Mike Thackwell: the maverick who refused to play the game

Have a crack he certainly did, immediately on the pace and on the podium. People sat up, made a note of the name.

“It was fun, and I knew I could beat the other guys,” he smiles almost apologetically. “I’d already said to myself – ‘there’s 25 guys in the world racing F1 cars and, if I could do that, then I should do that.’ We looked after our own cars; I was teamed up with James Weaver, and we taught at the Scorpion Racing School together. He could build engines, fix just about anything, and we were always experimenting with stuff. James was the master of what we called the ‘big send’, attacking a corner at right angles, big slide on – probably not the most technical way to do it, but he was the master of that. He’d fly past me, throw his car into a huge slide right in front of me, crazy. They were good times.”

Thackwell’s early career was nothing less than meteoric. In 1979, at the age of just 18, he was instantly a front-runner in the Vandervell F3 series, taking five wins in a works March 793, beating the likes of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Kenny Acheson. When times were hard Alan Jones helped him out with some cash and he was the talk of the town. Predictably, March took him into F2 for 1980, in the works BMW-powered 802, where he impressed again but with frustratingly few results and too many retirements. But he’d put in some brilliant drives, attracting F1 offers from Ensign when Clay Regazzoni was injured – which he turned down – and from Arrows which he accepted, standing in for an injured Jochen Mass at Zandvoort.

“That was tough,” he laughs. “I’d never sat in the car before practice and the ground effects, with those skirts, made it so heavy to drive. My neck was all over the place and I struggled to hang on to it through the long right-hander on to the straight. But I loved that run down and into Tarzan, a great corner, and we only just failed to make the grid.”

By half a second in fact, and 1.32sec behind Riccardo Patrese who’d driven the car all year. This performance came to the notice of Ken Tyrrell who offered Mike a third car for Montréal and Watkins Glen at the end of the year.

“Yeah, it all happened so quickly, and maybe I hadn’t grown up enough at that stage – I mean, I was 19 years old, for God’s sake – and there I was on the grid for the Canadian Grand Prix. But I deserved to be there, I knew I was quick enough, I had the respect of the other guys and I was confident I could do the job. Anyway, I sat on the back row in the Tyrrell, and there – just two places ahead of me – was Gilles Villeneuve, an absolute hero of mine. He was how a racing driver should be, head and shoulders above the rest of them, I reckoned. In the drivers briefings he didn’t pay much attention to all the talk of safety… He kind of sat there looking a bit bored, slightly amused by it all. Anyway, it was the time of a tyre war, and so the grid was all mixed up. The Michelins weren’t working well in the cold weather, and Villeneuve should have been way further up the grid. Jody Scheckter didn’t even qualify and I thought ‘this F1 is crazy’ – both Jody and Gilles were way more experienced than me.

“I knew the track like the back of my hand,” Mike tells me, with a big smile. “I’d been an instructor there with the Scorpion school. I was feeling so confident, pretty blasé to be honest, and we’d tested there a lot. I knew I could walk that race, nobody was going to touch me that year, that’s how I felt. Going into practice I told Ron I’d try the stiff set up we’d talked about. He warned me that the hard dampers and springs, on hard Pirellis, might cause the car to bottom out over the bumps. He told me to take it easy. But, hey, I wasn’t worried, just wanted to get out there. So Geoff [Lees] and I went out, Geoff was in front of me, and I started chasing him, throwing the car around a bit. There was no way he was going to be quicker than me. Then, all of a sudden, I was going beyond that limit that all drivers sometimes go beyond – you have to – like Villeneuve, or Senna, they were often over that limit, in that special zone. But, at the fast bit out the back I hit a bump, lost it, simple as that, and hit a marshals post very hard. My head hit the steering wheel; it was a heavy blow, my helmet cracked. I don’t remember very much after that. It was just bad luck, the post being where it was.

“The car folded up like a banana. I was a bit beaten up, and they took me to hospital. My left leg, heel and ankle were smashed up and I wasn’t in great shape for a while. Ron said it was his fault, he shouldn’t have let me put the hard set-up on the car, but I told him: ‘don’t be stupid, I made a mistake, hands up. I just lost it, no excuses’.”

Recovery from this lasted for months, any hope of the title gone, and Mike began to think a little differently about his racing. Tauranac wasn’t convinced of his fitness at the end of ’81 and he was forced to look elsewhere. A major setback for the young man who’d already had a tempting taste of F1.

“Yeah, I did change after that,” he says. “Nothing to do with safety, that never bothered me, but I needed to grow up, and other aspects of my life began to be more important. I hadn’t really had time to grow up, so while I was out of the car and when I got back I was changing as a person, and I guess that was the beginning of me seeing a life away from motor racing. The racing somehow didn’t seem so important any more, not as fundamental to my life as it had been through the early years when it was all I wanted, all I thought about. Looking back, I was in a bubble, very self-centred, and the accident somehow changed me.”

In fact Mike returned to Ralt in 1983 after a year with the Horag March 822 which produced sporadic results on a very small budget. His return to Ralt saw him forced to play second fiddle to Jonathan Palmer, a deal he’d agreed in advance with Tauranac. He was getting back to his best, chased Palmer hard for the title, and then, in 1984, he simply ran away with the F2 championship. In a league of his own in the Ralt RH6/84, he took six poles, nine fastest laps and won seven of the 11 races while leading 408 of the 580 laps that were run that year.

“That felt good, yeah, and I was enjoying the driving. That car was so good, too quick for the formula really, too easy in some ways,” he smiles, ready to surprise me again. “I always raced best when things were tough, when conditions were against me. My best drives came when things were as difficult as they could be. At Spa in 1985 the F3000 race was on the same weekend as the Grand Prix, the track was breaking up, the F1 boys refused to race and went home on the Saturday. What the hell was that about? Just confirmed my view of F1, you know, because I was there to race. That’s what we’d gone there to do. Ron wasn’t that keen but said it was up to the drivers and most of us were ready to give it a go. In the race I went off a couple of times, most people did, but I won, and that was one of my best-ever races because the track conditions were so difficult. I should have won the title that year, and after that maybe my motivation went away a bit.”

More F1 cameos with RAM and Tyrrell had led to nothing, but he made sports car forays too, for Jaguar and then Mercedes with whom he won the 1986 Nürburgring 1000Kms partnering Henri Pescarolo. But by the end of 1987 he’d walked away from racing.

“Hey, those Merc sports cars were so quick, loads of grip, great to drive,” he says. “But I’d had enough. I quit racing and went to fly helicopters in the North Sea oilfields. That was good. And I spent some time back in Australia helping my dad with his gold exploration. I tell you, digging for gold is hard work.”

As we continue chatting in the winter chill, Mike puffs at his pipe, sips a Famous Grouse, flicks through a few photos. Here’s a man content to be who he is and where he is. We ramble away from racing cars, to Hippocrates and Socrates, to our mutual fascination with the mysteries of the human condition. A deep thinker, Mike has little time or patience with what might have been.

“Look, you gotta understand,” he says, looking me very straight in the eye. “It’s been nice getting together again after 30 years, talking about the good times, but F1 just wasn’t going to be my life. There seems to be so little integrity, so little appreciation of the privileges – why would an F1 star want to do a TV ad for a big bank rather than campaign for better road safety? They live in a bubble. It’s beyond me. You have to be tough to walk away and yes, maybe I do regret letting the fans down. They still send me photos to sign. But the things I saw in F1, and the people… they were not for me.”

I try to picture him in Monaco, Boss-suited with Ray-Bans and Rolex in place, and a few smart sentences for the sponsors. Forget it, let’s check out the waves.