Of all the evergreen talents in the sport, few are as unsung as British ace Andy Wallace.  With more than 30 international sports car victories the 48-year-old’s career is still rolling on successfully into its third decade.  Yet to the author it seems barely five minutes since this sports car legend was announced to the watching world as ‘the talented young gas-fitter from Oxford’ by Murray Walker... when he was known to many as ‘Mister Wally’.

After getting his instruction from the renowned Jim Russell school at Silverstone aged just 15, Andy first sprang to prominence by winning the pre-74 Formula Ford championship.  His Hawke DL11 was largely self-fettled in breaks between working both for the local gas company and by turning his hand to any odd jobs from spannering to instructing that needed doing around the racing school. 

It was here that he was first encountered by yours truly, then aged nine and doing much the same as Andy – albeit on a smaller scale.  Holidays and weekends were spent on my bike, zooming round the industrial units that had been fashioned from Silverstone’s abandoned wartime RAF buildings, polishing cars for people, talking far too much and generally getting underfoot.  Yet the place where I was most often found was the Jim Russell workshop, where the future Le Mans and Daytona winner was usually working hard in scrotty overalls alongside the other mechanics and wannabe drivers.

Those were happy days, with the sound of spanners and the smell of oil and polish – not all of it spilt by me – and impersonating the cast of ‘wacky’ characters on Steve Wright’s radio show.  Talk was of gear ratios, camber settings and girls... most of which went over my head, but I could join in with vigour when it came to talking about The A-Team or who was going to win the Tourist Trophy.

At about this time the British Racing Drivers’ Club did something special – it created a racing team called British Racing Prospects.  Staffed by senior members of the Jim Russell team, it was to be both a progression from the racing school and a means of promoting British talent with a professional setup to tackle one the major Formula Ford series of the day – the Esso British Championship.

With a fleet of Van Diemens painted patriotically in royal blue with red and white stripes, BRP built itself the pick of the talent available to it at the end of 1982 – and that was Andy Wallace.  Big things were planned for 1983 when Wally’s new long-wheelbase Van Diemen arrived with its big hump of an engine cover.  Among the team-mates joining him that year were John Mayston-Taylor (who later found fame as the restorer and recreator of 1950s Jaguars), and Tony Chambers, the manager of pop band Hot Chocolate.

It’s no small exaggeration to say that Tony turned Silverstone on its head – he arrived driving a Lamborghini Countach.  What’s more, his Van Diemen wasn’t prepared in the blue-white-and-red colours of BRP: his was black with the famous Hot Chocolate logo of a girl’s red lips wrapped around a Malteser.  Once ‘TC’ turned up at Snetterton for a test session and the Countach’s scissor door opened to reveal none other than Errol Brown, the band’s lead singer, who was incognito in a fur coat and enormous wide-brimmed hat! 

Yet despite such an entourage, Wally’s season as team leader was blunted by the Van Diemen’s lack of pace against the all-new Reynard of Madgwick Motorsport’s latest Brazilian star, Maurizio Sandro Sala.  At the bitter end BRP acquiesced and got their leading man a Reynard of his own – and on live TV Mister Wally dominated the all-important finals meeting on Silverstone’s Grand Prix circuit, live on the BBC, to be lauded by Murray Walker.

The week afterwards we were sitting in the racing school workshop drinking tea and admiring the new ZZ Top keyring that had been made by another BRP hopeful – Frenchman Rudy Thomann – from a broken piece of Van Diemen.  Later Rudy was to work on the record-breaking Lotus bicycle, but then talk was of BRP graduating to Formula 3 with Wally as the lead driver – and a star-struck Frenchman gasped: “Meester Walleee!  You could be in F1 in two years!”  We all believed it – even if Andy didn’t.

As things turned out, Mister Wally was right to pooh-pooh the idea.  He did eventually win the British Formula 3 championship in 1986 – at the wheel of a Madgwick Motorsport Reynard! – and thereafter for many years had fame as the only British F3 champion never to start a Grand Prix.  After the financial chaos of the late 1980s, funds for Formula 3000 became hard to come by and Mister Wally’s future looked bleak – but then out of the blue came a call from TWR and the chance to drive for its mighty Jaguar sports car squad in 1988.

The rest is history – second place on his debut at Jerez and that tumultuous victory at Le Mans against the might and wrath of the factory Porsches.  Victory at Daytona in 1990 put him on the map in America and cemented a bright future for this most enduring of endurance drivers on both sides of the pond that is still in full swing today.  Formula One’s loss was a gain to so many teams and fans around the world – so race on, Mister Wally!

Working in motor sport, one too often forgets the privilege it is to travel far and wide.  Yet after ten long months spent chasing after the world’s international championships, it’s finally time to say farewell to the Airbus and settle in for the last big events of the year at home in the UK.

In a somewhat nostalgic frame of mind, therefore, I took a quick scan of the world’s press to see what’s being said about the sport before returning home for the winter.  With a weather-plagued  Japanese GP and the Citroens of Loeb and Sordo scampering off into the distance in Catalunya, it was interesting to take a peek at where the real news was to be found.

Next year’s WRC calendar gets a thumbs-up from Auto, Motor + Sport – albeit mostly because the Rallye Deutschland is back on the schedule.  I am always full of admiration for Germany’s national pride in its motoring achievements.  A decade ago I watched a race on TV in which the Ferrari of Michael Schumacher was leading the McLarens of Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard – and the commentator stoutly called the order as ‘Schumacher-Mercedes-Mercedes’.

On to matters of the moment, and you’ll find coverage of the bust-up at this week’s Amman Extraordinary Motoring Conference in the UAE’s Gulf News.  Well, some of it anyway.  Any mention of Max Mosley’s intimidating letter to Prince Feisal of Jordan – or the resultant regional swing in voting towards Ari Vatanen in this month’s FIA presidency elections – seems to have gone missing.

Hardly surprising, really. Despite the UAE’s Mohammed Bin Sulayem acting as running-mate to Mosley’s man Jean Todt, a dim view is taken in the Middle East of people attempting to strong-arm the local royalty.  Yet Gulf News bills Bin Sulayem as the ‘legendary rally driver and 14-time Middle East Rally Championship title holder’ while omitting to mention that ‘Former Member of the European Parliament Ari Vatanen’ is probably more deserving of the tag of legendary rally driver.

Italy’s press has meanwhile been having a field day with Fernando Alonso’s move to Ferrari, not least in the wake of Felipe Massa’s explosive reaction to the sorry saga of Singapore 2008.  The Brazilian now feels robbed of world championship glory – and according to il Giornale, Alonso agrees.  He is quoted referring  to his ill-gotten win as ‘theft’ and saying that he wouldn’t worry if the FIA annulled his victory because he’d already got lots.

At a stroke the lad from Oviedo managed to combine a dig at Lewis Hamilton with plonking himself in the the heart of the Tifosi’s affections, and at a stroke I’m looking forward to some mighty press conference shenanigans over the next few seasons.

Here in Alonso’s homeland this weekend it’s all about the rally – and all the more so with the announcement that Sebastien Loeb and local hero Dani Sordo will continue to drive for Citroen next year.  Sports daily Marca trumpets the news with great vim – although it was rather hard to concentrate after discovering that ‘Sordo’ emerges as ‘Deaf Man’ on the Internet translation site, and seeing an adjacent headline that ‘Dani Deaf’ had lost the lead in Catalunya to his team-mate.

And so it’s back to Britain, where national pride in motor sport has been in a state of flux since the springtime, when Jenson Button stopped winning anything.  Fortunately Red Bull-backed Kris Meeke won the Intercontinental Rally Challenge last weekend, becoming the first Briton since the late Richard Burns to take a major international rally title, and perhaps the most eye-watering tribute was to be found in Fleet Directory:

“Kris Meeke and Paul Nagle may well have been crowned champions in the Intercontinental Rally Championship [sic], but this is not the only title holder Peugeot may have this year, the 3008 could just be the fleet car of the year...” said the scribe, whose lateral thinking had previously brought gems such as: ‘Poaching young football players, just like traffic calming, can backfire’.

But things are no less tenuous in the mainstream, as proven when Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper, the ‘super soaraway’ Sun, placed a touching tribute to the bad boy of Formula One on its website... entitled ‘Lapping Up Briatore’s Babes’.  

Here you can click on some suitably fleshy thumbnails to reveal nine of the lardy lothario’s most celebrated squeezes.  If the convulsions of envy get too much when eyeballing Elle McPherson and Heidi Klum in their skimpies, you can at least console yourself with imagining what Flav said when he watched their shapely bottoms sashaying away from him for the last time:

“F***ing hell... my every f***ing disgrace.”

In timely fashion, amid these days of motor sport’s scandal and turmoil, one of my colleagues sent through a request from his editor for ‘top ten heroes’ to have graced the cockpit of a competition car.  It’s always good to remember how there are always more heroes than villains at the heart of our passion for racing.

There will be a Top 100 heroes published in Motorsport News at Christmas time.  Here are my ten submissions, based not only on their achievements but to what they’ve given the sport and my passion for it.  After all, as has been proven, many people can win races, it’s how they do it that counts.

So here are my ten – have a think about yours and let the debate begin!

1 Sir Stirling Moss

The greatest virtuoso of all? Most likely.  Name any branch of the top-line sport and he excelled in it. If you want to define ‘cool’ then there is little to compare with Moss in a powder blue shirt flinging a Maserati round Monaco or a Vanwall through the narrow streets around Pescara.  The cars he drove carry with them their own aura – whether a Mercedes-Benz, Aston Martin, Jaguar, Lotus or Ferrari – but their lustre was so often enriched by ‘the boy’.

2 Gilles Villeneuve

These days drivers do their utmost to avoid any thought of the people in the grandstands but Gilles was a fan and with that in mind he played to the crowd.  It didn’t matter how many races went un-won because of his all-or-nothing style: here was a man so in love with the sport that he seduced millions.

3 Jean Alesi

For me the stand-out moment came while standing at Maggotts-Becketts in 1992 watching him attempt to qualify the repellent Ferrari F92A for the British Grand Prix.  The car was trying so hard to harm him that he might as well have had a live cougar in the cockpit, but the commitment was absolute, the car control amazing and the bravado captivating.

4 John Cleland

Cleland was twice a British touring car champion on the track – and the man who took the series to the man on the street.  Ever-ready with a quip, often at the expense of his rivals, yet equally someone who genuinely cared about the sport and those involved in making it happen.

5 Mike Hawthorn

Britain had only the ghost of Dick Seaman and silent movie reels of Sunbeams and Bentleys to call upon when Hawthorn arrived.  When he left it was as Formula One world champion, with Vanwall as constructors’ champion.  The huge grin, bow tie and the stories of havoc he would wreak in the pursuit of fun, remind us that if you’re going to do something – you should have a bloody good laugh while doing it.

6 Keke Rosberg
In 1983 Eau Rouge was bumpy, sharp and dangerous – and Rosberg alone took it flat.  Then there was that 160mph lap of Silverstone, which I witnessed as he flew over the Woodcote chicane, and followed up with astonishment of 1500bhp powerslides down Paddock Hill at Brands Hatch.  In a word: fever.

7 Duncan Hamilton
During WW2, Hamilton flew a Supermarine Seafire which was bright blue with a lightning flash down the side.  In peacetime the thunderbolts were all Hamilton’s own work, not least drowning hissorrows  after being excluded from the 1953 Le Mans 24 Hours, then getting reinstated and having to regularly pit for brandy to stop the hangover putting him out of the race... which he famously won.

8 Stefan Bellof
Just how good he could have been in Formula One, we shall never know - only that race in Monaco '84 when he outshone even Senna is there to tantalise us.  Yet in sports cars he was supreme.  On paper the Group C formula for sports car racing was an economy marathon for races of between 6 and 24 hours.  But then came Bellof, and suddenly there were fireworks, the dull drone of a Porsche 956 became more urgent – and inspired others to follow his loony lead

9 Peter Collins
The pin-up boy of 1950s British motor sport was the sort of bloke who would be captain of the football team, pinch your girlfriend and copy your homework.  In days when Enzo Ferrari treated most drivers like cattle, he was so overwhelmed by the talent and charm of Collins that he gave him a home at Maranello.

10 Hans-Joachim Stuck

If you were to describe your perfect motor racing series, I’d wager that you would want parity of performance yet with some ingenious engineering to bring some of the sport’s most established manufacturers in there.  Throw in a truckload of truly world-class drivers and of course some majestic circuits for them to race on and you’ve just about got it all together, right?

It certainly was right in the decade when Group C ruled the earth.  If you thought the soundtrack to the Eighties was a welter of synthesisers and drum machines; think again.  Actually – just for a second – don’t.  Get yourself in the mood with some Eurythmics, Human League and Duran Duran.  Weep for the days when melody was king and Simon Cowell had yet to give every pop star mid-Atlantic accents and forced vibrato.

I digress: the pop music may have been fabulous, but it paled in comparison with the clarion call of Jaguar’s V12, the Ferrari V8 wail of the Lancias and the rumbling malice of the Mercedes.  For rice rocket lovers nothing can match the shrieky yowling of a Mazda rotary, but ultimately the soundtrack is dominated by that concerto of deep, urgent grunt twinned with turbo flutter-and-whistle from the master of Group C racing: Porsche.

This phenomenal category emerged from the morass of the 1970s, when regulations for the World Sportscar Championship appeared to change whenever there was a mild breeze outside the FIA.  A new formula was decided upon where fuel economy was paramount.  Now that sounds about as riveting as a weekend weeding the flowerbeds, but what happened was something close to alchemy.

In effect the FIA removed virtually every technical restriction except for one: the cars could weigh no less than 800kg and store a maximum fuel capacity of 100 litres.  Beyond that they were only limited to a maximum of five refuelling stops within a 1000 kilometre distance.  For the boffins in engine management, aerodynamics, metallurgy and advanced composite construction this was like every Christmas arriving at once.

Small wonder, therefore, that in its prime the World Sportscar Championship boasted Aston Martin, Jaguar, Lancia, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Peugeot, Porsche and Toyota.  That it pulled in more than 50,000 spectators to every race and brought upwards of half a million to Le Mans.  This was motor racing on a grand scale, creating a grand spectacle – and all without a big fence around the paddock, super-egos or even ferocious budgets.

Just look at how any privateer teams won races and filled the points positions: the likes of Joest, Brun, Kremer and Fitzpatrick added to the competition at every level.  Marvel at the Aston Martin Nimrod programme, which was put together using gaffer tape and goodwill when there were barely two pennies to rub together.  Event the mighty TWR Jaguars were cobbled together using as much road car technology as there was brilliance from the likes of Tony Southgate and Ross Brawn.

Yet this was big business.  As a sponsorship magnet Group C’s appeal went far beyond tobacco and the ubiquitous petrochemical firms.  It was cool, it was inexpensive and it drew in fashion labels, chinzy drinks firms and serious businesses.  With the money came talent – hence it was no surprise to find the biggest names in the Eighties tackling Group C races.  Stalwarts like Derek Bell, Jacky Ickx, Hans Stuck, Bob Wolleck, Klaus Ludwig, Jochen Mass and Henri Pescarolo found their careers entering an Indian summer – all the more so when they were joined by Formula One men.

Ricardo Patrese led the Lancia squad.  Stefan Bellof was world champion for Porsche.  Keke Rosberg drove the last top-line race on the old Nurburgring at the wheel of a Richard Lloyd Porsche, then Ayrton Senna got to grips with the new Nurburgring at the wheel of a similar Joest car. Martin Brundle and Derek Warwick both won the championship.  Jean Alesi stormed Le Mans – as did the ‘Brit Pack’ of Julian Bailey, Mark Blundell and Johnny Herbert.  Oh, and then Mercedes produced some snotty kids called Wendlinger, Frentzen... and Schumacher.

Small wonder that Bernie Ecclestone didn’t like Group C, badmouthing it as a ‘manufacturers’ championship’ rather than a pure racing series.  Funnily enough, when Max Mosley got himself into the FIA presidency in 1991 he installed Bernie as his vice-president for marketing all the FIA championships – and within 12 months Group C racing was dead.  Most of the manufacturers, meanwhile, found themselves being wooed towards Formula One.

Like Concorde and the Apollo rockets, Group C racing took us further and faster than we could dream of attempting today.  The races live on in DVD form, and recently the cars have begun to reappear after long years in the wilderness.  Tellingly at last year’s Le Mans, the fastest of the oil-burning Peugeots was fully 10mph slower than the 20-year-old Sauber-Mercedes that starred in the ‘classic’ warm-up race.  Those were the days, indeed.

You get an enormous sense of wellbeing when you first glimse the palm trees of Nice. As the rest of Europe turns to autumnal shades of grey and mud, on the Cote d’Azur the skies above the palm fronds are cornflower blue and the girls beneath are golden brown.  Everything here is as it should be – all year round.

By chance it so happens that the original golden girl of the Riviera, Brigitte Bardot, is celebrating her 75^th birthday at the same time as our visit.  BB was in fact ‘une Parisienne’ by birth but, for her, immortality has come in a bikini with the shimmering sea in the background, rather than as an urban sophisticate or even mad old bat with a lot of stray dogs.

Besides beautiful girls, the other great love affair in this little pocket of paradise is with motor sport.   There is Monte Carlo with its rally and the Grand Prix of course, but also there is La Turbie’s ancient hillclimb, the ghosts of the Nice Grand Prix, Antibes street race and a hundred other long-forgotten races of the Twenties and Thirties. 

You can imagine William Grover-Williams blatting around the place in a Bugatti with Orpen’s muse by his side.  Or Isadora Duncan throwing her scarf over her shoulder in a Type 35 on the Promenade des Anglais with a cheery “Farewell, my friends, I am off to glory!” before garotting herself by mistake.

For a real taste of the old-fashioned opulence of the region, bypass Monaco and Eze and in 20 minutes you’re across the border in Sanremo – home to a rally more glamorous than the Monte and all in a very relaxed Italian mien.  You can tell it’s glamorous – Michele Mouton is on the winner’s list, as is the king of cool, Markku Alen. 

These days Sanremo is a round of the Intercontinental Rally Challenge, meaning that hordes of rorty Super 2000 superminis abound.  Admiring the pluck of young crews setting off in rally-prepared Seicentos and Pandas to take on works Skodas and Abarths is great fun – all the more so as there is still classic style dripping from every pore of the place.  There’s a historic event that runs side-by-side with the modern stuff, and it drips with all the charm of the region.

So much so, in fact, that while battle has raged in the hills, I’ve been having fun of my own.  After all, if one had the means, there is nowhere else on earth that would be nicer to live – or simply have a little pied-a-terre to retreat to when the real world gets too much.  But what sort of cars would you have in your ‘garage paradiso’? 

Here cheap is chic and yet supercars are a must-have.  The local population is to be found in Fiat 500s – both the original ‘Fifties cutie and its modern reincarnation.  Yet a base model Renault Clio in oxidised white paint is rendered cool beyond words by its surroundings, which makes things tricky.

 It’s a matter of taste, and having the wrong car could be as socially damning as being caught with last season’s Vuitton.  So, with a few criteria, we began to fill our fantasy driveway.

There could be nothing American or Japanese, obviously.  Big, uncouth barges and clinical gadget-driven machinery have no place in the belle monde.  It would be a brave move to go German as well, because while the roads would be seductive in a 911 or an M3, they just lack the right laid-back joie de vivre.

If you’re going to go glam, you’d better be prepared to do it right.  A Lancia Stratos may have been awesome in the hills above you, but a more modestly-paced Frua-bodied Maserati A6G will be leagues ahead in the cool stakes.  So, here is my verdict on the cars for every occasion when in the Riviera.  I’m sure Brigitte would be proud:

For picking up a pain au raisin at breakfast time – vintage Vespa scooter

For airport trips and the weekly shop – Nuova Fiat 500 Abarth

For chic lunch appointments in Antibes – Renault Floride

For weekends racing between lunch in Portofino, dinner at the Hotel Byblos, dancing in the Caves du Roy and breakfast in Monaco – Ferrari 275 GTB

For strapping on a ski rack and heading into the Alpes Maritimes – Alpine A110

Bernd Rosemeyer was born 100 years ago today.  We all know the legend of the man who knew no fear, who took the mighty V16 Auto Union grand prix cars and streamliners by the scruff of the neck and hustled them to ten international race victories, a European championship and a succession of world speed records... but who exactly was he?

It is not an easy question to answer, because all that we accepted about the legendary ‘Silver Arrows’ of Auto Union and Mercedes-Benz has been shown to be somewhat wide of the mark.  The ties between the fabulous racing cars and the Nazi state that nurtured them have been glossed over, the swastikas painted out of the photographs and the legends re-written to the point where, today, fact and fiction are all-but inextricable.

All of us marvel whenever the Mercedes-Benz museum wheels out its old tigers at Goodwood, Donington or the ‘Ring.  We applaud the determination of Auto Union to rebuild its pre-war arsenal of Porsche-designed V16s and later V12s and we all thrill to see them, hear them, smell their ‘special brew’ fuel and retell the old legends.  Yet for all that is presented to us we see so little... just as Audi, Porsche and Mercedes would like us to see.

Rather than face any uncomfortable truths, we in the motor sport community long chose to accept what was explained to us.  So it was, for example, that the line was swallowed that there was no state funding drive for the German racing cars of 1934-39.  We chose to believe that Hitler alone put forward a bounty of 500,000 Reichmarks for the design of the ‘German racing car’ in 1933 and then had to split the figure between two teams rather than one. 

Until recently there was no mention of the government funds that totalled up to 40% of the annual budget of both teams, or of the offsetting of budget against orders for new aircraft engines, tanks, staff cars, trucks and the weaponry of war.  Nor of the squeeze put on the AvD and ADAC – as Germany’s national motoring clubs – to chip in to the racing fund.

In much the same way we chose to believe that the ‘Silver Arrows’ were born out of necessity as a weight-saving measure in the paddock at the Nürburgring the night before the 1934 Eifelrennen, when their German ‘racing white’ paint was stripped off to get under the 750kg weight limit.  The fact is, however, that none of the cars was ever seen at a race meeting in white paint, and that the Eifelrennen was a ‘Formule Libre’ event that didn’t impose a maximum weight limit.

We are told that the drivers themselves (and men like Mercedes-Benz racing manager Alfred Neubauer, or the designers Ferdinand Porsche and Rudolf Uhlenhaut), carried on as if the Third Reich didn’t exist – or if they did notice, they poked fun at it.  From the post-war ‘denazification’ hearings onward, the racing men claimed that they only ever joined the Nazi motoring corps, that this was done under duress and that they were never involved with the party or its politics... which is slightly at odds with the facts.

Hermann Lang, the 1939 champion, was a paid-up member of the Nazi party.  Having climbed from obscurity to Grand Prix mastery via the shop floor of the factory he fully believed that he could never have become a racing legend without a Nazi government.  Thirty years later he remarked: ‘We were proud of it’.

Auto Union’s original star man Hans Stuck is often held up as a paragon of anti-Nazi revolt among the racers.  It is true that he was unpopular among the rank and file of Nazis because his wife had a Jewish grandfather – yet after his performances declined and Rosemeyer’s soared, who argued for his reinstatement in the team?  None other than SS-Gruppenführer Karl Wolff, acting on behalf of his boss Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.  In effect Himmler bullied Auto Union into keeping Stuck on the squad for the 1938-39 seasons, regardless of his wife’s ancestry.

But when it comes to the SS in motor sport, the name most closely associated with that most sinister order of the Nazi regime is none other than Bernd Rosemeyer.  Far  the legend of being press-ganged into the motor corps and festooned with unwanted rank as he grew famous, he was in fact a volunteer for the SS – joining in 1932, before Hitler had even come to power. 

Sure enough Rosemeyer was promoted within the SS for each of his many achievements –  to the point where he died as a Hauptsturmführer or captain.  Far from being a ceremonial position, most had to work extremely hard to attain such rank – most notably Josef Mengele, Klaus Barbie and Amon Göth.  Yet to her dying day Rosemeyer’s widow Elly Beinhorn repeatedly claimed that her husband never so much as wore the uniform... although unearthed photographs now prove that to be, at best, a mistake on her part.

To me the ‘Silver Arrows’ of the 1930s remain one of the most hypnotic and, yes, heroic stories in the history of motor racing.  What was achieved in the workshops of Zwikau and Untertürkheim can never be belittled, nor the raw courage on the track ever underestimated.  Yet for too long the very humanity that created the legends has been downplayed, hidden away and ultimately cheapened.

The distortion of time, selected memory and downright lies has given us a picture of Bernd Rosemeyer as a child-like 28-year-old whose only allegiance was to speed.  There is no doubt that he was, in a too-brief career, one of the most gifted exponents of the art of driving fast that the world had ever seen.  What else either he or his contemporaries may have been is left, for the time being at least, as pure conjecture.

Bernd Rosemeyer – 14 October 1909 – 28 January 1938

International Race Wins

1935 Masaryk GP (Brno, CZ)
1936 Eifelrennen (Nürburgring, D)
1936 German Grand Prix (Nürburgring, D)
1936 Coppa Ciano (Livorno, I)
1936 Coppa Acerbo (Pescara, I)
1936 Swiss GP (Bremgarten, CH)
1936 Italian GP (Monza, I)
1937 Eifelrennen (Nurburgring, D)
1937 Vanderbilt Cup (New York, USA)
1937 Donington GP (Donington Park, UK)

1936 European Grand Prix Champion

1936 German Mountain Champion

International Speed Records

16 June 1937 ‘Flying’ times (set in streamlined car from rolling start)
1 kilometre: 389.610 km/h (242.093 mph)
1 mile: 389.881 km/h (242.261 mph)
5 km: 376.254 km/h (233.794 mph)
5 miles: 368.505 km/h (228.979 mph)
10 km: 357.214 km/h (221.962 mph)
10 miles: 360.279 km/h (233.867 mph) World Record

25 October 1937 ‘Standing’ times (set in Grand Prix car from stationary start)
1 kilometre: 351.906 km/h (218.664 mph)
1 Mile: 353.271 km/h (219.512 mph)
5 km: 346.220 km/h (215.131 mph)
10 km: 334.510 km/h (207.855 mph)

25 October 1937 ‘Flying’ times (set in steamlined car from rolling start)

1 kilometre: 406.321 km/h (252.476 mph)  
1 mile: 406.286 km/h (252.454 mph)

26 October 1937 ‘Standing’ times (set in Grand Prix car from stationary start)
1 kilometre: 188.679 km/h (117.240 mph) World Record
1 mile: 216.423 km/h (134.479 mph) World Record

26 October 1937 ‘Flying’ times (set in steamlined car from rolling start)
5 km: 404.585 km/h (251.398 mph)

27 October 1937 ‘Standing’ times (set in streamlined car from a stationary start)
1 Mile: 223.176 km/h (138.675 mph)   World Record

27 October 1937 (records set in Grand Prix car) 
1 kilometre Standing Start: 169.811 km/h (105.516 mph)
1 mile Standing Start: 199.505 km/h (123.967 mph)  
5 km: 346.154 km/h (215.090 mph)  
5 miles: 345.106 km/h (214.439 mph) 
10 km: 341.621 km/h (212.273 mph) 
10 miles: 340.903 km/h (211.827 mph)

'Soon Mosley will be gone, to be followed one day by his little pal. Behind them the pair will leave a sport stripped of its integrity, its old values replaced by a superficial prosperity that can no longer conceal a putrescent core.' Richard Williams, The Guardian.

This damning little passage from one of the sport’s most inspiring scribes (even if his historical books are a touch patchy), has resonated this week.  Written in the wake of the Renault F1 debacle, it is imbued with the yearning for the sport’s good old days that almost every fan shares – even if they cannot agree when those days might have been.

Golden eras are a generational thing.  There are those who pine for the ‘Formula Ford’ era of the 1970s; those who feel that the ‘half-tonner’ cars of the early Sixties represent a minimalist perfection; there are many fans of the fireworks that were the hallmark of Prost vs. Senna vs. Piquet vs. Mansell; the turbo-era afficianadoes... the list is endless.

All are united by one common bond: believing that things just ain’t what they used to be.

The question is, were those days ever as great as we like to remember them? Already the Schumacher era is being canonised as one of unprecedented virtuosity – the contribution of the team members, compliant number two drivers and the complete cock-ups of rival teams being pushed as far back into the shadows as his many indiscretions on the track.

How often, for example, is Giuseppe Farina remembered as first Formula One world champion rather than a man who would do his best to have you off the road – regardless of the consequences – even if you were lapping him?  How many people think of the pre-war Silver Arrows as anything but a calling-card for the Third Reich, staffed in the main by voluntarily card-carrying Nazis?

For me what rankles deepest in today’s sport comes from the culture – or lack of it – created in the reign of Max Mosley and Bernie Ecclestone. 

Employing a driver who requires the instruction to ‘push’ during a race, for example, or is too stupid to know what lap he is on, simply beggars belief – regardless of whether he has been ordered to crash on that lap or not. Then there is the bastardising of the racer’s language so that the qualifying session is now ‘quali’, Eau Rouge is ‘Turn 3’ and the Lesmos are ‘Turns 6 and 7’.

These matters trouble me more deelpy than whether or not disgruntled team members are circulating knowledge of their car designs, or bad drivers tailor a low speed crash to order.

The history of every sport is filled with cheats, crooks and liars from the gladiators onward – but the current scandals of Formula One are symtomatic of the enormous self-importance that has been fostered by cloistering the paddock behind electronic gates and great swathes of opaque screening. 

Sport requires two things to be considered great: heritage and an affinity with its followers – whether factual, notional or manufactured.  Formula One has long since abandoned any affinity with its followers and has done its damndest to recreate its own history, abandoning its founding Grand Prix in France and jeopardising its European heartland in the search for ever-more cash...

A search that began with Gold Leaf Team Lotus in 1968.  Clark, Hill, Chapman, Lotus 49... ah, what a golden era that was!

When I was a youngster, many of my peers would write letters to the jewelry-encrusted, tracksuit-wearing former disk jockey Jimmy Savile expressing their heart's greatest desires.  For the lucky few, Jim'll Fix It allowed young girls to dance with the Royal Ballet and young boys to ride through a ring of fire with a motorcycle display team – and the rest of us jealously watched them doing so on TV. 

Having been granted their wish through the magical medium of the BBC, the kids would then go and meet old Jimmy in the studio, where he would lovingly place a Jim'll Fix It medal of achievement around their necks, present a memento of the experience and ask the audience 'Now then, now then, guys and gals, how's about that then?' 

These days such things are, of course, politically a no-no.  Encouraging pre-pubescent children to write letters about their deepest longings to a long-haired septuagenarian bachelor (and then to sit in close proximity of him while he smoked a large cigar), would incite rioting the length and breadth of the land in this day and age, possibly knocking swine 'flu off the front page. 

I don't know if there was ever a French version of Jimmy Savile, but it would appear that Sebastien Loeb may well be on the way to having his greatest wish come true. Because if there's one thing Sebastien would like more than ten consecutive WRC titles, or even victory at Le Mans, it's the chance to drive a Formula One car competitively. 

 Having now logged two majorly impressive Formula One tests in the past couple of seasons, the world's favourite gymnast-cum-rally-god positively glows whenever the prospect is mentioned to him… and now, lo and behold, the opportunity may be at hand. 

The Citroen WRC team is, of course, sponsored by Red Bull.  And as luck would have it, Scuderia Toro Rosso has a spare seat since it gave up on the hope of Sebastien Bourdais doing very much while perched upon it.  Currently it has a very young man in the car who has yet to show any eyecatching form, and as there aren't exactly any major championship honours at stake then… why not make Sebastien's dreams come true?   

Let's face it: France has little else to sing and dance about in Formula One these days.  As the creator of Grand Prix racing it has confronted the ignominy of watching its race be swept off the Formula One calendar after 103 years and, with the Renault squad being about as French as Lord Nelson, the Tricolore has been hanging rather forlornly at the sport's pinnacle of late. 

Loeb may not win a race… but he is a 24 carat superstar.  He is, admittedly, about two decades older than most aspiring Formula One drivers but he is also fundamentally talented and infinitely marketable.  You cannot help but hope to see it happen. 

So it's down to Mr. Mateschitz, the Red Bull supremo, to make the call.  And if Loeb is to get his wish from 'Diet'll Fix It' then he can look forward to my letter asking for a ride in a Spitfire very shortly.

Presumably Mikko Hirvonen's sponsors at Abu Dhabi read this column and hastened round to his car with a packet of their magic crinkle-cut crisps.  His victory, particularly on such a rich and evocative event as the Acropolis, was exactly what he – and the championship – needed.

In the very landscape where Aesop sat and told his fables, the steady slog of Hirvonen's victory took a great chunk out of Sébastien Loeb's hare-like performance in the opening half of the season.  Admittedly I can't recall a fable where the tortoise had a 300hp Focus RS under its shell, but then anything's open to interpretation.

With five rallies to go Seb has just seven points in hand, and while Dani Sordo showed prodigious speed in Greece neither of the works Citroens scored a point.  Sacre bleu!  Sacre shunt!

Now the Essex boys at Ford (no stereotyping for a pair of Finnish-driven, Emirati-sponsored cars built in Cumbria there then), have got some momentum going.  Jari-Matti Latvala's title hopes may have ended up in a heap at the bottom of a Portuguese hillside but he's now delivering regular manufacturer points.  Hirvonen's finally stepped out of the bridesmaid's dress and produced a very classy victory – it's coming together nicely.

Yet Loeb looks no more ruffled now than he did when he threw himself off the bridge over the Corinth Canal on Thursday for a bit of bungee fun.  He may have just had the biggest shunt of his WRC career – several people's WRC careers in fact – but all we see is a Gallic shrug, a mildly amused smile and a bit of a glint in the eye.

As Ford team boss Malcolm Wilson reflected on his broken shoulder and rib: 'Well Sébastien managed to win the title after breaking his arm so I thought it might work for us'.  There's the rub: the gap's closed up nicely but it's still going to take something special to actually get past – and everyone knows it.

Seb knows that he will have the satisfaction of fighting off a resurgent team to claim his sixth title.  Ford knows that it is going to have to stretch every sinew and use its combination of Latvala's pace and Hirvonen's strength to the full.  And we know that we're going to see a great champion taking on a pretty formidable challenge.

The only problem I can see at the moment is that we're going to have to go to the backwoods of Poland for the next installment!

Coming to the end of the opening day's action on the Acropolis was rather like the watching last few minutes of The Deer Hunter.  All that tension and wondering who's going to end up with the poisoned chalice of leading the way through the gravel in the WRC's regular game of Russian Roulette.

Sebastien Loeb had manfully kept himself in the frame despite being forced to sweep some of the most demanding stages of the season, but no tactics were really called for to keep him away from the overnight lead.  Dani Sordo had put in a strong performance and kept early leader Jari-Matti Latvala honest, so quite naturally in the back-to-front world of Day 1 he backed off at the end. 

Latvala meanwhile slipped off the road and dropped three minutes – which was hardly intentional but it may actually be a blessing in disguise.  What it meant for his team mate Mikko Hirvonen, however, was that he took the bullet and will be the one sweeping the roads for everyone on the morrow.

Poor old Mikko.  As Edmund Blackadder once said: 'my life is strewn with cowpats from the devil's own satanic herd'.  Probably the intercom in the Focus crackled with something very similar at the end of Stage 6.  In Finnish, of course.

Certainly something seems to have gummed up Hirvonen's progress towards WRC greatness of late, cowpats or not.  Life seems to have settled into a disappointing pattern of finishing second and sportsmen of Mikko's calibre simply don't know how to spell 'second'.  While Latvala has bounced back from an abominable start to this year with victory in Sardinia, Hirvonen has nothing to bounce about… and it shows.

As someone who will happily champion this fine sport and all who compete in it, I set about thinking of ways in which to put a spring in his step.  Obviously the mystery blonde sprang to mind, as the day's always a little brighter after she's shimmered through it, but sadly this weekend she's absent – and as a result the mystery is a mystery no longer.

"Oh I know who you mean," said my man at Subaru.  "She's with one of our teams – Uspenskiy Rally Tecnica."  Once he'd put his teeth back in he explained that she works for Patrik Flodin's Russian outfit in the Production WRC.  Doing what, I wondered.  "Riding a bicycle and putting a smile on everyone's face," said he.

This got me no closer to finding a solution for the Hirvo Blues, of course, so I stopped in at the Abu Dhabi Oasis, which is where the Emiratis put on a complete home-from-home for the rally media – right in the heart of the service area.  Having missed lunch and breakfast I was glad to find a bowl of crinkle-cut crisps, which I haven't had since I was a kid, and looked out over the sparkling breakers on the Gulf of Corinth. 

The combination of sea breeze and ready salted snack produced my Eureka moment.  I suddenly thought: this is one of the world's greatest rallies.  The weather's amazing.  The sea is positively turquoise.  What would I do if I was leading the rally as well?  I'd put my foot down and thank heaven for my good fortune.

So there you have it: the solution to the Hirvo Blues. A packet of old-fashioned crisps to inspire some old-fashioned winning by taking the lead and staying there, letting everyone else eat your dust.  There are two more days to go and rather than look upon the day's events as a disaster, just look at it as a clear shot at win number 8.

And for my next trick…