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teams were pleased. At the same time, Bernie, as representative of the teams, was negotiating with various broadcasting companies. He was generating huge income by selling the sport to the TV companies and then distributing funds back to the teams, replacing the start money with an even bigger purse. Again, the British teams were pleased.

      The teams stopped being pleased when it transpired that there was no ‘we’ of a collective, there was just an ‘I’ of Bernie. By controlling the TV rights, Bernie basically controlled the entire sport, and of course it has made him a very, very wealthy man, worth £4.2 billion at the last count.

      I guess you could argue about the ethics of it, but Bernie and Max Mosley, who was his legal advisor, hadn’t done anything illegal; they’d simply seen the loopholes and quietly got on with exploiting them. As someone who makes his living doing something similar, I’d be flirting with hypocrisy if I were to stand in judgement.

      Besides, as Lord Hesketh said later, the teams were all too busy fiddling with cars to notice what Bernie was doing. In 1993 they tried to challenge him, but by then the FIA had been formed out of the old FISA, and who was in charge of the FIA? Max Mosley. You can guess how that turned out.

      I like Bernie. I liked him then and I like him still. A straightforward bloke, he doesn’t talk a lot, but you need to listen to what he does say. As for his impact on the sport, he took it from being a junior league category watched by a few enthusiasts to the major league sport it is today. Yes, of course he’s made enemies along the way. There are people who don’t like what he’s done. But overall, there’s no doubt he’s been good for the sport.

      When I first met him in November 1986, he was still on his way up and combining his involvement with FOCA with his ownership of the Brabham team. He got in touch with me on the back of the Beatrice news. Would I meet regarding a position? We dined at his favourite London restaurant, although for the life of me I can’t remember the name of it. Just that it was where Bernie held court. We had two meetings. The first was what you might call a sounding-out exercise. He wanted to get the measure of me, gauge my interest, that kind of thing. The second meeting …

      ‘I need a new technical director at Brabham,’ he told me.

      I knew full well that Gordon Murray was technical director at Brabham. He was a guy I’d always respected, the person who, years before, had responded so thoughtfully to my suggestion for a new suspension system when I was at university, and I was nervous about treading on his toes, dethroning him, whatever you want to call it.

      ‘Gordon is leaving,’ said Bernie. ‘Nothing to do with you. He’s just leaving. We need a new technical director. Whether it’s you or not is up to you.’

      He produced a contract. ‘You don’t have to make a decision now,’ he said. ‘I can recommend you a lawyer if you like.’

      The financial offer was good, and I was out of work, so the chances are I would have signed there and then if he’d pushed me. But he didn’t, and I sat on the contract for a couple of days, being about to add my signature when the phone rang again.

      It was Bernie. ‘I’m selling the team. I’ve found a buyer, all set up, and if you want to still join, that’s up to you, but please be aware that I won’t be involved any more.’

      That gave me some thinking to do. After all, Bernie was one of the main attractions. With Bernie on board I knew the team would be well funded and run. Without him I might be staring down the barrel of another Beatrice situation.

      I decided to err on the side of caution and declined the offer in light of the new development. Once bitten, twice shy and all that. But I remain grateful to Bernie for his honesty and transparency.

      That left me at a loose end once again. Fortunately I then heard from Carl Haas, who since 1983 had been partnered with the actor Paul Newman as Newman/Haas Racing. Carl wanted me to join as Mario Andretti’s race engineer. Not only that, but he offered me what was an enormous sum of money: $400,000 a year. To give you an idea of just what a rise that was, I’d been earning about $60,000 a year with March/Kraco. Needless to say, I accepted.

      Now, it might sound slightly odd that Carl planned to make me the world’s highest-paid race engineer (I imagine that must still be the record) when thus far I hadn’t actually crossed anyone’s palm with the drivers’ championship silverware – not Bobby and not Michael Andretti.

      But Carl is a shrewd businessman. Carl was the Lola importer for North America and March were Lola’s only serious rival at the time. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I guess he figured that if he could stop me returning to March to work on their 1987 IndyCar, and instead contribute to the development of Lola’s 1987 car, then he would weaken the enemy and hence strengthen his sales. As a designer, my stock in IndyCar was high. After all, my cars had won the Indy 500 twice: the March 85C in 1985, the 86C the following year. In USA sporting terms, that’s a bit like coaching two successive Super Bowl-winning teams.

      And then there was Carl. He was a real character, always, but always with a huge cigar clamped between his lips. I’m not sure how often it was lit, but it was certainly a permanent fixture, to the extent that on the odd occasion he removed it, you could see where it had left a permanent indent.

      He was very superstitious. I remember in Mid-Ohio in 1985, Bobby was on pole, Mario second. Carl always had this thing where he’d make a big performance of blessing his car on the grid – so he’d come up to it and walk around it, touching it while muttering Hebrew under his breath.

      That day, he’d gone through the whole rigmarole before he realised he was blessing the wrong car. He was blessing Bobby’s car, not Mario’s. So great was his indignation that he removed the cigar, actually took it out of his mouth, and tossed it in fury across the track. He marched to Mario’s car for a hurried blessing.

      It didn’t work. Or, you might say, it did work. Because Bobby dominated.

      Carl was a likeable guy though. The team was based in Chicago and the first time he picked me up from the airport ready for the first test – early 1987 – we walked back to the car park, got in his car, a brand new BMW, and it wouldn’t start.

      ‘This goddamned car,’ he growled, ‘it’s got a security code.’ But he’d forgotten it. We tried every significant combination of numbers he could think of – his birthday, his mother’s birthday, etc. – until at last I said, ‘How about 0000? Isn’t that the factory setting?’ And that was it.

      Carl always had lots of change in his pocket. I can’t remember how it happened, but he fell over outside a restaurant one day, and all his quarters and nickels and dimes rolled off down the street. Being so superstitious he assumed it was an omen of bad luck and we had to help him pick up every single dime.

      He and his wife, Bernie, both looked after me. The Lola T87 had been designed for the Cosworth DFX engine, which every IndyCar team used up until that point, but my first job was to install a new Chevrolet engine made by Ilmor, a company based in Brixworth, Northamptonshire, and run by their chief designer, Mario Illien and his business partner, Paul Morgan. It marked the beginning of an ongoing and very fruitful relationship with Ilmor.

      It also meant I had to design a new front end to the gearbox and a new oil tank for the Lola, so I got stuck in.

      Meanwhile there was the job of forging a relationship with another Mario – Andretti – for whom I was to be race engineer. I’d met him previously during my three seasons in IndyCar, but only briefly, so the opening test of the season at Laguna was the first time I was properly introduced to him.

      We took seats in a little restaurant in Monterey. The waiter brought the menus and I watched as Mario looked at his, squinted a bit and then stretched his arm right out, trying to find a bit of light from the table lamp to read it.

      I thought, What have I done? This guy needs reading glasses!

      Thankfully my fears would turn out to be groundless. As with many people, his eyesight had started to deteriorate in his mid-forties (I’ve been extremely lucky in that regard, so far), but while Mario sometimes found it difficult to focus

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