The remarkable dual life of a hidden hero who worked with F1’s greats

Nearly 40 years on, it remains among the great Formula 1 images. The John Player Special Lotus, captured in moody black and white from behind, is rolling to a standstill in a drenched collecting area as bedraggled onlookers peer through a wire fence.

The driver has already thrown off his belts, his left hand cupped in glory as the chap he’s turning towards, in thick-framed Peter Sellers specs and flat cap, welcomes him with arms spread as wide as his ecstatic smile. It’s a sopping Estoril in 1985, Ayrton Senna has just logged one of the great wet-weather drives – and he’s now a grand prix winner. No wonder Peter Warr, who hasn’t relished this feeling for three years, is letting rip.

But what completes our man Steven Tee’s masterful work is the fella just above Senna’s left-front wheel: no coat, Goodyear cap, joy spread all over his face – and caught mid-pogo, about six inches off the ground with arms, somewhat amusingly, straight by his sides. That’s Kenny Szymanski, Lotus’s long-serving ‘tyre guy’, dedicated F1 enthusiast – and one of the sweariest men in motor sport (which is saying something).

“Well, I still haven’t come down,” says Kenny today, “I’m still up in the air. We were all soaking wet because it was pissing like a cow on a flat rock. A great moment. My friend Clive [Hicks] is beside me, but he’s being blocked by some punter – which pisses him off to this day. Then there’s Peter Warr with outstretched arms. A wonderful day. I’m so glad that was Ayrton’s first win and not Monaco in 1984 with the Tolemaniacs…”

We’ve caught Kenny, after a fair degree of faff with modern-day means of communication, at some godawful hour in his California hotel room. But that’s how he likes it, because he has an appointment on the first tee at “the crack of sparrows”.

Now we’ve got him, let’s find out more about one of F1’s most random life stories and an off-the-wall eccentric who built happy friendships with Mario, Elio, Nigel, Nelson, Ayrton and many more during his free-wheeling, hard-grafting, years in the grand prix paddock.

Prepare for take-off

Szymanski found his way into a motorsport career while working on airlines before making it his full-time job

Photo by: David Phipps

How it began is like something straight out of Kerouac or Catcher in the Rye. “I grew up in Wisconsin, so I’m a Cheesehead – a [Green Bay] Packers fan,” says Kenny as he explains how the racing bug bit from nowhere. “A grandparent brought a programme back from the 1960 Indy 500, I looked at it and said ‘this is great.’ That garnered up my interest.”

Speaking of Garner… “Then the movie Grand Prix came out and I went to see it six times. Now I was hooked on F1. Before that I never knew F1 existed. As for my family they didn’t know f*** all about it.

“So then I got a job with American Airlines.” Kenny was what today we call a flight attendant – but in his slightly less varnished words, “a ball-bearing stewardess on the dolly-trolly”. “I was over in Switzerland on a hiking tour and decided to pop down to Monaco to have a look at what was going on there. This was 1976. When I saw it I said, ‘This is great.’ So I started chatting up people, like we do.

"I was scheduling the races around my flying. They can put anyone in my boots to do the stewardess job, but doing the tyres with Clive Hicks, that was a different story" Kenny Szymanski

“F1 motorhomers Mike and Anne Murphy were looking after Lotus. Mike was loading chairs in the paddock and as I always do, if you see something needs doing, dive in. I said, ‘Hey, can I give you a hand?’ The rest is history!

“Once I started gabbing he introduced me to Bob Dance” – Lotus’s legendary mechanic – “who took a chance on me.” To cut to the chase, back at Monaco in 1978 Kenny pitched in as a Lotus ‘gofer’. “I told Bob Dance, I’m tired of sneaking into pits, taking pictures and doing f*** all. I really like this sport and I want to make a contribution. I was skipping around, doing races when I could, then in 1979 I did every one.”

So did you give up the AA job? “F***, no! I was doing both. I was scheduling the races around my flying. They can put anyone in my boots to do the stewardess job, but doing the tyres with Clive Hicks, that was a different story.”

Talk to Kenny and you quickly realise why Mario Andretti, world champion in 1978, quickly took to the new guy. They remain firm friends to this day: “He liked the fact I worked hard. And being a Yank, that helped a little bit… And he knew my enthusiasm was there, and he always enjoyed that.”

Szymanski (pictured working on the front wheel of Mario Andretti's Lotus 80) developed a friendship with most of Lotus's drivers

Photo by: David Phipps

Besides collecting tyres from Goodyear, Kenny got his hands dirty however he could and eventually worked pitstops once tyre changes became a thing: “Mario introduced tyre stagger to F1, which he used at Indy. He applied that to a left-hand down or right-hand down course in F1 and had us checking the staggers and matching up tyres. That really was a challenge.”

Airs and graces

Szymanski lived this crazy dual life on the airlines and in F1 for the next 10 years. What was it about racing that appealed?

“Just the competition,” he replies. “Plus the fact there are no excuses: you do it now and you do it right. It’s not like everyday life where everybody mollycoddles everyone and makes excuses. You have no choice, the clock is ticking and they are going to start without you.

“Although I remember in a restroom in Atlanta, where I went to see a NASCAR race, who’s stood in the queue for the gents but Richard Petty? I said ‘Richard Petty, why don’t you cut in front of us?’ He said, ‘Ah no, don’t worry about it mate, they won’t leave without me.’ Stupid story, sorry.”

Beyond Andretti, Kenny forged friendships with all the drivers at Lotus in the 1980s. He describes Nigel Mansell as “great” but was much closer to Elio de Angelis, who stayed with the team for five years before his fateful move to Brabham in 1986 – and his senseless death in a testing accident at Paul Ricard.

“Elio and I were like brothers,” says Kenny. “He got his first win in 1982 in Austria. With each lap as they ticked them down I wrote the letters C-I-A-O one by one on the pitboard: CIAO ELIO, P1. It was on the front page of a Roman newspaper.

“We were trying to get around Alain Prost in the Renault and the Guvnor” – Colin Chapman – “asked, ‘How many more laps have we got to go?’ I said, ‘Four, Guvnor – don’t worry, that Renault isn’t going to last.’ He turns around, looks at me and says, ‘Yeah, but that’s our engine next year.’ I said, ‘That’s next year, Guvnor, this is today and we need that win.’

“There’s a good picture of him patting me on the back on the pitwall. The finish with Keke was so close,” – just 0.05s separated the Lotus from Rosberg’s fast-closing Williams. “A great day.”

Szymanski has fond memories of the first win for de Angelis at the 1982 Austrian GP, by a nose over Rosberg's Williams

Photo by: Motorsport Images

And Chapman: what was he like?

“He was great, I enjoyed the Guvnor,” says Szymanski. “At my first race we wrote ‘Set 13’ on one of the tyres and Colin saw that and said, ‘No, no, no, no, no! We don’t write 13 on the signal board or on the tyres. Please chaps.’ But he knew we were new. In Spain in 1978 he threw his hat in the air when we won, as he always did, and I caught it. I loved the whole family. Jane, one of the daughters, I always called her JPS – Jane’s Pretty Special.”

Museum peace

As for Senna, Kenny cherishes the memories of the great Brazilian’s three years at Lotus. He saw a lighter, humorous side the public rarely glimpsed: “Ayrton was 100 per cent serious, he gave you 100% effort. But he’d walk in in the morning, come over, smack you with a fist on the shoulder and say, ‘How’s my f***ing American friend today?’ You’d raise your fist and he’d say, ‘Uh, uh – don’t touch the driver!’”

"Michael tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Tell me, how is it you are here? We never have people coming in for just a one-off to help out'" 
Kenny Szymanski 

Senna was also one of a number who paid a visit to what Kenny calls “the 85th Street Museum” – his apartment in New York, which is filled with memorabilia collected from his years in F1.

“It was in 1986 after the Canadian GP in Montreal,” Kenny recalls. “We were at a dinner with his sponsor Nacional, right near where I live. We finished the dinner and I said, ‘Ayrton, you have to come to the 85th Street Museum and see it.’ His manager Armando said, ‘Oh no, Kenny, we’ll come next time.’ But Ayrton being Ayrton, he said: ‘We’ll do it now.’ So they came to the museum.

“The first thing he did was look at the right-front tyre from Portugal 1985, which I have in my flat signed by him. He looked at the [wet-tread] blocks which of course were worn because they’d done a GP, they were rounded off a little bit. But they were almost pristine.”

He lists others who visited the museum and signed his front door: Mario, of course, Jeff Andretti, Hazel Chapman, Johnny Dumfries (“the Dummy”), Jackie Stewart. Then there’s Nelson Piquet, whom Kenny befriended long before his ill-starred spell at Lotus.

“He liked Clive and myself and we became big mates,” says Kenny. “We’d pass out rude cards to the drivers on their birthdays. So Nelson, when he came to New York, he rang and came by the Museum.

The 85th Street Museum in New York is a treasure trove of memorabilia that Szymanski has collected over the years, and has been visited by some of racing's great and good

Photo by: Sutton Images

“I’ll never forget it: he needed some carburettors for one of his boats so I took him on the subway up to a garage in the Bronx. When he signed the door, he signed ‘To Kenny, FACK YOU’. I said, ‘If you are going to put graffiti on my door, at least spell the f***ing word ‘f***’ right!’ He loved that.”

When a change of management in 1988 spelt the end of Kenny’s time at Lotus, that might well have been that. “10 years was good, I was happy with that,” he says. “We’d made our contribution.” But more than a decade later, an old friend called and Szymanski found himself back in the F1 paddock – for an experience he’ll never forget.

Kenny had worked closely with Nigel Stepney, perhaps F1’s most (in)famous chief mechanic, at Lotus. In fact, they worked the same tyre in pitstops, with Stepney on the gun: “Every time when he walked in, Nigel at the start of a day would never say good morning – he’d say, ‘Get that f***ing wheel on, Yank!’ It made me laugh every time. Nigel was a real tactician. They called him The Punisher. A good worker and he expected the same from you.”

Meeting Michael

By 2001, and in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Stepney was a key cog within Ferrari – and he called Kenny needing a hand for the US GP at Indianapolis.

Szymanski takes up the story: “I said, ‘Stop, Nigel: are you asking me if I wanna wear that famous red shirt?’ He said yeah. I said, ‘How much do I have to pay you?’ Then I helped them out on odd races, when Michael [Schumacher] and Rubens [Barrichello] were there. That was quite a treat. We went to Japan, Italy, Indy of course. To this day, I think about that experience. It was wonderful.”

So, Schumacher. Speak to anyone who worked with the seven-time world champion and they’re quick to say how great he was on a one-to-one level. Kenny is no different.

“He was very, very interesting, I’ll tell you,” he says. “We were having a team dinner at Indianapolis at that first grand prix I worked with them in 2001 and he and [his wife] Corinna were sitting behind me. Michael tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Tell me, how is it you are here? We never have people coming in for just a one-off to help out.’

“I explained to him that I’d changed the left-front with Nigel at Lotus for Ayrton, and they needed a hand. It was a very special moment with Michael that I never forget. It’s not often someone of that stature will ask you a question about you.”

Symanski (right) cherishes his time spent assisting Ferrari at the behest of former colleague Stepney

Photo by: Ralph Hardwick

Today, Kenny loves to drop back in on F1 at the Austin grand prix and this year spent some time with the crew at Alpine: “The tyre guy was so happy to bring us into the tyre department and show us around. It was really good to see inside of the new F1.”

So what did he think? “I liked it when we only had 20 guys. It’s become so particular, track limits and all this bullshit. I know the drivers have agreed to it and that’s their own call – but let ’em race, for f***’s sakes.”

Kenny’s enjoying retirement today, but only stopped ‘doing the tyres’ last year when he was working for Ganassi in the American IMSA sports car series. Ganassi mainstay and six-time IndyCar champion Scott Dixon was a recent visitor to the Museum, the latest to sign the famous door.

“Those 10 years with Lotus were the best of my life, hands down,” says Kenny, who’s itching to get down to that first tee. “Then to top it off, to work for Ferrari… I’ll never forget coming out of the shower and one of my room-mates, a truckie, had the red shirt laying on the bed for me. I said, ‘Praise Jesus! This is something special.’ Needless to say I’ve still got it.” We know where it’ll be.

“Racing has been wonderful, it’s made my life,” says Kenny as he signs off. From walking the aisles of 747s to striding the paddocks wheeling a stack of tyres, what a life it’s been. It wouldn’t happen now.

Now retired, legendary tyre man Szymanski can reflect on a glorious career in motorsport

Photo by: Michael L. Levitt