Drivers with odd Day jobs (celebrities who raced)

[Everso Biggyballies]

Bottom post of the previous page:

I knew him (Mike Smith) in 1975 when he ran in the Radio 1 Championship running a Capri. I remember there was also a Marc Smith who I was good friends with and also ran a Capri. Mike Smith was a bit of a hothead then too.That is when I was working with Mazda withJohn Markey's Arian Automotive in BTCC and also ETCC and the British Production series.... we ran a number of RX3's in the Championship. We ran Cozy Powell, drummer of note (another for this list) Tony Lanfranchi we also ran amongst many others. Im sure I already mentioned him in the early days of the thread though.

Others running were Gerry Marshall, Noel Edmonds, (another name for the list if he hasnt been mentioned with Cozy)as he was at the time a Radio DJ before he became a TV Presenter. ). Edmonds ran a Capri as well. Jeff Allam was another, as was John Brindley.

There were two Production car Series that year.... one the BBC Radio 1 Series, the other the Britax Production series. Many competitors ran both.

Cozy after a class win in the RX3. Actually Cozy also won outright Ford Escort celebrity races and the pic might have been from one of them.


Cozy at Snetterton with the Hitachi sponsored RX3 alongside.

For those interested I wrote an article (with pics) about the Mallory Park Radio 1 fun day which was quite an event. 50,000 tartan clad teenage Bay City Roller fans were there and we had a track invasion by most of them in the middle of a Formula Ford race. (The Bay City Rollers had just arrived by helicopter on the infield.) Oh and it involved the Wombles in a boat with Tony Blackburn, another top DJ at the time, and several police wading in the lake trying to apprehend fans

Quite an amusing read even if I say so myself. Happy Days

Anyway it is here viewtopic.php?p=314590&hilit=Mallory+Pa ... ay#p314590

[sadsac]

The good old days Everso Biggyballies
I was a Bay City Rollers fan when I was a kid my brother loved Shawadywady

[MonteCristo]

Steven Bradbury raced V8 Utes and Minis when he wasn't winning gold ... once ... by total fluke.

Also saw him race Formula Vee in person at Morgan Park Raceway, Warwick.

Needless to say, he wasn't very good: https://www.driverdb.com/drivers/steven-bradbury/

[Everso Biggyballies]

The good old days Everso Biggyballies
I was a Bay City Rollers fan when I was a kid my brother loved

Shawadywady were there that day too.... so were the Three Degrees and Noddy Holder of Slade!

[Everso Biggyballies]

John Oates, of Hall and Oates, raced in IMSA GTU in the mid '80s.



He was a car nut from when he was a kid. He always had a love of cars (and with success became an avid car collector, particularly of Porsches.)

...Having discovered go-kart racing in the Hamptons in the late 1970s, Oates decided to get his racing license while touring in Europe. He learned on Formula Fords at Brands Hatch, but then found his UK racing license didn't translate state-side. He enrolled at the Bertil Roos school at Pocono, where he was classmates with John Andretti; Michael Andretti had attended just a year before.

“We grew up in the same part of Pennsylvania, only about twenty-five miles apart,” Oates said. “I just had dinner with Mario and Michael a few weeks back after the Indycar race at Birmingham. It's still so great to hear the racing stories.”

The worlds of racing and music overlapped in Europe, too, where George Harrison introduced Oates to the likes of Jackie Stewart and John Surtees. His particular racing mentor was British racing driver Richard Lloyd, who had originally worked for Decca Records. Lloyd had a great deal of success in racing Volkswagens, and was moving into racing Porsches.

Which is how Oates found himself behind the wheel of an IMSA 924 GTR. At Lime Rock in 1983, he acquitted himself well with a fourth-in-class finish and tenth overall out of a field of 37. “We did pretty well to beat the factory Toyota teams,” he reflects....

.....Racing at a high level, achieving rockstar acclaim, and driving the cars he once dreamed of, Oates was living in a golden age. But any golden age, by definition, must end.

“I heard a pop, and that's all I remember,” he says. “Maybe I remember dirt. But I just woke up in an ambulance.”

As part of a crossover promotion between the band and the then-new Pontiac Fiero, Oates had been offered a seat in a Huffaker-built Fiero GTU. The car was a monster, with wide flares, a stubby wheelbase, and a punched-out 3.0L four-cylinder engine making 375 hp.

“I'd tested the car for about an hour at Sonoma, and it was... twitchy is a good word. If you've driven Road America then you know there's a kink in the long straight after the carousel that you can take flat, if you're brave. The transmission just locked at pretty much the worst place it could.”

Oates laughs as he talks of getting a lift from the hospital back to the track so he could drive his car home, despite the concussion. Safety standards were different in the Eighties. Nevertheless, it was a wake-up call.

“I had basically moved into the professional ranks while I was not giving it a professional effort,” he says. “I was still touring and making music. I would have needed to do more testing, been more serious.”

I just pulled the motor racing references from this article which goes into more detail of his collection / car history.
https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-cultur ... -gearhead/

[Everso Biggyballies]

Mark Knopfler of Dire Straights used to do a fair bit of racing. I remember him breaking his wrist in a Celebrity support race at one of the first Adelaide GP's. Happened right in front of me.
He used to race in Historics (Sports cars?) in the 80's. Mark also raced a single seater in the British Monoposto championship in the early 1990s.

Maxwell Fraser, aka Maxi Jazz, lead singer of Faithlessc competed in the Porsche Carrera Cup GB in 2007. I believe he also did (Ford) Fiesta Cup

Going back to the fifties GP driver Johnny Claes was a famous jazz trumpeter and bandleader in the UK pre his motor racing days.

[Nononsensecapeesh]

Prince Bira of Siam, the first Thai F1 driver.

[Nononsensecapeesh]

Perry McCarthy, all we know is he was called the black-suited Stig!

[Everso Biggyballies]

George Harrison's love of Motor Racing and F1 in particular dont need mentioning, and his close friendships with many in pit lane (both MotoGP and F1) are well known. His love of Motor Racing was born from when he went to Aintree for the 1955 British GP and witnessed the battle between his two heroes, Fangio and Moss

Less well known is that he did once drive an F1 car at a test day. Actually it was twice.... George drove the Rob Walker Cooper made famous by Stirling’s win at Monaco in 1961 at a Donington demo once. That was the second time. The first time was back in 1978 when he drove the Durex Surtees at Brands Hatch.

On the 25th of April 1978, a handful of people gathered in the old back paddock at Brands Hatch.

It was a highly select group including then-F1 entrant, and still the only person to win both world motorcycling and F1 championships, John Surtees.

The scene was informal as a spare Surtees TS19 F1 car (pictured above in the hands of Vern Schuppan at Silverstone the year before) was readied for reigning 500cc champion Barry Sheene to enjoy his first ever formal laps in F1 machinery.

The casual atmosphere completely belied the moment as Sheene stepped into the cockpit of the plain white car, which had its Durex livery unsheathed from its bodywork.

Remarkably though this was not the most significant aspect of the day at all, for spectating from the pit wall that afternoon was one-quarter of the Fab Four, Harrison himself.

A close friend of Sheene’s, Harrison was a familiar face in an F1 paddock, yet certainly not in an F1 car.

All that changed after Sheene completed his 70 laps that spring afternoon, which in turn came after the hands-on Surtees had set the car up.

Among the very small and select eyewitnesses that day was Nigel Steer, then a junior mechanic with the team reporting to team manager and future Edenbridge Racing founder Peter Briggs.

Steer himself went on to have a long career, mostly with Tyrrell, and continues to work in F1 to this day, now with the AlphaTauri team where he is based at its Faenza headquarters.

“Barry spent pretty much most of the day in the car and then George got it in later on, towards the evening time,” Steer recalled to The Race, 43 years on from strapping Harrison into a then contemporary F1 car.

“I can’t remember how many laps he did, it was probably only five or six, but he definitely had a go that day. George took quite an interest in what was going on, but I don’t think there was anything organised for him to drive the car at first.

“I’m pretty sure it was quite spontaneous, and it was probably a case of John just saying, ‘go on, you can have a go now George’.

After the brief run Steer joined Surtees, Sheene and Harrison to a legendary Brands hostelry.

“We went to the Kentagon for a good few hours afterwards,” remembers Steer.

“I recall it being good fun with those two telling stories for a while.

“I suppose today it would be a big thing with TV and photographers everywhere but then it was just a few of us having a drink after a fun day at the track.

“I reckon the barmaids probably didn’t even know there was a Beatle and a couple of world champions in the place. Different times.”

https://the-race.com/formula-1/the-last ... ing-world/
That tale is just an extract from a brilliant article about George, Motor Racing, his generosity (hidden 'sponsorships' of friends plus a couple of other stories involving George and Motor Racing people.





As an aside George son Dhani continued the racing connections as he worked for McLaren Automotive for a period as a designer ....before deciding to follow George’s footsteps in the music business

[Everso Biggyballies]

The late Keith Flint (frontman of Prodigy) raced Motorbikes before turning to Team Ownership in BSB.

[Everso Biggyballies]

Damon Hill played on Def Leppard's "Demolition Man" .....

The guitar-solo at the end of the song is played by former Formula 1 driver Damon Hill. The band kept running into Hill at parties where they would talk about his guitar playing, so they invited him to play on the album.

https://www.songfacts.com/facts/def-lep ... lition-man

[Nononsensecapeesh]

Damon Hill played on Def Leppard's "Demolition Man" .....

The guitar-solo at the end of the song is played by former Formula 1 driver Damon Hill. The band kept running into Hill at parties where they would talk about his guitar playing, so they invited him to play on the album.

https://www.songfacts.com/facts/def-lep ... lition-man

Jacques Villeneuve has also tried his luck at being a Musician.

[Nononsensecapeesh]

In recent years, Michael Fassbender has tried his luck in Endurance Racing, he made his Le Mans 24 Hours debut in 2022.

[Nononsensecapeesh]

In recent years, we've had Sir Chris Hoy swap cycling for Motor Racing, particularly of the endurance variety.

More to the point, Chris Hoy took part in the 2016 Le Mans 24 Hours, finishing 17th outright and 12th in the LMP2 Class.

[Everso Biggyballies]

In recent years, we've had Sir Chris Hoy swap cycling for Motor Racing, particularly of the endurance variety.

More to the point, Chris Hoy took part in the 2016 Le Mans 24 Hours, finishing 17th outright and 12th in the LMP2 Class.

There is actually a documentary of that weekend, going into the preparations, lead up, testing and of course focussed on the actual event.

Originally made for and shown on BBC2. TV I found it online.....

SIR CHRIS HOY: 200MPH AT LE MANS

https://vimeo.com/188152852

[Nononsensecapeesh]

In recent years, Michael Fassbender has tried his luck in Endurance Racing, he made his Le Mans 24 Hours debut in 2022.

For the record, Fassbender came 16th in the GTE-Am Class and 51st outright, out of 53 finishers.