Personal tribute: David Leslie 1953-2008

Monday was a sombre day in the Autosport office. We all felt pretty down - shocked - about the plane tragedy that had claimed the lives of David Leslie and Richard Lloyd in such a brutal fashion.

The buzz, the silly voices, the shouting-out of ideas, all seemed to have faded out on Monday March 31st. Most of the guys knew Leslie or Lloyd, some of us knew them both. And what we all have in common is that we genuinely liked them.

But, later, there was a smile... That lunchtime, I was preparing my obituary on Leslie and chatting with our picture editor, Peter Mills. Pete showed me a transparency he'd dug out from 1998. It was a post-season test at Nogaro, attended by most of the British Touring Car Championship teams, and to which I'd travelled with photographer John Brooks to get some winter feature material.

In the photo, there I am in the pitlane, with David Leslie, the two of us beaming, looking as though there's nowhere in the world we'd rather be than standing on a piece of asphalt, miles from anywhere in rural France, knowing that we were here because that's where the racing cars were. I look 10 years younger than I do now, David looks exactly the same as he did last week - the beard, the grin and the haircut taken off the Beatles' Rubber Soul album. And we both look like two people in love with their jobs.

And that's what David Leslie was - a man in love with his job. Ironically, it was to Nogaro that he was headed last Sunday, to drive Lloyd's Apex Motorsport GT3 Jaguar in an equalisation test.

Part of me reckons that David would have hated the whole concept of equalisation - as a purist, he would much rather see engineering and driving excellence rewarded. But part of me says he would have seen it as a positive: if equalisation encourages more manufacturers, teams and drivers, then that means better, closer racing, more jobs for engineers and mechanics, and so on.

It was dependent on the right deals being put together, but it looked as though GT3 could be providing Leslie with a belated return to the international arena, 21 years after he finished runner-up in Group C2 in the World Sports-Prototype Championship with Ray Mallock in the Ecosse.

Apex Motorsport Jaguar XKR © LAT

At that stage Leslie seemed a hot property in sportscar racing, a discipline to which he'd turned when the single-seater opportunities dried up.

And, while Leslie's career was almost inextricably intertwined with Mallock's from the mid-80s, it was with Nigel Mansell that he was most associated early on. Karting rivals from the age of 12, their careers moved in slightly different directions due to Leslie's lack of finances. "Nigel was doing very well then," David once told me. "He was quickly into the British Junior kart team, but at that time he could afford it. It's one of those things really."

But they were up against each other again in 1976, when both started in Junior Formula Ford, and in '77, when they moved into seniors. While Mansell won the BRDC's Brush Fusegear title, Leslie scooped the BARC championship - and finished second in the Formula Ford Festival behind Chico Serra.

If someone had told you then that one of Leslie and Mansell would become World Champion, you wouldn't have known which of them would do it...

As a 10-year-old, I first saw both men racing that year, and clearly remember Leslie's blue Royale RP24, sponsored by the Cross Flags garage, of which a certain Bert McNish (father of the then seven-year-old Allan McNish) was proprietor.

In Paul Lawrence's excellent book on the history of Royale, "Nowhere to Hide", Leslie remembered: "We'd been running on a shoestring and really struggling, and Bert came along and helped us. He gave us £500, which paid off the debts we had. He came to all the races with us as we had a Bedford camper van and a trailer on the back. It used to be my father and myself, Bert and my father's cousin. When Allan McNish wanted to start motor racing, they came to us and that's when David Leslie Racing started."

I became a fan, especially when it became clear that this young Cumbrian-based Scot was not particularly wealthy, at which point he instantly assumed 'brave underdog' status with Simmons father-and-son. We watched him win in Formula Ford 2000 and Atlantic, then switch to Formula 3 in a privately run Ralt.

Leslie could well have played a pivotal role in my deciding what to do with my life. In 1981, when he was racing in F3, I was sitting with my dad in the Silverstone grandstand, listening to David being interviewed over the PA. I was 14 at the time, and wanted to be a racing driver.

Then David, in response to a question regarding his financial situation, mentioned that it was costing him £3500 per race. A quick mental calculation: 20 races at £3500 per throw - that's 70 grand! I knew that a local-government solicitor was never going to have that sort of money to throw at his son's racing career, and it definitely helped me decide to write about the sport instead!

Luckily - or unluckily, depending on which way you look at it - I did get to race. Formula First brought junior single-seater racing within the financial limits of a new batch of drivers, and I had a couple of years crashing my way around the circuits of Britain. It didn't make any difference to my career, but it did give me a little bit of knowledge of driving a racing car, so that I was able to test a selection of machines reasonably competently in my first job at Motoring News and then at Autosport.

David Leslie drove for Eddie Jordan in the 1981 British Formula 3 championship © LAT

It was on one of these tests that I first got to know Leslie. He was the man of the moment in the British Touring Car Championship at the time, driving the Ecurie Ecosse Vauxhall Cavalier run by his ex-Group C2 co-driver Ray Mallock. Mallock's younger brother Richard was in charge of the separate Mallock constructor, famed for its cars in the Clubmans formulas.

I was invited to drive a selection of the cars, powered by the two-litre Formula Vauxhall Lotus engine, at Snetterton, and Leslie was there too to drive the Mallock. (Incidentally, he'd just won the TOCA Shoot-Out, but hardly anyone noticed because that was the race in which Mansell crashed the Ford Mondeo - typical bad luck that Leslie should be overshadowed by his ex-rival).

I was puzzled that in the Mallock, the most successful car, I was nowhere near as quick as I had been in one or two of the others. But Leslie explained it all to me, telling me that the set-up was much stiffer on the Mallock - for an experienced, ace driver it was the quickest way to go, but it wasn't so user-friendly for someone of my experience. Therefore, I was going to feel more confident and drive more quickly in the cars with a softer set-up.

It seems quite obvious, but to be honest I had no way of telling from feel whether a car was running a soft or stiff set-up. All I knew was whether it was hard or easy to drive. It impressed me that a BTCC star was prepared to explain in detail why I performed as I did in the different cars.

But he was like that, wasn't he? Dario Franchitti, who made his name by becoming the 1991 Formula Vauxhall Junior champion with Leslie's team, paid tribute to him on this website earlier this week: "David had an amazing way of explaining things," he said, "and I can see him doing it now: he'd stand with his legs slightly apart, hunch over a wee bit, hands shoulder-width apart, and he'd start explaining how to do something through the corner. He had a knack of explaining something, talk you through it, and you'd think 'okay' and go and do it."

I know exactly what he means - because Leslie would also stand with that hunch, hands and legs apart, explaining a BTCC incident, or a handling problem.

And here's David Coulthard, who Leslie ran to double title success in junior Formula Ford in 1989: "Throughout the winter of 1988 and all through 1989, both David and his father coached and guided my career to the point where I entered a multi-year contract with Paul Stewart Racing in 1990, which led to me making my Grand Prix debut four years later. He was selfless in his help and advice and regularly would jump in my Formula Ford race car to show me the correct techniques and driving lines required for single-seaters."

Allan McNish was another to go through the David Leslie Racing team, as were Le Mans Series ace Jamie Campbell-Walter and 2001 BTCC Production champion Simon Harrison. They all would have enjoyed the benefit of his advice.

I got to know Leslie much better when I started covering the BTCC in 1996. Among a field of international stars and up-and-comers he was never the most fashionable driver, but he was always a tough competitor, and very forthright in his opinions.

Nissan teammates Laurent Aiello and David Leslie © LAT

But he was always a great team player, who was rarely happier than when he returned - after stints at Mazda and Honda - to Ray Mallock's RML Nissan fold. Mallock hadn't expected to get Leslie, the man who had done much of the early development work on the Cavalier and provided a platform for what would be John Cleland's 1995 championship.

But when, in late 1996, Honda switched its allegiance from Motor Sport Developments to Prodrive, Leslie proved outspoken in his criticism of the decision, and Mallock was quick to swoop to secure his disenchanted friend.

It's tempting to highlight the successes of Anthony Reid (runner-up in 1998) and Laurent Aiello ('99) from that Nissan era, but Leslie was part of the bedrock of those successes.

He put in a lot of work on the Primera, and was always famed for his development driving expertise, although this was more of an instinctive process based on feel than a studious, methodical trawl over data-logging. Interestingly, Mallock told me in 1997: "Anthony will pore through the data, while David gets in and drives by the seat of his pants. Both their solutions have their advantages."

Don't forget, too, that Leslie was still in with a mathematical chance of taking the 1999 title from Aiello at the final round. And Aiello, reckons Allan McNish from his time in the DTM, is the best touring car racer of them all.

The last time I saw David Leslie was a few weeks ago. He'd brought his 1958 Lola Mk1 - lovingly restored with his son Graham - down to the photographic studio of LAT, our sister company, for a shoot that encompassed various models from Lola's 50-year history, and popped up to say hi to the Autosport office.

He cared about people, especially those who are as enthusiastic about racing as he was. He had his political side during the white-hot competitiveness of 1990s BTCC, but so did everyone, and he had to play that game. But that wasn't the real David Leslie.

Instead, the real one was the guy who, during a stop-gap year in the middle of his 1980s sportscar career, co-drive an Opel Manta to the 1988 Thundersaloon Class B title. He was the guy who was a much-loved part-time Motorsport Management lecturer at Swansea Metropolitan University.

He was the man who, for no reason other than having fun, restored his 1977 Royale RP24 to race against all the young guys in Formula Ford three decades later. He was the man who once rushed over to me in the BTCC paddock at Thruxton, desperate to know if I had any news from the Le Mans test weekend that was going on at the same time.

And he was the man who, aged 54, was on his way to Nogaro for a test, in an exciting new Jaguar XKR, that he would have been looking forward to with as much enthusiasm as he had when he started this sport, more than four decades ago. We'll all miss him.