What racing drivers will do for money

Motor racing is an expensive business.

One of the great hinderances to participation in the sport is that one can't just go outside and take part. It requires a great deal of planning, purchasing and effort to get going - even if the results are usually pretty exciting.

Here we present the cases of some drivers who went to extreme lengths to get on the grid.

Trying not to get murdered

Justin Keen's short-lived exploits in Formula 3000 in the early '00s were funded by a small group of private backers intent on living what the Brit calls "the James Hunt motor racing lifestyle". That's how he ended shooting a movie that - his words again - "bordered on soft porn" in New York.

Keen's patrons had bought into a business in the US and thought they could bottle the experiences they were enjoying as they travelled Europe watching their driver compete on the international arena. The film was planned as a marketing tool for a venture that involved fast cars and, if you believed the hype, beautiful women.

"I played the role of a racing driver hanging around with rich blokes who came draped in hot chicks," recalls Keen, who managed five F3000 races with the Monaco International and European Minardi teams in 2001 and '02.

"There was one scene where I was driving a '69 Chevrolet Camaro SS with the police in hot pursuit and a girl sitting next to me. The implication was that she was doing the kind of thing most blokes can only dream of. I always remember the director was a guy called, appropriately enough, BJ. It was all a bit cringeworthy to be honest."

Keen isn't sure what became of the film and whether it was ever completed. But he'll never forget some of his experiences with the backers, whom he declines to name.

"Putting money into my career was basically an excuse for these guys to fly to Europe for the weekend and get up to all kinds of mischief," says Keen, who quickly segued in sportscar racing and now concentrates on his commercial property business. "I witnessed all sorts of things.

"I found myself in seedy places mixing with some pretty dodgy people. On at least one occasion I remember thinking, 'I could get murdered here'."

Radio Ga Ga

Touring car star Tom Coronel barely had two guilders to rub together as he set out on Benelux Formula Ford 1600 campaign in 1992. So when he needed a new battery for the three-year-old Mondiale he'd been loaned for the season at Zolder early in the year, he knew he was in trouble.

It was actually the Dutchman's second new battery of the weekend. He managed to wreck the first when he dropped it as he and his mechanic went to fit the thing. A temporary fix allowed Coronel to qualify with an external starter battery perched on his lap and jury-rigged to the car's electrics.

That wasn't an option for the race, which meant procuring another battery. The only solution was to buy one, but with no money in either the bank or his pockets, Coronel had to sell the only thing of any worth he had with him.

"If you had a CD player in your car in 1992, you were the daddy," says Coronel, who points out that he didn't actually own the car into which it was fitted. "I'd bought it for maybe 900GLD [around £300] and I sold it to a mechanic from another team for something like 600. I was so upset, but it was my only choice."

Coronel went on to finish in the top six in what turned out to be an important weekend in his career. Watching that day was Peter Scholz from engine tuner Zagk.

"Peter told me he liked my style and he liked my speed," recalls Coronel, "and he was going to loan me an engine."

Coronel won the Dutch FF1600 title the following season and finished second in the Benelux series. Just six years later (pictured above) he was Formula Nippon champion in Japan.

Controversial on Sunday, sell on Monday

Bob Berridge's indecent pace aboard an antediluvian Formula Ford 1600 nigh on 20 years old raised both eyebrows and suspicions. So he decided to use his speed aboard the Lotus 69F in the '80s to financial advantage.

The truck mechanic from Stockton who went on to start the Le Mans 24 Hours five times did nothing to dampen rumours that the Kent four-pot in the back of his Lotus was a bit trick, hooky even. If anyone claimed he was running an illegal engine - and they frequently did - he'd promptly suggest they'd be better off saving their protest fee and buying the offending unit.

"I'd buy engines out the back of Autosport for four or five hundred quid, run them for a while, win a few races and then sell 'em as the dog's bollocks latest thing for £1500," recalls Berridge. "I must have done that three or four times."

The canny tactic helped Berridge fund his FF1600 campaigns, which included winning the British Racing & Sports Car Club's series for pre-1974 machinery in 1985, and an appearance in the final of the Formula Ford Festival at Brands Hatch in '88.

Borrowing from a journalist

Journalists for the most part don't have money to splash around, let alone give to racing drivers. But Autosport's very own Marcus Pye came to the rescue of an impecunious Formula 3 racer back in 1985: he bought Simon Hadfield enough fuel for him to actually race his Sparton at Silverstone early that season.

Hadfield might have been well on the way to establishing himself as a top historic racer, but he still had aspirations to climb the single-seater ladder. With a loaned Sparton SE420 and a budget comprising what he calls "thin air and hope", he managed a couple of outings in Class B that year. Just.

Pye came to the rescue as he trawled the poor end of the pitlane talking to the runners in older machinery.

"I went up to Simon and his wife, Mandy, and asked if everything was OK," recalls Pye. "He said, 'Not really, we don't have any money to put fuel in the car'.

"I asked him what it was going to take, stuck my hand in my pocket and gave him 20 or 30 quid. It wasn't a loan, more about helping to get someone in the paddock out of trouble. We've been great buddies ever since."

How to spend prize money

The McLaren Autosport Young Driver Award came with a £50,000 cheque when Darren Turner scooped the prize in 1996. So what do you think he did with the money? Put it towards a Formula 3 budget perhaps? No, he bought a Bentley Arnage!

There was rhyme to his reason, however. Turner had contested the 1996 British Formula Renault series with Redgrave Racing, whose late boss Richard Redgrave wheeled and dealed in motors. Turner purchased the Bentley in an attempt to make a bit more money to add to his F3 pot.

The catalyst for the deal was Richard's son, Mark, a former racer himself. He'd gone to work for an advertising agency in London and alerted his father that his employer was on the look-out for a black Bentley Arnage to use in a campaign.

"Mark gave Richard a heads up, and in those pre-internet days, buying and selling cars was all about contacts," recalls Turner, who was living with the Redgraves on their Norfolk farm at the time. "I remember Richard telling me, 'Mark needs a car, I've found one, you've got the money in the bank, let's buy it and split the profit'."

The Arnage was duly purchased and stowed in a barn before it was moved on.

"I suggested to Richard that because it was was my money that had bought it, I should be allowed to drive it around for a couple of days," says Turner. "But all I was allowed to do was sit in it with the engine running and smell the leather.

"I think we paid £35,000 for the Bentley. I can't remember how much we sold it for, but I recall a profit figure of £12,000. I think that's how much we had to split between us."

Turner did make it to F3 in 1997 and even got to rub shoulders with the Bentley-driving classes. The Portman Racing team for which he drove had been set up by Piers Portman, son of the late Edward, Viscount Portman.

A new girlfriend to the rescue

Johnny Mowlem had a mega deal on the table. His problem was the three grand of the required five he was missing in his quest to get out in a Class A Formula 3 car for the first time at the end of 1995. But when he recounted his tale of woe on a first date, he ended up coming away with an interest-free loan to the said amount.

The luck of a poorly funded driver who'd managed four class victories in Class B F3 for year-old cars over sporadic campaigns in 1994 and '95 was that his new girlfriend was a successful TV actor and presenter. Fiona Lee-Fraser, to use her stage name, may be known to readers of a certain age as Laura Regan, daughter of headmistress Mrs Regan, in the BBC children's soap Grange Hill circa the late '80s.

"I don't remember it quite like Fiona does, but she says I gave her a real sob story and that I was dropping some pretty heavy hints," recounts Molwem. "It might actually have been our second date, though I always say first date because it makes for a better story."

Mowlem's dream drive in the DAW team's Dallara-Mugen Honda F395 for the non-championship race at Donington Park didn't go to plan, however. He didn't make it away from a grid that also boasted Juan Pablo Montoya and Memo Gidley: he stalled the thing as he adjusted his foot on the clutch ready for the getaway.

"It was probably the lowest point of my motorsport life," he says. "I'd scraped all the money I had in the world together and borrowed three grand off my new girlfriend, then missed out on a big opportunity to further my career. I thought, 'I'm going to stop all this bollocks'."

It didn't end up all bad for Mowlem, though, as he went on to have a successful sportscar career after switching codes the following year. Oh, and he married that girl!

Stepping into the Dragons' Den

Formula Ford racer Rob Hall was looking for a way back onto the national scene after finishing second in the local Castle Combe series in 2007. His solution to the problem was to try to sell himself on primetime TV in front of a panel on entrepreneurs on Dragons' Den the following year.

The seed of the idea was sown on a train journey made by Rob and some of his mates to Cardiff to watch a few stages of Rally GB.

"We were talking about how I could raise some money on the train," recalls Rob. "Someone said I needed to get myself on TV and then someone else shouted out Dragons' Den, and it went from there."

Rob's father David, himself an FF1600 racer in the '80s, took up the challenge. He had to wait until his son was 18, but they made it onto the show and asked for just £50,000 to part fund a season in a Duratec-engined car in return for 50% of his future earnings.

"To be honest we weren't really after the Dragons' money; we were after their contacts," says Hall Sr. "I'm not sure we got that across and we walked away empty-handed."

The TV appearance did, however, open doors. The show was seen by Irish Formula Ford racer Noel Roddy and resulted in the loan of a Mygale that Hall Jr raced sporadically over the next five years. It was aboard this car, a Duratec SJ00 converted to Kent-spec, in which he finished fourth and then second in the Walter Hayes Trophy blue riband event at Silverstone in 2012 and '14 respectively.

"We thought it as worth a punt," says Rob, who also appeared in the follow-up Dragons' Den: Where are they now? show. "I had my 15 minutes of fame and I guess it got my name out there, because that's how the chance to race the Mygale came up."

Not quite floating to F3000

Shares were effectively sold in the late Justin Wilson to pay for his Formula 1 graduation with Minardi in 2003. Fledgling Formula 3000 driver Sam Hancock picked up the idea and ran with it in an attempt to fund a season of Formula 3000 the following year - he tried to turn himself into a publicly listed company.

The difference was that Justin Wilson plc was a private placement scheme that offered a return to its investors in terms of a percentage of the driver's earnings. Shares in Hancock's SH plc would have been listed on the OFEX stock exchange and traded like any other commodity. That was the idea, anyway.

But the flotation "failed miserably", according to Hancock.

"I was imbedded with a sports marketing agency that also looked after Sven Goran-Eriksson [England football manager at the time] and we took inspiration from what Justin had done the previous year," he recalls. "There were so many rules and regulations that we didn't launch until just before Christmas. That was a disaster because you had to reach our minimum stipulated target of £750,000 within 40 days. We only got to something like £450,000."

Hancock, who'd had three low-key F3000 outings with Supernova at the end of 2003, reckons he didn't have a choice but to pull the trigger at just the wrong moment after being offered a seat by Arden after some promising winter testing.

"Arden actually managed to fit me in the car and I'd gone quite well," recalls 6ft2in Hancock, now a successful historics racer. "They made me an offer, so we had to crack on. My problem was that it's always first past the post with the money."

Nothing going on but the rent

Ian Flux had a problem over the course of his 1978 Formula 3 campaign. The meagre £10,000 budget he had for the season didn't cover such niceties as new tyres. So he came up with an inventive solution to make sure he had fresh rubber every weekend - he worked as a rent boy.

It was a case of needs must, says the club racing legend, as he strove to build on the promise of his 1976 and '77 F3 assaults. When his team boss, Alan Howell of Cloud Engineering, explained that they were all set for the weekend ahead, save for four new Goodyears for their year-old March-Toyota 773, Fluxie said, "Leave it with me".

"I needed 250 quid and you weren't going to earn that as a mechanic in the short time we had," recalls Flux, who was then earning £40 a week working for Howell. "But you could get that kind of money in just a couple of nights by basically whoring yourself out.

"I knew some boys up in London, so I went and found them in Piccadilly and just got on with it. When you go to boarding school, you learn certain lessons. I was just putting my education to good use."

Flux, who insists that at 63 he's not retired even though he didn't race in 2019, is happy to talk about his after-dark escapades of more than 40 years ago.

"It's how I paid for my racing," he says. "It's part of my life, why shouldn't I talk about it? It was something I did in 1978 because I had to if I wanted to continue in F3, though I did go back to it on occasion when I was short of money."

That explains why he calls F3 racer Tim Lee-Davey, a barrister, the only person who knows the true story of his foray into the world's oldest profession.

"I had been done for soliciting in 1982 and I was looking for my name on the board at Marylebone Magistrates' Court when I had a tap on my shoulder," remembers Flux. "It was Tim, so I told him I'd been done for speeding, and he pointed out I was in the wrong court for that. Then he said, 'Here you are Fluxie; I see, soliciting'."

"He asked me if he could help: he told me what to say and got my fine cut in half."

Digging up an F1 career

Derek Daly didn't know how he was going to find the money to move onto the circuits after a racing apprenticeship served on Ireland's short-ovals. That was until his girlfriend's brother arrived back from a six-month stint working down a mine in Australia with four grand in his pocket.

Within days he and friend David Kennedy, who'd been racing a Lotus 51 Formula Ford in their homeland, were on a plane to Perth. Australia was more appealing than the other option. Working on the Alaskan oil pipeline required significant expenditure on clothing. Heading Down Under involved, says Daly, "cutting the arms of our shirts and the legs off our trousers".

"Our mission was to make the biggest chunk of money possible and be back in time for the Irish Formula Ford season," recalls a driver whose contested 49 grands prix for Ensign, Theodore, Tyrrell and Williams. "Within 10 days of the conversation with my girlfriend's brother, we were in Perth.

"The key to Australia was that you were paid straight time for the first eight hours and double time for the second eight, but you got paid triple time if you could do three shifts in a row. We would volunteer for as many 24-hour shifts as possible."

It was physically-demanding work, recalls Daly: "We were essentially labourers and our job was to break iron ore down into small enough chunks so that it could go on conveyor belts and then be shipped all over the world."

The two F1 wannabes earned £5000 in their six months over the winter of 1974-75. Daly ended up winning the Irish title, but not before that chunk of money had all but run out.

He wrecked the Crossle 25F he'd bought before his departure to Australia at Mondello Park in the summer. His luck changed when he was approached by John Crossle, founder of Ireland's most successful racing car marque, offering a new 30F in exchange for the crashed 25F, so long as Daly could source a new engine.

Thanks to a loan from Kennedy, who would also go on to race F1 cars, he did just that. Eleven races and 10 victories later, Daly was Irish Formula Ford champion. Just two years after that he made his F1 debut at an event he visited the day after landing in London from Australia. Niki Lauda won the 1975 International Trophy at Silverstone in a Ferrari; in '78 Daly led a race held in dreadful conditions aboard a Hesketh-Cosworth 308E (above, Daly is pictured at Zolder that year).

More than just a pitstop

A young up-and-comer from Scotland by the name of Anthony Reid, winner of the grandly titled Jim Russell Racing Drivers' School International World Scholarship in 1977, had spent the winter of 1979/80 cleaning toilets by day and driving minicabs by night on the Shetland Isles to pay for his racing. So he wasn't about to blow even a fraction of his budget on rent for a flat as he strived to further his career down south.

Why would you when a bijou residence at the very epicentre of the Formula Ford world could be had for just a few quid a week? Reid rented one of the pit garages at Brands Hatch - #18 to be exact - on and off through 1980 and '81 for both his PRS RH01 and himself.

"It was a fiver a week and you got a couple of days of testing thrown in," recalls the former British Touring Car Championship frontrunner. "I had everything I needed: room for my car, tools and a little camp bed, and then running cold water in the garage and a shower block at the end of the pitlane.

"The only time we had to move out was for the British Grand Prix and the big bike race. I remember Barry Sheene having a cigarette on the pitwall while he waited for me to shift my stuff."

Reid's tenancy of #18 The Pitlane, Brands Hatch, Fawkham, Kent encompassed the 1981 Formula Ford Festival, his breakthrough race. His 10th place in the final resulted in an invite from ex-JRRDS boss John Kirkpatrick to drive for his new team funded by a couple of wealthy benefactors.

Reid was on his way. And a subsidised drive meant he got to swap his unheated garage for a shared flat near Market Harborough.

Really backing yourself

Rarely has there been a battle so bitter and so intense as that for the 1991 Formula Renault crown, and for good reason. The two protagonists, Bobby Verdon-Roe and Jason Plato, both stood to win a hell of a lot of money if they took the title.

That wasn't because Renault or series sponsor P&O Ferries were offering masses of prize money, but because both drivers had effectively bet on themselves to scoop the crown. They had taken out prize indemnity insurance policies in the hope of paying for the next step up the racing ladder. Verdon-Roe's was for £100,000, while Plato was on for a cool quarter of a million.

"The money we both had riding on the championship fuelled the acrimony," says Plato. "That's why it all got so fruity. For me, it was shit or bust - the gloves were off."

Never was their rivalry more fruity than at Donington Park in August. The two Van Diemen FR91s - Verdon-Roe's run by Fortec, Plato's by Manor - clashed multiple times as they squabbled over the lead. Plato was ahead into final corner, only for Verdon-Roe to run into the back of the leader.

Opinions still differ as to who was to blame, but Plato today admits that, even though he was in neutral courtesy of a damaged gear linkage, he deliberately drove into Verdon-Roe on the exit. The Fortec car jumped in the air, spun but still beat the coasting Manor Van Diemen to the line by a tenth.

Verdon-Roe ended up winning the championship and put his £100,000 into a part season in the British Touring Car Championship with the RML Vauxhall squad. Plato, whose title tilt wasn't helped by two exclusions for technical infringements, was only fourth and had to resort to knocking on Van Diemen boss Ralph Firman's door at six in the morning to land a Formula 3 drive.

Top-end tombola

Former sportscar and tin-top racer Pascal Witmeur (pictured at Spa, below, in 1992) has been a mover and a shaker on the Belgian motorsport scene for more than 40 years. So it shouldn't be a surprise that he came up with a novel way of funding his Le Mans 24 Hours campaign with an ageing Rondeau back in 1984 - he organised what was effectively a giant tombola.

The top prize wasn't a bottle of whisky, but the chance for the winning entrant to cover the Cosworth-engined Rondeau M379C Witmeur planned to race at La Sarthe in its decals. He sold 75 tickets at the equivalent of €1750 a pop to fund his and old mate Jean-Paul Libert's campaign with Jean-Philippe Grand's Graff Racing team at Le Mans and the Spa 1000Km in September.

The idea was conceived, says Witmeur, "over a couple of beers". It helped that he and Libert ran a sponsorship agency and that his friend was editor and publisher of the Belgian edition of French motorsport weekly Auto Hebdo.

"Every entrant got a page in a special supplement in the magazine and then maybe 20 tickets to a big 'Hollywood' party in a well-known discotheque in Brussels," he remembers. "We managed to sell everything in about two weeks."

The winning ticket was bought by British American Tobacco cigarette brand Barclay, whose motor racing sponsorship Witmeur and Libert looked after. Smirnoff vodka took second prize and plastered the Rondeau in its colours for the Spa race in September. The final winner was Denim, which put the name of its Rexona deodorant on the drivers' overalls.

"We had a lot of big companies enter because they were our clients," says Witmeur, who ended up 11th, and second in Group C2, at Le Mans together with Libert and Grand. "But the restaurant next to our office where we used to eat lunch also bought a ticket."