The Editor: Jackie Stewart’s surprising admission

It’s not often you can get excited about some scaffolding going up around a shed and workmen stripping out an asbestos roof. But last month the team here at Motor Sport managed to.

The shed in question was the old premises of the Tyrrell Formula 1 team in rural Surrey. As we report in Matters of Moment this month, the shed is to be re-homed at Goodwood where it will be open to the public during their motoring events – and good on the Duke of Richmond for rescuing it (it had been under threat from demolition had Goodwood not offered to step in and foot the costs of dismantling and rebuilding it – a figure put at around £100,000).

I like to think that Motor Sport and its readers played a small part in saving this evocative piece of history.

Back in 2021 we received a letter from a reader, Alex Farrell from Surrey, alerting us to the fact that the shed was due to be demolished unless a new home could be found. We published the letter and I wrote about it here, and it seems someone was listening.

One person who will no doubt be pleased is Sir Jackie Stewart, the key driver component in Tyrrell’s incredible team of garagistes who took on the world from that shed and – against the odds – won. As it happens we visited Sir Jackie early in the New Year after he kindly invited the whole Motor Sport team for lunch at his house in Buckinghamshire.

It was a splendid afternoon – as you might expect – and JYS was on top form showing his collection of memorabilia (including his 1973 F1 championship-winning Tyrrell) and regaling us with stories of his racing past.

But there was a more reflective note to the afternoon too: more than once Sir Jackie brought up the subject of Denis Jenkinson, our continental correspondent, with whom he had an occasionally combative relationship during his heyday in the 1970s.

Motor Sport famously found itself on the wrong side of history when it came to taking a view on Stewart’s safety campaign, and Jenks in particular was scathing in his assessment of the Scot’s push for greater safety provisions. Not that Jackie was alone – many other drivers and F1 people had similar views – but he was the highest-profile campaigner, and probably the most effective.

“I like to think Motor Sport played a part in saving the Tyrrell Shed”

It began after DSJ castigated JYS for his role in persuading sports car drivers not to take part in the 1972 1000Kms at Spa, a venue by then considered too dangerous for F1. The view of Jenks, widespread at the time, was that danger was an inherent part of motor sport and by removing the element of jeopardy you lost something vital from the sport, and he wrote as much in our pages in strong terms. The soon-to-be-world champion, who by some counts lost 57 of his friends and peers by the end of his career, responded with a robust letter to Motor Sport:

“I feel compelled to write in response to Jenkinson’s outburst in attacking me personally in your June [1972] issue.

“What Denis Jenkinson thinks or says concerns me little. To me he is a fence-sitter, doing little or nothing to secure a future for our sport. The readers of Motor Sport, however, are much more important. I would like to say to them that whatever criticism I get will make no difference at all to my personal effort to make motor racing, of all classes, safer for as many people as possible within our sport.

“There is nothing more tragically sad than mourning a man who has died under circumstances which could have been avoided had someone done something beforehand.”

The pair eventually smoothed over their differences, and JYS told me at the lunch what an admirer he was of Jenkinson as a journalist – “There was no one else quite like him.”

Perhaps I am over-thinking it but that afternoon , where Stewart, 84, also said he was scaling back the number of grands prix he would attend this year, there was a sense that we had put to bed a bit of history between the oldest surviving grand prix winner and the magazine of record for motor racing. It was a pleasing way to start January and our 100th year of publication.

To the RAC for the annual HERO-ERA awards dinner. For the uninitiated, the organisation specialises in creating wonderful historic rally events ranging from a one-day beginner event to five-star month-long excursions.

The dinner served as a reminder of the richness and depth of the domestic motor racing season. And a straw poll of the Motor Sport editorial contributors proved the point when I asked them to nominate the events they are most looking forward to.

Andrew Frankel: “The first club meeting at Castle Combe, my local circuit. I’ve not done enough spectating at club level events in recent years and always regret not doing more. I won’t even care much what’s on the fixture list.”

Mat Oxley: “The 2024 Isle of Man TT – on live TV for the second year. Michael Dunlop stands on 25 wins. Two more and he’ll overtake his late uncle Joey to become the most successful TT racer in history.”

Damien Smith: “The British Hillclimb Championship, Shelsley Walsh, in June. It’s a criminally overlooked series, with F1 levels of performance from the top cars shooting up a country lane. Witnessing it at Britain’s oldest active venue is an itch that must be scratched.”

Gordon Cruickshank: “The Bentley Drivers Club, Silverstone in August. If you love Bentleys, they’re all here for the club’s centrepiece meet, competing or just sharing Bentley lore. The racing is intense and there’s nothing like the noise of all those massive thundering cylinders.”

And mine… well after the HERO-ERA dinner I feel in the mood for a spot of historic rallying.

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Joe Dunn, editor
Follow Joe on Twitter @joedunn90

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