by Ross Finlay (22 Sep 03)

The first time I saw Tony Rudd - from the sidelines - was during an incident in 1952 at the Turnberry circuit which would be unthinkable in today's top-class racing world, and the last was when, many years later, he was Lotus's man at the launch of the Sunbeam Lotus.

Now that he's died, I've been looking back through his very engaging and direct-speaking autobiography It Was Fun!, which used as its title his response, well after the event, to a remark of Colin Chapman's as they were leaving a late-night drawing board session at Lotus: "I hope you are having fun. When it stops being fun for me I shall quit."

In his long career - he waited till he was 68 before retiring - Tony Rudd worked for only three companies, but what a trio: Rolls-Royce, BRM and Lotus. Yet his involvement with motor racing went back even before he joined Rolls-Royce as an apprentice in 1939. Through a family connection, he became friendly with the Siamese racing princes, Bira and Chula, and his first visit to a motor race was when Bira won at Brooklands in September 1938.

After the war, when his department at Rolls-Royce dealt with some remarkable characters - not least the famous test pilot Alex Henshaw, who once, after a mechanical failure, "put his Spitfire down by the expedient of going between two houses (taking the wings off in the process)" - he became Rolls-Royce's engineer attached to the V16 BRM project.

His book is a warts-and-all insider's chronicle of that magnificent but star-crossed project, headed by two more remarkable characters, Raymond Mays and Peter Berthon, each with considerable strengths and just about equivalent weaknesses, who certainly wouldn't have held the same positions in a 2003 Grand Prix operation.

Rolls-Royce Displeased

It was Tony who discovered that BRM was tinkering around with the Rolls-Royce centrifugal superchargers in a way that raised R-R hackles when the news got back. And he also worked out one of the reasons why the car's handling was so unpredictable. Putting a couple of wooden chocks between the front wheel rims and the chassis, he discovered that the steering wheel could still be turned through a full 90 degrees.

Later on, he left Rolls-Royce and joined BRM full-time, being with the team from the days when Fangio, Gonzalez, Moss, Parnell and Wharton were, at various times, on the driving strength (Fangio a puzzle in that he didn't feel it part of his job to explain how the car could be made better, Wharton regarded as a complete pest in this context, however formidable as British Hillclimb Champion). In Ron Flockhart Tony finally found a driver-engineer whose feedback was invaluable; by then, even the Mark II V16 was a lost cause, although it could win at British Formule Libre level.

However, after BRM became effectively a division of the Rubery Owen organisation, it was under Tony Rudd's engineering direction that it eventually produced winning Grand Prix cars which took Graham Hill to the World Championship and gave Jackie Stewart his first GP victory, and got involved in the Rover-BRM gas turbine Le Mans project. Tony also observed that highly unusual industrialist Sir Alfred Owen in close-up action.

In 1969, after 19 years at BRM, he left amid a certain amount of acrimony over an erroneous claim that he had been fired, and moved to Lotus. His insider's account of working there, eventually as group engineering director, involved both with the outside engineering contracts and with the racing team - and its personalities like Graham Hill again, Pedro Rodriguez, Jochen Rindt and Nigel Mansell - is all fascinating stuff.

Sunbeam By Lotus

Lotus Engineering, of course, worked with all manner of larger organisations including some as different in their approach as General Motors, Chrysler and DeLorean. During the late 1970s Lotus collaborated with Chrysler in producing that splendid machine, the Sunbeam Lotus, although it was launched after Chrysler's UK operation had been bought by Peugeot.

Tony was Lotus's man at the international press launch in France, based on the castle which was the birthplace of that great military and political figure, the Marquis de Lafayette, and which turned out to be run by a trust whose headquarters were in, of all places, Glasgow.

In his book, Tony noted that the intermediate days of the two-week launch period, between one bunch of journalists leaving and the next lot arriving, were spent by "a large joint working party retrieving and repairing the shunted and inverted cars ready for the next influx".

I seem to remember that he was also highly amused when a French motoring writer who happened to be on holiday in the area came along for a chat, asked about the power output of the Sunbeam Lotus, and let slip that he had been able to keep up with one of the press-driven cars quite easily while at the wheel of his own Matra Rancho.

By early 1986, after Colin Chapman's death, General Motors owned a majority interest in the whole Group Lotus operation, which GM chairman Roger Smith is said to have remarked he wanted to retain its "rustic simplicity". There's something quite amusing in the thought that different divisions of the Norfolk firm were involved with cars like Chevrolet Corvette Indy and the Vauxhall Lotus Carlton while also building the Elan.

Of course, GM eventually couldn't see a place within its vast and sprawling empire for something as simple and rustic as Lotus, although Tony Rudd was long gone by the time Lotus became effectively part of Proton.

The Sporting Spirit

I was back at the site of the old Turnberry racing circuit the day before writing this, and I could still conjure up across (blimey!) 51 years the memory of that incident mentioned at the start of this column. Tony Rudd and some of the mechanics were doing a frantic repair job on Reg Parnell's V16 BRM on the front row of the grid, when their principal rival Mike Hawthorn got out of Tony Vandervell's Thin Wall Special Ferrari, strolled over and advised them not to get too upset by the starter's agitated desire to get the race under way with or without Parnell: "Take your time, chaps. They won't start without us."

A while later, there was another start-line incident, this time at Goodwood. This time the BRMs were ready to go, but the Thin Wall Special had been taken back to London for repairs, and its transporter was delayed in holiday traffic. It arrived back at the circuit only just in time, and in the fumble to get the Thin Wall onto its grid position Hawthorn couldn't find reverse, so that the car was sitting about a wheel too far forward.

The starter looked enquiringly at Rudd and pointed at the position of the Thin Wall. Rudd waved at him to get the race going, and so did Fangio. Hawthorn won, and the BRM team were invited to protest, but would have none of it. Vandervell, who'd stood the BRM mechanics a drink after the Turnberry race (a pint of Pimms each), went the whole hog this time, and had the cockpits of both BRMs loaded with presentation bottles of champagne, "saying that racing against true sportsmen was what he enjoyed most in the world".

Tony Rudd's book ends with the most self-deprecatory final sentence I've ever seen in anybody's autobiography, but his contributions to motoring and motorsport were so significant, and his memories so rich, that I don't believe a word of it. After finally leaving Lotus, he wrote: "I was very surprised how easily I slipped into the role of a retired old fogey."

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