Waving the Saltire

Trivia Question: Name the small Northern European country whose drivers have racked up five Formula 1 World Titles over the years. If you think the answer is Finland, then you're wrong. Between them, Keke Rosberg, Hakkinen and Raikkonen have racked up four titles, though there remains the possibility that Raikkonen or perhaps even Kovalainen, could add to that total (Rosberg fils races under a German licence and doesn't count).

The correct answer is my adopted home, Scotland, as a recent visit to the National Museum of Scotland, where Jackie Young Stewart's 1973 Tyrrell currently takes pride of place by the entrance, reminded me. Now you can get into an argument as to whether Scotland is really a 'country' in its own right at all (though it's not necessarily a debate I'd recommend starting on the streets of Glasgow or Edinburgh, especially in the evening after the rugby or the football), but there is no doubt that for a decade, between 1963 and 1973, Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart ensured that Scotland was preeminent in the world of Formula 1.



For all that the two men came from the same small part of the world - southern Scotland, they appeared to be very different people. Where Jim is remembered as a quiet, shy man of few words, who let his driving do the talking - a BBC documentary on his career, which aired earlier this year, was titled The Quiet Champion', Jackie was and remains a flamboyant, outspoken personality, never afraid to say what is on his mind. He campaigned hard on driver safety, and an astute businessman, he was perhaps the first to see race driving as a 'career' in the modern sense of the word. What the two men did have in common was that they were the outstanding talents of their age.



Despite its achievements in the F1 world, motorsport has a low profile north of the border. The two big Scottish newspapers, The Scotsman and The Herald, generally provide only the most cursory coverage of the sport (in marked contrast with some London-based broadsheets, perhaps most surprisingly the left-leaning and hardly car-loving Guardian which has, perhaps, the best coverage of the lot). Nor does it much impinge on the popular consciousness. Certainly, in my office, I'm in a minority of one in being more interested in Button vs. Barrichello vs. Vettel than in the Auld Firm rivalry and the latest tribulations of Hearts under its Lithuanian owner. I don't think anyone else regularly tunes in to BBC1 for the F1. And as for any other forms of motorsport....

Part of the explanation, I suspect, lies in the absence of any really successful Scottish racing drivers for the best part of 20 years after Jackie Stewart retired. Yes, Johnny Dumfries won the British F3 championship, but his career never recovered after he found himself partnered with Ayrton Senna at Lotus in 1986, though he did go on to win Le Mans with Jaguar. At a national level, the likes of John Cleland and David Leslie met with considerable success, but for 20 years, no Scottish driver really established himself on the international stage (though I always thought that the late David Leslie had the talent to do so, if not the breaks).

I suspect it doesn't help, either, that there is now only one permanent race track in Scotland - the small though deceptively tricky Knockhill circuit, across the bridge from Edinburgh. At just 1.3m in length, and lacking much in the way of passing places for anything not capable of running door-handle to door-handle it means that, an annual visit by the BTCC circus aside, it rarely plays host to race meets of real significance (though the Scottish Motor Racing Club do put on a good show). Contrast that with the south and midlands of England, with Silverstone, Donington Park, Brands Hatch, Oulton Park and a host of smaller venues and its easy to see why the sport has never caught the public imagination to the same degree up here. At one time, there was the Ingliston circuit on the outskirts of Edinburgh, but that had disappeared by the time I moved here in the mid-1990s and the place is now used only for the Royal Highland Show - rather oddly as it is a good 3 hours train ride from the Highlands...

It can't be down to a lack of successful Scottish racers any longer though. In the early 1990s a trio of youngsters driving for the father-and-son David Leslie Racing operation would go on to make a very significant impact on the sport. First came Allan McNish. Shooting to prominence in the 1990 F3000 championship, his career thereafter spent some time in the doldrums, before he hooked up with Porsche to win Le Mans, and then moved to Toyota to work first with their sportscar programme and eventually with their fledgling F1 effort. This led to a season in F1 in 2002, but things never really worked out there, and he has subsequently established himself as a sportscar racer par excellence, one of the lynchpins of Audi's sportscar programme, winning the ALMS three times and claiming another Le Mans victory in 2008.

Next up came another Dumfries and Galloway man, David Coulthard. In his early years, he didn't strike me as quite as quick as McNish, but he was the one who progressed easily to F1, first with Williams and then with Mclaren. If he never quite had the last couple of tenths that might have enabled him to add to the five titles picked up by Clark and Stewart, but though he may never have entirely convinced people like myself he was truly from the top drawer, he did win 13 Grands Prix which is more than all but a small handful of racing drivers can claim.

A year or two behind him was Scots-Italian Dario Franchitti. Unable to make the break into Formula 1, he instead went off to ply his trade in the US, first in the then-strong Champ Car Series, and later in the Indy Racing League. In 2007, ten years after his debut, he won the IRL series and the Indianapolis 500. There followed an unsuccessful diversion into NASCAR, but this year he came back to the IRL with Chip Ganassi Racing and secured his second title by winning the final race at Homestead last weekend.

And what was the extent to which all this was followed in Scotland? A brief mention on the evening news and that was it. Chances are, nothing short of a Scottish rival to Lewis Hamilton will change that. Though you never know, maybe a street-race round Glasgow would be just the ticket....

David Leslie - In Memory of a Proper Racer

When I first heard on Sunday afternoon that a small private plane had crashed into a house in Kent, killing all on board, I couldn't help fearing that someone from the motor racing world might have been involved. After the deaths of Colin McRae, Steve Hislop and Bertie Fisher, it somehow seemed a distinct possibility. And so on Monday, looking up BBC News, it turned out to be the case. Sportscar team boss Richard Lloyd and Scottish racing driver David Leslie were amongst the five victims of the accident. Sympathy, obviously, goes out to the family and friends of all five men on board the plane. It was Leslie whose name meant the most to me personally, as a racing fan.

I first remember seeing David Leslie race as a kid attending the Donington 500km sports car race, back in 1989. Sportscar racing was a rather bigger deal back then than it is now, with works teams from Jaguar, Mercedes, Porsche, Nissan and Toyota vying for honours. New to the field for 1989 were the works Aston Martins being run as a joint venture with the Ecurie Ecosse team. The Aston Martin AMR1 was never amongst the quickest C1 cars in its brief sports car racing career, but it looked absolutely fantastic in its clean white blue and red livery. In Leslie's hands, it picked up a 6th place at Donington too. A few weeks earlier, he had gone even better at Brands Hatch, finishing 4th paired with Brian Redman, despite the fact that the late 60s F1 star was by then well past his competitive best.

By that time, Leslie was already in his mid-30s with a substantial career behind him. While the likes of Fernando Alonso and Nico Rosberg were in F1 at the age of 20, Leslie didn't even switch to cars until the age of 23. He was a quick learner, though. In his second season in Formula Ford, he won not one but two National titles. In the following three years, he followed that up with title wins in the now defunct Formula Ford 2000 and Formula Atlantic Series. Thereafter, lack of finance to progress further caused his single seater career to stall somewhat, though he did claim pole at the opening round of the 1983 British F3 championship, ahead of a certain young Brazilian by the name of Ayrton Da Silva...

From there, he took the well trod road into Sportscars. Scottish Businessman Hugh McCaig had taken it upon himself to revive the Ecurie Ecosse sportscar name of the 1950s and became one of the leading lights in the new Group C2 sportscar category during the mid-1980s. David Leslie, as a solid, promising and perhaps importantly, Scottish driver, was recruited to the driving strength. Their successes included winning the teams' title in 1986 and a second place in class in the 1987 Le Mans 24hr race. The team withdrew from C2 in 1988 in order to concentrate on their Aston Martin C1 project. That, however, was killed almost before it had begun, when the parent company ran into trouble and was bought by Ford. The American car giant already owned Jaguar, and could see little point in paying two of its luxury car brands to compete against each other in sports car racing.


Leslie's Ecurie Ecosse C286.

Leslie would go on to drive for Jaguar at Le Mans in 1990 and 1991, but did not finish the event on either occasion. It was his, and McCaig's move into touring car racing in 1992 and 1993 with the Ecurie Ecosse Vauxhall Cavaliers which brought him to wider attention though. McCaig always had a knack for ensuring that his cars were stunningly well turned out, and the Saltire coloured Vauxhalls were no exception.

More importantly, though, the Ecurie Ecosse Cavaliers were quick. Quick enough to embarrass the works team on occasion, and quick enough to allow Leslie to win the end of season TOCA-Shoot Out race at Donington in 1993 (a race perhaps best remembered for Nigel Mansell's messy appearance in a Ford Mondeo). At an age when most racing drivers' careers were beginning to wind down, Leslie finally got himself into a car which would enable him to take outright wins. From there, Leslie established himself as a significant force in British touring cars, driving for Vauxhall, Mazda, Nissan and Proton, taking 9 wins and scoring a best championship position of 2nd in 1999, behind Laurent Aiello at Nissan. He finally bowed out of the series at the end of 2003 after a fruitless couple of years with the Proton Impian.

Leslie's involvement in, and influence over the racing world was not limited to his driving. He played a key role in guiding some of the leading Scottish talents of a generation through their formative racing years. David Coulthard, Dario Franchitti and Allan McNish all acknowledge that Leslie provided invaluable help in furthering their careers. A Monaco GP winner, an Indy 500 winner and a Le Mans winner. Not bad for a small country...

After the end of his touring car career, he took up commentary for Eurosport, working alongside Martin Haven on their coverage of the World Touring Car Championship and the FIA GT series. A quiet, softly spoken man who might not initially seem an obvious candidate for the job of sports commentator. He came across more as a college lecturer than a media pundit (and technically, he was, as he lectured part time in Motorsports Management at Swansea). However, his depth of knowledge and enthusiasm for the sport was nonetheless obvious from the start, and was complemented with an endearingly dry sense of humour. On at least one occasion, he dovetailed commentary duties for the FIA GT series with driving duties for Graham Nash Motorsport's Saleen S7R. "Sorry, got to go now, I'm driving in a few minutes..." Not something I've often heard from a commentator.

I only once met David Leslie, very briefly, at the Knockhill Speedfair in 2006. He was there running demonstration laps in his old Ecurie Ecosse (which he pushed notably closer to the limit than Jackie Stewart did his old championship winning Tyrrell. He came across, though, as a pleasant, approachable man, and to judge by comments made after his death by those from the racing world who knew him, the impression I was given was accurate.

Leslie also took the opportunity that day to race his recently restored 1977 title-winning Formula Ford Royale RP24. It says something about the man's genuine enthusiasm for the sport that he not only went to the trouble of restoring his old car, but raced it with considerable aplomb. Against opposition in much more modern machinery, and despite being slow in a straight line, he stood every chance of winning the race, before his engine gave up the ghost. How many other semi-retired racing drivers in their 50s would go back to their Formula Ford roots in this way? He was a man, who it seemed, simply loved racing. Neil, at Fastest Lap, tells his own story of his exploits in a Shelby Mustang at Laguna Seca back in 1997.


David Leslie in action in his restored Royale RP24 at Knockhill in 2006.

For some people, motorsport is about glamour, fame, 'chasing the dream', making piles of money or being in with the 'in crowd'. It's this mentality which drives ITV's interminable, tedious pre-race features. David Leslie, it seemed to me, was the very antithesis of this kind of attitude. A man for whom it was all about the racing, who in the words of Allan McNish "gave far more to motorsport than it ever gave back to him."

Photos are author's own.