{"id":47272,"date":"2014-07-07T20:03:06","date_gmt":"2014-07-07T19:03:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/issue_content\/cult-heroes-6\/"},"modified":"2019-07-20T05:27:07","modified_gmt":"2019-07-20T04:27:07","slug":"cult-heroes","status":"publish","type":"issue_content","link":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/archive\/article\/january-2006\/19\/cult-heroes\/","title":{"rendered":"Cult heroes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Bill McGovern<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The forgotten man among tin-top aristocracy, Bill McGovern deserves veneration if only for being the first driver to win the BTCC title three years on the trot. Starting out at Woburn hillclimb in a Vauxhall VX 4\/90 in late 1963, he was resolutely trounced by a Mini Cooper S. So he went out and bought one of his own and took FTD at a Brands Hatch sprint a weekend later. A year on he entered his first race at Snetterton and came second: by 1966 he was spanking a Hillman Imp for Paul Emery while dabbling in single-seaters, but being a twenty-something with four daughters dampened his enthusiasm for the dangers of open-wheelers.<\/p>\n<p>Then along came George Bevan and his trick Sunbeam Imp, with which McGovern won Britain&#8217;s premier saloon car series from 1970-72. Numerous incidents stopped him short from taking a fourth title a year on, while the Bevan VW Passat proved a tugger in &#8217;74. Retiring at the end of the following year, McGovern made sporadic comebacks in the &#8217;80s, running at the front in Modsaloons and Renault one-make series. <strong>RH<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":706,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[],"tags":[167,44034,193,56144,39519,227],"issue_decade":[121591],"issue_year":[121636],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content\/47272"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/issue_content"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/706"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47272"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content\/47272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":230550,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content\/47272\/revisions\/230550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47272"},{"taxonomy":"issue_decade","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_decade?post=47272"},{"taxonomy":"issue_year","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_year?post=47272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}