Club Night - Stuart Turner Talk

At the March club night we enjoyed a most entertaining talk from Stuart Turner entitled ‘My misspent life in motor sport’. He told us he was born and grew up in the Stoke area. After leaving school he got a job in the County Treasurer’s office in Stafford, but was then very soon called up to do his National Service (still compulsory in those days) in the RAF. They posted him to Bodmin to learn Russian (!) and it was here he had his first exposure to motor sport when he found himself one of a group fruitlessly pushing one of Prince Bira’s racing cars up and down a runway trying to get the damn thing to start.

After National Service he went back to a job in accountancy. One day his step-sister’s boyfriend suggested he come along with them for the ride on a North Staffs MC road rally. At one point in the event he took over the maps from Sis, and found he had a talent for navigating. He joined the club and very soon progressed to doing anything up to 60 rallies a year – sometimes three on a weekend – editing the club magazine and organising events. In those days most competitors took drugs like Benzedrine to keep them awake all night.

Stuart was navigating for a variety of drivers in a variety of different cars, all generally fairly standard in those days. He and Ron Gouldbourn won the BTRDA Gold Star championship three years on the trot (1957 – 59) and by the late ‘50s he was also doing a number of international events. Here he spoke fondly (I think) about co-driving for Wolfgang Levy in a two-stroke Auto Union on the Liège rally.
This event was a 96-hour flat out blind across Europe and back – with just a single one-hour rest halt in the entire event. Try telling that to the young people of today …

He’d also been submitting rally reports to the weekly magazines, and one day in 1960 he added a PS to one he was sending to Motoring News asking if they had any permanent jobs going. In a very short time he found himself Sports Editor of Motoring News, and he and his new wife Margaret had to move from Staffs to London. In his time with MN he became the very first Verglas (their rally columnist), devised the legendary Motoring News Rally Championship and also found time to win the 1960 RAC Rally navigating for Erik Carlsson in a Saab. While recce-ing this event in Scotland Erik was forced to roll the car down a bank to avoid a fish lorry, which meant he started and won the rally with several cracked ribs.

Stuart’s stint with Motoring News didn’t last long, for in mid-1961 he was offered the job of BMC Competitions Manager, having been recommended by the previous incumbent Marcus Chambers. He arrived to find he had a large and disparate bunch of both drivers and cars to manage. On the car front the main effort was being put behind two wildly different cars, the Mini and the Big Healey, although there were occasional diversions, usually prompted by the Sales Dept, when cars such as the 1800 ‘Land Crab’ and MGB were pressed into competitive service. Stuart said he never had too much trouble getting a decent competition budget, but this might possibly have been helped by Stuart having made the MG financial controller godfather to his eldest daughter.

The drivers included the likes of Pat Moss and Peter Riley who were true professionals, plus the ‘gentleman’ drivers who did it as a hobby. Stuart mentioned John Gott, whose day job was Chief Constable of Northants, and the Morley twins, Don and Erle. Stuart could never get the Morleys to do the Liège rally because it always took place in August, which clashed with harvest time on the Morley family farm.

Having recruited proven stars Paddy Hopkirk and Rauno Aaltonen, Stuart was asked to try out an unknown young Finn called Timo Makinen. Timo was a bit wild but shone on his Mini debut in the 1962 RAC Rally. Stuart then hurriedly rearranged his entry for the 1963 Monte and put Timo with Christabel Carlisle in a Healey. In atrocious weather they won the GT category, and Christabel, who during the first day had wanted to get out and go home, then realised that Timo knew what he was doing, and toward the end of the rally was even urging him to go faster.

Then began the ‘Mini era’ – the Swinging Sixties where the Mini was ultra-cool and winning rally after rally. After Paddy Hopkirk took the Mini’s first Monte win in 1964 car and driver were whisked back to England to star on the prime time TV show Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Just before the start of that Monte the Beatles had flown into Paris with all the accompanying mass hysteria. Ringo had been delayed and came on a later plane, so Stuart took the opportunity to go and pick him up in a Mini. More publicity …

Stuart even reckoned that the infamous 1966 Monte where a number of British cars, including the Minis in the first three places, were disqualified on a technicality after the event, was good for BMC because of all the hoo-hah and publicity it generated. However, by 1966 Stuart was getting slightly bored. BMC was turning into British Leyland and things were being done differently. With a growing family he fancied a job where he spent more time at home, but he’d built up a great team who he didn’t want to leave. As an example of the team spirit he told the story of one of the mechanics, Robin Vokins, who had been detailed to do a last-minute check for ice on a few key corners on a Monte stage. When he arrived he found the stage had been closed early, so he ran several miles up the mountain to do the check.

Stuart finally left BMC in early 1967 to become Publicity Manager at Castrol. During this period he set up the nationwide series of Castrol quizzes, in which our club team used to shine. He also organised the launch of Castrol GTX very successfully, although he admitted to us that its main competitor at the time, Duckhams Q, was a superior oil. In this period he was part of the organising team for the 1968
London-Sydney Marathon, which included running a control on his own in the centre of Kabul being mobbed by a throng of locals.

Once again he was becoming bored, so when Walter Hayes offered him the job of running Ford’s competition department in 1969 he jumped at it. Here his efforts led to the great days of the Escort in rallying – eight RAC Rallies on the trot – and all other aspects of Ford GB’s involvement in motor sport. He was also in charge of Ford’s AVO operation, which gave the world the Mexico and the RS2000.

The Mexico had been named to commemorate Ford’s win in the 1970 World Cup Rally, which had been a new challenge. The event included stages in South America hundreds of miles long and at high altitude in the Andes, and no-one knew how the drivers would cope, and whether they might even need oxygen. The legend therefore goes that Roger Clark, whilst out recce-ing the event, was instructed to find and make love to a woman at 14,000 feet and report back. Roger cabled back that he couldn’t find a woman at 14,000 feet but had made love 14 times at 1,000 feet without problem, so saw no need for oxygen.

In 1975 he moved on to become Ford’s Director of Public Affairs. This brought him into occasional contact with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who Stuart described as ‘making Bernie Ecclestone look effeminate’. By 1983 he was back in motor sport, as Director of European Motorsports for Ford. One of his first moves in this job was to cancel the C100 Group C project and the RS1700T rally car, which led to him receiving hate mail from disgruntled enthusiasts. He then led the development of the Sierra Cosworth, the RS200 Group B car and the Escort Cosworth, and believes he was the first person ever to get a speeding ticket in a Sierra Cosworth whilst road testing a very early example.

He took early retirement from Ford in 1990 and since then has been involved with a variety of different projects including being a founder member of the Motorsport Safety Fund, writing a number of books, and encouraging grass-roots motor sport.
He is also an award-winning after-dinner speaker, as this evening clearly demonstrated, and we were very fortunate to be have been able to hear him.