One

Making a splash

By one of those accidental twists of fate, my career in rallying really started to take off at the very moment when it actually seemed to have sunk without trace.

It all happened fairly dramatically one morning during the 1971 RAC Rally of Great Britain. Always one of the toughest events in the rallying calendar, this was made worse than ever that particular year by severe Arctic weather, heavy snow having blanketed most of the UK. Conditions were so bad at times that only 104 of the 231 starters eventually managed to complete the course that started and finished in Harrogate, and which, for the first time, featured special spectator stages in parks and the grounds of stately homes such as Woburn Abbey.

I was in Ford Escort number 60 alongside Yorkshireman Peter Clarke, one of the top drivers in the British championship at the time. As co-driver, my job involved map-reading, navigating, and shouting instructions to Peter throughout the five-day rally, while occasionally taking the wheel when Peter needed a rest during an event that, in those days, went on non-stop day and night with only a few short breaks along its 2500-mile route.

We were doing well in the early stages, up among the leading British crews despite some rather ominous noises emanating from the gearbox. And when it came to the spectator stage at Woburn we were still managing to clock speeds in excess of 80mph as we hurtled along the roads leading through the famous Safari Park, where the wild animals must have wondered what on earth was going on.

Shouting “Hard Left!” as we hit a long, fast left-hand bend, I was aware of Peter’s feet doing a bit of ballet dancing on the pedals along with some frantic gear-changing, and when I glanced up from my map I observed a huge crowd of excited spectators to the right, a huge oak tree to the left, and – even more alarming – a vast lake immediately ahead. Two wheels of the car slipped off the tarmac as the gearbox refused to accept third gear, and we skidded over the wet grass at undiminished speed, heading straight for the lake.

Having very nearly drowned in Lake Windermere as a child, and having barely been able to swim at all until my late teens, I have always had something of a fear of water. So the scenario that unfolded before my horrified gaze in the next few split seconds was, to say the least, unnerving. Safety organisations advise that in the event of driving into water one should remain calm and allow the water to seep in and fill the car until the pressure inside equals that of the water outside, at which point it should be possible to push the door open. But there was no chance of me keeping calm in the circumstances! My brain went into overdrive, I panicked – and had my door open before we hit the water.

As the car began to sink I felt the ice-cold, muddy water creeping up to my waist. At that point, I remembered the wild animals of the Safari Park, and, having noticed lions and tigers in the distance as we sped through the stage, conceived the rather irrational fear that something equally predatory might be lurking in the murky depths, and that a large set of open jaws might break the surface at any moment and clamp themselves around my head or various other important bits of my body.

That prospect was enough to have me clambering out of the car and onto the roof, still clutching my precious Ordnance Survey maps and my rally road book, desperate to stay out of reach of any advancing crocodiles. Peter, meanwhile, seemed more concerned about attaching a tow rope to the car as an RAC rescue Land Rover arrived on the scene. I let him get on with it!

As I sat there shivering on top of the half-submerged Escort that freezing morning, little could I imagine that this would be a positive turning point in my life. However, unknown to us at the time, the whole incident had been filmed by rallying’s top film production company. It was featured that night on television, while the next morning photographs appeared in every national newspaper. So, in every sense, we’d made quite a splash!

More significantly, as far as my future career was concerned, the footage was seen and greatly enjoyed by Ford’s director of motorsports, Stuart Turner, one of the most influential people in rallying. He wrote to me saying that he hadn’t stopped laughing, and that Ford was delighted because it had achieved much greater press and TV coverage than Saab, which had actually gone on to win the rally!

Within a matter of months I was co-driving in the Ford works rally team, and twelve months later I went out and won outright the RAC Rally with Roger Clark, an achievement that completely changed my life. And this, in time, led to my career in television, not least of which was a 15-year span as a presenter on BBC TV’s Top Gear.