new bike for Christmas/birthday (I guess that combo can come in handy sometimes), which left me very happy but somewhat dumbfounded at the time after the kart experience. Initially I fancied a Ducati 250 but then, reading Bike magazine, read a road test on a relatively new bike, a Moto Morini 350 Sport. My dad agreed and hence at exactly 17 I became the proud owner of one. Just one small problem: the law only allowed learners to ride bikes under 250cc. So for £25 I acquired a very tired 1958 BSA C15 to learn to ride and pass my test on, while my dad kindly took it upon himself to do around a thousand miles on the Morini to ‘run it in’.

The summer of 1976 was a wonderful long hot summer, perfect for my newfound love of riding motorbikes, despite the melted tar on the road that caught out so many of my mates. I became an enthusiastic member of the local bike club, Shakespeare’s Bikers, which met at The Cross Keys every Wednesday at seven, and enjoyed many weekend outings. Suddenly I had a new passion, a group of friends from all walks of life (through college and the bike club), and – thanks to this new network – an introduction to a social life that included girls. Added to these was the advent of punk, a welcome backlash from the slushy music of Donny Osmond et al. House parties featuring this new anarchic music allowed me to indulge in the only form of dancing I’m any good at – pogoing.

I loved my bike. There was a real camaraderie among us bikers, a feeling of freedom that a car simply does not bring to the same extent. There was even a brief period in which I thought my future should be as a bike designer, but in my heart of hearts I knew this was the flush of a new romance; I should stay true to my equally unlikely ambition of becoming a racing car designer.

My maternal grandmother, Kath, lived on gin and Martini – a habit inherited by my mother – and I was very fond of her, which made it doubly upsetting when gangrene took her leg, after which she seemingly lost the will to live and passed away in a nursing home a few months later, in the summer of 1977.

No, I was told by my parents, you can’t spend your grandmother’s inheritance on another motorbike. You should put it in the building society. And anyway, what’s wrong with the Moto Morino?

But I’d been close to Kath, so I insisted it’s what she would have wanted. Manipulative, I know. But who among us is above a bit of strategic emotional blackmail at times? It worked and I got what ‘we’ both wanted: a Ducati 900SS (registration number CNP 617S), which was a very smart bike for an 18-year-old.

I loved British-made cars, mainly Lotus, but when it came to bikes, I lived la dolce vita. During my OND course we visited the Triumph and Norton factories, and what struck us was their arrogant belief that they were still the best in the world. They were determined to carry on doing what they were doing, making the same old Commandos and Tridents, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the Italians were making more attractive and better-quality bikes, while the Japanese were also manufacturing better-quality bikes at far lower prices.

The Triumph factory in particular was a dirty, union-run relic of a bygone age. One detail that stayed with me was a room in which the distinctive Triumph pinstripe was applied to the petrol tank. A pot of gold paint sat in one corner of the room. On a table in the centre was a petrol tank, and somewhere between the two was a Triumph worker, an old boy clad in grey overalls. The paintbrush in his hand shook as he approached the tin, dipped and slowly returned to the petrol tank, splattering gold paint on the floor as he came.

We watched, agape, convinced we were about to witness an act of vandalism, but at the very last moment his hand steadied and with a flick of the wrist and a smooth flourish he applied a perfect gold pinstripe to the tank.

A second, younger man would lift the tank away and replace it with a new one as the old boy shambled back to the paint pot and the whole process began again. It was incredibly inefficient. You dread to think what the white-coated engineers of Suzuki and Kawasaki would have made of it. But it was also strikingly beautiful. No doubt there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

Like many of their generation, my mum and dad were vehemently opposed to Japanese-made products. ‘Jap crap’, my dad called them. So it was inevitable that I’d be drawn towards Italian bikes. The trouble was I was too drawn towards them (and girls, music and booze), and I almost flunked my end-of-first-year exams. Ian Reed had told me that in order to make it in motorsport I’d need a degree, and there was no degree without my OND. After that, and for the first time in my life, I truly applied myself academically, as well as setting about finding a university.

One thing I learnt from almost flunking those exams was that distraction is the enemy of performance: I thought I was revising in the lead-up but in fact I was listening to music while reading notes. I learnt the words to ELO songs, not my material.

Of the unis I considered, Southampton was the one calling out to me. I knew from reading Autosport that the racing teams Brabham and March used the wind tunnel in Southampton to develop their cars, and I figured that being a Southampton student might give me a chance to ingratiate myself with them.

The course itself was Aeronautics and Astronautics, and I didn’t – and still don’t, really – have an interest in aircraft. By rights I should have been aiming for a mechanical engineering degree, and if I’d wanted to end up in the automotive industry working on production-line cars then that’s what I’d have done.

But I didn’t want a career in the automotive industry. I wanted a career in racing. My thinking was that an Aeronautics course would teach me aerodynamics and about the design of lightweight structures, about materials and control theory. I decided that because of that parallel technology with aircraft, and because of the lure of the wind tunnel, I’d aim for Southampton.

I worked hard to get into Southampton and I succeeded. But the problem was that even though I’d apparently got the highest OND mark in the country, the maths content of the course was the same maths I’d learnt at advanced Maths O-level. At Southampton, all the lecturers assumed that students were educated to A-level standard.

With engineering, and particularly aeronautical engineering, being so maths orientated, I was woefully out of my depth and struggling to keep up with the lecturers, who would simply skip through the derivations of equations, assuming we all knew what they considered to be the basics.

At weekends I studied. Not socialising, not tinkering with ‘the special’, not even gallivanting around on my motorbike, just trying to get myself up to snuff with my maths. But however hard I worked, I always seemed to be two steps behind everybody else. To make matters worse, I shared Halls with a bunch of ’ologist students who did nothing but party – not exactly the perfect environment for the kind of crash-course study I needed. By Christmas I was seriously thinking of throwing in the towel.

Finally, in desperation, I did two things: first, I returned to see Ian Reed, who by now was at March, a production racing car company making Formula One and Formula Two cars, a sizeable outfit by the standards of the day.

‘Look,’ said Ian, ‘if you want a job as a draughtsman then it’s yours, but you’ll only ever be a draughtsman. If you want to be a proper design engineer, you need to get your degree. What I suggest you do is get your head down and keep battling.’

Second, my tutor, the late Ken Burgin, who was always very supportive, noted that I was struggling and helped me with extra tutorials. In addition, he instilled in me the need to keep going. That was the mantra. Ken and Ian both said it: get your head down, Adrian; keep battling.

So I did. And although I never really caught up with the maths – to this day, it’s my Achilles’ heel – I did manage to overcome the problem by memorising mathematical derivations parrot fashion. Put simply, I never understood them, but I knew how to fake them. It hasn’t held me back in the long term and, in a perverse way, it instilled in me a determination that when the going gets tough you need to get your head down and find a way through it. I also formed the ability to really and truly concentrate when studying, which has certainly helped me in my career, though I have to admit, not socially. Particularly at race weekends I tend to suffer from tunnel vision, not seeing left or right, only what is right in front of me.