Money talks – but sometimes it’s fibbing. Flighty financier JP van Rossem kept Onyx on track, then flapped off
Grand Prix Photo
Paddock rumours of skulduggery from mild cheating to murder have always been popular gossip, but Crispian Besley has decided to pin down a bookful of those which have the evidence to prove them. I assume that he and Evro have had some careful conversations with lawyers, though he points out that everything he includes is in the public domain already. Many will be known to racing people, he says, but he reckons plenty will be unknown – and as he has assembled 66 different crimes he’s on solid ground there. Looking at the extent of his references, he has deeply immersed himself in this grubby business.
His introduction quotes this from George Orwell: “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in violence.” I didn’t expect to see any of the last but it’s here – an appalling serial killer who drove in IMSA. It’s particularly gruesome, and closes with a picture of his dead body.
I’m relieved to see that in his list of certified bad boys – “entrants, drivers, team owners, mechanics, sponsors, race promoters, circuit owners, spectators, fantasists and even protesters” – Besley leaves out we journalists, although he could have mentioned the editor who put libellous words in the mouth of a grand prix driver. I see I’m listed in here, though – as a source, not a suspect. (I also hit a new high: the title page includes two quotations, one from E Hemingway, the other from G Cruickshank. A pairing that will never happen again.)
Motor racing, writes Besley, provides an ideal platform for certain crimes, especially fraud (a Ponzi scheme that funded Porsche racing) and drug smuggling (Vic Lee’s cocaine-stuffed transporter), adding that he doesn’t mean to trivialise the crimes or to glorify the miscreants, and indeed he takes a neutral line as he explains the Middlebridge/Brabham crash and the financial shenanigans that tempted Lord Brocket into faking a multi-car theft for the insurance. As well as being a keen historic racer, Besley is in finance himself so he’s well placed to explain the build-up to the Bernie Ecclestone/Gerhard Gribkowsky bribery scandal and the sleight of hand involved in the Lotus/DeLorean affair, quoting the judge at the trial of Colin Chapman’s right-hand man Fred Bushell as saying, “If Chapman had been in the dock he would have received a minimum of 10 years for a massive fraud.” Mind you, DeLorean deserved that for perpetrating that terrible car on a gullible public.
Unintented crimes are included: racer Kaye Don was jailed after his passenger died in a crash
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There are, and yes I’m going to say it, the usual suspects: Nelson Piquet Jr and Crashgate, drug-running John Paul Sr and Jr, Spygate, Jean-Pierre van Rossem who bought the Onyx F1 team before his dubious Moneytron firm imploded (he later bought a refrigerated coffin for his wife).
But there was plenty new to me: the youthful idiot who joined a Brands Hatch race three-up in his girlfriend’s VW Polo, and the unknown ‘L W Wright’ who blagged cash, car and entry to a major NASCAR race and then vanished for ever. Do you remember Southern Organs sponsoring a race series? Who knew that the two men behind the associated fraud went on the run and lived for eight months in a roofless bothy on a Scottish island. A fascinating and ludicrous story.
Every so often Besley throws in an Easter egg (1930s racer Kaye Don being imprisoned for manslaughter, the sad legal infighting that finished the famous Bardinon car collection), then we’re back to more wrongdoing – a photo of Jean-Marie Balestre in SS uniform, tales of ‘Prince’ Malik who offered Tom Walkinshaw $125m in sponsorship and then scarpered. Besley notes without comment that Malik recently announced his intention to run for the presidency of Nigeria.
“Motor racing provides an ideal platform for certain crimes”
He’s similarly cagey over who organised the Max Mosley News of the World sexposé, quoting from Mosley’s autobiography that “the conventional wisdom… has always been that someone in F1 was behind it”. Besley simply concludes “there are several suspects” – and wisely stops there.
Coming to Cooper racer Ian Burgess – jailed for smuggling heroin which he claimed was an MI5 spying fee – the book extends the story beyond what Burgess told me when I tracked him down in the 1990s. Intriguing to find that when I interviewed this charming rogue in a London club he was actually on the run, having escaped his open prison. No wonder he wouldn’t give me contact details. “I’m only in the UK very briefly, dear boy.”
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Driven To Crime: True Stories of Wrongdoing in Motor Racing Crispian Besley Evro, £40 ISBN 9781910505700 |
It’s a hugely entertaining book, despite a tendency to get waylaid by history – the chapter on Giovanna Amati (not a criminal but a kidnappee – victims are in here too) gets distracted into the complete rundown of women in Formula 1, and each entry includes the full story of the team or driver concerned. There are seven pages of Lotus history before we get to the meaty stuff – handy if you’d never heard of them but that might have been trimmed given the expected readership. At around 500 pages, it’s a hefty hardback.
While he was researching it I loaned Crispian my copy of the typewritten ‘samizdat’ Naughty Quiz which lists a range of embarrassing or illegal events in racing, but as only a few can be proven he has wisely skated round these. Even without, it’s a riotous read.
Jon Saltinstall
Motor Sport’s taster of this title (Jacky Ickx: his significant races, January) picked out 10 notable drives/rides of the Belgian master. Open the book itself and you find 573 boxed descriptions, one for every race of his career, with yearly scene-setters. Not a format to draw me in, to be honest – a lot of potted race reports? But read through and the story of this dedicated individual with the film-star smile slowly assembles, from the eager kid winning trials (and collecting pinball machines) to the gritty, thoughtful endurance expert – who could equally win a Formula 1 race, a 1000Kms WSC round or a desert raid.
While the range and the research of the book impress, the format restricts photo size (900 of them!) and I found I wanted to hear more from and about the character of the driver – the two-page intro by Derek Bell, so often sharing a Rothmans Porsche with the Belgian, tells more human stories than I found in the rest of it. A phenomenal reference then, but the title is firmly correct: this is definitely the story of a career more than of a man. GC
Evro, £95
ISBN 9781910505809
Brian Long
If you’d arrived from a different planet, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the WRC was a racing discipline using hover vehicles, such is the proliferation of ‘in-flight’ images used by publications. This ode to the ‘Lan Evo’ has such a photo on its cover but inside you can also read about the groundwork that made these Mitsubishi monsters so popular with rally aficionados. The subject is attacked chronologically – with Tommi Mäkinen taking a starring role. Perhaps one for the fans. LG
Veloce, £19.99
ISBN 9781787117129
