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Farewell to a genius, a racer and a very good man

I was very saddened to hear of the recent passing of Peter Westbury.  He was one of my heroes as I grew up in the 1960s, reading old copies of Motoring News and picturing the races in my mind long after they’d been held; and when I first met him in the 1970s I was not disappointed. Peter will be remembered by many as the Championship-winning, bearded hill-climber who made four-wheel-drive a pre-requisite for any sort of success. He was an engineering genius – the man behind Felday Engineering (along with the very likeable Mac Daghorn).

Much more than that, however, Peter inspired no lesser driver than Jim Clark: intrigued by Peter’s ground-breaking Felday four-wheel-drive, 2-litre BRM-powered sports car, Jim approached Peter about possibly racing the car in the Guards Trophy race at Brands Hatch in 1966. Jim duly turned up on the race weekend – and loved the car from the moment he sat in it.  I asked Peter once about that momentous time.

“I don’t remember a minute when Jim was not absolutely in tune with it,” he said. “He just adapted to it naturally. It was an absolute pleasure to watch and to share. He could make the car understeer or oversteer at will and was also very detailed with his descriptions. I never went along with that stuff about Jim not being a good test driver. He was superb.”

Thanks to Peter Darley, the official Team Lotus photographer at the time, we can see Jim and Peter on the grid at Brands, discussing last-minute details (with, in the background, former driver, Henry Taylor, who was by then head of Ford’s Competition Department). Note Peter’s standard-issue Firestone jacket with added “Felday” logo.

Peter was a very fast and able racing driver in his own right, eventually progressing to the front of international Formula 2 racing in 1969-70 with a beautifully-prepared Brabham BT30. (Peter is pictured below – photo courtesy of LAT Photographic – at the 1969 German GP, when F2 cars ran alongside the F1s.) Thanks to his long-standing ties with BRM, Peter was also invited to drive an F1 BRM P153 at Watkins Glen at the end of 1970.

Articulate and well-informed, Peter was always enthralling. I last saw him at Goodwood two years ago, when we chatted at length with Sally Swart, Jim’s ex-girl-friend (top). Peter was telling me how much he was enjoying his retirement in the Caribbean (St Lucia), where he spent much of his spare time in support of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Club (as per the logo on his blazer). He had plenty to say about modern F1 – and most of it was constructively good.

He that sort of man.

Peter Darley’s superb photographs can be enjoyed in two current books – Jim Clark: Life at Team Lotus and 1965: Jim Clark and Team Lotus – the UK Races.  His next volume, Pit and Paddock, will be published in early 2016

Jim Clark tests new Ford Falcon!

Jim Clark and Graham Hill were both Ford-contracted drivers from 1967 onwards – and Ford of Australia duly put their testing talents to use during the 1968 Tasman Series. In this short Movietone News clip, courtesy of AP, we see Jim and Graham at Ford’s You Yangs test track in Victoria, examining the new Ford Falcon and driving demonstration laps for the camera. Interesting to see that  Graham wears his Buco helmet while Jim chills in the Aussie breeze. There’s no mention of the reigning World Champion, Denny Hulme, in the period voiceover, but that is Denny with Jim and Graham at the start of the clip. Being a Ford Galaxie man in Europe, Jim, I imagine, would have been quite impressed with the Falcon – and would particularly have liked its future high-performance derivative, the GTHO. Sadly he died only few weeks after this video was filmed.