That teenage student is now past 60, and since my phone call he has managed, one way or another, to spend his life behind the wheel of an extraordinary variety of cars. In fact, he reckons he has raced and tested over 100 different types. He made it – just – into Formula 1, and he climbed the podium at the Le Mans 24 Hours. Achieving his boyhood ambition hasn’t made him rich. It’s been a lifetime of ducking and diving, and at times he has been almost on the breadline. But it’s certainly kept him happy. Now we’re talking over smoked buffalo and dover sole in a delightful Wiltshire pub, The greyhound in Stockbridge, not far from the village where he lives with his wife patsy and three sons.
Tiff was christened Timothy, but when he was born his three-year-old brother had trouble getting his tongue around the name and pronounced it Tiffamy, and it stuck. “Dad was a freelance naval architect, but never seemed to make any real money. Mum was a needlework teacher. We lived in a rented flat, no telly, no washing machine, no central heating. It wasn’t until my grandad died and we moved in with my grandmother that we lived in a house. But dad was mad keen on racing, even though for most of my childhood he didn’t have a car. From when my brother and I were very small we’d all squeeze into our only transport – Mum’s pre-war Austin 7 – and make pilgrimages to goodwood, stopping at the foot of the downs to take on more water because we’d be overheating.
“My earliest memory is seeing peter Collins in the Thinwall Special Ferrari” – presumably the September 1954 meeting, when Collins won the formule libre race. Tiff was then not quite three, but clearly it made a deep impression. “From that moment all I ever wanted was to be a racing driver.” Other goodwood memories are Jim Meikle demonstrating his jet-powered Cooper single-seater in 1957, and Jean Behra’s BRM smiting the chicane in 1958. “And we did the Boxing day Brands Hatch meetings, rugs over our knees, flasks of hot soup. The night before we were going to a race meeting I was always too excited to sleep.
Of course the man I really idolised, the man I’d watched coming up through Formula Junior to lead the Lotus F1 team, was Jim Clark. When I was 16, on our way home from the BOAC 500 at Brands Hatch, we called in to see my aunt. We hadn’t heard the news, but she had: the man we’d expected to see driving the Ford F3L at Brands had been doing a Formula 2 race in Germany instead. And had been killed. I’ll never forget the dreadful shock of hearing that.“
As I got older I did holiday jobs – petrol pump attendant, Christmas postman, anything I could – saving every penny towards my dream. As soon as I left school in the summer of 1969 I went to the racing school at Brands. In those days £10 bought you ten laps. Whenever I had another £10 I’d do ten more, and you could work your way up to doing school races at £30 a time, just four cars on the grid. I’d now been accepted on a five-year sandwich course in civil engineering at City university, six months a year there, six months working at builder george Wimpey’s: and when I was working I was paid £45 a month. That summer I was doing spec housing in Essex. My rent cost £10 a month, and if I could live on £5 a month that left £30 to do a race. I’d hitch-hike home, or jump on trains and buses without a ticket and jump off again before I got caught. Mum’d give me a square meal and some clean clothes, and I’d borrow her old Minor to get me to Brands.”
But, back at university for the winter term, Tiff’s money was all gone, and he had just a few school races to show for it. The only option was to enter the Autosport contest, and hope.
Having received the life-changing news that he’d won, first he had to find a tow car to collect his prize: £75-worth of rusty Morris Minor Traveller dealt with that. Wimpey now had him in Gloucestershire, doing 12-hour days on the construction of the M5, but he took a week’s sick leave to do the Jim Russell course. Two of his fellow pupils were a young Belgian aristo called Patrick Marie Ghislain Pierre Simon Stanislas Nève de Mévergnies, who as Patrick Nève was to get as far as F1 for a brief spell; and a New Yorker called Leigh Gaydos. Six weeks later, in their third race together, Gaydos hit a marshals’ post at Mallory park and died instantly.
Tiff’s first race in the Lotus 69 came at Snetterton. “I couldn’t afford different sets of ratios, or the new trick Firestone Torino tyres that the quick boys were using. But I was fifth in my heat and 10th in the final, so I was under way. The Lotus soon lost its smart red and white colours when someone got sideways in front of me at Snetterton’s Russell Corner, which was nearly flat in top in those days, and I cartwheeled over the bank. It took a month of graft to get it more or less straight.”
None of this diminished Tiff’s dedicated determination. In two and a half seasons he managed a remarkable 90 races in the Lotus, with 82 finishes, 22 podiums – and three wins. The car was kept in a lock-up without lights or power, and the chassis was set up with a length of string and two tin cans. “For engines I built a friendship with Doug and Alan Wardropper, father and son stock-car racers who ran Scholar Racing Engines. They were very kind to me, lost bills down the back of the sofa, did me lots of good turns. But the Lotus got more and more uncompetitive, so in mid-1973 I managed to line up a cost-price Elden chassis, plus a loan engine from Doug and Alan, and sold the Lotus to an Austrian racer.”The Elden brought some success in 1974, but the 1975 factory-loaned Mk 17 that replaced it was an ill-handling disaster. Dividing his time between City University and Wimpey, Tiff was still penniless: any money he could scrape up went, of course, on racing. “I was working five days a week, preparing the car in the evenings, then I’d set off after work on Friday evening in a rusty old Transit which I now took the car around in, and slept in at the track. A lad my age would pull alongside in his new Ford Capri, smart Seventies sweater, dishy Friday date at his side, eight-track stereo playing. I had holes at my elbows, a bungee cord to stop the gear-lever jumping out and I couldn’t afford a car radio. But I was following my dream. I was a racing driver – even though with the Elden I was struggling to finish in the top ten.”