Latest / Rusty's Garage / John Cleland (Part 1)

Transcript

John Cleland (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.
• 0:28
  For this episode, I'm actually at home.
• 0:31
  It's night time here, but early morning for my guest.
• 0:35
  He's a proud Scot, and that's where he's parked up for this podcast, Scotland.
• 0:40
  John Cleland is a legend from a family that have history with car dealerships, and as you'll hear, he's still in the game today.
• 0:48
  But race fans will know him from the British Touring Car Championship, where he was a star for Vauxhall during the awesome two-litre super touring era in the 90s.
• 0:58
  He's a real character outside the car and kind of feisty when he needed to be with the helmet on.
• 1:04
  His connection with this part of the world goes back many years, from owning a Brock Big Bang a Commodore to racing at Bathurst.
• 1:12
  We'll chat about that and more, including his loyal nature that saw him pass on some big opportunities to drive for famous German marks.
• 1:21
  I've not heard him talk about that before.
• 1:23
  Plus a special race car that he's managed to keep –
• 1:26
  Fittingly, he's all dressed up in some old Brad Jones Racing Team kit for this discussion.
• 1:32
  He just loves it and always has.
• 1:36
  I grew up in the middle of Scotland, not far from Glasgow, a little place called Bogside.
• 1:42
  And my father was a car dealer.
• 1:44
  But at weekends, he was the main scrutineer for the whole of Scotland.
• 1:48
  So he would scrutineer rallies, autocrosses, hill climb sprints,
• 1:54
  all of those kind of things.
• 1:55
  And as a sort of seven and eight-year-old kid, I would go in the back of the car and just go with them to all these events.
• 2:02
  So I kind of grew up in motorsport, but I never, ever did the karting side of it.
• 2:08
  Karting was...
• 2:10
  I always wanted a kart, but go-karts back in those days, they probably had solid tyres, so they were pretty average things.
• 2:18
  And...
• 2:19
  I remember him swapping, taking one back as a part exchange, because we were car dealers.
• 2:24
  And he took one back as a part exchange, and we couldn't get it to go.
• 2:27
  So my earliest memories of go-karting was being towed behind my father in a Lotus Cortina up and down the main roads, trying to get this go-kart to go.
• 2:40
  So that was my one and only experience of go-kart racing.
• 2:44
  But clearly it was a powerful influence, John, being around racing and all of those events.
• 2:50
  Yeah, I mean, it was, and I was never ever gonna do, play golf or football at weekends.
• 2:55
  You know, I grew up in it.
• 2:57
  And as it turned out in latter years, my father was my biggest fan.
• 3:00
  He was influential in doing all sorts of things.
• 3:05
  But to begin with, when eventually I convinced him it was a good idea to go racing, he would buy the car,
• 3:12
  And the first car was a Mini, as most people in Britain started.
• 3:15
  If you didn't start in go-karting, you started in a Mini.
• 3:18
  And the deal was, he would buy it.
• 3:22
  I had to find the money to run it.
• 3:23
  I had to look after it all year.
• 3:25
  And I had to give him back his money at the end of the year.
• 3:28
  And I thought, you hard old bastard.
• 3:30
  That's really not fair.
• 3:33
  But I tell you, it was a really good discipline because I wasn't getting something free.
• 3:39
  I was being given something, but I had to make it work.
• 3:43
  And I had to then return him his money at the end of the year.
• 3:47
  And most of the time we did that because we went through minis, which
• 3:52
  I did hill climbs, I did rally cross, I did autocross, I did sprints, but I only ever did one race.
• 3:59
  And my first ever race was in a mini at Ingolston.
• 4:03
  Now, Ingolston is a little track just outside of Edinburgh.
• 4:07
  It's right next to Edinburgh airport.
• 4:09
  It's no longer there as a racetrack because it was owned by the sort of Royal Highland Society.
• 4:14
  And they were more interested in having the Highland show full of cows and sheep than they were about having motorsport.
• 4:21
  One of my earliest memories there was Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart came up and raced, what were they, electric milk carts around the track.
• 4:31
  Whoa.
• 4:32
  And I've got a program from that.
• 4:35
  It was in the 60s, whatever it was.
• 4:37
  I can't remember when exactly.
• 4:38
  But I've got one with Jackie and Jimmy's autographs on the front of it, which was pretty special, you know.
• 4:45
  Very.
• 4:45
  I mean, a pair of absolute legends.
• 4:47
  Were the crowds big back then?
• 4:49
  And what was that like?
• 4:51
  Yeah, I mean, the crowds were huge there because, I mean, in Scotland, we only had Ingleston.
• 4:57
  There was no Knock Hill.
• 4:59
  The racetrack was Ingleston.
• 5:01
  That was it.
• 5:02
  Because the old Charter Hall, where people like Jimmy Clark started racing,
• 5:08
  that died many years before.
• 5:10
  So to go somewhere else, you had to go into England, you had to go to Croft or Eulton Park or somewhere like that.
• 5:17
  So for anyone Scottish, you went to Englestone at weekends and the fact that it was five minutes from the center of Edinburgh,
• 5:24
  made it much easier to draw the crowds in.
• 5:27
  And I mean, you get huge, huge crowds, but thinking back on it, it was a very dangerous place.
• 5:34
  One of the, I remember one of the super saloon races there, a guy called Doug Niven, who's actually Jim Clark's cousin.
• 5:41
  He was driving a Volkswagen Beetle plastic bodied thing with a V8 Retco engine in it.
• 5:50
  He lost it in the kink going down the back straight.
• 5:53
  And there was a toilet block adjacent to the kink.
• 5:57
  And there was a bloke in the dunny there as he hit the toilet.
• 6:02
  And it exploded and blew the whole building apart.
• 6:08
  So it wasn't the safest place in the world to go spectating.
• 6:14
  So I love to ask people in the podcast, did you get your licence first go?
• 6:19
  Yeah, I did get my license first go.
• 6:21
  Because I'd been driving since I was seven or eight, and my job in the morning before I went to school, bear in mind, we were car dealers,
• 6:31
  I had to put all the used cars out on a used car lot and line them up, and then I would get on the bus and go to school.
• 6:39
  But my old man had, he would buy and sell everything.
• 6:43
  Although we were British Leyland dealers, so that was Triumph, Jaguar, Rover, Land Rover, all of those things, he had a propensity to buy things like, he came home one night with a gull-wing Mercedes.
• 6:56
  Now,
• 6:57
  He probably took 200 quid or 100 quid of profit for it in a pub somewhere.
• 7:02
  But today that car's a million pound.
• 7:04
  Yeah.
• 7:04
  And he had loads of Lotus Cortinas.
• 7:07
  And I remember lining these cars up in the morning before I went to school and thought, bear in mind, I'm 15.
• 7:14
  So I then decided to take this Lotus Cortina down the main road for about five or six miles just to clear it out before I got on the bus and went to school.
• 7:26
  So I'm not even sure how I kept a driver's license if I let's get one.
• 7:31
  Legendary car, though, Lotus Cortina.
• 7:33
  Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 7:34
  You know, if you're ever to be infectious about some sort of cars, I mean, they are just famous, aren't they?
• 7:41
  Ah, they were.
• 7:41
  But, I mean, the thing evolved a little bit, and then, because my old man never wanted me to race.
• 7:46
  He said, because he was a scrutineer, he knew that motorsport was dangerous, and he knew Jimmy Clark really well and Jackie Stewart.
• 7:54
  So, yeah.
• 7:55
  In that era, Formula One drivers were being killed all the time.
• 7:58
  Not so many, you know, in the lesser formula.
• 8:01
  But there was no way he was going to let me race.
• 8:03
  So it was hill climb after hill climb after hill climb.
• 8:07
  And the next car we bought after a Mini was a thing called a Chevron B8.
• 8:12
  Now, it's a little sports car, two-litre sports car, with a BMW engine in.
• 8:17
  And he gave 1,400 UK pounds for this car, right?
• 8:22
  1972 or 73, £1,400.
• 8:24
  That's a lot.
• 8:25
  Complete with a trailer, right?
• 8:29
  The car went from me to an accountant I sold it to.
• 8:34
  Then Sterling Moss owned it for a period of time and he raced it for a period of time.
• 8:39
  It then went to Sweden, Japan, and it came back to the UK about a year ago.
• 8:44
  Now remember, my old man gave £1,400.
• 8:48
  It was up for sale at £285,000.
• 8:53
  Whoa.
• 8:54
  So when I got my old man two grand, in other words, £600 of profit after a year, I thought I had a result.
• 9:02
  If I put it in the corner, if I stuck it in the corner of the garage, I'd have had £285,000 of profit.
• 9:07
  Crazy.
• 9:07
  Crazy.
• 9:08
  If only we could have known that then.
• 9:11
  Ah, crazy money, yeah.
• 9:13
  With the benefit of hindsight, you put things away.
• 9:16
  Wouldn't you?
• 9:16
  Now, in addition, you talked about autocross and hill climbs and things like that.
• 9:21
  Is it correct to say that you did some rallying as well?
• 9:24
  We could have been talking to you, Har Cleland.
• 9:26
  Is that right?
• 9:26
  Yeah, that's right.
• 9:28
  You see, again, because there was only one racetrack here, and we took, as we set up in business down in a place called Peebles, we set up a coat dealership, so the old Mitsubishi Coat.
• 9:41
  Mitsubishi, yeah.
• 9:42
  Yeah.
• 9:43
  And the only guy that was running one was Andrew Cowen.
• 9:46
  He was going out and doing the East African Safari Rally and the Southern Cross in Australia and things like that, with a Colt Lancer.
• 9:53
  We were the only other people that rallied one.
• 9:56
  Because I was a Colt dealer, I thought, we'll go rallying, it's good for advertising, it'll be fine.
• 10:03
  Well, it was a little production car, and we started 10 events, and we finished 10 events, because being Japanese, it was pretty reliable.
• 10:12
  But I got a letter from the Forestry Commission asking me to stop rallying because I was knocking more trees down than they were.
• 10:21
  I was actually getting that good at the end of the season, I could roll it over and not damage the roof.
• 10:27
  It was clever.
• 10:29
  What were some of the stats on that beautiful little car?
• 10:31
  I mean, are we talking twin weathers and what sort of things did you have on it?
• 10:35
  No, it was an absolute cooker.
• 10:37
  It was a 1600cc five-speed gearbox.
• 10:40
  It still even had the radio in it.
• 10:43
  And the guy that I had that navigated for me was a...
• 10:47
  he worked for White Horse Whiskey.
• 10:49
  And he's a journalist today, a guy called John Fyfe.
• 10:53
  And every weekend, we'd arrive to do an event somewhere, and he had a book full of little miniature White Horse Whiskey bottles.
• 11:04
  So we'd fill the glove box of the coat of the rally car full of White Horse Whiskey bottles.
• 11:09
  When we, as we did quite frequently, fell in a ditch...
• 11:13
  As the spectators helped us back out the ditch again, he would wind the window down and throw out about a dozen little bottles of whiskey.
• 11:22
  So it wasn't long before we found that the worst corners at all of the stages throughout Scotland, there were thousands of people there because they knew they'd get whiskey if they helped us out the ditch.
• 11:36
  But it was a really fun time.
• 11:39
  I really enjoyed the rally and we won the class a couple of times.
• 11:44
  And it was the old Jim Clark rally.
• 11:46
  In those days you left, it wasn't round the closed roads of Scotland.
• 11:51
  It was, you went on to some military ranges.
• 11:55
  So there were tarmac and they were very narrow.
• 11:59
  really quick.
• 12:00
  So you did that at night, you went into the forest in the morning, and then you went back into the military ranges in the afternoon.
• 12:09
  In the forest, I was kind of pretty average, less than average.
• 12:14
  On the tarmac, we caught everybody, like one after one, all the time, we were catching cars.
• 12:20
  So if there was a tarmac stage on a rally, we were ace.
• 12:23
  But if it was a forest stage, we weren't as clever.
• 12:28
  So I decided if I was either going to have to give up or I was going to kill myself or hurt myself badly.
• 12:33
  So that was what happened.
• 12:35
  So was that the catalyst then to go circuit racing?
• 12:37
  Is that the, I mean, clearly if you were strong on tarmac, is that what prompted it?
• 12:41
  Pretty much because we then, we became Opal dealers after that and then the Opal General Motors, Vauxhall connection just started at that point.
• 12:50
  And that was the catalyst because it was quite clear that in the hill climb days, I was pretty handy on tarmac.
• 12:57
  Then they're rallying.
• 12:58
  And it was just like, why am I wasting my time going rallying here?
• 13:02
  We've got to go circuit racing.
• 13:04
  And we built production cars and we went production racing with Opel Commodores and Opel Monza and things like that.
• 13:14
  It then just sort of got bigger and bigger.
• 13:16
  And I would go and I would race against people like Jerry Marshall and Tony Lanfranchi.
• 13:23
  And then the UK in those days, I mean, Jerry Marshall was a bit like Peter Brock.
• 13:28
  He was the man.
• 13:30
  He was the man to beat in a saloon car.
• 13:34
  So I'm in the same race as him, holding my own, doing pretty well.
• 13:38
  So it was a good gauge on, yeah,
• 13:42
  I'll do this because I'm pretty good at it.
• 13:45
  Yeah.
• 13:46
  Somewhere here, I don't know how far down the path of circuit racing this happened, is it true that your dad acquired a Peter Brock Bathurst-winning Commodore?
• 13:56
  In this part of the world, they're fondly referred to as a big banger.
• 14:01
  I think it was an 84 Bathurst winner that Brock and Larry Perkins had driven together.
• 14:05
  That is a special car, John.
• 14:07
  Yeah, yeah, it was.
• 14:10
  My brother's down in Albany.
• 14:11
  Okay.
• 14:12
  And he'd been there for about 45 years.
• 14:14
  So my father went out there and Brock was racing in Western Australia.
• 14:20
  What's the one in Perth?
• 14:22
  Barbegallo or Wanneroo.
• 14:23
  Barbegallo.
• 14:24
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 14:25
  and he went and met Brock and the big banger, the Marlborough 05 car.
• 14:31
  And my father represented General Motors dealersport in the UK.
• 14:36
  And what happened there was every Vauxhall Opel dealer
• 14:41
  for every new car they sold, there was, I think it was £10 or £20 a car, went into the motorsport fund.
• 14:49
  And that's where people like Jimmy McRae, Russell Brooks and all these guys got the money to fund their racing and their rallying.
• 14:57
  So my old man decided that would be a good car to bring back and race in a thing called the Thunder Saloon Series here, which was a big banger V8.
• 15:09
  Any rules didn't matter, just go for it.
• 15:12
  You could have anything you wanted.
• 15:14
  And the funny thing was when the car arrived here, it still had the door panels in the back and it still had the ashtrays in the door panels and they were full of cigarette butts.
• 15:27
  Brock had been racing this thing, but it was just your average saloon car still.
• 15:32
  But when it arrived here, it was in the full day-glow Marlborough colours with the 05.
• 15:39
  And I know there was two of them, and it was a lot of argument.
• 15:43
  And I think there's one in the Bathurst Museum,
• 15:46
  And there's a great deal of confusion as to which car we had here in the UK, whether we were sold the Harvey car or whether we were sold the Brock car.
• 15:55
  And I suppose when you think back to, that would be 1984, something like that, I would think.
• 16:02
  84, no, 85.
• 16:04
  Brock...
• 16:08
  We probably wanted to keep that car, had he known, you know, the future.
• 16:15
  But we didn't give a lot of money for it.
• 16:16
  I think General Motors stole the car, really.
• 16:19
  They brought it right here.
• 16:20
  We put fuel in it and we raced the whole season and won the championship with it.
• 16:24
  And the car was here for a number of years.
• 16:29
  And then I think it went back.
• 16:31
  Now, I'm sure that it is the car that's in the museum at Bathurst.
• 16:35
  I'm convinced that's the car.
• 16:37
  But my memory of it is good in driving it, but not in terms of the chassis numbers and all the stuff that went with it.
• 16:44
  But the fact that Brock drove it, because we'd been watching places like Bathurst on TV, it was well televised here.
• 16:53
  So we knew what your racing was all about.
• 16:55
  It was great.
• 16:57
  I'd love to have known about the conversation that your dad had in acquiring the car.
• 17:01
  So having that car dealer background, cutting a deal with the whole dealer team and then getting it for the price that you did.
• 17:08
  It must have been a great old show.
• 17:10
  Yeah, I'm sure it was.
• 17:11
  And sadly, my father passed away a few years ago.
• 17:14
  We never really have the answers to it.
• 17:15
  But I kept finding little notepads with...
• 17:19
  John Harvey's phone number on it and Brock's number and then brake pads and this and that.
• 17:25
  I'm sure that there was some dodgy deal done that nobody will ever know what happened really.
• 17:31
  I love it.
• 17:32
  I love it.
• 17:33
  I want to break into the discussion here just for a moment.
• 17:36
  Typically, I like to leave the podcasts in the guess words, their recollections.
• 17:41
  A few of you have messaged about which car in the Holden dealer team stable was actually sold to the Clellands.
• 17:47
  Was it the Bathurst winner or in fact the team's other car, the number 25, which finished second in the great race that year in the hands of teammates John Harvey and David Parsons.
• 17:58
  Now, John Clelland's covered some of the confusion at the time, but he sounds pretty confident that it was the Bathurst-winning car.
• 18:05
  We may never know the truth on this one, because sadly Peter's no longer here, and nor is John's father.
• 18:11
  There are long-time members of the HDT crew and some historians who are adamant, even now, that it was the 25 car that Clelland's ended up owning.
• 18:21
  Others, who worked very closely with Peter at the time, firmly believe it was the 05 Bathurst winner.
• 18:27
  Either way, it was a Holden dealer team big banger Commodore.
• 18:31
  I love the passion and the messages we get on socials and via the website.
• 18:34
  So thank you.
• 18:35
  Please keep them coming.
• 18:37
  Let's let the debate on that one, which has been going on for decades, continue.
• 18:41
  Now, back to the podcast.
• 18:43
  That was the second car that we got, the Brock's car, because when he did the European Touring Car Championship with the, I think it was the Group A car.
• 18:52
  I think that's where they were.
• 18:53
  It was the Mobil.
• 18:54
  Again, it was 05.
• 18:55
  It was the blue and white Mobil car.
• 18:58
  Yeah.
• 18:59
  He did spa and damaged it and left it in Europe while they flew back.
• 19:04
  We brought it back to the UK in another deal.
• 19:07
  We didn't own it, we just rented it.
• 19:09
  And myself and a guy called Vince Woodman did the tourist trophy race at Silverstone with it.
• 19:15
  Fantastic.
• 19:16
  Yeah, it was going well.
• 19:17
  I think we were running fifth or sixth against Tom Walkinshaw with the Rover SD1s.
• 19:23
  with guys like Walkinshaw, Steve Soper, Brancatelli and the Volvos, Jeff Allum.
• 19:31
  And we were running right up there.
• 19:32
  And then the old dog threw a wheel off it at one point.
• 19:35
  And that was the end of that.
• 19:36
  The cars, John, clearly you like that style of car.
• 19:40
  I mean, very different to what we'll talk about as far as your super touring career is concerned.
• 19:44
  I mean, diametrically different style of race car.
• 19:47
  But did you enjoy that big banger rear-wheel drive V8-powered machine?
• 19:50
  Clearly.
• 19:51
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 19:52
  It was something that I loved rear-wheel drive cars anyway, because I'd had the sports cars, I had the little Chevron, then I had a bigger Chevron.
• 20:02
  And so it was two-litre sports cars, big rear-wheel drive, lots of power, and then into these thunder saloons, as they were called here in the UK, your supercars are your big bangers.
• 20:15
  And it just seemed to be that I enjoyed driving them because I could get them to work, you know.
• 20:22
  And I think a lot of guys that have gone out and driven these things in Australia over the years, there's been a few of them have gotten to work really well, and there's a few who have just never really caught on to them.
• 20:32
  So, yeah, I loved driving them.
• 20:33
  I absolutely loved it.
• 20:35
  I know as far as the Euros that have come to this part of the world and race them over time, as you say, they're a unique beast.
• 20:41
  Not everyone can get their head around them, but you're one of the few that's been able to do that.
• 20:45
  We'll talk more about Bathurst and supercars a little later.
• 20:49
  I want to get a sense of, at this point in life for you, are you a young man working in a dealership and the racing is part-time?
• 20:57
  What was it like juggling all that?
• 20:59
  And at what point did obsession become occupation?
• 21:06
  It never occurred to me that I would be a race driver.
• 21:08
  And I never ever became a full professional race driver.
• 21:13
  In other words, raced at weekends, came home, put my feet up, went and played golf, went to the gym, did bugger all, and then went and raced the following weekend.
• 21:24
  That wasn't what happened.
• 21:26
  Through my entire racing career, I have retained the ownership of the car dealership.
• 21:32
  And I would race here in the UK on a Sunday over a weekend.
• 21:38
  I'd be on the phone to the dealership saying, what are we sold?
• 21:40
  What about this?
• 21:41
  What about that?
• 21:42
  Then I'd get in the car and I'd race it, drive home, Monday morning, half past eight, I'd be back at my desk in the dealership.
• 21:50
  Then we might go testing through the week and then we'd race the following weekend or the weekend after.
• 21:55
  But I never, ever lost the ownership of the dealership.
• 21:59
  So...
• 22:01
  It wasn't really about, I'm going to become a professional driver here.
• 22:04
  It was a sport.
• 22:05
  It was just a reason not to cut the grass at weekends initially.
• 22:10
  That was where it came from.
• 22:12
  And I enjoyed it and I was pretty good at it.
• 22:14
  And every time I got in a saloon car, I seemed to make it work.
• 22:20
  And it then evolved through the whole General Motors thing.
• 22:24
  And I've stuck with General Motors pretty much my entire saloon car career.
• 22:30
  Not because I wasn't offered other things.
• 22:33
  Just every time General Motors came to the party, they had either a car or the salary was pretty good or whatever else.
• 22:41
  But I was getting professionally paid to do
• 22:46
  full-time but I was still a part-time cab dealer I was still going home and running my business at home and I'm kind of glad I did that because I still have that business which is very successful and now I've got no motorsport I've got something to uh to lean back on just share that with our audience because it's I understand it's Jaguar and Volvo and you've won lots of awards for the dealership haven't you
• 23:09
  Yeah, we sold Jaguar a couple of years ago because it was getting to the stage where I could see that Jaguar and Land Rover were definitely going to have to be all under the one roof.
• 23:18
  And we didn't have the luxury of the Land Rover brand.
• 23:22
  So I sold the Jaguar business to the local Land Rover dealer, knocked my Volvo one down and rebuilt it completely.
• 23:29
  So we've got the state of the art latest brand.
• 23:32
  corporate identity for the Volvo site.
• 23:35
  And yeah, we continually win awards for dealer of the year and talk for customer satisfaction, all of these things.
• 23:42
  But it's a passion.
• 23:44
  It's the same passion in my business that I put in the motorsport.
• 23:49
  If we're going to compete, let's win.
• 23:52
  And in racing, that's the case.
• 23:55
  Nobody remembers the guy that was seconded.
• 23:57
  And I managed somehow to instil that into my staff in the dealership, where they want to win the awards as much as I do now, because that recognition of being one of the best, if not the best in the UK, it really does help.
• 24:15
  I imagine that the skill set that dad imparted on you in those early years by making you go and knock on doors and find the support that you needed and to learn to fund it correctly, I mean, they're all baseline skills that probably still apply massively, do they, John?
• 24:32
  Absolutely, there's no doubt.
• 24:34
  And I think there's, if you see it in karting, you know, these kids that come through karting and their fathers are throwing them loads and loads of money and they go through karting and then they get into a bit of single-seaters and then they've got to throw more money at it.
• 24:47
  And then the trouble with that ladder is that the higher up that ladder of motorsport you go, the more money it costs.
• 24:54
  No matter how good that kid is,
• 24:56
  you not only have to be very wealthy, you have to be pretty lucky and be in the right place at the right time.
• 25:01
  I mean, probably Lewis Hamilton's a good example of that.
• 25:04
  Would Lewis Hamilton have been so successful if Ron Dennis hadn't put his arm around him many years before and said, we're gonna pay for everything you do in the future, son?
• 25:16
  I don't know, maybe he would have been, but there are lots of kids
• 25:20
  There's lots of people I've raced against that haven't had the funding, but are superb drivers and didn't make it just because they ran out of money.
• 25:29
  But likewise, I will still get, I used to get phone calls every month from fathers saying, wee Johnny's really good, he's the best at the go-kart, he's this, he's won that, he's won the next thing.
• 25:42
  what should I buy them next?
• 25:44
  And my answer to that's always been either a set of golf clubs or a tennis racket.
• 25:49
  Because if you keep pouring money down this funnel, it'll disappear.
• 25:55
  There's only, if you think about it, there's only about 10, 12 Formula One drivers being paid to drive the cars.
• 26:05
  The rest are taking money along.
• 26:07
  And if you think about...
• 26:09
  In our days of touring cars in the UK here, there were about two dozen fully paid factory drivers.
• 26:16
  Now, there was more drivers being paid to drive touring cars in the UK at that time than there were being paid to drive Formula One cars.
• 26:26
  And in a lot of the cases, the British Championship was so big.
• 26:29
  We'll come to that if we will, but it was so big that we were getting paid more money than some of the Formula One drivers further down the grid.
• 26:36
  So...
• 26:37
  That was probably the attraction for me.
• 26:39
  It was the money, it wasn't the sport.
• 26:53
  That moment when you crest over a hill with a bit too much speed and the steering goes light.
• 26:59
  It's equal parts excitement and also sheer panic as you think, am I airborne?
• 27:04
  When did you decide to try and break into the BTCC, to the British Touring Car Championship, and how did you stitch that all together?
• 27:11
  I was racing the, after the Holden that we brought over, we built a thing called the Carrollton, which again had a seven litre V8 thing in it.
• 27:19
  And we were racing that in this Thunder Saloon series.
• 27:23
  And I was watching the British Championship because at the time there were Sierras at the front, Sierra Turbos, and some of the stuff that came from Australia.
• 27:32
  Rob Gravitt brought over Dick Johnson's Bathurst winning cars and,
• 27:37
  and started to dominate the front end of the...
• 27:40
  It was called the ESO British Touring Car Championship.
• 27:45
  There was class structure, so there was four classes.
• 27:47
  So you had the big bangers at the front, the Sierras.
• 27:50
  Then you had the 2.3 BMW M3s.
• 27:55
  Then you had a two-litre class, which had Volkswagen Golfs and stuff in.
• 28:01
  And then you had the little class.
• 28:03
  And I thought, Vauxhall didn't have a car.
• 28:06
  And then all of a sudden, they launched the Astra GTE, two litre, all singing, dancing.
• 28:12
  And it was, had all the makings of a good little race car because they were already, Vauxhall were already rallying it in World Rally.
• 28:21
  I think Louise Aiken Walker, and yeah, she became ladies world champion.
• 28:27
  and Malcolm Wilson were driving to Vauxhall.
• 28:31
  And all it needed to do was to lower it a bit, tidy it up a bit, and you could make a decent race car out of it.
• 28:38
  And I reckoned that if we could win the class on every occasion, we could win the championship.
• 28:46
  And because the Sierras, you know, Rouse would win one, Gravit would win one, somebody else might win one.
• 28:51
  So they were taking points off each other.
• 28:54
  And it was the same with the BMWs.
• 28:56
  Whereas I thought if we could go out there and dominate with the little Astra, we could win all the races, and we could theoretically win the championship.
• 29:05
  And it took a lot of badgering with Vauxhall to convince them.
• 29:10
  But it wasn't a difficult decision from their point of view because the rally car was there.
• 29:15
  They had the engine, the gearbox, and a lot of the suspension was already designed.
• 29:20
  It just needed lowered a bit.
• 29:24
  And they had the appetite because the dealers were paying part of the fund for it.
• 29:30
  They decided eventually that was a good idea and we ran one car.
• 29:33
  We built the car and in 1989 it went out and there was 13, I think there were 13 rounds that year and I won 12 of them and the other one had a wheel fall off it.
• 29:46
  So I ended up winning the championship, but I badgered the living daylights out of General Motors to the point where they were either going to say, listen,
• 29:54
  go away, you're annoying us.
• 29:56
  Or yeah, this is a good idea.
• 29:58
  And they could see that at the time,
• 30:02
  If a car won a race somewhere, as a manufacturer, they could advertise that as race winning, and they would sell cars on a Monday morning.
• 30:13
  That's kind of how it worked.
• 30:15
  And if you think to how that worked with Lexus Subaru is a really prime example of that.
• 30:21
  Nobody had ever heard of Subaru until Colin McRae won rallies with it.
• 30:26
  Yes.
• 30:27
  As soon as Colin won rallies, it became an iconic car, it was blue, and everybody in the world wanted one of these things.
• 30:35
  What better argument for going motorsport than that?
• 30:39
  And General Motors did a similar thing.
• 30:41
  I mean, we would win a race on the Sunday, and they would have a full page advert already sorted out for all the papers, the national papers in the UK, on a Monday morning.
• 30:52
  It was just a big thing, and it grew, and it grew, and it grew.
• 30:56
  But a problem, in 89, I won the class, but the highest I'd ever finished in a race was about, I don't know, 10th, 11th.
• 31:07
  And although I had won the championship, the best championship you could win in the UK, I'd never won a race.
• 31:15
  And I felt like I'd cheated because how can I win the championship?
• 31:21
  How can I be holding this trophy with Jim Clark's name on it?
• 31:25
  but never won a race.
• 31:26
  That just struck me as that wasn't right.
• 31:29
  And that's where Alan Gow came into the picture because when Gow came over here to the UK...
• 31:35
  There was a gang of them, there was Andy Rouse, Dave Cook, who ran the Vauxhall's, Vic Lee, who eventually ended up in jail, and Dave Richards.
• 31:46
  And they created TOCA, which was the touring car association.
• 31:51
  And that was what then steered the British Touring Car Championship over, and still does to this day.
• 31:59
  It was where it started.
• 32:01
  It was an amazing chapter, an amazing era, John, that whole two-litre period and the way that it evolved.
• 32:09
  So, you know, you said you felt – you didn't feel whole or satisfied in that sense.
• 32:15
  I mean, still you've won the title.
• 32:16
  That's amazing.
• 32:17
  But clearly they were committed to moving forward, and I think it was the Cavalier.
• 32:22
  That was the next step, wasn't it?
• 32:24
  Yeah, yeah, it was.
• 32:25
  I mean, they went to the Cavalier and –
• 32:31
  It wasn't being used anywhere else for anything.
• 32:34
  And we just basically put all the astro bits in a Cavalier and then spent the next year trying to get it to work.
• 32:44
  But what happened was they changed the structure slightly of the championship.
• 32:49
  So there wasn't quite as many classes.
• 32:52
  And
• 32:54
  It turned out from the Cavalier stage right through until the last days of my career really, it was about Vauxhall and BMW fighting for race wins and championships.
• 33:06
  And that was really where that whole battle seemed to come from, was we had a Vauxhall that was capable of winning races.
• 33:14
  And I think we won...
• 33:16
  I don't know, I think it was about the third ever race we entered with it.
• 33:20
  But it was competitive right from the get-go.
• 33:23
  And Wauxhall then decided they had to put a second car in, so we needed, you know, a teammate there to back me up.
• 33:30
  Or he would win and I would back him up however it worked.
• 33:33
  But we had the two cars.
• 33:35
  And then that whole championship just evolved through the decision that, nah, they've got to change.
• 33:41
  And we've got to make this.
• 33:42
  The winner of the race wins a championship, effectively.
• 33:45
  That's how it works.
• 33:46
  You can't have the class structure.
• 33:48
  You've got the spectators on TV and you've got the spectators on the banking watching cars...
• 33:54
  And the guy that's coming 10th wins a championship.
• 33:57
  That's not right.
• 33:58
  There's no way that's right.
• 34:00
  So the way that whole championship evolved and changed for the better was really down to Alan Gough.
• 34:08
  I mean, Gough undoubtedly was the driving force behind making the success of what it is today.
• 34:14
  For people that are listening to the podcast that don't know, Alan Gow had worked alongside and with Peter Brock for some time.
• 34:22
  And he came over and with the people that John's just been talking about, helped spearhead the...
• 34:30
  era a very special super touring era for the sport we'll get to just how big it became John but I want to pick up on something you said there a moment ago I may not have the year right but maybe it was 91 I think was that the the year of your first race win and how satisfying was that to finally grab one in the British Touring Car Championship
• 34:50
  It was amazing.
• 34:51
  It was just to win the race eventually, rather than winning a class, and to see the chequen flag first was absolutely...
• 35:00
  I'd proved the point.
• 35:01
  I'd won races in production saloon racing.
• 35:05
  I'd won races in the Thunder Saloon Series before.
• 35:09
  That was fine, but to win a British Touring Car Championship race from the front was pretty special.
• 35:18
  It just never looked back from there.
• 35:20
  But not once in all of that time did I think that I was gonna be a professional driver, even then.
• 35:28
  It was, I was still doing something.
• 35:30
  I was still getting in my car and driving home and I was still selling cars through the week at home.
• 35:34
  And then I'd talk to my engineer maybe and we'd go back and we'd do a test.
• 35:39
  And I mean, God, we were testing everywhere in those days because money was no object.
• 35:44
  But to win the first time out, or for that first time, was pretty special.
• 35:50
  Like anybody that wins a race, an important race for the first time, is a pretty special thing.
• 35:57
  And the series had all the elements, didn't it?
• 35:59
  So more and more manufacturers would get on board.
• 36:03
  A two-litre formula, a great chunk of those were front-wheel drive cars.
• 36:09
  But, I mean, obviously BMW had their rear-wheel drive car, and then later Audi would arrive with the Quattro.
• 36:15
  But Murray Walker was commentating it back then.
• 36:17
  I mean, it was the complete entertainment package and lots of action.
• 36:22
  And with that came some rivalries, John, didn't there?
• 36:27
  Yeah, there was a few of them.
• 36:31
  Yeah, I mean, what happened, we had about 12 manufacturers with two car teams, and the budgets just got bigger and bigger and bigger.
• 36:43
  And I think through the height of the British Touring Car Series through the 90s, as it grew, it started...
• 36:52
  You'd have a couple of million quid as a budget.
• 36:55
  It got up to 10 million pounds apparently, was the fourth budget for three Mondeos in the year 2000.
• 37:04
  Now, I think the Vauxhall budget, the biggest it ever got to was a bit over 5 million.
• 37:10
  But you would have the best cars, you'd have the best transporters, you'd have the best motorhomes, you had the carbon fibre pit trolleys, you name it, we had it.
• 37:21
  And it just got silly.
• 37:23
  But whilst we were in it, nobody thought anything of it.
• 37:26
  I mean, as I said, we would test, we would crate the cars up and we would send them to South Africa.
• 37:32
  We went to Kailami and we spent a week in Kailami testing because we could rent a track for, you know, a slab of beers.
• 37:41
  We could be guaranteed of good weather.
• 37:44
  And we could get peace and quiet to test there.
• 37:46
  Where if we'd gone in January to Silverstone or Brands Hatch to test, we'd have spent our lives either digging the cars out of snow or waiting for the rain to go off.
• 38:00
  So we would go to Estoril, Vallarunga.
• 38:05
  We went to Port.
• 38:06
  We were all over.
• 38:08
  We were absolutely everywhere in Europe testing.
• 38:11
  And we would go down to, I remember going to Vallarunga in Italy to test tyres for Michelin.
• 38:18
  And they said, right, we're going to do tyre tests, slicks Monday, Tuesday, and we're going to do wet tyres on Wednesday.
• 38:27
  And I said, how do you know it's going to rain on Wednesday?
• 38:30
  They said, no, no, it's not going to rain.
• 38:32
  We'll show you.
• 38:33
  We'll explain it to you.
• 38:35
  So off we go.
• 38:36
  And you would do, you know, five laps, come in.
• 38:40
  Another five laps come in, then you'd explain exactly what the tire wanted.
• 38:44
  Then they would throw an average, there'll be a baseline tire in the middle of that, and then you'd be testing a development tire.
• 38:52
  And then every fourth or fifth, but it wouldn't tell you when, they would throw the base tire back in again.
• 38:57
  So just to test you that you were paying attention.
• 39:01
  Anyway, it comes, you've been in the car at nine in the morning and got out of the car at five o'clock at night.
• 39:06
  It was great time, just great time.
• 39:10
  Wednesday comes and sunshine.
• 39:13
  So how are we going to test wet weather tyres?
• 39:16
  So there's a short track at Vallarunga.
• 39:19
  So what they did was they put a big water bowser, a couple of water tankers out, soaked the track.
• 39:25
  We went out, did five laps, came in, talked about the tyres.
• 39:28
  They put the bowser back out, soaked the track again.
• 39:32
  And there was, I think there was four or five teams.
• 39:34
  There was BMW, Renault, Ford and people like that there.
• 39:38
  It was amazing.
• 39:39
  I've never worked with a manufacturer so professional in the way that they did things.
• 39:45
  So we had all the slick testing and we had all the wet weather testing and it was 25 degrees of temperature all day long.
• 39:53
  So those were the things that we were doing.
• 39:54
  It was, at the time you never thought about it, but we were pretty privileged really to drive a car eight hours a day and be paid for the privilege of doing it.
• 40:04
  It was just great fun.
• 40:07
  They spent money like it was going out of fashion.
• 40:10
  Very different to the Thunder saloons that you'd been racing and things like this.
• 40:14
  I mean, front wheel drive cars, did the whole move to that style of machinery and perhaps the style of driving required, did it suit you straight away?
• 40:23
  Yeah, it did.
• 40:24
  I mean, it's never been a problem going rear-wheel drive, front-wheel drive.
• 40:28
  It's left-hand drive, right-hand drive.
• 40:30
  None of that ever seemed to bother me.
• 40:33
  The thing with a front-wheel drive car, you had to drive it with your fingertips.
• 40:37
  You had to be really gentle with the inputs, because in the early stages, those cars didn't have any aero on them in the early stages of the early 90s, when we went to the Cavalier.
• 40:48
  They had no front spoiler, no rear wings, no aero package at all.
• 40:53
  What made the racing really exciting was that we had Dunlop, Yokohama and Michelin.
• 41:00
  There were three tyres and they all had a strength and a weakness at some different point during the race.
• 41:07
  And that's what made a lot of the racing really good in those days because the Yokohama would be pretty good through the latter part of the race where it was a dirty track.
• 41:19
  The Dunlop would be good at the beginning when it was brand new.
• 41:22
  The Michelin was fantastic in the wet.
• 41:25
  So you had different cars and driver combinations being good at different times during a race.
• 41:31
  And the dulcet tones of Murray Walker
• 41:35
  commentating on it was just amazing.
• 41:37
  He was, he was the voice.
• 41:42
  He never, in the earlier stages, he never commentated it live.
• 41:46
  He did it later in the week.
• 41:48
  So all the mistakes you see Murray making, they were deliberate.
• 41:53
  You know, he made himself look foolish in many respects,
• 41:56
  But that was part of what the whole capture of that audience in those days was.
• 42:03
  I remember that he said he wanted to wire me up, because we watched you guys running with movable cameras and linked up to the pits for many years, but we'd never really done that.
• 42:16
  And Murray said to me, we're going to wire you up so that in the race, do you mind if I talk to you?
• 42:22
  And I said, no, no, no, no, that would be fine.
• 42:24
  But I was, I think I was on the front row of the grid at Donington.
• 42:29
  I said, whatever you do, don't do it if I'm surrounded by cars and I'm in a really, what looks like a complicated situation because I won't be able to reply.
• 42:40
  So, right, right, okay, that's fine.
• 42:42
  So the race starts, you can imagine what's gonna happen.
• 42:45
  The race starts and I'm running, I don't know, second or third or something.
• 42:51
  And there's about 12 other blokes looking for the same piece of tarmac.
• 42:54
  We're rubbing shoulders, we're grazing each other.
• 42:58
  And the next thing I hear is Murray coming into my helmet saying, John, good afternoon, it's Murray Walker here.
• 43:03
  Can we have a chat?
• 43:08
  I said, Murray, I'm a bit busy right now.
• 43:10
  Can I phone you back?
• 43:15
  So I said to him after the race, I said, I thought you said you were only going to talk to me if I was in a quiet position.
• 43:23
  Yeah, he says, but I just thought I'd test you out.
• 43:29
  He was a lovely bloke, really lovely bloke.
• 43:31
  Definitely.
• 43:32
  Massive for the championship to have him.
• 43:34
  It was, it was.
• 43:35
  Yeah.
• 43:36
  I said before, John, about rivalries.
• 43:38
  Fans will be able to find it on YouTube.
• 43:40
  I immediately think back to final round, 92.
• 43:46
  You're in the battle for the championship.
• 43:49
  Steve Soper makes contact with you.
• 43:50
  His teammate, Tim Harvey, goes on to win the crown.
• 43:55
  How do you feel years on about that?
• 43:57
  And there is a little bit of social banter now and then that I see between you and Tim.
• 44:01
  Does time heal all wounds kind of thing?
• 44:04
  No.
• 44:10
  No.
• 44:10
  No.
• 44:12
  The thing about Steve was that...
• 44:16
  I had raced with Steve in a 24 hour race twice, previously in the UK.
• 44:22
  He and I had done the World Higher 24 hour race with Tiffany Dell and Steve and myself.
• 44:28
  So I knew Steve and I didn't have a problem at all with Steve.
• 44:34
  The irony of it all was that at the beginning of that 92 season, Vic Lee, the owner of the team,
• 44:41
  had asked me to drive the BMW that Harvey ultimately ended up in.
• 44:45
  Now, not many people know that.
• 44:47
  But Vic had spent the winter trying to get me to drive it.
• 44:51
  The reason I didn't was that at the time, Steve was the BMW man in Germany, he was racing DTM.
• 44:58
  Was I going to get fair treatment over Steve or would I be the second fiddle?
• 45:04
  And I took the decision that I would play second fiddle to Steve.
• 45:09
  So I didn't take the drive.
• 45:11
  So the irony of it all is that car should have been mine anyway.
• 45:16
  Well.
• 45:17
  Yeah.
• 45:18
  So as we get to the final race, Tim Harvey and Will Hoy and myself, all we had to do was Tim could be, Will could be first, Tim second and me third or
• 45:31
  Will seventh, Tim eighth and me ninth, or at least in that order, one, two, three.
• 45:37
  All I had to do was follow them both home and the championship was mine.
• 45:41
  I had calculated it already in my head.
• 45:43
  I knew where I was.
• 45:44
  And during the race, I knew exactly what the points were at any time.
• 45:49
  So I got it figured.
• 45:52
  The problem was that Steve had a shunt at the beginning and everybody that goes on to Google, to YouTube, will find this race.
• 46:01
  Now bear in mind, this was 1992.
• 46:02
  We're talking 28 years ago.
• 46:08
  And people still remember it.
• 46:10
  Yeah.
• 46:11
  The net result was Steve got between me and Tim, and that was no good for me for the championship.
• 46:17
  I had to get back past Steve, which I had a lunge and did and got past him.
• 46:22
  Only was, got to the next corner.
• 46:24
  He decided not to lift off.
• 46:26
  And the last I heard was this BMW doing 12,000 revs coming in through the driver's door.
• 46:34
  And we're both off.
• 46:35
  And that was that.
• 46:36
  But...
• 46:37
  I got out the car.
• 46:38
  His car was behind me, so I didn't see him.
• 46:42
  I get out, and I'm looking round about to see what happened.
• 46:46
  Then I see Steve is still in his car, in the gravel.
• 46:50
  So I rush across to grab him.
• 46:52
  I've got my hand on the door handle, trying to pull it open to actually remove his Adam's apple.
• 46:58
  And...
• 47:00
  He's sitting inside hanging onto the door handles not to let me in.
• 47:04
  And I'm trying to get in and kill him.
• 47:06
  And fortunately for me, the marshals separate us, but I then made a few TV comments that the man's an animal.
• 47:16
  And of course, that phrase has been used so often it's not funny.
• 47:22
  The problem then after was that the marshals
• 47:26
  the governing body in the UK, the MSA, wanted blood.
• 47:31
  They wanted something.
• 47:33
  Because that incident, because the championship was growing exponentially, it was getting bigger and bigger and bigger,
• 47:42
  They wanted blood because that incident appeared on every single newspaper, every motoring magazine.
• 47:49
  It wasn't inside.
• 47:50
  It was on the front page of everything.
• 47:53
  It became just so widely known.
• 47:57
  But what it did for touring cars was it made the public sit up and look at it even more closely than they were.
• 48:04
  And for the credibility of the championship, everybody then wanted to come and watch it because...
• 48:11
  It was close combat, no quarter given.
• 48:17
  We were going to court.
• 48:18
  Steve and I had both employed barristers.
• 48:22
  The MSA, the Motorsport Association, wanted to take us to court and somebody was gonna lose a driving license.
• 48:29
  And I don't think it was gonna be me.
• 48:31
  So the night before the court case, I phoned Steve at home and I said, Steve, there's no point here.
• 48:39
  Having you lose your license, I lose my license, whatever happens here, I don't get my championship back.
• 48:46
  Let's just go into court holding hands and say it was a racing accident.
• 48:52
  So Steve thought for a minute and he said, no, I don't trust you, I don't believe you.
• 48:56
  I said, no, really, I'll say it first.
• 48:58
  As long as you come in and back me up, I'll say it.
• 49:01
  So that's what we did.
• 49:02
  We didn't even tell the lawyers.
• 49:04
  We went in and I said,
• 49:07
  It was really a racing incident and we made a bit of a meal of it and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 49:12
  Wyn Percy, who you know from years in Australia, Wyn was invited in as the driving standards advice for the MSA that day.
• 49:24
  And he had smoke pouring out of his ears because he knew it was just a load of crock.
• 49:30
  Because he knew what happened and they did definitely want Steve's license.
• 49:36
  But I didn't want that to happen because it would have hurt his livelihood.
• 49:40
  It didn't get me back my championship.
• 49:42
  And what was the point?
• 49:44
  So we decided to walk out of there hand in hand.
• 49:49
  But it took years later for Steve one day to say to me,
• 49:55
  It was a job.
• 49:56
  It was what he had to do.
• 49:57
  He was paid by BMW to do a job.
• 50:01
  He didn't actually go as far as saying, I deliberately took you out, but he was paid by BMW.
• 50:08
  He said, you know the annoying thing about it?
• 50:10
  He said, when Vic asked you to go and drive that car, it wasn't Vic.
• 50:16
  He said, BMW Munich had told Vic to go and employ you.
• 50:21
  I said, well, why did Vic never tell me that?
• 50:24
  Because if Vic had told me that BMW's money was behind my move from Vauxhall to BMW, I would have done it.
• 50:31
  I'd have gone.
• 50:31
  Because if I thought on...
• 50:34
  As a manufacturer, Vauxhall were only ever involved in saloon car and rallying, whereas people like BMW were involved in sports car racing.
• 50:45
  They did all sorts of stuff.
• 50:47
  Le Mans.
• 50:48
  And Steve then went on and did Le Mans with BMW.
• 50:52
  He raced in the American Le Mans series.
• 50:56
  That was one of my regrets.
• 50:58
  And the other regret was when Audi came into the championship, I had done a two-year deal the first time ever.
• 51:07
  I'd done 95 and 96.
• 51:09
  I'd signed a two-year contract with Oxlade.
• 51:12
  I won the championship outright in 95, thinking, fantastic.
• 51:17
  I've got number one on my new Vectra for 96.
• 51:22
  And the phone never stopped ringing when people wanted me to go and drive for them.
• 51:25
  And one of them was Audi.
• 51:27
  Wow.
• 51:28
  To go and share the car with Frank Bieler in the Quattro.
• 51:32
  Yeah.
• 51:32
  Yeah.
• 51:34
  And I could have gone and done that.
• 51:35
  And I'd signed the contract, but Audi said, well, we can get you out of the contract.
• 51:41
  And I said, no, worse than that, I've actually shaken hands with them.
• 51:45
  And if I shake hands with somebody, that's me.
• 51:49
  I've done the deal.
• 51:50
  It's, I'm a man of my word in that respect.
• 51:53
  That probably was the worst decision I made because I enjoyed the time with Vauxhall.
• 51:59
  But had I gone with Audi, Frank then went on to win Le Monde five times.
• 52:04
  And, you know, I'm not a lot older than Frank or Emmanuel Epirot, who shared the car with him.
• 52:10
  So my regret was not to do the Audi thing.
• 52:15
  My regret was never to go to Le Mans and win it.
• 52:18
  That would have been just fantastic.
• 52:20
  But, hey, such is life.
• 52:22
  Such is life.
• 52:23
  Wow, great stories.
• 52:25
  I want to touch on a little bit more about the technical side of the cars because you alluded to it before.
• 52:31
  I mean, ridiculous budget levels, engineering filtering through from kind of Formula One and technology and thinking in some teams as well.
• 52:42
  The one that caught my eye that I found intriguing, lots of old Holdens in Australia have a three on a tree, column shift.
• 52:51
  You guys ran a sequential shift, but it was column.
• 52:56
  It was different.
• 52:57
  Yeah, it was different to everyone else.
• 52:59
  So firstly, I mean, was it ever problematic?
• 53:03
  What did you think when they pitched that idea to you?
• 53:06
  And was it in some respects, maybe a little bit of an advantage?
• 53:08
  It looked like it was a quick shift.
• 53:10
  How it came about was the Vauxhall team had a floor mounted gear lever, normal floor mounted gear lever,
• 53:20
  Ray Malek, when Ray Malek took over the Vauxhall deal from Dave Cook Racing in 94, the previous car they'd been running had been engineered by David Leslie.
• 53:34
  He had been the driver.
• 53:37
  David had come from stick shift go-karts, you know, full circuit, you know, gear lever go-karts.
• 53:45
  He wanted that gear lever on the column because that was what he was used to with the go cap.
• 53:53
  So Ray Malek designed the Cavalier in those days to have that column gear change.
• 53:59
  Wow.
• 53:59
  And of course, when I went across to drive for Malek in 94, it still had this silly bloody lever up on the steering column.
• 54:11
  And I thought, I'm not sure about this.
• 54:12
  Can we not just put it back in the middle of the floor where it should be?
• 54:16
  And he said, no, just try it, just try it.
• 54:18
  And actually it was pretty good because it was quite direct.
• 54:21
  With it being where it was, it had less movement between the column.
• 54:26
  There were less knuckle joints between it from an engineering point of view and the gearbox.
• 54:32
  So it was less right angle drives.
• 54:34
  It could go right into the box.
• 54:37
  It actually worked really well.
• 54:39
  And once you got in your head that up was up and down was down, but it wasn't, it was the other way around.
• 54:46
  So as you were accelerating, you would imagine you'd be pulling the gear lever to change up gear.
• 54:52
  And as you're braking, you would push it down the way.
• 54:54
  Nah, just to complicate it, they flicked it the other way.
• 54:57
  So it was the opposite way around, which was a pain right in the jack seat because you had to...
• 55:03
  You had to remember that, otherwise it would just explode the engine.
• 55:07
  But it was actually, it worked really well.
• 55:09
  And it stuck, it stuck all the way through the 888 days of the Vectra, because by that stage, they had the gear shift would run down through the centre of the gearbox itself.
• 55:21
  You know, it was a really complicated thing.
• 55:29
  That's the end of part one of my podcast with two-time British touring car champion John Clelland.
• 55:34
  Make sure you download part two for more laughs with the great man, plus his memories of racing at Bathurst, the immense satisfaction from his second BTCC title, and the decision to stop full-time racing in the UK.
• 56:01
  Listener.