Latest / Rusty's Garage / Andy McElrea (Part 1)

Transcript

Andy McElrea (Part 1) · Rusty's Garage

• 0:02
  A listener production.
• 0:14
  I'm automotive commentator and journalist Greg Rust, and this is Rusty's Garage.
• 0:29
  For this episode, it's an Aussie in New Zealand talking to a Kiwi who now calls Australia home.
• 0:35
  We are literally split by the Tasman.
• 0:38
  Andy McElroy settled on the Gold Coast in the early 2000s and now runs his self-titled McElroy Racing operation with a diversely successful range of services that interconnect, prepping race cars for customers with a focus on Porsche and GT machines.
• 0:55
  There's driver development.
• 0:57
  tuning, engineering support and an impressive simulator, a tool to learn and complement the race programs, not a toy.
• 1:06
  Along the way, this outfit, as Warren Luff explained in a recent episode of Rusty's Garage, has coached some impressive young racers in that gap between karts and the junior formula to turning professional.
• 1:20
  There's the right level of stern talk when required, but because a number of the team at MR have a driving background, the coaching is next level and delivered with a kind of intuitive guidance that not everyone can offer.
• 1:34
  MUSIC
• 1:34
  The things that I can sort of see them doing or advice that I can give them to not only make them a better driver on track, but also to be a better driver off track and how they engage with fans and sponsors and all that sort of stuff.
• 1:47
  Because the outside of the car is such a huge part of what we do.
• 1:51
  And a lot of the time that determines whether you actually get the opportunity to get into the car as well.
• 1:57
  Matt Campbell and Jackson Evans are great MR graduate stories that have earned drives within the Porsche framework globally.
• 2:06
  Young racers that were perhaps on the quieter side to begin with, but now walk and talk with a level of confidence shaped by experience here, results and the invariable stirring and laughter that are standard for this outfit.
• 2:21
  Andy has a nickname for everyone.
• 2:24
  Shag, George and more.
• 2:27
  His son Hunter is now racing in America and endeavouring to make it to IndyCar.
• 2:32
  We'll talk about that later.
• 2:33
  But we begin with Andy's own driving career, one that you sense could have gone further.
• 2:39
  There are right turns too that took him to Europe and the States to work with some big names that he still calls friends.
• 2:48
  This is a story of mateship too, of not being afraid to roll the dice and have a go, and one of family that has a generational love of racing.
• 3:00
  I grew up in a little country town in the South Island of New Zealand called Ashburton.
• 3:04
  It's become somewhat infamous since a handful of us lads that have left the town and come over here and relocated and tried to live our dreams in Australia.
• 3:19
  Yeah, we, myself, Tim Miles, Johnny Evans, Jackson's dad and Paul Crookshank and a couple of our other buds, we all grew up together.
• 3:28
  We met at school.
• 3:29
  We soon worked out we had a common interest with race cars.
• 3:34
  And, yeah, it just sort of grew from there.
• 3:37
  We all left school, got our, you know, 16 or 17, as you did back then, and went and did our apprenticeships.
• 3:45
  And, yeah, just started racing.
• 3:47
  Yeah.
• 3:49
  From my own perspective, my family was very much a motorsport family, obviously with dad racing my whole life and my grandmother before him.
• 4:00
  So she was the one who actually got us all addicted to this crazy game.
• 4:05
  So she was one of the founding members of the Ashburton Car Club and...
• 4:10
  She did a lot of car club events and sprints and things like that.
• 4:14
  And then Dad had an opportunity to take over the family farm, which looking back now would have been a far more lucrative and wiser move, but he loved cars and used to do broadsides up the driveway at the farm.
• 4:30
  And when my uncle Tommy, Dad's younger brother, was smart enough to be mustering horses in the mountains,
• 4:39
  with my grandfather, well, with his grandfather rather.
• 4:41
  And so Tommy ended up taking over the farm, which was the right thing, and Dad, he went off and did his own thing around cars.
• 4:52
  So when you hear people talking about it's in the blood, well, in our case, it's definitely in the blood, no doubt about that.
• 4:59
  We will talk more about the Kiwi Racing Mafia to your South Island mates as we go in the podcast here and later on about your son and his racing.
• 5:08
  While you reflected on your dad there a moment ago, there is a cool picture that I spotted in the build up to this.
• 5:14
  You, your dad and Hunter, I think it's 2017.
• 5:19
  You all raced a Toyota 86 together.
• 5:21
  Might have been a class trophy, I think, in all of that.
• 5:25
  That personally must have been a very special one, was it?
• 5:28
  Yeah, it was.
• 5:30
  At the time, we kind of knew we were doing something pretty cool, the three of us together.
• 5:37
  And it was one of those little windows of time where Dad was young enough and healthy enough to do a mini endurance race.
• 5:48
  And Hunter was old enough and was starting to get his –
• 5:55
  get himself organised in Formula Ford racing.
• 5:57
  So he was, dad was young enough, Hunter was old enough, and I was just in the middle.
• 6:01
  So, yeah, that was a pretty amazing thing.
• 6:04
  And as the years go by, it becomes, as you reflect a little bit more, it becomes more obvious how special it really was.
• 6:11
  And one of the, probably one of the coolest things about it is,
• 6:15
  Hunter had got his first GoPro at the time.
• 6:17
  So he fancied himself as a bit of a producer, as they all do.
• 6:24
  And so he did a little, it was probably a 30-minute video of that whole weekend.
• 6:32
  And, you know, obviously in another 10 or 15 years' time, it's going to be real special because the bond that Hunter has with my dad is really special because they're obviously, again,
• 6:43
  the similarity, the connection that we've all got through racing, yeah, those two guys, they're actually like brothers.
• 6:50
  When they get together, they share one brain, and they're just, you know, taking the piss and having fun, and they clearly love each other's company, which is pretty neat.
• 7:01
  Terrific.
• 7:01
  What was your first racing experience, mate?
• 7:03
  And give us a sense of the feeling that it left you with.
• 7:06
  I believe it was around like an Austin A30, and it might have been autocrosses and things like that.
• 7:11
  What was the first experience?
• 7:12
  My first sort of competitive experience was exactly that.
• 7:16
  I had an Austin A30 that jumped out of fourth gear, and I used to have to sling my leg over the gear stick to hold it in gear.
• 7:24
  And I was a mechanic, but I was...
• 7:27
  It was clearly not a very good one because I couldn't even fix my own A30 Austin gearbox.
• 7:32
  But one of the advantages of growing up in a little town like that was we had lots of shingle sprints and farm autocrosses on farms.
• 7:40
  And then, you know, we would go up to Christchurch or down to Timaru and do a track day, a sprint event.
• 7:47
  Yeah.
• 7:48
  So those were my sort of early days behind the wheel.
• 7:52
  But even before that, Dad had bought a homemade single seater, which had a, someone might hear this and correct me, but I'm pretty sure it had a Norton 750 engine in it.
• 8:06
  And it was kind of, you know, looked like a Cooper or one of those cars from the 50s or 60s.
• 8:14
  And I would have been nine or ten, and Dad thought it would be cool to get me started on my racing career, despite having not ever sat in a go-kart.
• 8:23
  So I got the chance to drive it around the track at Ruapuna in Christchurch at lunchtime.
• 8:29
  And one of the last bits of advice Dad gave me before I hopped in this thing was, if it's on fire, hop out.
• 8:36
  But he wasn't much more specific than that.
• 8:41
  So this thing was pretty, the car apparently had a reputation for every time it was driven by whoever owned it at the time, something would fall off it.
• 8:51
  And this day was no exception.
• 8:52
  So I was eight or nine years old, driving down the front straight at Timaru with my mum and my grandparents and half of the Ashburton Car Club standing on the fence watching me puddle around at about 40 mile an hour.
• 9:05
  And going down the front straight on about the third or fourth lap,
• 9:09
  I wasn't a particularly confident driver at that age, but I lifted off the throttle in front of everyone and the thing backfired and blew the primary pipe off the exhaust, which was pointing towards the cockpit.
• 9:20
  So a big bloody shot of flame flew into the cockpit beside me and I'm like, I remember my guidance here.
• 9:27
  If it's on fire, I'll hop out.
• 9:28
  So cruising along somewhere between 40 and 50 mile an hour, I stood up on the seat and jumped out of the car in front of my grandparents and my mother.
• 9:36
  Dad was in deep shit for that for a long time.
• 9:39
  But that was my first experience on track, which was quite surreal because I'd dreamed about it my whole life.
• 9:46
  And then actually being out there was cool.
• 9:48
  And then doing something as famous as jumping out of it while I was driving along was probably helped set the scene for the rest of my racing career.
• 9:56
  Hey, you're a good talker.
• 9:58
  That's obvious, mate.
• 9:59
  Did you get in trouble at school with that or could you talk your way out of it?
• 10:03
  You know, even my kids don't believe this, but when I was their age, I was quite respectful, quite polite.
• 10:13
  Wasn't much of a... Was it, you know, certainly wasn't a salesman of any kind.
• 10:20
  And I think it was actually the confidence of leaving.
• 10:24
  I hated school.
• 10:24
  I was not good at it.
• 10:26
  It didn't like me.
• 10:27
  And so getting out of there and becoming an apprentice mechanic,
• 10:32
  It was probably the beginning of me building some confidence and then getting to do some of these car club events and finding out that my lifelong ambition of being able to be a half reasonable driver seemed to be a possibility that I just started getting confidence then.
• 10:50
  And then you add the special ingredient called alcohol and you never look back.
• 10:57
  Mate, you and your buddies that you mentioned before that you were knocking about with, I love stories like this about close schoolmates that then continue to cross paths in later life personally and professionally.
• 11:12
  Tim Miles, who's just sold supercars for a second time, always good to admire somebody who sells something twice, he was initially keen on your sister mate or something.
• 11:22
  Is that right?
• 11:23
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 11:24
  No, that's very true.
• 11:25
  We were...
• 11:27
  four or five or six years old.
• 11:29
  And Tim and I, so dad was driving in one of those car club events.
• 11:34
  Tim's dad, Alan, was also one of the founding members of the Ashburton Car Club with my grandmother.
• 11:39
  And Alan was a, after he stopped competing, he became one of the stewards for the,
• 11:45
  Motorsport New Zealand or man's, it was none at the time.
• 11:47
  So Alan was officiating, Dad was driving, and us kids were just playing in the gravel with our Matchbox toys and making out little tracks and doing what kids do at that age.
• 11:58
  But Tim, who's always had an eye for a pretty girl, thought my sister was pretty okay.
• 12:06
  So it was only years later that I found out he was only hanging around me for the first couple of years just to try and get a bit of a sniff at my sister.
• 12:12
  LAUGHTER
• 12:14
  Tell me, he says to ask about the Stew Special, a homemade sports car that I think you sold to him.
• 12:22
  Is that right?
• 12:23
  Yeah, I know where he's going with this.
• 12:25
  Trust him to ask this one.
• 12:29
  So, yeah, it was a homemade sports car that had been built by the guy who ran the local vehicle testing station in Ashburton.
• 12:39
  an old legend called Stuart Grazier, and he made this Helmand Avenger-powered two-seater sports car, which kind of was a little bit like a cross between a Lotus 7 and like a U2 sports car.
• 12:52
  So it was a really cool little thing.
• 12:55
  And that was sort of my third car that I owned, and it was a really neat little car,
• 13:05
  Road car and track car.
• 13:06
  So we had little guards that we bolted on it to drive it on the street, and then when we went to the track, we unbolted the guards off the wheels, and then they were exposed, and then we put some slicks in,
• 13:17
  and some steel wheels on it and raced in these car club events.
• 13:23
  And it was fantastic.
• 13:23
  Then I ended up actually winning my first championship with the South Island Sports Car Championship in that car against some proper race cars at the time, which was kind of fun.
• 13:33
  But after I was ready to go up to Formula Ford when I was about 17, I was ready to go
• 13:40
  Tim was showing signs of wanting to go, you know, follow my footsteps only a year behind me and take over the sports car that I ran.
• 13:49
  So we did it.
• 13:51
  It was a little bit against his dad, Alan's wishes.
• 13:54
  I think Alan was a far more sensible parent than my dad was.
• 13:58
  And he...
• 14:00
  was hesitant about Tim buying a sports car, but Tim was adamant and so he bought it.
• 14:06
  So the first day that Tim drove it, we went down and did a private test at our home track in Timaru and Tim drove around all day and did a really good job and at the end of the day, my mechanic, his name is Malcolm Lovett and he's a successful car
• 14:21
  dealership owner in Ashburton still today and Malcolm we called him Moose and so I asked if I could take Moose for a couple of laps in the stew special at Tiburu and there was this really cool corner, fast sweeping corner coming onto the front straight with a bump in the middle of it and I used to be able to do a pretty decent sort of a slide through there and impress anyone who might have been watching.
• 14:42
  And this particular day I didn't really account, I did a couple of laps with Moose in the passenger seat and then didn't account for the extra weight and
• 14:51
  lost it, hit the bump, lost it, fired into the bank right in front of the pits, in front of Tim and his dad in the assembled gathering.
• 15:00
  And poor old Moose started breaking these fence posts with his head as we sort of fired along the guardrail and tore the front off Tim's brand new race car, which was very embarrassing.
• 15:13
  It was one of the...
• 15:14
  And Tim's dad had a pretty serious word with my dad about my attitude and lack of respect and various other things of that nature.
• 15:24
  So he wasn't wrong at all.
• 15:27
  And it was one of those lessons I learned.
• 15:29
  And then Tim and I just, after work each night, we'd go back to our workshop.
• 15:33
  And over the next couple of months, we repaired it and got it back to how it was.
• 15:39
  And then Tim carried on.
• 15:40
  But, yeah, I crashed his car.
• 15:42
  That's what he's getting at.
• 15:45
  Can we go back here, mate, just to something you brought up a little moment ago, and that is you kind of quit school with about maybe two years to go, I think you were alluding to there.
• 15:54
  You had badgered a member of the car club about a job, hadn't you?
• 15:58
  And this is something that young people could probably learn from now about that persistence, about always knocking on the door and trying to – you knew you needed that mechanical skill set, didn't you?
• 16:09
  Yeah, we had a guy in our car club who was –
• 16:13
  A really, really good dude.
• 16:15
  His name's Murray Cairns, and Murray was the foreman at the workshop right over the road from the primary school that I went to.
• 16:25
  So I used to watch the cars getting worked on when I was a little kid in the playground, and then Murray was one of the leading members of the Ashburton Car Club at the time.
• 16:35
  And so...
• 16:36
  I just decided when I was sort of 15, 14, 15 or 16 that I wanted to be a mechanic because I knew I needed to be one to work on my cars.
• 16:44
  And I wanted to work for Murray because he was a cool guy.
• 16:48
  And so I went and hassled him the –
• 16:55
  The owner of the business is also the brother of my godfather.
• 17:00
  So there's a slight connection.
• 17:01
  I may have had a little bit of an advantage, but I went and asked for a job and they told me, no, we don't have a job for an apprentice.
• 17:09
  We've got one now.
• 17:10
  Come back in three months.
• 17:11
  And so every two months I would go back and ask and, you know, get dressed and brush my hair and go and ask if there was a job yet.
• 17:20
  It was made clear by mum and dad I wasn't leaving school until I had a job.
• 17:22
  And so I just kept badgering them every couple of months until they finally said, hey, yeah, we will have a job coming up shortly.
• 17:29
  And so I got to leave school and go and start my apprenticeship, which was the beginning of a new direction in my life, which got the rest of this show going.
• 17:40
  Yeah.
• 17:42
  Even now, mate, you have an affinity with Formula Ford.
• 17:44
  You still race them, you know, in historic races in New Zealand and things like that when the world is open.
• 17:50
  Am I right in saying that the first one you ever raced, which may have been a 75 car, I think, has a significant bit of Kiwi racing history too, doesn't it?
• 18:01
  The significant history that I know about it is that when I did my first crack at the National Formula Four Championship, I got last in every race.
• 18:08
  So that's significant.
• 18:13
  The poor thing.
• 18:13
  But it was a great car, a really good car to learn in, really predictable.
• 18:18
  And then I went after that year.
• 18:23
  Obviously, I must have shown enough cars.
• 18:26
  of a glimmer of hope for dad to help me by the Reynard, 84 Reynard that had just won the championships all of a sudden.
• 18:34
  I was in a contemporary car, was only a couple of years old, and was able to do the national championship, which was neat.
• 18:43
  But that car had just won the championship with John Crawford, so it probably had a bit more significance than the 75 Van Diemen.
• 18:52
  You got third in the 86 Formula Forward Championship, didn't you?
• 18:55
  And it was at a point in your career, mate, where, you know, every once in a while there were little speed humps for every race driver.
• 19:03
  You would eventually go off to England after that third place in the championship.
• 19:07
  Tell us about that little chapter and Craig Coleman, Dick Bennett.
• 19:12
  I mean, it was the beginning of a couple of overseas adventures for you, wasn't it?
• 19:15
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 19:17
  And, you know, again, we...
• 19:20
  Looking back, we were so, so naive.
• 19:22
  It wasn't funny.
• 19:23
  But, you know, I thought that I wanted to be a Formula 1 driver.
• 19:27
  And I mean, I did.
• 19:28
  But, you know, the reality of what needed to be around you commercially and everything else to make that a reality, it was just absolute blind faith that you have.
• 19:39
  So I went off.
• 19:41
  after doing the 86th Formula 4 Championship, completing that and getting third headed off to the UK.
• 19:49
  And I literally had £400 on me.
• 19:53
  Once I converted the money that I had saved, I had £400 rocked up at...
• 20:01
  At Gatwick.
• 20:01
  Winging a prayer.
• 20:02
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 20:03
  Rocked up.
• 20:04
  I had two aunts, one that lived in Reading and one that lived in Cambridge.
• 20:07
  So I got some free accommodation from each of them from time to time.
• 20:10
  But I went and went to help Craig Coleman.
• 20:16
  So he was a bit of a hero of mine because he'd just, you know, beaten me in the championship.
• 20:22
  And he was on track, well, had been given an invite to
• 20:28
  compete in the 1986 race of champions at Brands Hatch, which was a really cool thing, which ran for a couple of years.
• 20:35
  So I went over as his mechanic and helper and, you know, Dick Bennett, who most people that listen to your podcast would know who Dick is.
• 20:45
  He's an absolute legend in Formula 3 and now touring cars and so forth.
• 20:50
  But, you know, running center in Maurizio Gugelman and co, he's amazing.
• 20:54
  He needs no introduction, but Dick was a South Island boy like us, and he was very, very welcoming.
• 21:01
  He let me stay in his house for the first week or so, and I never forget crazy little things.
• 21:07
  He was playing Simply Red because apparently Ayrton liked Simply Red, and so he liked it.
• 21:14
  Wow.
• 21:15
  And it's sort of been one of my favourite groups ever since, and I think it's probably more the...
• 21:19
  That influence, the fact that old Mick Hucknall was a decent singer.
• 21:25
  But funny little things like that don't leave you.
• 21:28
  But, yeah, so we worked at West Surrey Racing and worked with another legend over here in Australia called Brett Lupton, who has Fast Lane Racing based in Perth now.
• 21:40
  But Brett was on his way up...
• 21:45
  motorsport ladder as a mechanic and he was, he was, uh, well, at that year, Dick, Dick in West Surrey Racing was supposed to run a guy called Bertrand Farby in the, in the 86 Formula 3 championship.
• 21:57
  And he was tragically killed in a testing accident leading up to that championship after Senna had been through Dick's team.
• 22:03
  So...
• 22:04
  They ended up running Maurizio Gugelman in a Formula 3000 car, and that was West Surrey's first year in F3000.
• 22:10
  But I met Brett, and we've been mates ever since, and that was many hundreds of years ago.
• 22:18
  And then Brett went on to stick with Maurizio and go to F1 with Leighton House and things like that.
• 22:25
  So it was just a fantastic year.
• 22:29
  Rocking up at Brands Hatch and watching, seeing Senna come around the last corner on the front straight and the JPS Lotus, that's stuff you just makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and stuff you just never forget.
• 22:41
  So there were lots of moments.
• 22:43
  There were some, I kind of, and she's probably where I learned to misbehave a little bit too because we got up to a bit of trouble over there, but probably not too much that can be said here.
• 22:53
  Yeah.
• 22:54
  Did you or Craig, one of you spin a bit of a funny story, you almost suggested that the South Island was its own separate country and then the next thing you're representing New Zealand in the international race of champions.
• 23:04
  Is this right?
• 23:05
  Yeah, mate.
• 23:06
  Yeah, this is hilarious.
• 23:07
  So my uncle was a wheeler dealer.
• 23:13
  He was the CEO of the James Payne Brewing Company over there at the time and he was a renowned salesman.
• 23:21
  He was...
• 23:22
  Yeah, he was regular Arthur Daly.
• 23:25
  And for those who can remember that show, he got hold of the guy who was running the race of champions because he knew I was the South Island Formula 4 champion.
• 23:36
  And I was over there helping the New Zealand Formula 4 champion.
• 23:38
  And he was struggling to differentiate the two and thought that I should be – it was unfair that I wasn't in the race when I was way off –
• 23:48
  Way off being ready to race against Roland Ratzenberger and Thomas Mazira and Craig Coleman and those guys.
• 23:53
  But it was – so he kept pestering the poor bugger that was running the race of champions and, like –
• 24:01
  a couple of days before the race at Brands Hatch, he headed home convinced that the South Island was its own country and that I should be the first reserve.
• 24:11
  And a guy called Scott Acheson, who won the American Formula Ford Championship, couldn't make it at the last minute.
• 24:17
  So I got thrown in, absolutely hopelessly underprepared, but it was an absolutely unbelievable experience to be in that race.
• 24:27
  I think I qualified on the back row and...
• 24:30
  Had a couple of guys behind me at the end of the race, but racing like Roland Ratzenberger and Frank Beeler and all these dudes who went on to these amazing careers.
• 24:39
  It was pretty cool.
• 24:42
  And then, you know, obviously the Porsche Sport Driving School has been a big part of my life the last 20 years, and that's where I met Thomas Mazira and his wife, Kate.
• 24:50
  He was in the race.
• 24:51
  He qualified on the front row, actually, and he was one of the older guys in the race.
• 24:55
  But Thomas has been a great mate for a long, long time, and that all started back then in 86.
• 25:00
  In some of the names that you've just rattled off too, it's probably worth sharing with people.
• 25:03
  You connect, I think, at some point around here with Mark Blundell too, you know, Formula Ford 2000.
• 25:10
  And he had success in both Europe and the British Championship in that.
• 25:13
  And you were a part of it, weren't you?
• 25:15
  Yeah, once again, my really famous uncle kicked another door open for me.
• 25:21
  So he knew Danny Blundell, Mark's dad, through some business dealings, and they were looking – they were running their own – Mark managed to be the –
• 25:33
  works Reynard driver for Formula Ford 2000 for that year.
• 25:36
  And they were running it with their own little family team called Fleet Ray Racing.
• 25:42
  And they needed a number two mechanic.
• 25:44
  So my uncle again rang at the right time and I got a job there as a number two on the works Reynard for the 86 British Formula Ford 2000 championship and the European.
• 25:57
  So we did both championships that year.
• 26:00
  And that was just an absolute eye-opener.
• 26:04
  So Mark, who clearly went on to a very, very illustrious career in Formula 1, he probably drove for the greatest teams in Formula 1 at their worst times.
• 26:14
  So he drove at Ligier and McLaren and Williams and...
• 26:21
  But always with her in a slump, unfortunately.
• 26:23
  But he then went on to IndyCar career and so forth.
• 26:25
  But Mark is still a mate.
• 26:27
  And what was funny was that year, so he had a mate called Steve Robertson.
• 26:33
  And Steve is now, is actually Kimi Räikkönen's manager these days.
• 26:39
  His manager.
• 26:40
  So Robbo and Mark Blundell were really good mates.
• 26:43
  Their dads were mates.
• 26:44
  They were mates.
• 26:45
  And Steve was about a year behind.
• 26:47
  He was doing Formula Ford 1600 when Mark was doing Formula Ford 2000.
• 26:53
  So I called everyone shag.
• 26:57
  Coming from New Zealand, calling everyone shag was pretty normal.
• 27:02
  And so we were at dinner one night with Steve Robbo's dad, Dave Robertson, who died a few years ago.
• 27:09
  But him and Danny Blundell were both renowned athletes
• 27:15
  I say wheeler dealers, but they dealt in big deals, millions and millions of pounds, and both very, very successful and pretty aggressive guys.
• 27:23
  But really, really, they were extremely generous and kind to me.
• 27:27
  And we were at dinner one night, and I called Mark Shag, and old Dave almost spat his dinner out, couldn't believe what he'd heard.
• 27:36
  And then he goes, he doesn't know what that means, does he?
• 27:41
  So on the racing side, the Mark Blundell and Bertrand Gachot, who everyone knows went on to get arrested and give Michael Schumacher his break, but Blundell and Gachot hated each other and if they weren't
• 27:59
  To say they're trying to kill each other may be an overstatement, but not much.
• 28:03
  They loathed each other.
• 28:05
  And we went to a race at Alton Park and both got – they were on the front row.
• 28:09
  They were always on the front row and there were some good peddlers behind them, but those two guys were so good and quick and hungry.
• 28:17
  There was one race at Alton Park where they both –
• 28:21
  didn't even start the race because they took each other's wings off on the warm-up lap.
• 28:25
  Crazy.
• 28:25
  They were that aggressive.
• 28:26
  Yeah, it was madness.
• 28:28
  And you could tell these dudes were both going to go to Formula 1 because they were just that aggressive.
• 28:34
  And it was neat being a part of that and seeing how hard –
• 28:39
  You had to race, and that's when I realised that I didn't probably have the talent or at least the seat time or anywhere near the budget or commercial backing required to get to the level that they were at.
• 28:54
  So I was just really, really honoured to be a part of it because it was a really, really cool time over there in the mid-late 80s.
• 29:02
  I want to have a little bit of fun here.
• 29:04
  Paul Cruickshank, Shaft, has given me a little bit of intel as well.
• 29:08
  Oh, dear.
• 29:09
  I don't know the name of the race.
• 29:10
  I think it was the Southern something or rather.
• 29:14
  He says, I think you and he shared a Mazda RX3 rally car in some sort of endurance race at Timaru.
• 29:24
  Share that story.
• 29:26
  Oh, dear.
• 29:26
  Yeah.
• 29:27
  So Dad was away for the weekend.
• 29:29
  So he had a white RX3 four-door Mazda, which was sort of a rally car.
• 29:35
  It was a little bit all-rounder, but it was a bit of a dunger.
• 29:38
  But, you know, it was a – I think it had a 12A engine.
• 29:42
  It had a fair bit of grunt and it had, oh, treaded tyres and things on it.
• 29:46
  So Dad was away.
• 29:47
  So we thought it would be a ripping idea on the Thursday night, probably having a couple of beers after work.
• 29:53
  we thought it'd be a good idea to go down and run in the Southern 200 at Timaru.
• 29:58
  So Tim Miles and Johnny Evans, they agreed to...
• 30:03
  To be the crew and Mark Leonard and a couple of our other buddies from Timaru, we drafted them in.
• 30:10
  So we whistled down there on the Saturday morning and signed the entry forms.
• 30:16
  So Shaft and I were driving the Mazda.
• 30:19
  I think we called it the Lizard because it was just a bit of a lizard.
• 30:22
  This thing wasn't real nice.
• 30:24
  But the...
• 30:27
  So we did a bit of practice on Saturday and, you know, borrowed some fuel churns because you had to do a fuel stop and things like that.
• 30:33
  So that was all cool.
• 30:35
  Then we finished the on-track stuff, went back to the Tamuka camping ground and Josie Spillane, who runs Highlands.
• 30:45
  In Cromwell.
• 30:46
  In Cromwell for Quinney.
• 30:48
  Yeah.
• 30:48
  So she –
• 30:51
  She had me on a couple of years ago.
• 30:52
  Her dad was the manager of the Tomuka Camping Ground at the time.
• 30:55
  So anyway, we were on this particular occasion.
• 30:58
  We got a bit hammered and we got back to the camping ground
• 31:05
  unfolded the awning off the side of my Fiat van, which my former Ford used to go into.
• 31:11
  We rolled our sleeping bags out.
• 31:12
  So that was where we were all set with A-grade accommodation for the night.
• 31:15
  Then we probably had probably a dozen DB, or DB Export, I think we drank at the time.
• 31:24
  Probably had a dozen of those each and then remember we hadn't done any pit stop practice.
• 31:27
  So it's about 10 o'clock at night and a nice still evening in the Tamuka camping ground.
• 31:33
  So we fired up the Mazda with a straight pipe and all the lights and the caravans and the tents all came on.
• 31:40
  So we proceeded to, you know, we had to be realistic.
• 31:44
  So Paul and I, we were taking turns at sort of, you know, like they do in the pit lane at the VF Supercar races now.
• 31:49
  They push the car forward, but we were a bit too drunk to do that.
• 31:52
  So we drove it and then, you know, drove it forward, two metres stopped and Tim and Johnny would run around and,
• 32:00
  try and change a wheel and tip a bit of fuel in it.
• 32:02
  And then we'd rev the shit out of it and then do a skit on the grass and leave.
• 32:07
  And then we'd time it.
• 32:08
  And that was, we had no idea how obnoxious we were behaving.
• 32:14
  And we did a couple more practice stops.
• 32:18
  And then after about the third one, we heard a knock on a window.
• 32:22
  And then there was an old boy in a caravan across from where we had our little pit set up.
• 32:28
  And he knocked on the door.
• 32:29
  He was holding up a stopwatch.
• 32:31
  He gives us a thumbs up.
• 32:32
  And he nods his head.
• 32:33
  Yeah, that was a good one.
• 32:34
  That'll do.
• 32:46
  $657.
• 32:49
  That's how much I've spent on roadside assist in the last two years.
• 32:53
  All this time I could have just hired Andy and his mates.
• 32:56
  Only thing is you have to be within walking distance of Tamuka Camping Ground.
• 33:02
  The Kiwi summer racing experience is kind of tradition.
• 33:06
  It's the thing.
• 33:07
  You came back, I think, in 88.
• 33:10
  You drove a Formula Atlantic car.
• 33:12
  I think Paul Cruikshank says that that car was a distant fourth in a four-car team.
• 33:17
  Is that true?
• 33:18
  Yeah, it was.
• 33:20
  And this all coincided when Dad was having some financial difficulties with what he was spending with his racing.
• 33:29
  And then his business could probably sustain his racing, but it couldn't sustain both of us.
• 33:34
  And so after my Formula Ford year in the Reinhardt in 86th,
• 33:39
  that was, I was pretty much oblivious to it at the time, but now it's, you know, it became obvious that things weren't good.
• 33:47
  So we did a...
• 33:50
  Dad obviously thought that I was going well enough to deserve a run in a Formula Atlantic car over the Summer Series, and that's iconic.
• 33:58
  We grew up watching Davy Jones and Ross Cheever and all these really, really cool drivers come from overseas to race Formula Atlantic against initially Kenny Smith and Radisic, and then obviously Beato stepped up and did a phenomenal job.
• 34:19
  thought very, very naively that, you know, before we understood the concept that you get what you pay for, we paid a very, you know, I think it was 30 grand for the season and it should have been, you know, 90 or 100 grand at the time.
• 34:34
  And we got a car.
• 34:36
  The first round was at Manfield and the car had been sitting in a warehouse in Malaysia for the last five years and it arrived in the country.
• 34:45
  So we're in, we're at Manfield in Palmerston North racing.
• 34:48
  The car arrived in a container in Auckland on the Friday night.
• 34:53
  So we missed the first day of practice.
• 34:57
  And this is, you know, obviously the first round of a championship, which is an important championship.
• 35:00
  So we did no pre-season testing, missed the practice on the Friday.
• 35:03
  Then one of Dad's mates, Alan Owers, he drove up to Auckland overnight, met a guy in the desert road halfway, picked it up, swapped over, picked up and brought it down to Manfield.
• 35:15
  And then we had a look over it and the calipers were all seized, the master cylinders were seized, it was covered in rust and corrosion and it was just a horrible piece of gear.
• 35:26
  But we were supposed to have a mechanic but that –
• 35:30
  didn't eventuate.
• 35:31
  So we kind of, dad, myself, Paul, and, and some helpers, we, so just got stuck in, tried to clean it up and get it going as best we could.
• 35:38
  And we ended up actually, you know, because we were keen and naive, you know, all the other guys, particularly Kenny Smith was very generous.
• 35:47
  Yeah.
• 35:48
  helping us out with some parts that we needed just to make the thing mobile, let alone race-worthy.
• 35:55
  But that was the first round.
• 35:56
  Then we went to the next round and it got a coat of paint and some signage, so it looked really cool and shiny wheels, but it was a dunger, unfortunately.
• 36:07
  And, you know, we finished a couple of races, and I guess for me the highlight was
• 36:11
  of that year was at Wigram, which was the really, really cool circuit on the airbase in Christchurch.
• 36:20
  I, for some reason, I was,
• 36:23
  even though I had to use about a thousand RPMs less than the other guys because the engine, no one knew sort of what state the engine was in.
• 36:31
  We, I ended up having a really, really good race with David Brabham, who was in a much newer car and raced Kenny and was quite competitive for most of the race and then it broke an exhaust header and we had to pull out.
• 36:48
  But...
• 36:50
  For me, it was my first time being able to race wheel-to-wheel with guys like David Brabham, who was already quite established, and Kenny, who's obviously a Kiwi legend.
• 37:00
  So that was neat, but it was also frustrating in that now you've now had a taste of this stuff and you can't do it again.
• 37:11
  So that was a bit tough.
• 37:13
  But it was a really cool experience to drive that car back then.
• 37:18
  Somewhere here, America beckons for the first time, I think.
• 37:22
  How and what, and it involved sort of Super V, I think, didn't it?
• 37:27
  Just explain that part of your chapter.
• 37:29
  Yeah.
• 37:30
  So I was quite restless.
• 37:32
  I'd done that 1988 championship in the Atlantic car and just thought there's got to be more to life.
• 37:40
  So I'd
• 37:41
  When I came back from the UK at the end of 86, I started selling cars in Christchurch, moving from Ashburton to Christchurch, selling cars, and was just a little bit frustrated that with, or no, not a little bit, a big bit frustrated with how people,
• 37:56
  I was watching the careers of Beardo and Paul Radisic and those guys starting to skyrocket and I'm selling cars in Christchurch.
• 38:04
  And so I thought, I've got to do something about this.
• 38:07
  So I hopped on a plane and went to America and a wonderful bloke by the name of Murray McLaren is also an Ashburton dude and went to school with my uncle Tommy.
• 38:19
  And he worked for Dave McMillan in the US with his Atlantic cars and Super Vs and things.
• 38:29
  And so I went one-way ticket to LA, met with Murray, and he was working at Swift.
• 38:37
  So remember those DB9, beautiful DB9 Swift Atlantic cars?
• 38:40
  So he was working at the factory at San Clemente, I think it was, somewhere south of LA, and
• 38:47
  So I went to work with him and then got a job just doing little jobs like riveting the rivnuts on the front of the tub to put the windscreens on and just helping out, not getting paid, but helping out and just being blown away that here I was at the Swift factory where all these cool cars were coming out of and all these famous drivers were winning races with them all over the world.
• 39:07
  And here I was bolting some of them together.
• 39:09
  So that was pretty cool.
• 39:11
  So...
• 39:12
  A week or so later, the Long Beach IndyCar race came to town, and Super V at the time was kind of like what the road to Indy is now, supporting the IndyCar championship.
• 39:21
  Super V were running at Long Beach, so I just did the old usual wander along each team and ask if they had a job, if they needed any helpers.
• 39:31
  And then there was a guy called Peter Jacob who ran a team called Barchi Racing, which was based in Chicago.
• 39:38
  Yeah.
• 39:40
  I didn't know it was based in Chicago at the time.
• 39:41
  I assumed it was based in California.
• 39:44
  But so I asked if they had a job.
• 39:48
  He goes, yeah, actually we do.
• 39:50
  So I started helping out and the following race was in Dallas in a car park of a casino or something, I think.
• 40:00
  And we...
• 40:02
  Hopped in the big Chevy Dooley with the 44-foot trailer on the back with the race car and we hit the road and obviously, you know, you don't have phones and GPS, you don't have a clue where you are.
• 40:13
  And whenever –
• 40:17
  a song from Tracy Chapman's album, that fast car song that she had back then.
• 40:22
  Whenever a song from that album comes on the radio, I always yell out to the boys in the workshop, what year is this?
• 40:27
  Because we listen to Tracy Chapman every bloody day for about six months.
• 40:33
  So I do recall that it was 1988 very well.
• 40:36
  But so we drove for a couple of days and then we raced in Dallas and Paul Radisic was running for another team and I think he won the race.
• 40:48
  And so it was kind of cool to see a familiar face and someone who I really admired there.
• 40:54
  And then I think we got second actually with EJ Lindsay and then we –
• 40:59
  packed up and we hopped in the truck again and we're driving for another couple of days.
• 41:02
  I'm like, oh, shouldn't we be back in LA by now?
• 41:04
  And Pete said, why would we do that?
• 41:07
  And I said, isn't that where we're based?
• 41:08
  And he goes, no, no, we're based in Chicago.
• 41:10
  I'm like, oh, okay, cool.
• 41:14
  Probably should have asked that question.
• 41:16
  So anyway, I lived in a little suburb called Vernon Hills just outside of Chicago for the year in 88, and that was really cool.
• 41:25
  That was a fun year.
• 41:26
  Little geography lesson.
• 41:27
  That's terrific, mate.
• 41:29
  And those contacts that you forged in that period, Andy, still kind of – and again, when you went back later, but they serve you well to this day, don't they?
• 41:38
  Yeah, so it was – I had –
• 41:41
  No idea how getting drunk and making a fool of yourself with all your mates could be so memorable because I've got a lot of guys.
• 41:52
  We went back, when we went back for Hunter's first race over there at the beginning of 2019,
• 42:00
  Um, we were, um, in the lobby of the hotel having breakfast about to go to in Florida, about to go to St. Petersburg.
• 42:09
  Um, and a dude come up to me and went, Andy, is that you?
• 42:14
  And I'm like, yeah.
• 42:16
  Um, and he goes, oh man, how long has it been?
• 42:19
  And I'm like, uh, I don't know.
• 42:23
  I've got no idea.
• 42:25
  And he puts his hand and he goes, Michael, Michael Cannon.
• 42:28
  And I'm like, hey, hey, Michael, how are you, mate?
• 42:31
  And still couldn't remember when or where, but he's the guy who's now Scott Dixon's engineer, right?
• 42:39
  So he was working for Dale Coyne Racing at the time.
• 42:43
  And when we met in 2019, he went over to Chip Ganassi and now he's,
• 42:49
  Scotty's engineer, but we caught up again later that weekend and started swapping stories.
• 42:56
  And it was, yeah, so it was back in 1988 when we were, it was still a pretty social time after the racing.
• 43:03
  A lot of the teams would stay back on the Sunday night and celebrate their weekend.
• 43:06
  Yeah.
• 43:07
  And he and I, some of the stories that came out later were a little bit eye-watering, but we had a lot of fun.
• 43:14
  And, you know, there's guys like that who are quite influential now who were just, for the want of a better word, shit-kickers like me back in the day, spannering race cars and having a great time and living the dream.
• 43:27
  So, yeah, there was quite a few relationships, you know, like Ziggy, Paul Harkis, who –
• 43:32
  is the workshop manager at Andretti, another guy that we kicked around with a lot.
• 43:37
  Now he's also very influential.
• 43:39
  So, yeah, it was – I never, ever would have dreamed that friendships that I forged in 1988 would –
• 43:47
  a be remembered but be possibly even be helpful you know 30 years down the road 1991 was a massive year for you dominated in multiple formula ford series and not just against the gun locals mate jonathan harmer and jason courage pierce's son was in new zealand too a very cool year to be able to
• 44:11
  Kiwi guy, Graham Lorimer, had been established in the UK for a little while, and he wanted to bring a team back to New Zealand and obliterate the locals with his big team and truck and all the, you know,
• 44:27
  equipment and staff that he could bring down.
• 44:29
  He was associated with Nigel Mansell in Europe, and they were called Mansell Madwick.
• 44:35
  So, yeah, Jonathan Harmer was the guy, was sort of their lead guy, and Piers Courage's son, Jason, they were their two lead guys, and they had three Japanese drivers who clearly were sort of helping fund the whole thing.
• 44:47
  But...
• 44:49
  The situation surrounding those guys was that if one of their drivers from the Mansell Magic team won the international portion of the New Zealand Formula Ford Championship, they would...
• 45:04
  win a full season in Formula Vauxhall Lotus at the time, which was the next biggest thing behind British Formula 3.
• 45:14
  So it was a massively coveted prize and championship to compete in.
• 45:20
  So for them, the carrot was enormous.
• 45:23
  Yeah.
• 45:24
  For us, there was no carrot.
• 45:25
  It was just we wanted to race and win and prove ourselves.
• 45:28
  So what was really fascinating is the first, we'd won a couple of South Island Formula 4 races getting ready for the championship.
• 45:34
  And then the New Zealand full national championship had done a couple of rounds before the international part, which is the five rounds over January, over the Christmas New Year summer break, started.
• 45:48
  So yeah.
• 45:49
  The first round of the international series was at Teratonga in Invercargill.
• 45:55
  And Lorimer had Mark Thatcher, who was a lawyer, a QC in London.
• 46:03
  And he was their legal counsel.
• 46:06
  So first time in Formula Ford Racing New Zealand, we had to have a team with a full-time lawyer for...
• 46:12
  So his job had been to analyse the rule book of the New Zealand Formula Ford Championship, which he'd done before they came down here.
• 46:21
  And then Lorimer came to see me.
• 46:24
  We were in scrutineering, I think, at Invercargill.
• 46:26
  And he came up to me and introduced me.
• 46:29
  He was like, hey, Andy, I'm Graham.
• 46:31
  I hear you go okay.
• 46:32
  And I'm like, oh, I don't know.
• 46:34
  I'll try.
• 46:35
  We'll do our best.
• 46:36
  He said, good luck.
• 46:38
  but you won't win this championship.
• 46:40
  And I'm like, oh, he's a nice chap.
• 46:44
  And clearly trying to nick me in the head, but didn't really work.
• 46:48
  It kind of had the opposite effect.
• 46:49
  But those words rang in my head because I'm like, I just felt something was up.
• 46:57
  Had no idea what it was.
• 46:58
  So as the championship unfolded, we were, it was, it was,
• 47:04
  the first year of the 91 Van Diemen's, which became an iconic Formula 4, they were competitive for many, many years in world Formula 4 racing.
• 47:12
  But we were in an 88 Van Diemen, which was three years older, but our car was really well sorted and the car and I were getting along really well.
• 47:23
  So we were pretty quick at the beginning of the year.
• 47:27
  Then when we got to Bay Park,
• 47:30
  which was a pretty scruffy but really cool track in Mount Manganui near Tauranga in North Island.
• 47:38
  And on the Sunday after the race, the top four or five cars, so it was myself, Mark Pedersen, Gary Croft, the other, they were the two main contenders, and I think Chris Abbott,
• 47:51
  our four cars were impounded.
• 47:54
  And we're like, oh, this is odd.
• 47:55
  What's up?
• 47:57
  So Lorimer's team had put a protest in to Motorsport New Zealand that our engines were illegal.
• 48:03
  And we all had different engine builders, so that sort of made us wonder what was going on there.
• 48:10
  Turns out that there'd been a printing error in the rulebook
• 48:15
  that year, and there was a paragraph or two around the minimum weights of parts like pistons and flywheels and things that had been omitted.
• 48:26
  The wording, minimum weight may be achieved by machining, or words to that effect had been left out of the rule book.
• 48:34
  So essentially it meant any part in the engine that wasn't completely off the shelf and been modified to meet minimum weight was
• 48:44
  That became apparent.
• 48:45
  We went to the hearing, Crofty, Mark, Abbott, and Abbott was a lawyer himself, so he was a bit of free counsel for us all at the time.
• 48:54
  But we went to the stewards and the local technical guys went, you know, they're right.
• 49:02
  As the rule book, as it's been published,
• 49:06
  they're right, we're screwed, you guys are going to be all disqualified.
• 49:13
  So we're like, oh, that's a bit of a bugger.
• 49:15
  And this is kind of where the New Zealand, and motorsport in general, but we are a big family, and when you're up against it, you tend to rally together, particularly when it's in your mutual best interest.
• 49:27
  So us four teams that kind of hated each other on a regular basis, we all bandied together and went, well, hang on, if...
• 49:35
  our engines are illegal by the new definition of the rulebook.
• 49:39
  Shouldn't we be checking Lorimer's engines?
• 49:42
  So the officials went...
• 49:45
  Hmm, that's a very good idea.
• 49:47
  So they went, okay, and we're now 10 o'clock at night, so we're normally, you know, well into the DB exports by now, but we're dealing with legal issues instead.
• 49:57
  And so the officials went and asked Lorimer's guys to strip the engines of Harmer and Courage's cars.
• 50:06
  They had lightened parts, so under the new definition, they were also illegal, so they got kicked out too.
• 50:12
  So talk about getting bitten on the backside with their own information.
• 50:17
  They just clearly hadn't thought through the full implications of that.
• 50:22
  So that was a real eye-opener to all of us, how ruthless a team could be to win a championship.
• 50:31
  And clearly it was because those guys had such a massive prize on the line.
• 50:35
  And –
• 50:37
  Obviously, Lorimer and his guys had said, dudes, we've got to ace up our sleeve, which we'll pull out when we need to.
• 50:43
  I'm sure if Jase and Courage and Jonathan Harmer had been leading the championship, or one of them had been, they would have, may not have needed to do that.
• 50:52
  But they obviously needed to do that because I think we were leading it still at that time with the final round to go.
• 50:58
  Yeah.
• 51:00
  So, yeah, it was really interesting to see how vicious things can get.
• 51:06
  And that's when you realise you're actually racing for something that's pretty meaningful.
• 51:10
  True to the respect that you even have now but clearly had in that paddock at that time, mate, people, I think, chipped in to help repair a crashed car at one point.
• 51:22
  And is there some talk about a delayed race start at a significant point in the championship because they wanted you to have a fair shot at it, didn't they?
• 51:30
  Yeah, so this was the following weekend.
• 51:32
  So obviously things are starting to heat up.
• 51:34
  I was leading the championship and we're at the final round of the international portion of the championship that they were going for.
• 51:42
  I was leading Gary Croft and Jonathan, it was very close behind me, Jonathan Harmer.
• 51:49
  And Jason Courage and Mark Pedersen and a guy called Phil Hellibraker, six of us, any one of us could have won a race on any day.
• 51:58
  So at that point, um,
• 52:01
  So I was still had the benefit of having started the season really strongly.
• 52:08
  But it came down to a point where in the second to last, we had two races on the Sunday.
• 52:12
  The first race we were going down the back straight at Pukekohe, this is before they put the new extension in there.
• 52:17
  So we were honking down there.
• 52:19
  So at the kink,
• 52:22
  We were three wide, probably throw a blanket over five of us.
• 52:27
  Mega.
• 52:27
  And I was leading.
• 52:28
  Crofty was in my slipstream, about to pull out beside me.
• 52:32
  And Harmer then dropped in behind my car and...
• 52:38
  he flicked his steering wheel left into Crofty and sent Crofty sideways.
• 52:46
  He T-boned me and we both hit the fence at, I don't know, probably 7,000 RPM and forth.
• 52:53
  So at the highest speed we go anywhere in the country and we were both in the fence and Harmer carried on.
• 53:02
  He was leading and a really...
• 53:05
  Another good mate of ours to this day, Mark Pedersen, even though we raced hard against each other, Mork, as he's known, was incensed by what he'd seen, and he was close enough.
• 53:17
  He pinned his ears back.
• 53:19
  He was right there, but he caught Harmer with, I think it might have been on the last lap at the hairpin, just past where our cars were in the fence.
• 53:27
  Then you go down to a first gear hairpin,
• 53:29
  And Mork got Harmer, hit him in the gearbox and sent him off just to help try and make amends a little bit and help us Kiwis not have too much of a points deficit.
• 53:42
  So again, it was the boys sticking together.
• 53:46
  against the might of this British team that was now either throwing the rule book at us, hadn't worked, and now they were really taking the gloves off and putting our cars in the fence.
• 53:55
  So my car had both the right-hand wheels ripped off it, and that's when the camaraderie of New Zealand motorsports.
• 54:04
  So there was a point we had two or three hours.
• 54:06
  We had some parts we did not have spares at all, like the rear rock suspension rocker.
• 54:12
  So we were – John Crawford, who's a very good engineer –
• 54:15
  was welding pieces of angle iron to the rear rocker to give it some, because it had been bent so it was bashed into shape and then braced with some angle iron.
• 54:24
  And we had whatever parts we could get from some of that.
• 54:29
  I think we had the only 88 car in the championship.
• 54:30
  There was an 89 car there.
• 54:33
  So we got what parts we could there.
• 54:35
  And they pulled the gearbox off it and the clutch was full of dirt, things like that, that people wouldn't have thought of.
• 54:42
  And Nigel Barclay, a good mate of mine, his mum, she was working in the front with a little paintbrush, getting the mud out of all the master cylinders and the pedals and all that stuff had jammed up from the dirt that was stuck in there from the sideways trip across the grass into the fence.
• 54:58
  So there were probably at some points 12 to 15 people working on the car, on my car, to get it going again for the last race.
• 55:07
  And then we were...
• 55:10
  The cars were forming up on the grid.
• 55:11
  They were starting to head out.
• 55:12
  My car was still on the stands.
• 55:13
  We dropped it down.
• 55:14
  We ran, pushed it down to a flat little piece of concrete and didn't put the tow bars on it.
• 55:21
  We just ran string around it to get the wheels facing somewhere near the right place.
• 55:25
  And then the officials...
• 55:28
  found some imaginary debris on the track down the back straight or something because they could see that we needed about five minutes.
• 55:35
  So they went and tended to the imaginary debris and got a broom or something out and stood around for a couple of moments and then came back.
• 55:44
  And by that time, we'd just managed to get out on the track as the cars were forming up on the grid.
• 55:49
  So we went out around and we were on pole from our lap time in the first race.
• 55:54
  So we were on pole.
• 55:56
  we ended up getting third in that race and, and, um, and winning the championship.
• 56:00
  So that was, that was, uh, yeah, it was pretty surreal, uh, achievement and, and, you know, it was, you know, it was made all, all the better by the fact that, you know, us Kiwis were all racing each other as hard as we always did, but we had these interlopers coming to try and touch us up and we, uh,
• 56:18
  We cost them a free ride in Formula Vauxhall, so it was a pretty rewarding weekend or championship all round.
• 56:28
  True to form, mate.
• 56:29
  Did you break into Graeme Lorimer's room or into the team and you somehow acquired, shall we say, some team kit that night that you wore to the presentation?
• 56:40
  I don't know what the correct story is here, but you...
• 56:43
  Yes, yes.
• 56:43
  LAUGHTER
• 56:47
  So there's a tease.
• 56:48
  Poor old Graham.
• 56:50
  He obviously upset me more than I realised because we managed to – What a motivation though, mate.
• 56:56
  Ironically, it clearly spurred you on, mate, didn't it?
• 57:00
  Yeah, well, he – so with –
• 57:04
  I can't remember the exact detail around it, but we did break into something.
• 57:08
  And I don't think we broke into his truck.
• 57:10
  We broke into his awning.
• 57:11
  And they had these Mansell Madgwick T-shirts that they were wearing very proudly throughout the championship.
• 57:16
  And clearly Nigel Mansell back then was an absolute hero.
• 57:20
  And...
• 57:21
  So it was just another little attempt by those boys, very smartly, to intimidate us.
• 57:28
  So what we thought would be even better, we snuck in, stole some of these T-shirts, and then got drunk wearing their T-shirts with our wreath and our cup and trophy and all that stuff.
• 57:37
  So there's a cool photo of Johnny Evans, Crookshank, and myself wearing our Mansell-Mantwick T-shirts that weren't really given to us.
• 57:45
  We had to go and get them ourselves.
• 57:51
  That's the end of part one of my podcast with Larric and Racer turned successful team owner Andy McIlray.
• 57:58
  A quick thanks to all of you for the comments, feedback and the reviews.
• 58:02
  We read every one of them and often find ourselves adding the names you suggest to our growing guest wish list.
• 58:10
  In time, we will tackle as many of them for you as we can.
• 58:14
  In the meantime, tell your mates about it.
• 58:16
  and subscribe so you never miss an episode now andy is enjoying the chat he always does we have part two with him in the library and ready for you to fire up right now from success in trans am to losing a mate at the mountain plus the young stars who graduated from mr and his son's own bright future
• 58:46
  Listener.