Latest / Rusty's Garage / Craig Baird (Part 1)

Transcript

Craig Baird (Part 1) · Rusty's Garage

• 0:02
  A listener production.
• 0:10
  I'm automotive commentator and journalist Greg Rust, and this is Rusty's Garage.
• 0:27
  For this episode, it's an Aussie in New Zealand, me, talking to a Kiwi in Oz.
• 0:33
  Craig Baird has chalked up some serious miles as a racer, driving all kinds of cars right around the world.
• 0:39
  Colleagues and mates say he was good enough to make it to Formula One and brave enough to be a contender for the title.
• 0:46
  Sadly, that didn't happen.
• 0:48
  Bardo doesn't dwell on ifs, buts and maybes.
• 0:51
  It would have been some ripper yarns if he did.
• 0:54
  The racer with the Simon Le Bon looks and the cheek of James Hunt would have run amok.
• 0:59
  In the twists and turns of his career, he drove with and for some greats.
• 1:04
  The record books in Porsche Carrera Cup have his name at the top of the list of winners from any corner of the globe.
• 1:11
  We've known each other for years, done some dirt bike riding, worked together in broadcasting for a time.
• 1:17
  He's now in race control as an official for supercars, poacher turned gamekeeper, as they say.
• 1:23
  He's quietly helped some younger drivers along the way and was given a New Zealand order of merit for his services to the sport.
• 1:30
  Later on, we'll talk about driving with the king, Peter Brock.
• 1:34
  A tense encounter with the legendary Kenny Smith, surviving a huge crash in South Africa, and the Bathurst win that got away.
• 1:42
  We begin with a little fact check.
• 1:44
  Don't believe everything you read on Wikipedia.
• 1:47
  He's not turning 100 this year.
• 1:50
  That could actually be Luca, I reckon.
• 1:51
  That could be my son Luca fudging around with that, but I've read it before.
• 1:55
  I didn't know I was 99.
• 1:57
  You grew up in New Zealand on the North Island.
• 1:59
  Tell us about the early years, where you were raised, and your dad had service stations.
• 2:04
  What were the cars that sort of influenced you in that period as a youngster?
• 2:07
  Yeah, well, my father, as you say, had service stations and tow trucks.
• 2:11
  I was actually born in a little place called Huntley.
• 2:14
  So Huntley's halfway between Hamilton and Auckland.
• 2:19
  So he had a service station in Taupuri.
• 2:22
  In those days, he was racing a beautiful example of a Mark III Zephyr.
• 2:28
  I think the only thing that was on it was it was painted white with a number on the side, as most of them were in those days.
• 2:35
  And then I guess a year or so later, he moved into a really nice Lemon and Pyra Twin Cam Escort.
• 2:44
  which was one of Spragues, which was a famous racing driver in New Zealand.
• 2:49
  So yeah, twin cam escorts and stuff.
• 2:51
  And look, I don't really remember that side of it because I was just too young, but he opted to sort of move
• 2:59
  to Hamilton, got out of the motor racing side for himself and I guess at that stage was the decision, does he do motor racing himself or does he buy another service station and sort of benefit what we were doing as a family.
• 3:11
  So he chose that path which
• 3:15
  It was probably a big commitment for him too in those years because he had spent many years racing and doing a lot of hill climbs and then saloon car racing in places like Pukekohe, Bay Park, Levin.
• 3:28
  So he's reasonably well known around there.
• 3:31
  But as I say, the only reason I can remember any of that stuff is a few old scrapbooks that dug out of a wardrobe.
• 3:39
  Years later, you'd race, come to really respect and revere the great Jimmy Richards.
• 3:45
  He says your dad was pretty handy, mate, behind the wheel, wasn't he?
• 3:47
  Yeah, he was.
• 3:48
  I became very close to Jimmy when I was racing Carrera Cup when I started that.
• 3:54
  Obviously Jimmy was,
• 3:56
  was really just owned that championship.
• 3:58
  And I joined that championship after my supercars and I was fortunate enough, Tony Quinn gave me a starting career cup in the VIP team.
• 4:08
  But I'd always sneak to Jimmy's trailer at the end of the day.
• 4:11
  We had a little bit of a trade off actually,
• 4:14
  Jimmy was probably struggling for the last tenth or two in that era.
• 4:17
  He was still very, very quick and very hard to beat, but he would get myself down into the truck and buy me a quick,
• 4:27
  or not by me, pull out of the esky a quick Heineken and we'd always sit there and he'd try and work out what I was doing.
• 4:34
  He was still a wily old fox.
• 4:36
  He didn't miss a trick.
• 4:37
  So between him and Carl Batson would have a beer and work out, or he was trying to work out what I was doing to be that little bit quicker.
• 4:45
  But, yeah, he did.
• 4:47
  He said to me, as I said,
• 4:50
  He said your dad was pretty handy in a car.
• 4:53
  So that's a bit of a pat on the back from a legend like that.
• 4:57
  Speaking of your dad, he says there's quite a fun story about neighbors asking you to keep the car or the carting noise down.
• 5:06
  I think when their daughter was getting married.
• 5:07
  Is that right?
• 5:09
  Yeah, there was a story like that.
• 5:12
  I started racing go-karts when I was four years old.
• 5:15
  So dad had the service station in Hamilton and right next door it had a, had a quite a big block.
• 5:20
  So I'd made a, or my dad and I had made a,
• 5:23
  motorbike slash go-kart track on it.
• 5:25
  So pretty much every weekend I would, or any hour I had spare, I'd get down there and go round and round and round.
• 5:33
  And yeah, right next door, these poor people were, their daughter was gonna be married and they did knock on the service station and asked my dad very kindly if,
• 5:45
  The sun could stop the go-kart for the weekend.
• 5:47
  So a few tears by me, I guess, but you've got to do the right thing down there.
• 5:52
  Those skills that your dad instilled probably served you incredibly well throughout your racing career.
• 5:57
  He was hands-on with the build of those early go-karts, wasn't he?
• 6:02
  Yeah, he built everything.
• 6:03
  Everything from the go-karts to the engines all the way through.
• 6:08
  Probably until I was about 12.
• 6:09
  But yeah, my first three or four go-karts and my sister's go-karts.
• 6:12
  My sister was actually into go-karts before I was.
• 6:15
  So when I was about two, he built a trailer.
• 6:18
  So I just got, I think they roped me onto the back of this trailer.
• 6:22
  I was actually too scared to go in it.
• 6:24
  And my sister would pander around the local park.
• 6:27
  We could get away with it in that era.
• 6:29
  And so my sister was into go-karts before I was.
• 6:32
  I actually started racing, was at Cambridge, dirt track.
• 6:36
  There was no real tar seal tracks in those days.
• 6:39
  So I started on the dirt, mainly between sort of a little place called Morrinsville in Cambridge.
• 6:44
  And I...
• 6:45
  I remember quite clearly I was too young and my father sort of fudging books and paperwork to my mother's horror to get me a start.
• 6:55
  But in that era, I guess no one really, really bothered too much.
• 7:00
  So the first few years of my karting was all on dirt.
• 7:04
  It wasn't till I was probably eight or nine where we went to Auckland and there was a kart track, Rosebank Road, quite a famous kart track there.
• 7:14
  And that was the first time I saw Tarsil.
• 7:17
  I thought we'd sort of rocked up with this go-kart still with a bit of dirt and mud and oil.
• 7:22
  They used to pack the tracks down with oil and stuff and we were well out of our depth, but that really is where it kick-started my sort of Tarsil racing career.
• 7:33
  That's quite pivotal then because had that, you know, you not done that, it sounds as though you may have perhaps considered almost Speedway path, is that right?
• 7:41
  Well, it's funny you say that because we'd go to Western Springs every Saturday night.
• 7:46
  Just every Saturday night we'd go to Western Springs.
• 7:48
  And I didn't want to race even a midget car then, even though I loved watching Barry Butterworth was my childhood hero, him and Jim Richards.
• 7:56
  So Barry Butterworth would hop in a midget car and then jump straight out and jump into a sprint car on the same night.
• 8:06
  But what I really wanted to race was a solo bike.
• 8:10
  I just love Speedway bikes for whatever it was.
• 8:14
  And years ago, Ivan Major's mother lived next to our grandparents.
• 8:20
  So he used to send me quite a few little things from England and stuff.
• 8:24
  So I just had this real thing about Ivan Major and Speedway.
• 8:28
  But I don't think my father ever had the same passion for two wheels and no brakes.
• 8:34
  Your good buddy and mine, Darrell Beattie, for a time did race those things.
• 8:37
  Did you ever throw your leg over one?
• 8:39
  No, no.
• 8:40
  I sat on one and had a photo on it, but that's as far as I got.
• 8:44
  But to be fair, I didn't even race motocross.
• 8:47
  My parents weren't real keen.
• 8:48
  I always had dirt bikes.
• 8:50
  but never raced them.
• 8:52
  And to be fair, when I really started with the go-karts and got into it, probably more as a 12-year-old, as a junior, I just had this passion for four wheels by then.
• 9:03
  And I was winning New Zealand championships and I was getting...
• 9:06
  I was fortunate enough then too that I was getting factory go-karts.
• 9:10
  So we'd run a Yamaha on a Saturday and then the open class on a Sunday.
• 9:14
  So the team then was Kiwi karts and I would get engines off them, rotary valve engines to run in the open class because they had already sort of used them up the day before.
• 9:25
  So they'd let me run the,
• 9:27
  the dregs on the on the sunday so i was pretty fortunate a lot of people say oh beado must have been born with a silver spoon because he raced all this flash equipment throughout new zealand and stuff but it was always with a lot of hard work and big steal and borrow really tell me about the you know your schooling years then so were you a cheeky school boy or was were you just hell bent on a career in motor racing was that sort of what obsessed you
• 9:52
  Yeah, I was hellbent on motor racing.
• 9:55
  And to be honest, my headmasters and teachers always knew that.
• 9:59
  We would spend a lot of time away travelling the country, travelling.
• 10:04
  like most of us, I guess.
• 10:07
  It was a passion that not only I had, but my whole family had.
• 10:10
  So it wasn't too hard to convince my father that we'll leave on a Tuesday and drive all the way through to Christchurch or whatever and race the South Island Championship or the New Zealand Championship.
• 10:23
  So we're always travelling and
• 10:26
  I guess, to be honest, that was the springboard to cars.
• 10:30
  We never really thought about cars at the time.
• 10:32
  There wasn't that real sort of pathway like there is now.
• 10:36
  You go to this age in a go-kart and you go to that class and you go to an X Formula Ford or whatever.
• 10:41
  It wasn't really like that.
• 10:43
  We didn't have a clue what we were doing.
• 10:44
  It was just a...
• 10:46
  My dad and I were mucking around with an auto trader and saw a Formula Ford in it.
• 10:51
  And it was the complete package.
• 10:55
  It was actually a 1971 Titan, Mark VI Titan.
• 11:00
  And I thought it was a beautiful looking car and it had this really nice trailer.
• 11:04
  And the guy was trying to do a deal on the transit van, the trailer and the car.
• 11:09
  And it wasn't that expensive at the time.
• 11:12
  But we thought it was a mega deal.
• 11:15
  So until I actually rocked up at the racetrack with it.
• 11:18
  And so I'd been polishing the thing for about three weeks until I'd turned 15.
• 11:23
  And I thought it was a Formula One car.
• 11:25
  And then I rocked up at Pukekohe with a 1971 car.
• 11:28
  And this guy's there in a 1985 Raynard and Van Diemen.
• 11:31
  And it was like a different world.
• 11:33
  But I guess we had to start somewhere.
• 11:36
  New Zealand has pretty much since then had a wonderful kind of tradition really of giving younger guys that opportunity to move into open wheelers at an age that not every country does.
• 11:48
  At that time, mate, you were one of the youngest in Formula Ford for New Zealand, as I recall.
• 11:52
  Is that right?
• 11:53
  Oh, absolutely.
• 11:53
  It was the weekend.
• 11:54
  I turned 15 that week and I was racing it.
• 11:56
  No one had even come close.
• 12:00
  And I was racing, which was Pukekohe, but a club circuit.
• 12:03
  So they don't even have it now.
• 12:06
  The support categories are out there for when we're there with the supercars.
• 12:10
  You would actually – it's a bit of the old Benson and Hedges track.
• 12:14
  So the Benson and Hedges track used to come down the front straight.
• 12:17
  Instead of the fast turn one, you'd turn left straight.
• 12:20
  So we would actually run that loop down there.
• 12:22
  But part of that road still exists, I think, doesn't it, if you look closely enough?
• 12:25
  It's still there, yeah.
• 12:26
  So you would basically come through turn one the opposite way and then head back out towards the road.
• 12:31
  So it was a totally different track.
• 12:33
  And that was really where I started.
• 12:37
  But that was real grassroots stuff too.
• 12:40
  We didn't have just Formula Ford then because there was a New Zealand Formula Ford Championships.
• 12:45
  But that was kind of out of my league, not only my league, but my 1971 Titans league.
• 12:53
  I actually ended up doing some New Zealand championship races in that car, but never a whole championship.
• 13:00
  I sort of did Pukakoe full circuit.
• 13:02
  I would do...
• 13:05
  Bay Park, anything that was fairly close to home, we would take the old Titan out.
• 13:10
  And I was always a bit embarrassed because I used to lie down in the thing.
• 13:14
  It was like, you know, in the 70s, it was a lie down job and lie on top of the fuel tank and then all these modern...
• 13:21
  modern era Formula Fords.
• 13:23
  I remember there was a guy, Craig Coleman, Coleman Suzuki, they had a lot of motorcycle shops and he had a 1985 Van Diemen, absolutely polished.
• 13:33
  And it was the most beautiful car.
• 13:36
  But it was just so far for us to step from that car.
• 13:39
  So in the middle of that, we went to a 84 Reynard, but the Reynard just wasn't fast enough to ever win a championship in 86 slash 87.
• 13:51
  86 band demon in the end.
• 13:52
  So that's what I won the New Zealand Formula Ford Championship in.
• 13:55
  In one of those years there, Ross Stone can recall going to Bay Park and seeing a very young Craig Baird race.
• 14:01
  I don't think he met you that weekend, but he walked away very impressed by what you were doing, even at that stage.
• 14:08
  And years later, you would get to work together.
• 14:10
  Crazy.
• 14:10
  Yeah, exactly.
• 14:11
  And, you know, New Zealand's always had so much talent come through.
• 14:16
  I think when I came through carts,
• 14:20
  The guys I look back on then that were probably better than what I was then in karting, there was a guy, um, I've only come across them once before, but there was a guy, John Stewart, no one's ever heard of him.
• 14:32
  And he, he, he got out of racing go karts cause he was a really good rugby player as well.
• 14:37
  He's out of, um,
• 14:39
  Man or two, Murph knows him quite well, knows the family and the Higgins family and that very well.
• 14:45
  But there's a guy there that I always thought, I'd love to have seen what he would have done had he jumped into a racing car.
• 14:52
  But you know, it's like anything, there's plenty of talent floating around and sometimes we choose to go left and we go right or it just depends what and how it happens.
• 15:04
  Correct me if I'm wrong here.
• 15:04
  Were you 17 when you won that title in the RF86?
• 15:07
  Yeah.
• 15:08
  What did that mean, mate?
• 15:10
  I've often talked about it on the podcast.
• 15:12
  Anyone of note generally in motor racing pretty much through your era before and a lot since that have won the Formula Ford title have gone on to do great things, mate.
• 15:23
  It's a very significant box to tick at that age, isn't it?
• 15:26
  Yeah, I think if you can come out of karting, and I won seven New Zealand kart championships, and then when I got to Formula Ford, I won that in my second year, my second crack at Formula Ford, but it was kind of a bit unheard of as having a...
• 15:46
  winning a national championship.
• 15:48
  There just wasn't, there is now, there's a lot of young people doing it.
• 15:52
  And I think even if you took that same era and you looked at touring car racing, they would never have given
• 15:57
  a 20-year-old a chance.
• 15:59
  It was more, you know, like everyone winning races in Formula Ford with the old boys with all the old tricks and they wouldn't tell you too much and outfox you and do all the stuff.
• 16:09
  So that was a bit of a change for New Zealand motorsport, I think, and I was certainly the youngest anywhere in the world at that time to win a Formula Ford championship.
• 16:16
  So it sort of created a little bit of media hype around New Zealand, which probably got me to the next stage because Formula Atlantic was going to be a big step up for us.
• 16:29
  But we were lucky enough to get a bit of support.
• 16:32
  Celtics were very, very good to me during that era.
• 16:35
  So it allowed us to then buy, we actually bought, it was a John Watson car that was Rolled Australia and it was raced, it was a brand new car.
• 16:46
  Mike Thackwell raced it in New Zealand.
• 16:48
  There was Thackwell and David Bradman.
• 16:50
  So I ended up owning, funnily enough,
• 16:55
  no one will be surprised with this.
• 16:56
  I actually, we had to buy it through Kenny Smith, you know, so Kenny had had his feelers run through it and put a little bit of Kenny tax on it by the time we bought it.
• 17:05
  But that's probably a little bit of a joke.
• 17:08
  Kenny was, Kenny was actually very good to me as well in that era.
• 17:11
  But yeah, so that, that was really the, to step up to a real race car.
• 17:18
  Former Atlantic car was, you know, they were fast.
• 17:21
  They had a massive tire on them.
• 17:22
  They were,
• 17:23
  They were a real race car, so I was fortunate enough to start racing them.
• 17:28
  And Formula Atlantic or Formula Pacific, as they called it then, in New Zealand was really strong.
• 17:33
  It was like the testing ground for all the Americans.
• 17:36
  So you'd have the, you know, Tracys and Dean Halls and Mark Dismores and, like, many, many good IndyCar drivers come down there because that was – when they were getting into IndyCars, it was their –
• 17:51
  their off season.
• 17:51
  So while there was no racing in America, they'd all go to New Zealand and race former Atlantic.
• 17:56
  So that was the place that we had to head for if we were gonna try and sort of further my racing career.
• 18:03
  You rattled off some great names there too, but you can add to that, I think, even prior.
• 18:07
  I mean, the likes of Keke Rosberg, Roberto Moreno, Kenny, who you mentioned before, Kenny Smith, Paul Radiceff.
• 18:14
  It's cherished Formula Atlantic like that, isn't it?
• 18:17
  Because they were good-looking race cars.
• 18:20
  Just give people a sense of horsepower and what they were like to drive.
• 18:24
  I know you've shared a couple of pics recently on Instagram too.
• 18:27
  Yeah, they were just such a, well, they're a ground effect car.
• 18:30
  So in those days to have a tyre that size, if you looked at a Formula 3 car, we were much quicker than a Formula 3 car, not an outright horsepower.
• 18:37
  We only probably had about 250 horsepower, 240 horsepower, but they had a really, really big tyre on them, the tunnels on them.
• 18:44
  So they're a real commitment car and they're a very aggressive car to drive.
• 18:50
  sort of towards the end there with the Toyota engine, we were revving them at like qualifying 11,000 RPM.
• 18:57
  You know, the things absolutely screamed.
• 18:59
  They sounded more like a motorcycle than a car, but yeah, they're just a great car and they looked right.
• 19:06
  But it gave you grounding, whether you were trying to get to Europe or America, you'd actually driven a car with some real balls.
• 19:14
  So when you actually got
• 19:16
  opportunities and I was lucky enough to go to Europe and test formula three cars and that, they actually felt quite slow.
• 19:24
  You know, they were, you know, they'd rev to seven and a half thousand RPM, small tire, flat bottom.
• 19:30
  Um, so they didn't have the aggression of the formula Atlantic.
• 19:33
  It's, it's a shame.
• 19:35
  Even today in New Zealand, there's a lot of, I know Kenny Smith still races my, one of my formula Atlantic cars.
• 19:42
  He's, he's kept one of them.
• 19:43
  Um,
• 19:45
  He still enjoys driving them there.
• 19:47
  And there's a guy that's driven one of everything and still likes to go back.
• 19:52
  There's a lot of historic former Atlantic cars floating around New Zealand that are absolutely pristine.
• 19:58
  I've probably got, there's at least four of mine in New Zealand.
• 20:03
  but the one I'd love to own is that original Rolt RT4.
• 20:07
  Amazing.
• 20:08
  Tony Quinn has been a guest on the podcast.
• 20:10
  Am I right in saying he's got one of your old cars too?
• 20:12
  No, he hasn't got my RT4, but he's got the same model.
• 20:16
  He's got a 86 RT4, which was the first of the pushrod cars.
• 20:20
  And they were just
• 20:22
  they just, that was the car.
• 20:25
  There was nothing better.
• 20:26
  It's Ron Taranac when they designed and built that car.
• 20:30
  Not only did it look right, it went right, it sounded right.
• 20:33
  The whole, it was just the package.
• 20:35
  So I can walk back in, the last time I saw that RT4 was in a museum in Wellington and I went in there and it was all in its Caldex colours and it,
• 20:45
  To be honest, I just fell in love with the car again.
• 20:47
  It was just, even to this day, it's a, I suppose it's like looking back at some of the old McLarens through the 80s.
• 20:53
  I think there's still a finer and a more detailed, beautiful looking car than some of the current F1 cars.
• 20:59
  Just before we move on, I want to get a sense at this point of a sacrifice for the family because you're entering into an expensive phase of the sport.
• 21:10
  And then separate to that, the learnings for you as a young man to learn the business side of the sport, Beardo, to hustle and try and garner support from people.
• 21:20
  What was all that like?
• 21:21
  To be honest, the year or two before I won the Formula Four championship, so it was still called...
• 21:28
  driver Europe.
• 21:29
  So the package was really supposed to be go to the Formula Ford Festival.
• 21:36
  And that's where, when I won the championship, that's all I was really thinking about.
• 21:41
  This is my ticket, I go to the Formula Ford Festival.
• 21:44
  If you do okay in the Formula Ford Festival, it's a big tick in anyone's career.
• 21:49
  You know, if you finish in the top five, your name sort of gets sprouted around a little bit.
• 21:54
  But to be perfectly honest, I was probably let down a little bit
• 21:58
  through that era.
• 21:59
  I was given a little bit of little bit of money from Ford and an air ticket to go to the festival.
• 22:09
  But the prior winners really had got to race the car with a budget and bits and pieces.
• 22:16
  So I actually went over there.
• 22:18
  And to be fair, it didn't do me any harm either.
• 22:20
  I remember sitting at the Kent again and I was 17.
• 22:23
  I might have just turned 18.
• 22:26
  and I was sitting at the Kentigan and I was having a beer and there was a guy next to me, older bloke, real character, and he was just flicking his ash.
• 22:37
  He was just flat out smoking, pushing his glasses up for smoking, putting the glass into a beer.
• 22:43
  And then he asked me, he noticed my accent, I was talking to some other people there, and I got talking to him and he asked me what I was doing.
• 22:53
  And I was,
• 22:55
  I was actually living with, I was lucky enough to stay there with Jason Courage, Piers Courage's son.
• 23:01
  So we were living in London and he said, how are you making it quit in bits and pieces?
• 23:06
  And I said, oh, I'm not really.
• 23:08
  He goes, well, look, my name's Tony Lanfranke.
• 23:10
  Now, Tony Lanfranke was one of the, there was him and Jerry Marshall were two of the great touring car sports sedan, touring car drivers in England.
• 23:20
  And he said, oh, well, I also run the driving school at Brands Hatch.
• 23:25
  He said, why don't I pick you up on Monday morning, which is the following morning, and I'll bring you down here and I'll get one of the boys to take you for a drive around and you can drive them and we'll see if you're good enough to become an instructor.
• 23:40
  So I was really planning on going back to New Zealand, but Tony Lanfranchi had sitting there and he was drinking with Gerry Marshall, who I ended up working with those two for quite a few years after this.
• 23:53
  So I get to the brand's hatch and I was very nervous and I was quite shy then as well.
• 23:59
  And I ran into another name that I'd seen and heard and seen as racing and bits and pieces.
• 24:06
  It was this bloke, Thomas Mazira.
• 24:08
  And here's Thomas and another guy, Gary Isles.
• 24:12
  And they were two characters.
• 24:14
  If you think Thomas is a character now, you should have seen him back then.
• 24:17
  But...
• 24:19
  So they actually took me under their wing a little bit and I ended up working at Brands Hatch.
• 24:24
  So one door had sort of shut by not racing, but it had opened up many doors.
• 24:29
  And I remember Tony Lanfranchi got, he, well, I'll say it, he got sacked from being the head sort of instructor or running the driving school at...
• 24:39
  at Brands Hatch, but he said, look, don't worry, a couple of you guys, because you're under my wing, you'll probably get the sack too.
• 24:45
  But he said, I've already done a deal with Porsche cars in Great Britain.
• 24:50
  And he said, I'm setting up a driving experience at a place called Millbrook.
• 24:54
  So sure enough, it was only a few days later, he rang and he picked me up.
• 25:00
  We went all the way to Millbrook and we started doing the testing for this Porsche driving experience, similar to what we do in Australia still to this day.
• 25:08
  And the only difference was the instructors.
• 25:11
  We had Richard Atwood, we had Derek Bell, yeah, Tony Lanfranke, all these guys that were just absolute superstars.
• 25:25
  So David Coulthard, David Coulthard, he was racing an F3 car.
• 25:31
  There was a year or so later he came in and did work with us.
• 25:34
  And yeah, it's funny how things work out.
• 25:37
  And I'm still good mates with Thomas today and I still do driver training with Thomas today.
• 25:54
  The concept of apartments on the edge of the Hampton Down circuit was entirely new and untested in the market.
• 25:59
  The concept came from observing its success alongside golf courses to help fund the project.
• 26:05
  It was a major success, with the 80 apartments selling in only 5 weeks in 2006 and returning $26 million.
• 26:14
  I want to get a sense of young man, England.
• 26:18
  Is Formula One the complete objective or an open wheel career?
• 26:22
  What were you thinking at that stage?
• 26:23
  Oh, we all think we're going to be Formula One drivers.
• 26:25
  That's, I don't know, it's just built into us, I suppose.
• 26:28
  We come through go-karts and we all think we're good enough.
• 26:30
  And a lot of people probably are and just don't get the opportunity.
• 26:34
  But I was lucky enough that Dick Bennett's West Surrey Racing
• 26:42
  He had noticed what I'd been doing in Formula Atlantic.
• 26:45
  There was another, not only Kenny, but there was another guy, David Oxton, in New Zealand who was very close and had done a lot of racing with Dick over the years.
• 26:53
  And he said, you need to get this guy into an F3 car.
• 26:56
  You've got to remember, Dick was running...
• 26:59
  the best Formula 3 team in England.
• 27:02
  Ayrton Senna, Mika Hackenden, Rubens Barrichello, all the guns.
• 27:06
  All the guns, exactly.
• 27:07
  So anyway, I was lucky enough to get a test.
• 27:11
  So I did a few laps at Silverson just to drive the car.
• 27:15
  I didn't know the circuit.
• 27:16
  I just, you know, like half a dozen laps.
• 27:18
  And then I did a full...
• 27:21
  Formula 3 test at Snedderton with the whole field.
• 27:25
  It was a proper Formula 3 day.
• 27:28
  And my time was second overall for that day.
• 27:31
  So Dick at that time, he had three cars running.
• 27:37
  He had a Leighton House car, he had a Benetton car, and he had the Marlborough car.
• 27:42
  I think McNish was in the Marlborough car.
• 27:45
  And Derek Higgins, I tested Derek's car.
• 27:48
  We were second and
• 27:50
  He said, look, I've got a deal.
• 27:51
  I have to put a, in the Leighton house car, I have to have a Japanese driver for the first year, but I'm gonna go to Leighton house and we'll do a deal and we'll sign a contract.
• 28:01
  You can drive the Leighton house car next year.
• 28:04
  So I was 18 years old, living in England, had a job, had a bit of an income, swinging around some of the fancy clubs in London with Jason Courage, who was Courage Breweries.
• 28:16
  Very wealthy bloke and still a friend of mine today.
• 28:20
  who his uncle was Frank Williams.
• 28:22
  So it was all just sort of settling down.
• 28:23
  Like I was like, this is, this is.
• 28:26
  I'm away.
• 28:27
  I'm away, exactly, I'm away.
• 28:29
  But anyway, that year, halfway through the year, I'd learned how to drink in every pub in England and I floated around and I'd spent a lot of time with good mates over there too, like Tim Miles and even Adrian Burgess, we were,
• 28:47
  sleeping on their couch for six months and you know, at the other end of the country and then come back to London.
• 28:52
  So, yeah, it was amazing.
• 28:55
  I kind of thought I had it all sitting there ready to go.
• 28:59
  I had a contract.
• 29:01
  Dick, as I say, had the best business, Formula Three business in the country, known all around the world.
• 29:08
  So he was never gonna go back on his word.
• 29:10
  And I got a phone call from him one day and he said, mate, we've got some really bad news.
• 29:17
  Leighton House in Japan had gone bankrupt and they'd pulled all the funding for the racing, obviously, from Formula One all the way through.
• 29:26
  So a contract that I had just evaporated overnight.
• 29:30
  So that was probably a turning point.
• 29:33
  There was never any time that...
• 29:36
  my family or anyone in New Zealand was going to fund me through 350,000 pounds worth of Formula Three racing.
• 29:42
  It was probably even more, you know, by the time you do the testing and crash it a few times.
• 29:47
  And we put, it was kind of weird because New Zealand had, and Australia, had so many young people go over to England and make it.
• 29:57
  But then there was an error from,
• 29:59
  I reckon the last one that nearly cracked it was probably Brett Riley.
• 30:03
  Brett was my teammate for years with BMW, touring cars in New Zealand.
• 30:08
  I did my first Bathurst with Brett and Wellington Street Race with Brett and Denny Holm.
• 30:14
  Well, Brett was the last one, I think, that never really made it because he won the biggest Formula Three race in the world, which was
• 30:25
  the race of champions at Donington.
• 30:27
  He won that in the Unipart F3 car, but nothing came out of it.
• 30:36
  You know, he beat Man, his teammate was Nigel Mansell, he beat PK, he beat so many,
• 30:42
  guys that made it to Formula One, but for whatever reason, he never really got through.
• 30:47
  And I reckon New Zealand and Australia, we missed something there for a long time.
• 30:52
  From New Zealand's point of view, I don't think anyone really got given an opportunity, not given an opportunity, worked very hard for an opportunity, but actually got some money, actually got some backing out of New Zealand.
• 31:03
  proper money to go racing was Scott Dixon.
• 31:06
  So the Murphs, the Radisichs, the Bairds, and you'll have a list of them through Australia as well.
• 31:13
  There was just something that we just never had the funding or could never really quite crack it.
• 31:19
  The consortiums, the systems, if you will, the support mechanisms now are different in that sense, aren't they?
• 31:26
  Yeah, and I think Kenny Smith was very instrumental in working out, if he saw a talent
• 31:33
  See, I was racing, Kenny, and we were having punch-ups in the pits, you know, like it wasn't.
• 31:38
  Proper ones.
• 31:39
  Yeah, proper ones.
• 31:41
  Tell us.
• 31:43
  Well, he raced all those years and no one had ever put him on his roof.
• 31:48
  And I pioneered something for him and actually tipped him upside down at Timaru.
• 31:56
  And Dave Reynolds will appreciate this because I did mention to Dave I'd do it to him one time after a race, but Kenny walked up, all four foot five of him, and he said, mate, you ever do that?
• 32:07
  Where are you?
• 32:08
  I'll put the – and he was holding a screwdriver.
• 32:10
  He said, I'm going to effing put the screwdriver right through your neck.
• 32:13
  So as much of a gentleman as Kenny is, if you actually get him upside down, he's no longer a gentleman, but, you know, it's –
• 32:24
  He wasn't there trying to help people.
• 32:26
  We were racing each other.
• 32:27
  But when he sort of started, I wouldn't say retiring, but he rolled back from being really, really competitive, driven, trying to win everything, to looking at someone like Scott Dixon and goes, hey, how do we actually get him?
• 32:40
  I've got some contacts in America.
• 32:42
  I've got some contacts in New Zealand.
• 32:44
  We will, and probably consortium's the right word, we'll group these people together.
• 32:48
  They can all buy a share in them, took them to America.
• 32:52
  And the biggest part of this is not just funding it.
• 32:55
  is Scott actually delivered with it as well.
• 32:57
  He delivered on his promise of being a good race driver on and off the track.
• 33:03
  So that opened the door for probably more to start coming out of there.
• 33:09
  And Kenny has been very instrumental in bringing people out of New Zealand in the last sort of dozen years.
• 33:17
  A bit of research for this podcast.
• 33:18
  I spoke to your good mates, Andy McIlray and Tim Miles, and they both share a similar thought here.
• 33:26
  And I'm going to read you word for word, in fact, what Andy said to me.
• 33:29
  For what it's worth, I think Beardot could have made it to Formula One, probably even world champion.
• 33:35
  If he'd made it, he would have been a nineties James Hunt.
• 33:38
  I can remember hearing from Marcus Pye how brave he was, manhandling the horrendous Dome F3000 car around Brands Hatch
• 33:45
  when all the others were in Raynards.
• 33:46
  Apparently they feared for his life every time we tipped it into Paddock Hill Bend.
• 33:50
  Mega mate.
• 33:51
  Yeah, well, Andy, Tim, we've, we sort of grew up together.
• 33:55
  I can't even really go into many of the stories that, the trouble, the grief that they got me into.
• 34:03
  But, yeah, I sort of grew up with, when I first did a national round of Formula Ford, I sort of looked at Andy and,
• 34:12
  He had an 84 Reynard when I had a 71 Titan.
• 34:16
  Like he was at that end of the field and I was at the other end of the field.
• 34:19
  I remember my overalls and helmet was so bad.
• 34:21
  I used to ask him, could I borrow his helmet sometimes or a spare helmet and put it on because it looked better than mine, things like that.
• 34:30
  Tim was at the same end of the field as I was.
• 34:33
  I remember a very good story with Tim Miles once.
• 34:35
  He thought he was going half or right.
• 34:37
  And he said to a guy,
• 34:39
  Shane Higgins, he said to Shane Higgins, it was a rainy qualifying session.
• 34:45
  Tim had outqualified Shane, mainly because Shane stuck his thing in the fence.
• 34:53
  So he went up to Tim and he said to him, hey, Timmy, I'm off the back of the grid.
• 34:59
  Just remember one thing.
• 35:01
  Let me through into the first corner because I can afford to fix mine.
• 35:05
  You can't.
• 35:07
  So Tim thought he would outbox him to the first corner, and you know who the next one in the fence was, and still bleating.
• 35:14
  But there we had some funny stories.
• 35:17
  Andy was a very successful driver in his own right.
• 35:19
  You know, like he was racing Formula Ford 2000.
• 35:22
  He was teammates with Mark Blundell.
• 35:26
  They're still in contact today.
• 35:27
  I see Mark's taking close note of what Hunter McElroy's doing in America with the road to Indy.
• 35:34
  So, yeah, we're all old mates.
• 35:36
  There's a lot of good stories.
• 35:38
  And as I say, they've got me into a lot of trouble over the years.
• 35:41
  I'm sure they have.
• 35:42
  We won't give all of them away, but I will touch lightly on one.
• 35:46
  They tell me that, no, a good-looking young Craig Baird had a girlfriend at one stage and he would often sneak over for maybe a bit of a kiss and a cuddle.
• 35:56
  But you're a bit nervous about this particular girl's relationship.
• 35:59
  Dad, so you would always neatly lay your clothes out so you could dive straight back into them and make an exit.
• 36:05
  Now, what did her father think your future occupation would be?
• 36:09
  He said I'd make a very good fireman the way I laid my clothes out for a getaway.
• 36:15
  But the problem with that is you're not supposed to fall asleep.
• 36:18
  You're supposed to be awake and get the things back on, I guess.
• 36:22
  Tell me what happened from the chapter with it looking so promising in England to, I guess, a redirection, maybe a focus perhaps on Tintop Racing.
• 36:33
  How did that unfold, the ultimate decision to sort of come back and focus on this part of the world?
• 36:41
  Well, I made some really good contacts when I was in England.
• 36:44
  And one of those was Adrian Reynard from Reynard Racing Cars and, and his managing director, which was Rick Gorn.
• 36:51
  So I had already gone back and I won the New Zealand Grand Prix.
• 36:55
  I'd won the Formula Atlantic Championship.
• 36:58
  I'd go back to England and then I did a lot of testing for them, not only in their Formula Atlantic cars that they were sending to America, but also they really wanted to take on Rolt in Formula 3.
• 37:11
  So really through my test that I'd done for Dick, and Dick had rung Adrian Reynard up and said, look, this kid's half all right.
• 37:21
  You need someone to be testing.
• 37:22
  So it was actually Gilles de Ferrand and I were doing testing in that build-up as they were doing the F3 car.
• 37:30
  I'd pretty much done all the testing for Reynard.
• 37:35
  in the former Atlantic car, which then they were sending to America.
• 37:38
  So they were also trying to get me a start in America in a former Atlantic car.
• 37:43
  So the New Zealand series was held in such high esteem and we were
• 37:50
  Jos Verstappen was going down there this season.
• 37:54
  So it was sort of said that, right, we're going to make a change.
• 37:59
  Radicic was probably my toughest competitor through that whole former Atlantic thing.
• 38:05
  And he had been running the Reynard in New Zealand and he'd had a bit of a bad time with it.
• 38:14
  And to be fair, it was just the wrong card at the wrong time, which happens to many of us.
• 38:20
  And then we'd done the development of the 91 Raynard and we took it back down there.
• 38:25
  And it was a fantastic year.
• 38:27
  We had a heap of Americans, some Europeans, and one of those Europeans had been Jos Verstappen.
• 38:32
  And they gave me a car.
• 38:36
  So things were getting a little bit easier because I was winning down there and I had a really good relationship with them.
• 38:42
  They would package up a car, spares, give me an aerodynamicist, an engineer, send it all down to New Zealand.
• 38:49
  I had really good backing from Toyota New Zealand.
• 38:51
  So Toyota New Zealand would get the best engines built in America, you know, send them all down.
• 38:57
  So we had all this brand new equipment go down there.
• 39:00
  And we had, without doubt, we had the best package of anyone, you know, no one even knew what it was.
• 39:09
  an aerodynamicist was, you know, and we had this boffin there just working out what wing we should run and what gurney and how and what set up and we'd go testing and all the gear we had, even though my father had to put a lot of money in to sort of fund the racing side of it, the equipment side of it was, um, was, was, was really on a contra deal from Toyota and Raynard.
• 39:30
  So that's really what got me to the next stage.
• 39:32
  And we took a bet with, um, Lords of London and, and, and,
• 39:38
  I had a bet and I think the bet was, I forget what money my father put into it and his business partner, Roger Reville, they took a punt, a couple of hundred thousand dollar punt, but it was a 500,000 pound win if I won 12 from 12 races.
• 39:56
  And then it might've dropped like 50,000 pounds for every race under that.
• 40:00
  We ended up winning, I think it was like 380,000 pounds.
• 40:05
  So that's how I did a season in Formula 3000, in British 3000 was we utilized that money to then go with a guy, Graham Lorimer, to race 3000.
• 40:21
  And Lorimer had done a deal with a company in Japan, Dome, who was a car manufacturer.
• 40:26
  They had,
• 40:30
  They'd built a lot of sports car stuff and they decided they would get into Formula 3000 or Formula, I forget what they actually called it.
• 40:36
  It was Japanese 3000.
• 40:38
  So they wanted to, that was their big thing was Japanese 3000.
• 40:42
  But what they had done is they had just copied, they absolutely copied a 90 slash 91 Lola.
• 40:50
  Absolutely, you wouldn't know the difference.
• 40:53
  But the sad part for me is I got in that car the year before.
• 40:55
  The Lola wasn't too bad, but when the 91 Reynard hit Formula 3000, anyone that had anything else might as well have just gone home.
• 41:04
  The 91 Reynard was probably the best 3000 car that was ever built, and it won absolutely everything.
• 41:10
  So again, I'd just been boxed into a situation.
• 41:14
  I couldn't afford a full budget with a Reynard-run car.
• 41:19
  But to be able to do a deal with Graham Lorimer and have a Mugen deal, Mugen Honda deal and the dome, we pieced it all together.
• 41:27
  But just the combination didn't work that year and we sort of got to the end of the year and just, as Andy said, I did.
• 41:36
  I had some really good team owners come in.
• 41:39
  We got half-pie results in it here and there, but there was, it was in autosport at one stage that a journalist in autosport was watching me at Brands Hatch and said, look, the guy's driving the thing so hard, we're actually starting to fear for the bloke's life.
• 41:56
  And not many people write like that, especially in this era, but that's how hard you're trying the thing.
• 42:01
  But yeah, just wrong car, wrong time.
• 42:04
  Were you just a brave man having a crack?
• 42:07
  And was it, I mean, you know, in ladder terms, those cars are not far off Formula One.
• 42:12
  What would they like to drive?
• 42:14
  The 3000 car, you'd qualify well inside an F1 grid.
• 42:19
  You would out-qualify the back of an F1 grid.
• 42:21
  They were an extremely fast car, you know, 500 horsepower and light carbon fibre.
• 42:26
  It was, you know, they were a very, very good car.
• 42:29
  But as I say, you've got to be in the right car at the right time and it is what it is.
• 42:35
  Did I see in your sort of, you know, your CV that perhaps you might have driven a tin top for the first time, maybe at about 18, a BMW 635?
• 42:45
  Did you drive that at Pookie one year?
• 42:47
  Were you about 18 years of age?
• 42:48
  Have I got that right?
• 42:49
  Yeah, I was.
• 42:52
  I drove with a guy, Glenn McIntyre.
• 42:55
  So it was an ex-JPS car.
• 42:56
  And, yeah, just one thing.
• 42:59
  came to another and Wellington street race was the big thing.
• 43:02
  I saw Murph put something on there the other day.
• 43:04
  And I remember that when he, when he drove that, uh, that mobile Commodore around the streets of Wellington.
• 43:09
  And, um, that was the race you kinda, you needed to, to do.
• 43:16
  So the first time I did that, I think I was, I think I was 17.
• 43:20
  So I jumped in that for Wellington and Pukecoe.
• 43:24
  So that was my first taste of how weak I was, driving a 635 with no power steering.
• 43:35
  It was a whole new world.
• 43:38
  But it put me in really good stead because after that, we'd sort of run some reasonably good times in the thing,
• 43:47
  And there was a guy in New Zealand, Bill Bryce, that used to run an M3 BMW and Radisic had raced it.
• 43:55
  And, you know, he had some pretty good drivers.
• 43:59
  Denny Holm was racing for him at the time and Brett Riley.
• 44:02
  And so they offered to cross into me in the car with Denny because Denny was at the time where he was sort of humming and haring whether he wanted to do Wellington.
• 44:11
  So that was really my first...
• 44:15
  man up with Denny Holm because I was putting on my race boots and a guy, Calvin Fish, gave me a set of race boots, gave me these race boots.
• 44:24
  And they were these Adidas Monza race boots.
• 44:26
  And you couldn't buy them nowhere in this part of the world, but they're just half a size too small.
• 44:31
  So, but I still wanted to wear them.
• 44:33
  So I'd just wear them without socks.
• 44:35
  And Denny said to me, uh, oh, the first part was I said to Bill Bryson, and I said, Oh, the car's a bit understeer here.
• 44:43
  And, uh,
• 44:44
  So he's put Denny in and Denny did about two laps and hopped out and he said, that car is just absolutely perfect.
• 44:48
  The young fella doesn't know what he's talking about because Denny would drive anything.
• 44:52
  He'd just jump in it, drive it, hustle it.
• 44:56
  And then we're getting changed and I was sort of going, I don't know, it does feel quite understeady Denny and that and he'd look at me getting changed and he goes,
• 45:05
  did you drive the car like that with your boots with no socks?
• 45:07
  And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 45:11
  And he said, do you want to have a real good look at my hands?
• 45:15
  And I sort of looked at his hand and I knew he'd been in a bad accident years ago and he got very badly burned.
• 45:21
  And he says, I'll never ever want to see you ever drive a race car again without all your fireproof gear on.
• 45:28
  He said, I nearly lost both of my hands.
• 45:30
  Make sure you don't lose both your feet.
• 45:32
  So that was the last time I wore my Adidas
• 45:35
  Monza boots.
• 45:36
  So it's all these little things that come to mind as we ever yarn.
• 45:42
  Calvin Fish is a great mate of Lee Diffie's these days.
• 45:44
  He's based in the States.
• 45:45
  I'm glad you bring up Denny, mate, because as we venture into your career here, you have always had, it struck me that you've always had a deep appreciation for
• 45:54
  the Kiwi legends, you know, the service station that the McLaren family owned.
• 46:00
  You talked about Denny there a moment ago.
• 46:02
  You appreciate those that have come through before you, don't you?
• 46:07
  Yeah, I do.
• 46:07
  And to be honest, I can't get enough of that stuff.
• 46:10
  In fact, if you looked at my coffee table there, I've got the Bruce McLaren book there.
• 46:15
  There's something about just that era.
• 46:19
  It's one wish I do have.
• 46:21
  I drove the last McLaren Formula 5000 car that was ever sold.
• 46:26
  I drove that at Manfield, kind enough to give me a drive of that.
• 46:32
  But if I have one, I guess we've always got a box we want to tick.
• 46:37
  If it's a one bucket list box, that would be to, not in anger, but I would love to be able to just have the honour of driving a Can-Am car, McLaren Can-Am car, because I think that era was just something else.
• 46:53
  And it was just so sad that...
• 46:57
  we lost Bruce the way it happened.
• 47:00
  You know, like it's, Jimmy Stone's been through that story with me.
• 47:04
  He was there on that day and it was kind of one of those things, it was almost like a lap that wasn't actually gonna happen and they were, it was almost a, I think it was a pack up for lunch.
• 47:16
  I'm sure it was lunch, he was about to park the car and he just wanted one more go and
• 47:21
  they made an alteration, but that's, you can't change history, but those sort of things, I spend a lot of time, I think if you start on anything like YouTube and you start looking at Bruce or Jim Clark or, you know, it doesn't have to be a New Zealander as such, you just start digging deeper and deeper and deeper and I don't know why, I just have something at that sort of era.
• 47:53
  That's the end of part one of my chat with Kiwi racer Craig Baird.
• 47:56
  Head back to the library and hit the gas on part two, where we talk more about driving classic machines, his umpire role with supercars, whether he plans to keep racing after his 50th birthday in 2020, and how he stayed strong after the devastating loss of some racing mates.
• 48:24
  Listen up.