Motor Sport magazine, of which I was once de facto Editor, has a lively web page which includes pod casts. Now it has begun to release some of the tapes of a radio show, 'Track Torque', which ran from 1977-81. Rob Widdows, now a senior writer for Motor Sport, was the main presenter and I was the producer and co-presenter.
I have not always been a motor racing writer. I was once a perfectly respectable member of society, Head of English in a school, then I met Rob. We discovered that we had each published a book of poetry and we were nuts about motor racing.
Rob was the newly appointed Head of News for a local radio station, Radio Victory in Portsmouth. Radio Victory sounds like something that operated from Occupied Europe in WWII, but HMS Victory, Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar, is based at Portsmouth and is still a commissioned ship in the Royal Navy.
Rob had persuaded his masters to allow him an hour, late at night, in which he could try to do something about motor racing. Was I interested in helping him create a radio programme called 'Track Torque'?
We had no budget to pay expenses, let alone to fees. What we did have was naivety. We were simple enough ask people to come on the show and they all said that they would because nobody else was doing it. The radio station was a converted Victorian schoolhouse. Next door was a really grotty pub, but through the doors of that pub walked some of the greatest names in motor racing.
Ron Dennis was a guest several times. Nowadays he would send a team to defumigate and refurbish the pub.
Give me a name of anyone prominent in motor racing, 1977-81 and it is likely they were on 'Track Torque' and that includes people like Foyt and Penske. In those days you could wander down a pit lane with a tape recorder, a reel-to-reel effort of some heft. We got Chapman, Lauda and Prost that way, among many others.
We had big names from the past like Tony Brooks, John Cooper, Innes Ireland, Stirling Moss and Roy Salvadori. As well as the big names we gave exposure to club racers and their sponsors. We got sponsors to give us prizes that listeners could win and we had a great relationship with our nearest mainstream circuit, Thruxton.
From the beginning we had an advantage in that Rob knew Derek Bell, David Purley, John Watson and Mike Earle, later founder of Onyx Grand Prix. All three were local and supporters of the show. As our local rising star we had Derek Warwick and later we had youngsters like Tiff Needel and Jonathan Palmer.
Then there were journalists. Most of our listeners read a motor racing magazine and now they could phone in with questions to the like of Mike Doodson, Denis Jenkinson, Nigel Roebuck and Peter Windsor.
Goodwood was on our doorstep and Goodwood was then used for serious testing. One day we were short of a guest in the studio. I knocked on the door of a hotel room, Derek Daly answered. I said, "Do you want to spend the evening watching TV or would you like to star on radio?" Sorted!
My car became a mobile recording studio because I could get to the circuit when Rob could not. One such interviewee was Nelson Piquet so we could run the line: 'When was Nelson last on Victory?'
When David Purley got back in an F1 car after his horrendous accident, and lapped faster than he had ever done before, Track Torque was on the case.
There was the time when Derek Bell said to David Hobbs, "You must listen to this, it's a radio programme devoted to motor racing." Hobbo said, 'I thought that's why I am here.' Dinger said, 'Oh dear', or expletives to that effect.
I have never believed Dinger's claim of the time from his house to the station, we would have heard the sonic boom, but I do know that he and Hobbo entered the studio seven minutes after the hour wreathed in smiles. Nothing they had done in the previous 15 minutes had been remotely legal.
One night, Rob left his keys on his desk and the only other person in the station was a DJ who was not running a phone-in programme, therefore there was nobody on reception. We could not get into the station, there was nobody to answer the phone and we had Frank Williams as our guest. We sat in the pub and watched for Frank's Jaguar. It did not pass the pub.
Five minutes to going on air, we gave the door bell one last push, from desperation. There was going to be an hour of silence. We rang and Frank Williams opened the door. We never worked out how he got in, and he never told us. I began to understand why people like Frank are different to the rest of us.
I was once asked in the school staff room how much I was being paid for the show. The guy who asked me was a motorbike buff. I said that I was not paid and he scoffed. I said, 'Last night you watched telly and did not get paid for it. I spent three hours in the company of John Surtees and was not paid for it. Who had the better deal?'
After 202 programs the plug was pulled by a new management team which then steered the station to oblivion. They wanted glamour and glitz and could not understand why pretty girls do not work on radio.
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