Jim Bamber Blog

This is dedicated to Peter “Peggy” Ashcroft who died earlier this year. A real Gentleman.

FEBRUARY 2008
Whenever I say, “When I was in Africa” my wife Sally sighs and her eyes glaze over as she knows that what comes next is yet another boring story about my one and only time on that continent. Anyway she isn’t reading this so here goes:
When I was in Africa back in1987 to watch the Safari Rally I was amazed at the lengths that the Ford works rally team went to get me a funny idea for a cartoon. The Ford rally team then were not the slickly organised team that Malcolm Wilson has made them today. In those days the team based in Boreham in Essex were still hanging on to the reputation they had made for themselves with the Escorts. Times had changed, the supercars of Group B had gone and their place had been taken by what at first seemed a sad selection of production cars. Lancia had the excellent 4WD Delta soon to become the championship winning Integrale, a car I still lust after. Ford had only the 4WD V6 Sierra and the new rear wheel drive Sierra Cosworth. The V6 was too heavy and too slow and the Cosworth with only two wheel drive was no match for the Lancias on loose surfaces.
In those days the Ford works team was lead by Peter Ashcroft affectionaly known throughout Rallying as ‘Peggy’. I once gave him a cartoon about his previous boss Stuart Turner with the stipulation that he hang it in his office. The cartoon referred to Turner as a ‘Dinosaur’ and to his credit Peggy duly hung it on the wall right behind where Turner would sit during their meetings.
Anyway back to Africa although the story really starts in Essex when the team drives, yes drives the Safari prepared RS Cosworth from Boreham to Heathrow. The car is then loaded onto a truck which drives across the channel to Germany and from Frankfurt is flown to Nairobi in Kenya. In a few days scrutineering will take place just outside the centre of Nairobi. All of the other rally teams are based in and around the capital. But not Ford, oh no! They drive the car 300 miles across Africa to the coastal town of Mombasa where the team finishes the car’s preparation. Then, and this is where it gets really daft, only hours before scrutineering they drive the car back to Nairobi. They do this at night, in Africa and at high speed! What were they thinking about? Only a nutter like Jeremy Clarkson would try that today! I had never been to Africa but even me pig ignorant as I am knew that it wasn’t at all like Essex. Thanks to Richard Attenborough and many other wildlife programmes on tv I knew that at night all the animals come out and play. A lot of these animals are very big and one thing they love to do in the small wee hours is to lie down on the warm tarmac. I think you can imagine what comes next. Well you can but it never occurred to anybody at Ford. At aprx 80 miles plus one of the cars driven by a mechanic hits a very big cow and the car is wrecked. This by the way was Stig Blomqvist’s car. I never asked Peggy how he had broken the news to Stig.
“Oh hello Stig, Peter here. We have a small problem with some bits on your car. What bits? Er well that’s the problem, we lost some but don’t worry we know what Lion eat them!”

Oh yes I’m sure that went down well. What followed though was quite amazing and shows how good the mechanics can be when the going gets tough. They ‘borrowed’ another competitors car and in the remaining few hours before scrutineering cobbled together all the bits they had left from the original car and rebuilt a Ford Sierra Cosworth for Stig to drive. Those old Boreham mechanics were some of the best in the business at putting a car together, just keep away from the mechanic they later called ‘the terminator!’

Take a minute and look on the map of Essex to see how close Boreham is to the port of Felixstowe and how far it is from Heathrow! And then if you have Google earth, fly to Mombasa in Kenya and then north west to Nairobi. You will see the sort of terrain the car had to drive over. Crazy but thanks to Peggy and the boys from Boreham I was rarely stuck for anything to draw.

As a footnote the car never finished the event. Electrical trouble forced Stig out before halfway. The Boreham boys didn’t give up though and the following year in Corsica they thrashed the 4WD Lancias in another Cosworth Sierra driven by “Diddy’ Auriol.
Peggy and his boys had their day in the sunshine at last. I witnessed that and promised myself I would go back to Corsica as I thought it such a fabulous place. Sadly I haven’t yet but if you have a chance to go then do it. The drive from Ajaccio up the west coast to Calvi is quite stunning and not to be missed. Just don’t have anybody from Ford drive the car!

Just scanning through the pages of CAR India to see if its Editor Adil Jal Darukhanawala has used any of my cartoons this month when I see a picture on the back page that takes me back to the British Grand Prix of 1985. The picture is of a young Ayrton Senna sitting in a black painted John Player Special Sinclair C5 in the Silverstone paddock. What was so special about that you may ask? Well I had sat in that very same car on that very day and it had been Ayrton Senna himself who had asked if I wanted to sit in the car.

At that time I was a friend of Colin Chapman’s daughter Jane and we were both standing next to Ayrton each clutching a glass of champagne from the nearby Lotus marquee when he asked if I would like a go and so I jumped in. I had to pinch myself while he knelt alongside and ran through the simple controls. After all he was a rising star then after winning his first Grand Prix only a few months earlier in Portugal and here he was telling me how to drive a pedal car! I wasn’t worried though, after all I couldn’t possibly embarass myself in a car that could barely manage 30mph, could I?

Racing drivers are infamous for the excuses they come up with but not many can have trotted out the fact that they couldn’t pedal fast enough. I only managed a hundred yards before the battery died. Ayrton had been running along behind me and told me that the car’s battery couldn’t hold a charge. I got out and we talked for a couple of minutes about the car and if it was going to be the revolution its inventor Clive Sinclair hoped it would become. Both of us thought it no more than a toy. Then he was dragged away by a Lotus minder for qualifying and I never spoke to him again.

Almost ten years later following his death, I couldn’t work. It wasn’t the time to be funny or even political. I had thought briefly of drawing a cartoon about how appalled I was at how the Imola Grand Prix had continued even though the organisers knew that Senna was dead. The show must go on, money was involved and money and the making of it is far too important to be stopped just by the death of the best driver of his generation. So for a few days I stopped work and instead I built a long brick wall in my garden. I looked at it again the morning I saw the picture of a young Ayrton Senna sitting in a pedal car and I remembered that day.

As for the pic I don’t know who’s photo it is. I thought it might be Jeff Bloxham’s but he says no. So if it’s yours and you want me to take it off please get in touch.