Rob Walker

ROB WALKER 1917-2002 was not only the first private team owner to secure victory in a Formula One World Championship-qualifying Grand Prix, but also the last ever to do so. A member of the Johnnie Walker whisky family, Walker described himself as "self-unemployed", and in his passport he described his occupation as "gentleman". His association with Stirling Moss ('58-'62) never went beyond a handshake. Moss drove Walker's privately-owned and privately-prepared cars to victories in Formula One, Formula Two, InterContinental, Tasman and GT racing up to World Championship level. Their small team, based at Dorking, Surrey, was the perennial underdog, yet a thorn in the side of the works teams - a role which both relished. Moss won the 1958 Argentine round in Walker's tiny Cooper-Climax, with an engine 20 per cent smaller than the opposing factory Ferraris. There was also the only F1 race victory ever scored by a four-wheel drive racing car, at Oulton Park in 1961 with Moss in the experimental Ferguson P99. During the 1959 World Championship series, Moss won the Portuguese and Italian Grand Prix in Walker-entered Coopers; in 1960 the Monaco and United States GPs fell to their Lotus-Climax cars; and in 1961 they took the Monaco and German GPs, still with the Lotuses. But Moss was not the only winner in Walker's distinctive dark blue and white racing cars. The veteran French driver Maurice Trintignant scored victories in the 1958 Monaco Grand Prix; at Cordoba, Argentina, in 1960; and at Pau, France, in 1962. Even before Moss began driving for Walker, those same distinctive colours were winning, most notably on Formula One and Two Connaught cars driven for Walker in the early 1950s Tony Rolt. But on April 23 1962 Moss's career in the top flight ended in his crash at Goodwood. Walker continued in Formula One, campaigning Lotus, Cooper and Brabham cars for drivers including Trintignant, Jochen Rindt, Jo Siffert and, ultimately, Graham Hill. Walker Racing was not, however, immune from disaster. Both the Mexican Ricardo Rodriguez and the Rhodesian former racing motorcyclist Gary Hocking were killed in his Lotus cars in 1962. Then his first 3-litre Lotus 49 caught fire while being stripped down, totally destroying Walker's racing workshop at Dorking. Yet his team came back barely three months later when Jo Siffert won the British Grand Prix in a fresh Lotus 49 B at Brands Hatch. From 1966 to 1969 the London stockbroker Jack Durlacher helped support the team, and in 1970 Brooke Bond-Oxo gave sponsorship, with Graham Hill driving. From 1971 to 1973 Walker joined forces with John Surtees in his F1 team, and in 1974 he supported the one-car Yardley McLaren operation with Mike Hailwood driving. Walker later contributed his time-keeping skills and management experience to the Embassy-Hill, Hesketh, Penske, Copersucar-Fittipaldi and Wolf teams. In 1975, with businessman Harry Stiller, he briefly ran an elderly Hesketh car for Alan Jones, who would become the Williams team's first World Champion Driver. Robert Ramsay Campbell Walker was born on August 14 1917. His father Campbell Walker was an heir to the Johnnie Walker whisky fortune, and his mother, Mary Marshal Ramsay, came from a family with business interests in tea and rubber trading. Cam Walker died in 1921, aged just 32, and Rob's mother subsequently married the much older Sir Francis Eden Lacey, long-time secretary of MCC; thus Rob and his older brother John grew up on the Sutton Veny estate near Warminster, Wiltshire, which his mother and stepfather had bought at the time of their marriage. Rob was educated initially by a governess, then sent to Sherborne. He was, by his own admission, "academically hopeless; I could never even master joined-up writing. I have printed everything out longhand all my life." But he was a natural ball player: tall, lean and athletic. His fascination with fast cars stemmed from a visit, aged seven, to the 1924 Boulogne Grand Prix. The preliminary event was won by B S Marshall, whose wife happened to be seated in the grandstand beside young Walker; she explained every move to him. While at Magdalene, Cambridge, Walker qualified as a private pilot; but he was soon banned for life for "jumping the course" in a Tiger Moth biplane between races at a point-to-point meeting; a policeman took his number and reported him to the CAA for low flying. Trying to prove that his Delahaye coupe, which had four speeds in both forward and reverse, was just as fast either way, he overturned it at around 60mph - going backwards. He sprinted and raced at Brooklands both a supercharged Lea-Francis car and an ex-Prince "Bira" Delahaye. In 1939 he co-drove the Delahaye in the Le Mans 24-Hours classic with Ian Connell, taking over at 8pm suitably dressed for dinner in an impeccable dark blue pin-striped suit and tie, then opting for informal Prince of Wales check for the Sunday morning stint. The Delahaye's pedals had burned Connell's feet so badly that Walker had to drive for the remaining 12 hours, his feet protected by water-soaked rope-soled plimsolls. He and Connell finished eighth. On the outbreak of war he joined the Navy as an ordinary seaman. He was accepted as an FAA pilot and flew Gladiator, Skua, Roc, Swordfish and Fulmar aircraft before being grounded due to deficient night vision. He survived the torpedoing of the cruiser Cleopatra off Sicily, and the effects of clambering out of a landing Swordfish - after "rather too much gin" - while it was in mid-bounce. The MO's report read: "Multiple contusions and abrasions; patient partially anaesthetised at time of accident." Walker had married Elizabeth (Betty) Duncan in 1940, and after the war he kept a promise to her that he would not race cars again. Instead he competed until 1957 in speed trials and hill-climbs, in which cars run one at a time against the clock. He launched his Pippbrook Garage business at Dorking, where his team prepared his cars for drivers including Tony Rolt, Reg Parnell, Peter Walker, Peter Collins, Roy Salvadori, Tony Brooks, and Jack Brabham. When Salvadori first test-drove a Formula Two Cooper-Climax and declared that, with a little more power, it could challenge an F1 car on a tight circuit, Walker personally funded a project to produce an F1 "special" to contest the 1957 Monaco GP; Jack Brabham drove it to finish sixth. From this basis Cooper cars developed to secure consecutive F1 world titles in 1959 and 1960. Walker's always impeccably dressed figure became a familiar sight on pit counters around the racing world, as he expertly manipulated three stopwatches at a time, while his wife kept the lap chart. From the early 1970s he contributed race reports to the American monthly magazine Road & Track, continuing long after he had given up direct racing team support.