BTM TALK – INTERVIEWING THE INTERVIEWER News
Trust Members’ talks series but never before a Hollywood star, as host Steve Cropley reminded us at the start of the evening with veteran motor racing journalist Simon Taylor. You will recall Ron Howard’s 2013 film Rush about the epic 1976 Formula One World Championship battle between James Hunt and Niki Lauda. One of the tricks of the film was to use an actor as commen- tator to describe the action in each race sequence which made it easy to adapt the film to different languages. The film’s producers found out that, luckily, the British commentator of the 1970s, one Simon Taylor, was still alive! Simon went on to describe his coverage of the final race of that season for the BBC. Asked at the last minute to find a co-commentator, he managed to find Barry Sheene wandering around the paddock and of- fered him a dry place to watch the race in exchange for some words. Fortunately Barry’s four-letter word description of the weather con- ditions only made it to the ‘words for level’ sound test. The BBC voice at the other end of the line in London calmly responded, “Watch it Tokyo”. The main content of the evening came from Simon’s experiences during his Motor Sport magazine series ‘Lunch with...’ which ended last year after 125 episodes. Simon started the discussion with our own BTM President Sir Stirling Moss and spoke about the 1961 Monaco Grand Prix which Stirling famously won in a supposedly-outclassed Lotus 18. After the race Moss calculated his average race lap time which was only 0.4 seconds slower than his pole lap, a sign of the consistency of his speed during the race.
W
e have been lucky to invite many famous characters to the Brooklands
Simon Taylor on the stage at Brooklands (Gareth Tarr).
The recently-departed John Surtees soon came into the conversation and Simon said that by the time of his ‘Lunch with...’ session he was a much more mellow character than during his racing career. When he ran his own team in the 1970s Surtees had set up a sponsorship deal with Bang & Olufsen but hadn’t realised that the deal was dependent on running the boss’s son in the second car! Of course, the lad was hopelessly slow and the deal fell through, the ultimate demise of the team probably starting at that moment. It also emerged that John had hoped to have his funeral at a magnificent Catholic monastery, only for the chief monk to point out that Surtees wasn’t a Catholic. “Well no, but I did win the World Championship for Ferrari, and that’s pretty much the same thing”. In fact his
Simon driving his HMW-Chevrolet Stovebolt Special at Kop Hill Climb in 2016. This is an ex-Stirling Moss car and was also used in a film starring Kirk Douglas entitled, The Racers (Gareth Tarr).
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