Motorsport | TheShortAxleblog

One of the big regrets of my life is that I haven’t (so far) competed in a motor race. While being heavily involved with the motor sport scene throughout my career, I’ve never been given the opportunity, or committed myself to creating the opportunity, to ‘have a go’.

I’d really like to do it, just once, just to prove I wouldn’t have been that good, and to be secure in that knowledge. Though there was that time with the Porsche track day instructor at Oulton Park who two corners in to my lap said to me; “I can see you’ve done this before, have you raced?” I suggested we went back and got me a bigger crash helmet, even though I was already wearing the largest of the four sizes (small, medium, large, journalist…).

Occasionally, however, I am given a close-up demonstration as to why I wouldn’t have been that brilliant a racer – a snapshot showing how the really good race drivers are very much on a different planet to the rest of us. This week is a case in point.

The occasion is the launch of Honda’s new Civic Tourer, another new contender in a new and growing niche, the downsized estate car. Increasingly it seems, we prefer our load luggers to be crafted from mid-sized family hatches, rather than the larger environment of the Mondeos, Insignias and Accords.

The Civic is the second debuting mid-sized tourer I’ve driven in a week. And yes, the Civic is very good, reliable and practical, and with apparently more rear space than any of its rivals. On the launch event, however, I don’t admit to preferring the Seat Leon ST I drove last week – it had just a bit more upmarket style for me.

The Civic Tourer, however, has one major plus, in that it has been chosen to be the new car for Honda’s uber-successful British Touring Car Championship team. As a result, the launch route takes us for lunch to a very wet Rockingham race circuit near Corby, where the BTCC team are conducting the very first runs of the new car.

This is highly familiar territory for me. Getting on for 10 years ago (which is frightening to think about) I spent a season working at Rockingham, back in the days it had an oval racing championship worth watching. My BTCC history goes back much further, to the eight years working in the series in the 90s (even more frightening to think about), at the height of the Super Touring era – great times, when Matt Neal, today the Honda team’s lead driver and a three-time Champion, was just beginning to make his name.

The team’s PR man Richard Tait-Harris, someone who gives the impression of being on a continual neat caffeine drip, reminds me I’ve known him 18 years before trying to embarrass me by gleefully telling all my fellow hacks how he must get all the team info right or I’ll correct him; “Andrew knows more about touring cars than anyone” – I will have my revenge Mr Tait-Harris…

What Richard knows I know, and most of the other journos here don’t, is that despite the new Civic BTCC car having only turned a wheel for the first time in the last couple of days, we are all going to get taken round the track in it by Mr Neal or his team-mate Gordon Shedden – also a champion of the BTCC series.

Naturally I am at the front of the queue. Unlike most of my colleagues I have ridden in many a touring car before, but not for several years – I think the last time was in 1997, in an Audi driven by the much-maligned John Bintcliffe, who definitely spent most of the lap trying to scare me as payback for all the laughs we had enjoyed at his expense in Touring Car Worldwide magazine…

Matt welcomes me to the cockpit, and as the belts are tightened around my these days rather portly frame I know that with a familiar and experienced passenger aboard, he won’t be pussy-footing around.

And he certainly does not. Three laps later I have had my lesson, my confirmation that I would never be able to race really well, and the catalyst emphasising this fact is rain. I have never before been around a track so thoroughly wet as the Rock is today, and this is both a highly technical circuit and one that becomes lethally slippery so very easily.

Yet Matt circulates this track at speeds I would probably consider impressive on bone-dry Tarmac. He uses all the road, powering right up to the forbidding concrete wall at the final corner, and he uses more than the road, running across kerbs that are twice as greasy as the track and on this day covered in water and mud.

And the car tries oh-so hard to catch him out, even snapping sideways in a straight line at one point. In the corners it breaks away constantly, viciously, yet Matt’s reaction is instant, myself totally amazed at the way he snaps the steering wheel round in total faith that the tyres that have just lost grip will instantly find it again – which they always do. I can’t imagine having such a speed of reaction, such a complete feel for what the car is doing.

Back in the pits, I learn more about this car, the first estate in the BTCC for two decades. I remember the first one, Volvo’s 850, intimately. It was big and boxy, and a pure publicity stunt to announce the Swedish brand’s arrival in the series – the real, win-contending race car came in the following year, and it was a saloon…

Honda can’t afford to simply perform a publicity stunt – its Civic hatches have won the last three BTCC titles, so the novelty of a Tourer will mean nothing if it’s running down the field amongst the have-nots. Honda expects to carry on winning with this car.

And Honda can be confident. It will surprise many to learn that the idea of racing the Tourer came not from the brand’s very clever marketing types (remember the Cog television ad?), but from Matt Neal, the man who will drive the car. And talking to me, Matt confirms that the Tourer has no technical advantages as a race car – its biggest advantage is that there is no disadvantage…

The car is 240mm longer than its hatch sibling, but that extra length is all in the rear – the wheelbase is the same, so save for some careful redistribution to cope with the extra weight of the shell, mechanically this is the same car as its title-winning predecessor.

Perhaps the most pertinent indication, however, of just how confident the team is in this car is the test I’m at. People in motor sport will tell you that the first run of a new car is something done on the quiet, ironing out the inevitable issues out of the public gaze. But three days giving passenger rides to journalists? No way…

So Honda’s Tourer will win races, maybe a championship, in 2014. And I’ll look forward to seeing some of those wins, knowing that’s something I just couldn’t do….

Just before 8.30am on the morning of 4^th January 1967, Donald Campbell eased his Bluebird K7 boat away from the jetty on the edge of Coniston Water and headed out into the lake – in pursuit, as he had been so many times before, of a new world record for speed on water.

His first run, made just after 8.45, saw Bluebird cover the measured kilometre on the lake at an average 297.6mph, though it peaked at around 315mph. Then, unaccountably, without waiting for the wake of that run to subside and the lake to return to its traditional stillness, Donald turned the boat round and began the second, opposite direction, run.

Donald Campbell’s final run – 4th January 1967.

At 8.48, travelling at around 290mph, Bluebird’s bow lifted out of the water and, in a scene that was to be repeatedly played out on newspaper front pages and TV newsreels for days and ultimately years afterwards, the boat performed a graceful backflip, crashing back into the lake to sink to the bottom and take Donald to his death.

Visit Coniston lake today and you will find that air of stillness remains – it’s a tranquil place seemingly quite removed from the drama of 1967 and before. But Campbell reminders are everywhere, his spirit very much pervading Coniston.

There are summer boat trips, retracing the route of the record runs with detailed descriptions of what went on. The shoreline Bluebird café offers a wide range of memorabilia, while the museum built to commemorate Victorian great John Ruskin includes a Campbell wing with photos and artifacts.

Donald Campbell’s memorial on the shore of Coniston.

Eventually this museum will also house the restored Bluebird K7, salvaged from the lake in 2000, in an operation that also eventually located the body of Donald himself. Today he lies at peace in Coniston churchyard – a plot to which many fans of speed make a pilgrimage each year.

Away from home

Yet neither Donald Campbell, or his equally speed-record setting father, Sir Malcolm, came from the Coniston area. Both spent the vast majority of their lives in two small boroughs of East Surrey – boroughs that today barely acknowledge these two heroes ever existed.

Growing up in the small town of Horley, in the shadow of Gatwick airport, I soon became aware that the Campbells were locals. My late father used to tell stories of delivering oil to Donald, while I discovered that a rambling property called Povey Cross cottage, today in increasing danger of being swallowed up by the ever-expanding airport, had been owned for many years in the 1920s by Malcolm. Here he housed his earliest Bluebirds, giants of cars that would be unloaded at Horley railway station and driven home along public roads. It was in these that he took the Land Speed Record past 300mph in 1935, following this by raising the water speed record to 141.470mph, on Coniston lake in 1939.

Malcolm Campbell in his LSR-setting Bluebird of 1935, probably taken at Povey Cross Cottage.

Later, as a cub photographer on the local paper I went to Malcolm’s final home on Reigate Hill, a fascinating building with parts from the Mauretania liner incorporated into it – it was here that he died, after a series of strokes, on 1^st January 1949.

But it was only in 1998, after I was appointed editor of the Dorking & Leatherhead Advertiser newspapers and one Christmas decided to write a couple of features on the Campbells to bolster a fallow news period, that I discovered the full extent of the Campbell local legend.

Against father’s wishes

I learnt how Donald, much less well off than Malcolm but determined to carry on the record-breaking tradition, had rented out a garage at the Reigate Hill Hotel – today still trading as the Reigate Manor – in which he restored his father’s pre-war Bluebird K4 boat. This was something Malcolm had tried to prevent, Donald being forced to buy K4, and the Bluebird car, from the estate. It took great determination and many setbacks, but the younger Campbell finally became a record breaker in his own right in July 1955 with 202.32mph on the lake at Ullswater, not far from Coniston.

Donald then turned to the Land Speed Record, building the jet-powered CN7 car. In the late 1950s when he obtained his first jet engine he reputedly strapped it to the floor of a barn at his then home of Abbotts in the village of Leigh, midway between Reigate and Dorking. The barn is still there, at the opposite end of the road in which my mother lived for nearly 30 years.

Father and son Bluebirds – the 1935 and 1964 LSR cars.

Father and son Bluebirds – the 1935 and 1964 Land Speed Record cars.

As a youngster living at home, I used to drive to the pub in Horley a few times a week, passing another big house en route. Little did I know that Roundwood Hall was Donald’s home after Abbotts, and the big concrete shed that is still visible from the road today specifically built to house the Bluebird car and boat.

Only his final home, Prior’s Ford in Leatherhead, where he was living at the time of his death, has fallen victim to development, today recalled in the replacement building’s name of Campbell Court.

Even in death the Campbell connections with this small part of Surrey remained, particularly in the form of Leo Villa, the faithful mechanic who spent his life organising father and son’s records. After Donald’s death Leo retired to Reigate, where he took up gardening. He died in January 1979 in the same Redhill hospital where I was born 18 years earlier.

Heroes forgotten

When I was editing those two newspapers at the turn of the millennium, the local authority of Dorking & Leatherhead, Mole Valley District Council, was getting very interested in its heritage. Eventually we attended the unveiling of two statues to Mole Valley heroes – the composer Ralph Vaughan-Williams, and the 19^th century builder Thomas Cubitt. But neither Mole Valley or neighbouring Reigate & Banstead has found any reason to commemorate the Campbells.

Brooklands Museum, at the pre-war race circuit on the western edge of Surrey and where Malcolm competed in the 1920s before getting the record-breaking bug, keeps his memory alive through impeccably restored race sheds, while for Donald there is Coniston. But in the district where they lived, the only evidence of two men who set 11 world land and water speed records between them is a tiny, easily-missed display in the Leatherhead local museum. It is by no means enough.

Donald Campbell with his wife Tonia at Goodwood in the 1960s – still a speed king today.

So why raise this now? Well 1964, 50 years ago, was a special year for Donald Campbell. On 17th July on salt beds in Australia, he drove Bluebird KN7 to 403.1mph and finally secured an officially-recognised Land Speed Record, in the eyes of many exercising fatherly demons that had haunted him for years. Then on 31^st December he raised the Water Speed Record to 276.33mph.

His land speed marker was soon beaten but today Donald remains the only man to set land and water records in the same year. It’s the stuff heroes are made of, and well overdue for recognition in his home town. Half a century on, it would be good to see that wrong righted in 2014…

Want to know more about the Campbells and their speed records? I recommend this site; http://www.bluebirdspeedrecords.com/