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Roebuck's Memories Nigel Roebuck David Purley Dear Nigel, I have a house in Normandy, and, the demands of the racing season being what they are, I spend less time there than I would like. Whenever I do get there, however, a few laps around Rouen Les Essarts are essential to my wellbeing. Not used for F1 since 1968, and for racing at all, sadly, since '93, this is among the greatest open road circuits the sport has known. Mention of it conjures, of course, the image of Fangio's Maserati 250F, steered on the throttle through the downhill swerves, but whenever I am there, I think first of David Purley. As you come past the pits, the road starts to fall away, and then plunges right. If you're going reasonably hard, this is scary enough in a road car; in a single-seater it must have been something else again. Purley, second there in the F2 race in 1974, said he had his own way of coping with the fear. "When we did bayonet training in the Army, we were taught to scream as we lunged forward - to help take our minds off what we were doing, I suppose. At Rouen, we'd come past the pits at about 160mph, and then that incredible sequence of downhill sweepers would begin. For the last couple of hundred yards before them, I used to scream into my helmet, to give me more courage, to keep my foot from lifting. Helped a lot, I found." Even 30 years ago, David's views on safety were hardly mainstream. I liked him enormously, not least because he reminded me in so many ways of Innes Ireland. Both were tough men, genuinely tough men, but also compassionate and kind, with a laconic sense of humour aimed, not infrequently, at themselves. As I trudged through the sodden Zolder paddock, after the 1977 Belgian Grand Prix, I noticed Purley in conversation with Niki Lauda, and it was clear, from their expressions, that it was an interview of some heat. At its conclusion, I asked David what all that had been about. "Well, first of all, come in out of the rain and have some soup," he smiled. For Purley the afternoon had been memorable for the fact that briefly he had led a Grand Prix in his privately entered Lec. Granted, the circumstances had been freak - he had been in front because he stopped later than most to change tyres - but led he had. Later in the race Lauda was striving to hold off Gunnar Nilsson, and complained that Purley had held him up, causing him to spin. "He said I was in his way - that rabbits like me ought to stop to let aces like him through..." And your response? "I told him to bugger off! I said that if an ace in a works Ferrari couldn't pass a rabbit in a Lec without spinning, he wasn't a bloody ace in my book..." At the next race, Purley turned up with a white rabbit sticker on his car. Even the Rat had to laugh. It was in the dreadful circumstances of Roger Williamson's fatal accident at Zandvoort in 1973 that the name of David Purley became known across the world, a fact he rather resented. Television viewers everywhere witnessed his attempts to release the trapped driver from his burning March. "What surprised me, if you want to know, is that no other drivers stopped to help. There was all this talk of 'Purley trying to rescue his friend' and so on, but that wasn't the case - I didn't know Roger well at all. What happened was purely a reflex action. In Aden, if one saw a burning tank one tried to help the people inside, and it was exactly the same at Zandvoort. A matter of a man needing help. That car burned for several laps, and all the 'safety crusaders' just kept on bombing through the accident scene without even backing off..." David had no recollection of the accident. He remembered neither stopping his car, running across the road nor anything else. What maddened him was the marshals' inability to tackle the fire. "If you want to talk safety, that's where I do have strong views. One of those guys was wearing a plastic mac! If he goes near that car, he's dead, isn't he? And something like that I found totally unacceptable. If a bloke does have an accident, he should have the right to expect that everything possible will be done for him." That said, Purley's views on safety were otherwise unfashionable, to say the least. He had a contempt for a society increasingly hell-bent on protecting people from themselves. Who can imagine what he would made have of Tony Blair's Britain? "I don't suggest," he said, "we should race in shirtsleeves and linen helmets, or drive cars that aren't safe as they might be. That would just be stupid. But once you're togged up as well as possible, strapped into a good, sound, car, it's just you against the other blokes, your skill against theirs - and frankly I don't think you should be able to make mistakes with complete impunity. "If you're on a dangerous track you just make damn sure you don't put a wheel off. If you do, you know you're done. For me, that was the added spice of a place like Rouen or the Nürburgring." Over time other drivers, uncomprehending, suggested that Purley's apparent fearlessness was abnormal, that he had a death wish. I never thought that true, but undeniably David liked to test himself. Did he think, I asked him once, he was attracted to danger for its own sake? He was silent for a few seconds. "If I'm being totally honest about it, I would have to say yes, I suppose I am. I loved those F3 races at Chimay, for example. Public roads...no guardrails...very quick. I used to be very frightened there, and I think - in my case, anyway - you have to be a little bit frightened to drive a racing car properly. "I don't want to die in one, God knows. But for me there is a lot of satisfaction in the thought that I'm alive because of my own skill, my own ability to cope. I don't want to see F1 become slot car racing." Purley had no doubts that his racing philosophy had its roots in his time in the Army - particularly with the 'Paras' in Aden. Towards the end of the final evacuation there, he remembered that things got very hot. "We had everything chucked at us - mortars, grenades, Kalashnikovs - and nothing ever frightened me so much. I think probably I learned to control my fear there. I was a young officer, and you couldn't let it show. "It was the same with parachuting. When you're standing in an aircraft by an open door at night, 800 feet up, the 'plane bucking around and so on, that's very scary. Everyone would be standing about, yawning from fear, cracking very un-funny jokes and so on. Quite honestly, after that motor racing was a bit of an anti-climax." David's biggest regret was that he never drove a competitive F1 car. The Lec project was inevitably under-financed, and had a sadly short life. Anyone at Silverstone that July day in 1977 can remember the awful silence over the place as news of Purley's accident came in. Although he somehow survived the colossal impact with the bank at Becketts, he never raced regularly again, and he missed it. "I can't find anything else in life that gives me the same buzz as racing," he would say, "but aerobatics gives me a lot of pleasure." He had bought a Pitt Special, and it was in this, shortly before the 1985 British Grand Prix, that he died. After Purley's death, some swiftly concluded that he had got what he was asking for, that an early death was inevitable for a man who so embraced risk. To them I have nothing to say. I liked him for his absolute integrity, about racing - "People found cheating should be out for two years, at least" - as well as everything else. Once I mentioned to him the words on Peter Revson's ID bracelet: 'Everything is sweetened by risk'. "That's it," he responded at once. "That's it, exactly..." Dear Nigel, Taken from: http://www.autosport.com/featuresasknigelitem.asp?id=21514&s=5&l=3, |