by David Finlay (12 May 05)

I only ever had one chance to sit down and enjoy a conversation with Gerry Marshall, and I blew it. In the couple of weeks since he died, I've been very conscious of this.

The brief opportunity occurred a few years ago, when I was racing in a round of a national one-make championship at Castle Combe. The whole venture was a complete mistake. I had won two championships the previous season under such perilous financial conditions that I'd been paying entry fees for the next race out of prize money I'd won in the last race, which led to the daft notion that if I could win two titles on a disastrous budget, I could surely win just one on a catastrophic budget. This obvious error was compounded by the fact that I knew none of the tricks required to compete successfully in a one-make championship.

Castle Combe was a particularly bad meeting because we'd actually got the car going quite well in testing, and then committed the outstanding sin (people have gone to Hell for less) of changing the car before the next meeting. In qualifying at Combe, it handled like a bar of soap. By the end of the session I could not have been more furious.

My mechanics, mysteriously, were delighted, though at first I couldn't imagine why. Then one of them came up to me (just as I was smashing my crash helmet into a telegraph pole, I think) and said, in tones of great excitement, "Gerry Marshall has just asked if we have a spare ticket!"

He had indeed. Marshall, who was competing in the TVR Tuscan Championship that season, had invited more people to Castle Combe than he had tickets for. Our team consisted of three people, and we had two tickets left over. No problem. We gave him the tickets. He thanked us in a jovial and gentlemanly manner. I grunted something back at him, still fuming at the problems with my car. My mechanics spent the next ten minutes dancing little jigs because they had just met the Great Man.

Once I'd calmed down, I could see their point. Marshall had by this time been a legend for decades. Despite being the opposite of anyone's idea of a racing driver - he was physically enormous, and the title of his biography was Only Here For The Beer - he conjured up a phenomenal series of results in a wide variety of saloons and sports cars. By the time he died he had won over 600 races.

Some of his cars were nearly as remarkable as he was. Perhaps the most famous was Baby Bertha, the last in a long series of Vauxhalls he raced in the 1960s and 1970s. It bore some resemblance to a Firenza, but under the bonnet lay a thundering five-litre V8 engine which made this the most ferocious Vauxhall racer until the six-litre Carlton of the late 80s (and for more details of which see a previous article, Riding With John Cleland). Baby Bertha would have intimidated most drivers, but I doubt that any car ever intimidated Gerry Marshall.

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