GOING TO THE RACES

Motor racing got under way almost as soon as cars started to work properly. If you don’t have a fundamental grasp of the history of the sport, you won’t even get off the starting grid, so this bit’s important. Despite its innate glamour and excitement (or maybe because of it), for much of the twentieth century motor racing was a shortcut to an early funeral and lots of people died taking it. Indeed, as early as 1901 the French government actually banned the sport, although this prohibition proved half-hearted and short-lived.

ON THE GRID

James Gordon Bennett (who was a real person and not just an exclamation of disbelief) was the owner of the New York Herald and founder of the Gordon Bennett Cup, and also the undisputed progenitor of those who subsequently promoted the sport of motor racing.

In 1899 Bennett, who’d previously sponsored Stanley’s expedition to find Dr Livingstone, offered a silver trophy to encourage carmakers to improve their boneshakers through competition. By 1902 the race he backed ran from Paris to Innsbruck, with cars like the French Panhard and German Mercedes – with huge engines and tiny brakes – thundering along public roads and frequently bringing their hapless drivers closer to their Maker rather sooner than they had expected.

ENDURANCE TRIALS

Many early car competitions were held over long distances to prove the newfangled automobile’s durability. One was the Automobile Club’s Thousand Miles Trial in 1900, involving a drive from London to Edinburgh and back. This was won by a raffish, handlebar moustache-twirling chap named Selwyn ‘SF’ Edge, driving a British-made eight-horsepower, four-cylinder Napier, averaging 12mph in England and 10mph in Scotland.

An Australian-born businessman, Edge was probably Britain’s first celebrity racing driver. A clever self-publicist, he could be seen racing all over Europe and, memorably, in 1907 at the Brooklands motor racing circuit in Surrey, where he drove a 60-horsepower Napier for 24 hours averaging almost 66mph – which must have been exhausting, terrifying and boring all at the same time. The record stood for 17 years.

Brooklands was the world’s first purpose-built motor circuit, with concrete banking 100 feet wide and nearly 30 feet high, over which cars would sometimes disappear with a scream of brakes (and driver). This was a marvellously entertaining spectacle which had the crowds clamouring for more.

AN UNUSUAL LADY DRIVER

One of Edge’s protégées was Dorothy Levitt, one of the world’s first women racing drivers, who was working as a secretary at the car manufacturer Napier and was by all accounts a bit of a cracker. With his moustache-twirling in full overdrive, SF taught her to drive and in 1903 she piloted his Gladiator car to a class win at the Southport Speed Trials, shocking society by becoming the UK’s first female car race winner. Three years later she became ‘the fastest girl on earth’ at the Blackpool Speed Trials, reaching nearly 91mph in a Napier.

Levitt flew planes, raced powerboats and gave lectures to encourage women to take up driving, even though she wasn’t legally allowed to vote. She was, it is safe to say, a hell of a gal – and should be a role model for bluffers, both male and female, everywhere.

GRAND PRIX GLAMOUR

The 1920s saw the arrival of events like France’s Le Mans 24-hour race, which became and remains a huge party with an almost incidental car race in the middle of it. Despite Ettore Bugatti deriding Bentleys as ‘the world’s fastest lorries’, the magisterial green cars dominated the event between 1924 and 1930, driven by a group of wealthy Boy’s Own characters like diamond heir Woolf ‘Babe’ Barnato and Sir Henry ‘Tim’ Birkin, who were known as ‘the Bentley Boys’.

By the 1930s the exotic caravan of Grand Prix racing was well established, and a lot of national pride was staked on how the cars fared. Many were lethally fast. The 1935 supercharged, 4.4-litre, 16-cylinder Auto Union Type B was capable of 171mph, but the car handled like an eel on a wet stone floor and offered little crash protection.

POST-WAR PETROL POWER

Almost immediately after the Second World War, the first semi-official British Grand Prix race took place on a bomb site in the London suburb of Cockfosters, and by 1950 a Formula 1 race with a drivers’ championship involving petrol-powered gladiatorial combat between leading marques such as Ferrari, Alfa Romeo and Mercedes-Benz was up and running at Silverstone. The first title was won by one Giuseppe ‘Nino’ Farina.

Argentinean Juan Manuel Fangio was the man to beat in the 1950s. Driving for Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Maserati and Mercedes, he was world champion five times (four in a row), never driving faster than he had to to win (‘A crazy man finishes in the cemetery’ was his motto). The dashing Fangio retired in 1958 and lived to be 84.

SAFETY ON THE TRACK

Other racers weren’t so lucky. In 1958 the fatality tally was four, two the following year and another three in 1960. Drivers were being written off at a rate of one or two a year until the late 1970s, despite British driver Jackie Stewart, another serial racing world champion with three wins, campaigning for skilled medical cover, full-face crash helmets, seat belts, decent crash barriers and better circuit safety to protect drivers and spectators. Amazingly, he was criticised for taking the ‘romance’ out of motor racing.

In the 1980s and early 1990s a number of drivers continued to die, including the 32-year-old Canadian pin-up Gilles Villeneuve (described by teammate Jody Scheckter as ‘the fastest driver in the history of motor racing’) – but things still didn’t change until Austria’s Roland Ratzenberger and three-time world champion, Brazil’s Ayrton Senna were killed within 24 hours of each other in San Marino in 1994. This led to a raft of not-before-time safety measures, and the average racing car is probably now safer than a parked Volvo with nobody in it.

Formula 1 still attracts vast crowds, vast sums of money, vast TV audiences and vast controversy.

A FATHER-AND-SON FIRST

You also need to have a passing acquaintance with British drivers Graham and Damon Hill, the only father-and-son pair both to have won the Formula 1 World Championship (in 1962, 1968 and 1996). But Hill senior can’t claim the title of last moustache-wearing champion. That distinction goes to 1992 World Champion Nigel Mansell. There was a touch of Leslie Phillips or Spitfire pilot about the raffish Hill, whereas Mansell, who hailed from the Midlands, often looked like a slightly distracted policeman – which wasn’t all that surprising as his leisure pursuits included being a special constable on the Isle of Man.

MONEY-MAKING FORMULA

Formula 1 still attracts vast crowds, vast sums of money, vast TV audiences and vast controversy. Not every driver has everything from his underpants to his watch supplied by a sponsor, and not all of them trade in long-term partners for micro-skirted girl-band members and move from, say, Stevenage to a sun-drenched tax haven. But, of course, some of them do – and their fans would be disappointed if they didn’t.

The bluffer’s position should be that professional racing drivers demonstrate a unique mix of physical bravery, athleticism, coordination and single-minded determination which, in common with many other professional sportsmen and women, might make them wealthy but doesn’t make them particularly interesting. Or likeable. Had their energies been channelled into, say, trainspotting, they might have been similarly dedicated, albeit somewhat poorer, but they might have had more rounded personalities.

They spend hours at a time piloting cars that cost millions to develop and can hurl them from 0-100 and back again in about five seconds, but don’t have to worry about their no-claims bonuses if they crash. At the Monza circuit in Italy the average speed is 245kph, but that’s still 95kph short of the maximum speed drivers will achieve there. They will have their throttles mashed to the floor almost 70% of the time, and put their brakes on about six times per lap, but will change gear 46 times over the same period. They will be shaken, pushed and pulled about by the sort of G-forces fighter pilots experience, and some of them, despite being brilliantly skilled, will never actually win a Formula 1 race because the cars they drive are fractionally less competitive than the ones that win.

Perhaps racing drivers’ existences, which seem to mix having very exciting lives with having no lives at all, mean that if they want to spend £2,000 on a pair of sunglasses that make them look like a twerp, nobody should begrudge them. But you can’t help feeling that Nigel Mansell would have been much happier with a new truncheon. Or a moustache trimmer.

NEW ENERGY

Racing cars are changing along with their road-going counterparts. An electric race-car series, Formula E, is claimed to have F1-style electric racers capable of 200mph that will reach 60mph in about three seconds. One car, the Lola-Drayson B12/69EV, has four electric motors that produce an eye-watering 850-horsepower. Critics wonder how long the cars will be able to keep going flat out – about 15 minutes in the case of the Lola-Drayson, which might reduce its chances of becoming a serious challenger at Le Mans.

Mind you, Le Mans itself has in recent years been dominated by diesel and diesel-hybrid powered racers, and who would have thought that 20 years ago? Somehow you just know that electricity will triumph in the long run, once they’ve worked out the technology.

US Racing

As ever, the Americans like to do things their way and so bluffers will need to be familiar with the names IndyCar and NASCAR (always in capitals) which are the biggest auto racing organisations across the pond. Between them, they sanction and oversee the majority of official car races in the USA. In world racing terms, they’re a law unto themselves.

INDYCAR

IndyCar involves racing in cars that look vaguely like proper racing cars, but which aren’t nearly on a par with their over-engineered and highly temperamental Formula 1 counterparts. Thus they aren’t really taken seriously in global motor sports, whereas NASCAR can’t really be ignored by anyone who professes to know anything about professional motor racing.

NASCAR

What you need to know about NASCAR is that it stands for National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, and that it vies with F1 for the terrifying amount of testosterone oozing out of driving seats. In terms of television ratings in the USA, it pulls in more viewers than any other sporting event apart from the NFL (National Football League).

You’ll also need to know that its heritage is soaked to the very roots in bootleg booze. Indeed, illicit liquor trading is firmly behind the biggest motor racing organisation in the USA. To be fair, that’s no longer the case (allegedly) but NASCAR is fiercely proud of its good ol’ boy, redneck image. In the 1920s and 1930s Prohibition era, highly skilled drivers made a good living evading police while transporting bootleg whisky at high speed in modified ‘stock’ production cars across the Appalachian region of the USA. When the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 threatened to dry up their business, they began driving the still-illegal ‘moonshine’ – as dangerous as Irish ‘potcheen’ or the ethanol they used as fuel, and just as guaranteed to render drinkers (and drivers) blind drunk. By the mid 1930s it occurred to some of the better drivers that if they carved out a dirt track in a potato patch and started racing each other, people might actually turn up to watch.

NASCAR heritage is soaked to the very roots in bootleg booze, and it’s fiercely proud of its good ol’ boy, redneck image.

That’s all you need to know about the background; these days NASCAR is very big business and while ‘stock’ cars might vaguely resemble standard production models, underneath the skin lurks a monster of a power unit operated by a beast of a driver, who is sometimes female, in full Kevlar armour.

You’ll need to mention the following two races: Daytona 500 and Indianapolis 500, perhaps adding ‘that’s my idea of raw-seat-of-the-pants-racing-with-none-of-that-prissy-buck-passing-weasel-whining-I’m-only-earning-20-million-a-year attitude adopted by certain other professional racing drivers.’

One other thing you should know about NASCAR racing is that the cars only ever turn left, and so they are actually engineered with this in mind. And for extra bluffing points you might venture that they only race anti-clockwise because that’s how horse races are run in the USA – apparently as an act of defiance against British colonialists who used to race clockwise.

NASCAR V FORMULA 1

This is always a spirited area of debate for bluffers, so try your luck by raising the following 10 contentious points:

1.F1 is ‘classy’; NASCAR is ‘trashy’.

2.F1 is boring; NASCAR is more interesting. Sometimes there are pile-ups of 10 cars or more in the latter.

3.F1’s worldwide TV audience is immeasurably bigger than NASCAR’s.

4.In F1 the sprint to the first turn determines much of the race, and outright overtaking is rare; in NASCAR the track is routinely three or four cars wide and overtaking is common.

5.Given a choice should one prefer to attend Daytona 500, or the Monaco Grand Prix?

6.In F1 it’s all about who’s got the fastest car; in NASCAR it’s more about who’s the better driver.

7.F1 is about finesse; NASCAR likes to get up close and physical.

8.F1 has got great looking racing cars; NASCAR cars look like something you really don’t want to see in your rear-view mirror.

9.NASCAR drivers tend to be ‘characters’; F1 drivers are automatons.

10.NASCAR drivers shout ‘YEE HAH! F*** YEAH, BABY!’; F1 drivers address their racing teams in a dull monotone and talk about tyre pressures.

Take your pick.