Ross Finlay Tribute
by David Finlay (10 January 2005)
This simply was not in the script. My father never smoked, never drank, did not eat meat, took regular exercise and was not so much as an ounce overweight. I thought he would live until he was a hundred. Instead, on 15 December 2004, five years and one week after we formed our own online motoring magazine, he dropped dead. It was like being struck by lightning from a clear blue sky.
At times like this, people say nice things to surviving members of the family. It's just what happens. But we never expected anything approaching the reaction that occurred. Friends and colleagues made contact as soon as they heard what had happened, as did big names in motorsport (including three-times F1 World Champion Jackie Stewart and Mitsubishi WRC team boss Andrew Cowan). There were even heart-warming messages of support from CARkeys readers - in the UK, America, Romania and New Zealand - who never met Dad but felt they had got to know him through his writing style, which seemed to address each member of his readership personally.
Hearing and reading so many tributes in such a short space of time has been quite an experience. The word most often used to describe my father has been "gentleman", the predominant adjective "honest". He has been referred to as kind and caring. People who either knew him very well or who had met him barely half a dozen times have alike been quick to say how amazed they were at his fund of knowledge, and how amused they were by his entertaining way of telling stories on a bewildering variety of subjects.
Although he was far too self-effacing to admit this to people outside the family circle, his ability to act as a walking library hinted at a list of achievements in a range of subjects which seemed almost beyond the scope of one person, and which were almost completely unrelated to his own upbringing. The son of a blacksmith who never drove and rarely read a book (but who was himself one of the kindest men I ever knew), he inherited absolutely no technical facility whatever, instead developing a love first of writing and then of motoring.
At school in Glasgow he was introduced, by someone who seems to have been almost the perfect English teacher, to P G Wodehouse, who rapidly and permanently became his favourite author. He also became friends with fellow pupil Donald Brown, who taught him to drive and with whom he became involved in the local motorsport scene.
As a competitor he quickly became known as one of Scotland's finest rally navigators. In the modest but intensely competitive sport of navigational rallying he teamed up with a very fine driver called David Black, and together they became a star act. Twice British Touring Car Champion John Cleland, who also took part in these events, once made it clear just how dominant they were: "If we turned up at a rally and saw the names David Black and Ross Finlay on the entry list, we started wondering who was going to finish second." Never one to hide information from others, he published a series of Armchair Rally books which allowed readers to compete as navigators in "virtual" events without stepping outside their living rooms.
He competed on larger-scale events, too, like the Monte Carlo Rally (navigating for Sherwood Skelly in a Ford Zephyr), and teamed up with Logan Morrison as part of the works Healey 3000 team in the 1963 European Rally Championship. He later rallied with Andrew Cowan in a variety of cars including a Vauxhall Magnum and a very fast Ford Escort. The Escort came to grief on a stage in the Otterburn ranges in north-east England - it took off over a crest and flew so far that it didn't land until the road was coming up to the next crest. The car went nose-first into the tarmac with such force that the propshaft punched its way through the rear axle, an occurrence which still made Dad wince as he talked about it twenty years later.
He stopped rallying in the 1970s and - with the exception of a briefly discussed plan which involved us buying a Renault Dauphine and taking part in historic events - showed no sign of wanting to start again, describing it as a chapter of his life which was now closed. But he continued to write about motorsport for a long time afterwards, with the experience of someone who had taken part at a high level and the ability of an expert writer (one posthumous tribute from a friend and colleague conveys a sense of professional envy at his elegant way with words).
He had become a journalist quite early on, though not before working his way through National Service and - I can barely imagine this happening, even though I know it did - finding employment at an uncle's tailoring business. As well as writing about motorsport (often managing to avoid, while reporting on a rally, anything more than the briefest reference to the fact that he had won it) he drifted into the general motoring scene, writing insightful articles about individual cars in particular and the motor industry in general.
He was still doing this in the week he died, but he had not for several years found the time to write touring articles, though this had been one of his great enthusiasms. His two favourite countries were Scotland and France, and he explored both, conveying his delight at what he had found to a wide readership through magazine articles, a series of Touring Scotland books and several guide books published by the AA and the Reader's Digest.
One unexpected offshoot of all this was that he briefly became something of an authority on the whisky industry. In no way opposed to the existence of alcohol or the desire of anyone else to drink it, he detested the idea of drinking whisky himself (in the same way that he would refuse a helping of trifle if there was so much as a hint of sherry in it). But he loved the process of making whisky, and he loved the chance to learn more - and tell more - about the scenery and history of the areas in which the most famous distilleries are found.
No musician himself, he married an amateur singer and produced two children who became more or less heavily involved in the music world. Needless to say, he took an interest in the process of music-making and became a passionate admirer of Edward Elgar (perhaps his favourite part of England was Malvern, for the very reason that Elgar had been so inspired by the place). And, somewhat to my surprise, he also became quite well-versed in painting, shying away somewhat from my own favourites such as Munch, Schiele and Picasso but happily immersing himself in the earlier and somewhat gentler work of the Impressionists.
But for all his enthusiasm for art, music, travel and motorsport, writing was his life, and despite occasional wistful references to retirement he was still working at a rate which would put younger men to shame until the very end. He died while travelling to the AGM of a journalists' association of which he had been a member for more than forty years (imagine the shock felt by his colleagues when they learned why he had never arrived) and would, later that evening, have returned home to spend several late-night hours researching and writing news stories for this magazine. A road test report of the car he was driving would have followed within a couple of days, and it would have been carefully thought-out and neatly expressed as always.
It's all over now, on one level at least, and for those of us who remain there is an inevitable sense of "where do we go from here?" But I like to think that the enormous body of work Dad left behind him will stand as a tribute to a very remarkable man.
