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I distinctly remember a science lesson on the subject of friction. ‘So, class, who thinks friction is a good thing?’ asked the teacher. I was the only one who raised his hand.

‘Why, Newey?’

‘Well, if we didn’t have friction, none of us would be able to stand up. We’d all slip over.’

The teacher did a double-take as though suspecting mischief. But despite the titters of my classmates, I was deadly serious. He rolled his eyes. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ he sighed, ‘friction is clearly a bad thing. Why else would we need oil?’

A selection of school reports.

Right then I knew I had a different way of looking at the world. Thinking about it now, I’m aware that I’m also possessed of an enormous drive to succeed, and maybe that comes from wanting to prove I’m not always wrong, that friction can be a good thing.

CHAPTER 3

Dad loved cars but he wasn’t especially interested in motorsport. Meanwhile my passion in that area had only intensified through my early years. As a young lad I persuaded him to take me to a few races.

One such meet was the Gold Cup at Oulton Park in Cheshire in 1972, and it was there, thanks to some judicious twisting of my dad’s arm, that we’d taken the (second) yellow Elan CGWD 714K one early summer morning: my very first motor race.

At the circuit we wandered around the paddock – something you could often do in those days – and I was almost overwhelmed by the sights but mainly the sounds of the racetrack. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before. These huge, full-throated, dramatic-sounding V8 DFV engines, the high-pitched BRM V12 engines; the mechanics tinkering with them, fixing what, I didn’t know, but I was fascinated to watch anyway, inconceivably pleased if I was able to identify something they were doing. ‘Dad, they’re disconnecting the rear anti-roll bar!’

I’d seen real racing cars before. In another act of supreme arm-twisting, I’d persuaded my dad to take me to the Racing Car Show at Olympia in London. But Oulton Park was the first time I’d seen them in the wild, in their natural habitat and, what’s more, actually moving. It’s an undulating track and the cars were softly sprung in those days. I found myself transfixed by watching the ride-heights change as cars thundered over the rise by the start/finish line. I was already in love with motor racing but I fell even harder for it that day.

Posing with the Cosworth DFV engine at the Racing Car Show.

My second race was at Silverstone for the 1973 Grand Prix, where Jackie Stewart was on pole, and the young me was allowed a hamburger. Stewart on pole was par for the course in those days, but the hamburger was something of a rarity, as another of my father’s many foibles was his absolute hatred of junk food. He was always very Year Zero about things like that. When the medical profession announced that salt was good for you, he would drink brine in order to maintain his salt levels on a hot summer day. When the medical profession had a change of heart and decided that salt was bad for you after all, he cut it out altogether, wouldn’t even have it in the water for boiling peas.

That afternoon, for whatever reason, perhaps to make up for the fact that we didn’t wander around the paddock as we had done at the Gold Cup, Dad relaxed his no-junk-food rule and bought me a burger from a stall at the bottom of the grandstand at Woodcote, which in those days was a very fast corner at the end of the lap, just before the start/finish line.

We took our seats for the beginning of the race, and I sat enthralled as Jackie Stewart quickly established what must have been a 100-yard lead on the rest of the pack as he came round at the end of the first lap.

Then, before I knew it, two things happened. One: the young South African Jody Scheckter, who had just started driving for the McLaren team, lost control of his car in the quick Woodcote corner, causing a huge pile-up. It was one of the biggest crashes there had ever been in Formula One, and it happened right before my very eyes.

And two: I dropped my burger from the shock of it.

My memory is of the whole grandstand rising to its feet as the accident unfolded, of cars going off in all directions, and an airbox hurtling high in the air, followed by dust and smoke partly obscuring the circuit. It was very exciting but also shocking; was somebody hurt or worse? It seemed inconceivable they wouldn’t be. I recall the relief of watching drivers clamber unhurt from the wreckage (the worst injury was a broken leg). Once the excitement subsided it became obvious we’d now have to wait an age for marshals to clear the track. There was only one thing for it, I clambered underneath the bottom of the grandstand, retrieved my burger and carried on eating it.

At 13 I was packed off to Repton School in Derbyshire. My grandfather, father and brother had all attended Repton, so it wasn’t a matter for debate whether I went or not. Off I went, a boarder for the first time, beginning what was set to be another academically undistinguished period of my life.

Except this time it was worse, because the immediate and rather dismaying difference between Emscote Lawn and Repton was that at Emscote Lawn I was popular with other pupils, which meant that even though I wasn’t doing well in lessons, at least I was having a decent time. But at Repton, I was much more of an outcast.

The school was and maybe still is very sports orientated, but I was average at football, hopeless at cricket and even worse at hockey. The one team sport I was decent at was rugby, but at that time they didn’t play rugby at Repton, and never bothered with it for some reason. I had to satisfy myself with being fairly good at cross-country running, which isn’t exactly the surest path to adulation and popularity. I was bullied, only once physically, by two of the boys in the year above, which made my life in the first two years at Repton pretty tough. But boredom became the biggest killer, and the way I dealt with it was by retreating into sketching and painting racing cars, reading books on racing cars and making models, as well as something new – karting.

Shenington kart track. I remember it well, having persuaded my dad to take me there, aged 14. During our first visit, Dad and I stood watching other kids with their dads during an open practice day. What we quickly learnt was that there were two principal types of kart: the 100cc fixed-wheel with no gearbox or clutch, and those fitted with a motorcycle-based engine and gearbox unit.

The thing about the fixed-wheel karts was that you had to bump-start them, which involved the driver running by the side of the kart while some other poor patsy (a dad, usually) ran along behind holding up the back end, the two of them then performing a daring drop-and-jump manoeuvre. For me, it was intimidating to watch, with dads letting go of the rear end while the kids missed their footing, the driverless karts fired and then carried on serenely at about 15mph until they crashed into the safety barrier at the end of the paddock as onlookers scattered, followed by much shouting, kids in tears and so forth.

It was proper slapstick, but given my dad’s short temper I decided to go for the more expensive but easier-to-start second option.

Meanwhile, my father was making a few observations of his own. ‘As far as I can see,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘most of these boys are here not because they want to be, but because their dads want them to be.’

What could he mean? I was already sold on wanting a kart. No doubt about it. But Dad was insistent. I was going to have to prove my hunger and dedication. So he made a proposal: I had to save up and buy my own kart. But for every pound I earned, he would match it with one of his own.

During the summer holidays I worked my arse off. I canvassed the neighbourhood looking for odd jobs. I mowed lawns, washed cars and sold plums from our garden. I even managed to get a commission from an elderly neighbour to do a painting of her house and front garden. And gradually I raised enough money to buy a kart from the back pages of Karting Magazine. The kart itself was a Barlotti (made by Ken Barlow in Reading, who felt his karts needed an Italian-sounding name) with a Villiers 9E motorcycle engine of 199cc. It was in poor condition but it was a kart and, importantly, came with a trailer.

I managed to go to two practice outings at Shenington, but the stopwatch showed the combination of me and the kart to be hopelessly slow, way off even the back of the grid. In the meantime, back at Repton for a second unhappy academic year, I was at least getting on well with the teacher who ran the workshop in which we had two lessons a week. I persuaded him to allow me to bring the kart so that I could work on it at evenings and weekends. And so it was that in January 1973 my dad and I arrived at school in the veterinary surgery minivan (registration PNX 556M) with kart and trailer.

Now I could fill the long, boring periods of ‘free time’ at boarding school much more usefully – I stripped and rebuilt the engine, rebuilt the gearbox with a new second gear to stop it jumping out, serviced the brakes, etc.

The next summer holiday we returned to Shenington but, after a further two outings, the kart and I were still too slow. Simply rebuilding and fettling it had not made it significantly quicker; more drastic action was required – the engine was down on power and the tube frame chassis was of a previous generation compared to the quick boys’ karts. For the engine I needed a 210cc piston and an aluminium Upton barrel to replace the cast-iron one, funded by more washing of cars, etc., with my dad continuing to double my money. To make a new chassis was more ambitious, and for that I needed welding and brazing skills. So I booked myself on a 10-day welding course at BOC in the aptly named Plume Street, north Birmingham.

Every morning I got up at six, took the bus from Stratford to Birmingham to arrive by nine, spent the day with a bunch of bored blokes in their thirties, most of whom were being forced to take the course by their employers, and then returned home about nine.

I seemed to be quite good at welding and brazing, which meant that I progressed more quickly through the various set tasks than many of the others on the course. Some of them got quite resentful about this and started grumbling, while also taking the mickey out of my public school voice. I learnt that in circumstances such as this, I needed to fit in and began to modify my voice to have more of a Brummie accent, which was valuable when I started college. Shame it is such an unpleasant nasal drone though; I have since slowly tried to drop it again!

Armed with my new super-power, I returned to school and constructed a chassis. Over the Christmas holiday I rebuilt the engine using the Upton barrel, as well as making an electronic ignition cribbed from a design in an electronics magazine, with the help of a friend.

Come the summer term it was ready, so I rolled it out of the workshop hoping to get it going. The first time, no dice. I wheeled it back inside. Tinkered some more. I’d got the ignition timing wrong.

Another afternoon I tried again. This time, with two friends enthusiastically pushing the kart, I dropped the clutch and, with an explosion of blue smoke from the exhaust, it fired up.

Jeremy Clarkson was a pupil at Repton at the time and he remembers the evening well, having since told flattering stories to journalists, saying that I’d built the go-kart from scratch (I hadn’t) and that I drove it around the school quad at frighteningly high speeds (I didn’t).

In truth, it was more of a pootle around the chapel, but one that had disastrous consequences when one of the pushing friends took a turn, pranged it and bent the rear axle. It was annoying, because it meant I had to save for a new one, but at least he contributed towards it.

Almost worse than that, though, was the fact that the headmaster came to see what the kerfuffle was all about. It was hardly surprising. My kart was a racing two-stroke. No silencer. And the din was like a sudden assault by a squadron of angry android bees. Distinctly unimpressed, the head banned me from bringing it back to school. As it turned out, it didn’t matter; I would not be returning for another term.

There’s another story that Jeremy tells journalists. He says there were two pupils expelled from Repton in the 1970s: he was one, and I was the other …

Which brings me to …

CHAPTER 4

Coming up to my O-levels (GCSEs in today’s language), I shuffled in to see a careers advisor, who cast a disinterested eye over my mock results, coughed and then suggested I might like to pursue History, English and Art at further education. I thanked him for his time and left.

Needless to say, I had different plans. Working on my kart had taught me two things: first, that I probably wasn’t cut out to be a driver, because despite my best efforts, not to mention my various mechanical enhancements, the combination of me and kart just wasn’t that fast.

And second, it didn’t matter that I wasn’t cut out to be a driver, because although I enjoyed driving the kart it wasn’t where my true interest lay. What I really wanted to do – what I spent time thinking about, and what I thought I might conceivably be quite good at – was car design, making racing cars go faster.

So, much to my father’s relief, as the school fees were hefty, I decided to leave Repton for an OND course, equivalent to A-levels, at the Warwickshire College of Further Education in Leamington Spa.

I couldn’t wait. At Repton I’d been caught drinking in the local Burton-on-Trent pubs, which had earned me a troublemaker reputation that I was in no particular hurry to discard. My attitude to the school ranged from ambivalence all the way to apathy (with an occasional touch of anarchy) and the feeling was entirely mutual. We were never destined to part on good terms anyway. And so it proved.

At the end of each term, the sixth form would arrange a concert for the whole school. As usual, this was to be held in the Pears’ School, a venerable building boasting oak panelling and ornate stained-glass windows dating back to its construction in 1886. The survivor of two world wars and God knows how many other conflicts, the building was a justifiable source of great pride for the school, and it was in these historic surroundings that the prog rock band Greenslade had been booked to play.

Like many kids of the time, my tastes leaned towards the hippy end of things: long(ish) hair, voluminous Oxford bags, loon pants and psychedelic music: Santana, Genesis (Peter Gabriel’s Genesis, to be precise), Supertramp, Average White Band and of course Pink Floyd.

Repton disapproved. In an effort to stop the dangerous viral spread of platform shoes, the school had passed an edict banning any shoe under which you could pass a penny on its end. Being a smart Alec I’d used a piece of aluminium to bridge the gap between heel and sole, thus allowing me to wear my platform boots while still abiding by the letter of the law (no prizes for spotting the connection between that and what I do now). Unsurprisingly, the powers that be at Repton took a dim view of this particular act of rule-bending, but it enhanced my reputation in the teachers’ common room for being a troublemaker.

Anyway. I digress. The advantage of the fashion, in particular the forgiving trousers, was their suitability for hiding bottles of booze. Sure enough, what we fifth-formers did was tape half-bottles of gin, vodka and whatever other spirits we could purloin to our shins, then swish into the concert with the contraband safely hidden beneath our flapping trouser legs.

Greenslade began their performance. To be honest, you probably had to be on acid to enjoy it, but we settled for surreptitiously mixing our smuggled alcohol with innocent-looking glasses of Coke and getting slowly smashed.

It’s a dangerous and combustible combination: a hot summer, the end of term, lots of boys, booze and the pernicious, corrupting effects of dual-keyboard prog rock. Pretty soon, the atmosphere had turned rowdy. And no one was more rowdy than yours truly.

As with most concerts, the mixing desk was located in the middle of the auditorium. I sat close by and, seeing that the soundman had nipped off for a leak, I darted over to the mixer and slid all of the sliders to max.

The band played on. The noise, a mix of distortion, bass, shrieking keyboards and sheer, unexpected volume, was immense. Without a care for the tinnitus we would all suffer the following day, the hall erupted and for a moment, before the headmaster arrived and the soundman returned, absolute anarchy ruled.

Years later, Jeremy Clarkson said it was the loudest thing he’d ever heard. As we’ve already established, Jeremy is prone to exaggeration, but on this occasion he’s probably right. It was very, very loud.

My punishment? I was dragged to the school sanatorium and forced to endure a stomach pump. Completely unnecessary, of course, not even ethical. Simply a way of punishing me for what had happened.

The next day it was discovered that the loud noise had loosened the leading and cracked the ceramics holding the stained-glass windows in place. It was the last straw. My parents were contacted and summoned to the school.

My mother arrived in her Porsche (registration WME 94M). Quintessentially Mum: dressed in her usual white, with white boots and carrying a potted lily. She knew the headmaster had a taste for lilies and she was never one to pass up an opportunity to charm the birds from the trees. ‘Hello, Lloyd, how lovely to see you; here’s a gift,’ she said, placing it before him and taking a seat. ‘Is this about Adrian? He’s such a good boy, isn’t he?’

On this occasion her charms were wasted. ‘Indeed, this is about Adrian,’ she was told flatly. ‘But I’m afraid he hasn’t been a good boy. In fact, he has been a very bad boy. So bad, in fact, that I’m afraid you are going to have to take him away. He is no longer welcome at Repton.’

My mother looked from the headmaster to me and then back again. She raised her chin. ‘Well if that’s your attitude, Lloyd, I’ll have my plant back,’ she said. ‘Come on Adrian, let’s go.’

I know nothing about Jeremy’s expulsion, but that’s how I got my marching orders. I left Repton under a cloud, relieved to finally wave the place goodbye (flicking it the Vs at the same time).

I’ve been back since, mind you. Just the once, when my father and I competed in a ‘boys versus old Reptilians’ cross-country run. But other than that, it was a not-particularly-fond final farewell. The irony is that I am told photographs of Jeremy and me are among other noteworthy old Reptonians in their Hall of Fame.

CHAPTER 5

Post-Repton, life improved and things started to click into place: I finally raced the kart at Shenington, and though the kart and I didn’t exactly set the world alight, at least we could race towards the back of ‘the pack’, and were several seconds faster than we had been 12 months earlier.

By accident it turned out that the chopper blade I had made to go on the end of the crankshaft, to give the electronic ignition its signal to spark, happened to be of a width that meant it also gave about the right ignition timing if the engine ran backwards. And so the most notable feature of my race weekend was when I spun at the hairpin during practice and must have pressed the clutch while still going backwards. When I let the clutch back out I found I suddenly had four reverse gears instead of four forward! The look of disbelief from onlookers as I completed the rest of the lap into the paddock backwards, looking over my shoulder, still brings a smile to my face. The chief steward was less impressed with my efforts, however.

I also began work on a ‘special’, which was a road-going sports car that I planned to build from my own drawings. It was an ambitious project, and although it was one I ultimately abandoned, a couple of valuable things emerged from the experience. The first thing was that in the course of researching it, I read of a guy called Ian Reed of Delta Racing Cars in Surrey who’d built such a car, so – figuring he might be a useful source of information – I wrote to him.

One exchange of letters later and Ian invited me along to the factory, spent about half a day looking over my drawings, and gave me tips on how to develop and design the car, as well as a bit of useful careers advice.

Second, I was putting in the hours. Apparently, in order to attain expert status at any given activity, be it tennis, violin, cooking, whatever, you need to clock up at least 500 hours’ practice, ideally from the age of eight through your teens, when you’re much more receptive and can learn more quickly.

Me in my modified pedal go-kart.

Unknowingly, that’s exactly what I was doing. I was practising, just as I always had. For my combined eighth birthday-and-Christmas present (a dreaded combination familiar to anyone who has a birthday near Christmas), I’d received a pedal go-kart, and sure enough I customised it by adding on my own bodywork parts in order to make it look like a Formula One car. Later came my 10-speed Carlton bicycle that I lightened by drilling holes in it and swapping the supplied steel saddle post for my own aluminium design. I was very proud of that – until the day it snapped.

So even though my plans for ‘the special’ didn’t quite get off the ground, it was still a valuable exercise. And anyway, there’s only so much time you can spend in the workshop. The poor old special was competing with my new life of college, girlfriends and, most especially, as soon as I reached my seventeenth birthday, motorbikes.

For the first term at college I had cycled the three miles to the bus station in Stratford and then taken the bus to Leamington. Many of the guys on the course (about 15 of us in total, no girls) had Yamaha FS1E or Puch mopeds, while one of the guys, Andy, being slightly older, had a Norton Commando, making him supercool. Bikes were the main topic of interest between lessons and at lunch, and I immediately felt drawn. Luckily for me, it turned out my dad also had a passion for bikes, having ridden as a despatch rider in the army. Such was his enthusiasm, he offered to buy me a brand-new bike for Christmas/birthday (I guess that combo can come in handy sometimes), which left me very happy but somewhat dumbfounded at the time after the kart experience. Initially I fancied a Ducati 250 but then, reading Bike magazine, read a road test on a relatively new bike, a Moto Morini 350 Sport. My dad agreed and hence at exactly 17 I became the proud owner of one. Just one small problem: the law only allowed learners to ride bikes under 250cc. So for £25 I acquired a very tired 1958 BSA C15 to learn to ride and pass my test on, while my dad kindly took it upon himself to do around a thousand miles on the Morini to ‘run it in’.

The summer of 1976 was a wonderful long hot summer, perfect for my newfound love of riding motorbikes, despite the melted tar on the road that caught out so many of my mates. I became an enthusiastic member of the local bike club, Shakespeare’s Bikers, which met at The Cross Keys every Wednesday at seven, and enjoyed many weekend outings. Suddenly I had a new passion, a group of friends from all walks of life (through college and the bike club), and – thanks to this new network – an introduction to a social life that included girls. Added to these was the advent of punk, a welcome backlash from the slushy music of Donny Osmond et al. House parties featuring this new anarchic music allowed me to indulge in the only form of dancing I’m any good at – pogoing.

I loved my bike. There was a real camaraderie among us bikers, a feeling of freedom that a car simply does not bring to the same extent. There was even a brief period in which I thought my future should be as a bike designer, but in my heart of hearts I knew this was the flush of a new romance; I should stay true to my equally unlikely ambition of becoming a racing car designer.

My maternal grandmother, Kath, lived on gin and Martini – a habit inherited by my mother – and I was very fond of her, which made it doubly upsetting when gangrene took her leg, after which she seemingly lost the will to live and passed away in a nursing home a few months later, in the summer of 1977.

No, I was told by my parents, you can’t spend your grandmother’s inheritance on another motorbike. You should put it in the building society. And anyway, what’s wrong with the Moto Morino?

But I’d been close to Kath, so I insisted it’s what she would have wanted. Manipulative, I know. But who among us is above a bit of strategic emotional blackmail at times? It worked and I got what ‘we’ both wanted: a Ducati 900SS (registration number CNP 617S), which was a very smart bike for an 18-year-old.

I loved British-made cars, mainly Lotus, but when it came to bikes, I lived la dolce vita. During my OND course we visited the Triumph and Norton factories, and what struck us was their arrogant belief that they were still the best in the world. They were determined to carry on doing what they were doing, making the same old Commandos and Tridents, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the Italians were making more attractive and better-quality bikes, while the Japanese were also manufacturing better-quality bikes at far lower prices.

The Triumph factory in particular was a dirty, union-run relic of a bygone age. One detail that stayed with me was a room in which the distinctive Triumph pinstripe was applied to the petrol tank. A pot of gold paint sat in one corner of the room. On a table in the centre was a petrol tank, and somewhere between the two was a Triumph worker, an old boy clad in grey overalls. The paintbrush in his hand shook as he approached the tin, dipped and slowly returned to the petrol tank, splattering gold paint on the floor as he came.

We watched, agape, convinced we were about to witness an act of vandalism, but at the very last moment his hand steadied and with a flick of the wrist and a smooth flourish he applied a perfect gold pinstripe to the tank.

A second, younger man would lift the tank away and replace it with a new one as the old boy shambled back to the paint pot and the whole process began again. It was incredibly inefficient. You dread to think what the white-coated engineers of Suzuki and Kawasaki would have made of it. But it was also strikingly beautiful. No doubt there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

Like many of their generation, my mum and dad were vehemently opposed to Japanese-made products. ‘Jap crap’, my dad called them. So it was inevitable that I’d be drawn towards Italian bikes. The trouble was I was too drawn towards them (and girls, music and booze), and I almost flunked my end-of-first-year exams. Ian Reed had told me that in order to make it in motorsport I’d need a degree, and there was no degree without my OND. After that, and for the first time in my life, I truly applied myself academically, as well as setting about finding a university.

One thing I learnt from almost flunking those exams was that distraction is the enemy of performance: I thought I was revising in the lead-up but in fact I was listening to music while reading notes. I learnt the words to ELO songs, not my material.

Of the unis I considered, Southampton was the one calling out to me. I knew from reading Autosport that the racing teams Brabham and March used the wind tunnel in Southampton to develop their cars, and I figured that being a Southampton student might give me a chance to ingratiate myself with them.

The course itself was Aeronautics and Astronautics, and I didn’t – and still don’t, really – have an interest in aircraft. By rights I should have been aiming for a mechanical engineering degree, and if I’d wanted to end up in the automotive industry working on production-line cars then that’s what I’d have done.

But I didn’t want a career in the automotive industry. I wanted a career in racing. My thinking was that an Aeronautics course would teach me aerodynamics and about the design of lightweight structures, about materials and control theory. I decided that because of that parallel technology with aircraft, and because of the lure of the wind tunnel, I’d aim for Southampton.

I worked hard to get into Southampton and I succeeded. But the problem was that even though I’d apparently got the highest OND mark in the country, the maths content of the course was the same maths I’d learnt at advanced Maths O-level. At Southampton, all the lecturers assumed that students were educated to A-level standard.

With engineering, and particularly aeronautical engineering, being so maths orientated, I was woefully out of my depth and struggling to keep up with the lecturers, who would simply skip through the derivations of equations, assuming we all knew what they considered to be the basics.

At weekends I studied. Not socialising, not tinkering with ‘the special’, not even gallivanting around on my motorbike, just trying to get myself up to snuff with my maths. But however hard I worked, I always seemed to be two steps behind everybody else. To make matters worse, I shared Halls with a bunch of ’ologist students who did nothing but party – not exactly the perfect environment for the kind of crash-course study I needed. By Christmas I was seriously thinking of throwing in the towel.

Finally, in desperation, I did two things: first, I returned to see Ian Reed, who by now was at March, a production racing car company making Formula One and Formula Two cars, a sizeable outfit by the standards of the day.

‘Look,’ said Ian, ‘if you want a job as a draughtsman then it’s yours, but you’ll only ever be a draughtsman. If you want to be a proper design engineer, you need to get your degree. What I suggest you do is get your head down and keep battling.’

Second, my tutor, the late Ken Burgin, who was always very supportive, noted that I was struggling and helped me with extra tutorials. In addition, he instilled in me the need to keep going. That was the mantra. Ken and Ian both said it: get your head down, Adrian; keep battling.