David Piper: Forever green driving force

All he had now was the Lotus, £25 and the promise from Alfred ‘Pa’ Moss of a job on his farm.

“We didn’t see much of Stirling, he was a big cheese by then. But his sister Pat kept her horses there and Alf Francis looked after the grey Maserati 250F that Stirling raced. One day Ken Gregory [Moss’s manager] and Jack Brabham came by to look at the Maser. Jack stayed in my digs. Nobody knew him from a bar of soap. He was just a speedway racer from Australia.”

A year later David bought a Lotus XI sports car from Chapman and went racing around Europe, sleeping rough in the straw bales that lined the tracks and getting by on the starting money. Another chance meeting, this time with dealer and racer Dan Margulies, led to a drive in the Targa Florio in the latter’s C-type Jaguar.

“We drove it down, took the cattle boat to Palermo, and ended our race on three Dunlops and a Pirelli because we’d had a puncture. I remember Peter Collins roaring past going through Collesano, the megaphones of his Ferrari blaring. He gave me a cheery wave and a blast on the air-horns, and I thought to myself ‘I must get a Ferrari one day’. ”

That wish still seemed very distant, though. Back home, David worked for Vauxhall Dealer Deliveries in Luton, ferrying cars to and from the docks, and for the Gas Board, delivering cookers in Harpenden.

“I was learning about being a private entrant,” he laughs. “I traded up to a newer Lotus XI, and made my first visit to Le Mans [in 1958], as third driver to John Young and Maurice Charles in their D-type Jaguar. An early crash put them out – but I was hooked on that race.”

More of Le Mans – David’s nemesis – later. Less well known are his forays into single-seater racing. He ran his Lotus 16 in 1.5-litre F2 form in 1959, making his GP debut with it at Aintree – he retired with a blown head gasket – and finishing second in the F2 Flugplatzrennen at Zeltweg. But he was using 2.5 litres of Coventry Climax when he finished runner-up to Brabham’s Cooper in the Lady Wigram Trophy in January 1960. That year he also used the 16 to finish 12th in the British GP at Silverstone.

But sports car racing throughout the 1960s was how and when David became one of the most prolific, successful and well-known privateer racers, mainly in a succession of unmistakeable bright green Ferraris.

McQueen summoned his private ’plane and had David flown to a hospital in Luton. But the senior surgeon David knew there was on holiday and so he was transferred to the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in London.

“It was like a First World War establishment. Didn’t fill me with confidence. And it was obvious that the French had not cleaned me up properly after the shunt. The medical team was three nuns and an ambulance, I recall. It hurt so much I got my mechanic Fax Dunn, who saved my bacon on many occasions, to remove the plaster with a hacksaw. The wound had gone septic. The surgeon seemed shocked, started cutting bits off and then said I’d have to have the leg off at the knee. But a doctor friend of mine advised saving the knee, so I took a risk and told the surgeon to go below it, gambling on there being no further septic damage.

“I thought my career was finished. It was a bad time. But Douglas Bader came to see me and dropped his trousers to show me his two false legs. That made me feel more positive. Steve McQueen came to see me a few times too, always on his bike. He used to cycle through the hospital, up and down the corridors. That gave us something to laugh about.”

As you might expect by now, David returned to the circuits – despite his comfortable early life, he’d become used to setbacks – and he expanded his own privateer team, exploiting the valuable collection – Porsche 917, Ferraris 250LM, 330P, 330P2, 330P4 and 365P, Matra MS650 and Ford F3L – he’d acquired over the years by hiring them out to an increasing number of wealthy drivers keen to have some serious fun. “Those cars have been my pension, my life insurance. I’ve never had life insurance,” he says.

He was still driving them too, becoming the FIA Champion d’Europe Historique in 1990.

“I just got on with it. I couldn’t heel-and-toe, but braking turned out to be the real problem. So I learnt to left-foot brake, and once I got the hang of that, it was much better.”

This year will be David’s 54th season of racing and he will share some of the drives with Richard Attwood, with whom he first co-drove in 1965.

“It’s amazing, really,” he says, patting his right leg and reaching for his pipe. “I’ve had a great life – and you haven’t heard the half of it yet.”

The other half, however, is full of anecdotes unsuitable for a family magazine such as this.