Mike Parkes: the F1 driver with too many talents?

The two would work all hours, rush down to prepare the Lotus 11 Parkes was racing, then back to work, then race. Non-stop. Mike was also kept busy with girlfriends who tended to live in London while he was based in the Midlands. “He’d nip down there in the evening, come back in the early hours. Once he put his E-Type in a ditch through fatigue,” Fry recalls.

Parkes’ ability on the track meant people began offering him rides, notably Tommy Sopwith, whose Ecurie Endeavour team ran a squad of Jaguar MkIIs for him, Graham Hill and Jack Sears. This led to a highly successful association with Colonel Ronnie Hoare and the Maranello Concessionaires Ferrari 250GT.

When Parkes went to Le Mans in ’61 to over see the Rootes team of Sunbeam Alpines, he was invited by Ferrari to try a works 250GT. Still dressed in flannels, collar and tie, he was instantly quicker than the regular drivers, was offered a drive in a 250TR for the race and finished second with Willy Mairesse. His affair with Ferrari had begun. At the end of ’62 he left Rootes for a full-time position at Maranello as a development engineer cum race driver.

Delighted though he was, the language barrier meant he was lost outside the factory. Brenda Vernor was teaching English to Italian students locally, and Parkes sought her out to help with his correspondence.

“I first saw him,” she says, “sitting in the sitting room at the house where I was boarding. I felt sorry for this tall, slim, good-looking man sitting by himself, unable to converse with the family of the house.

“The arrangement suited me because I was free from school most evenings and it gave me some little pocket money, though over the years our relationship did become more than boss/secretary, after which I wasn’t paid anymore!

“Deep down he was very sensitive but he also had a wonderful sense of humour, especially when he was racing with ‘Lulu’ Scarfiotti and Lorenzo Bandini – they’d get up to such pranks. Most of the people he worked with at Ferrari, other engineers and mechanics, loved him.”

Indeed the Commendatore himself came to form a rare bond with him. Some even said Parkes had unofficially become Enzo’s right hand man. “There was a definite spark between them,” says Annabel Parkes. “I think it might have been because he was more than a driver – he was in the factory every day. There was a lot of joking. Mike introduced me to him as his sister and Mr Ferrari said ‘what, another one?’ and Mike replied ‘no, this really is my sister.’”

It should have been the dream job for Parkes and certainly he was happy, but a part of him remained unfulfilled. Even though he had spent over a decade in love with his work as an engineer at Rootes and racing only as a side line, by his mid-30s he had become more ambitious about his driving. Emboldened by a tally of victories in sportscars – the Sebring 12 Hours in ’64, Monza 1000km in ’65 and ’66, the Spa 1000km in ’66 – he yearned for an F1 chance and campaigned heavily to the boss. It smacks of a conflict between the driving and engineering sides of him; he could do both, but being ambitious in one tended to take him away from the other. The equilibrium was disturbed, and the fall-out was volcanic.

When he returned full-time to Ferrari in ’69 it was to continue with his engineering work and to manage the sportscar programme. It was not, of course, what he wanted. “He was more determined than ever,” says Brenda. “He wanted to get back into racing; it was as though the accident hadn’t happened.”

The boss, however, was adamant he didn’t want Parkes back behind the wheel, saying he was too valuable an engineer for the factory to risk. It was after yet another plea from Parkes that Ferrari made him what Sopwith describes as “a staggering offer. It was all but offering him the position of being Ferrari’s heir, and the money was fantastic. The only condition was that he give up racing. We were down on our knees begging him to accept it. I remember saying to him ‘you’ve done it, you’ve proved how good a driver you are, now move on and take this.’ But the idiot still wanted to be a hero driver and he turned it down. I think that was the biggest mistake of his life.”

In 1971 Parkes severed his links with Maranello to race a privateer Ferrari 512S, and later a Pantera, for Scuderia Filipinetti with middling results. When, in early 1974, the team disbanded after the owner’s death, Parkes moved to Lancia as a development engineer for the exciting new Ferrari-engined Stratos rally car. No-one had yet designed a supercar for the forests and Parkes’ dual skills – being sufficiently quick to get representative feedback but also understanding the engineering implications – were crucial in making the car one of the most devastatingly successful of all time.

Sandro Munari did much of the winning and his co-driver Piero Sodano confirms that Parkes was instrumental in the team functioning so well. “He had a great understanding of the drivers and they in turn respected him very much because he was a kind of legend.”

With the Stratos programme ending by 1977, Mike was getting restless again. He was no longer racing and his life was at a crossroads. “I often saw him cry,” says Brenda, “and he’d been crying the weekend he was killed. He was depressed and no longer happy at Lancia. I think what was worrying him was that he wasn’t getting any younger and was afraid that he wouldn’t find another job that interested him.”

There were changes afoot in his personal life too. He planned to marry an English woman, Penelope Dowson, and had asked Sopwith to be his best man. Maybe, at 47, he was finally thinking of settling down. Fry remembers being taken aback by something Parkes had said on a visit back to England. “He had everything I thought I wanted – a smart flat in Modena, an aeroplane, a fast motorbike, a Ferrari, Bentley, Cooper S and a hot Imp. But he went upstairs, looked wistfully at the children in bed, came down and said ‘good heavens, you have done well, Tim.’”