after reading this (paragraph 4):
From the "Ask Nigel" column on Autosport.com:-
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 well-being.
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 *** 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 ***y 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 Nurburgring."
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..."