Jim Walsh: the unassuming master of slipstreaming in 1970s FF1600

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If you went to Silverstone in the late 1970s, chances are you would have seen Jim Walsh starring in FF1600

Silverstone’s National layout frequently leads to single-seaters’ closest action today in Formula Ford 1600, and several decades ago series used the Club layout for similar thrills. The Wellington Straight led directly into Woodcote, used as a lap-ending hairpin, and a crowd favourite for FF1600 races on it in the 1970s was local (but Northern Irish-born) driver Jim Walsh.

Why? When there were last-lap fights involving six or more cars for victory, Walsh was able to get through the pack to win.

He is now 73, and since 2003 there has been a FF1600 race at Silverstone which awards the Jim Walsh Trophy. Formula Scout caught up with Walsh to discuss how he became a category legend, and where else his single-seater career went.

Walsh’s route into racing, as for so many drivers did at the time, was a trip to the Jim Russell Racing School in 1973.

“My father was a big motorbike fan and used to take me up to Mallory Park to watch and I always thought I’d love to go motorbike racing,” he recalls. “But a mechanic that worked for my father, John Murphy, was doing FFord and [we] used to go watching him at Silverstone and then my father asked me did I want to have a go and put me through the Jim Russell School.”

Having learned the essentials, the 22-year-old started racing in 1974 with a Merlyn Mk20A run by his family.

“It was a quick car, a nice-handling car,” Walsh remembers. “We had little bits of help, but it was only minor – family, friends and stuff but basically it was my father that put all the money in.”

Ahead of his debut, Walsh tested at Silverstone and had Murphy on hand to provide useful tips.

“I remember my first winter testing before the start of ’74. I thought I was going into Becketts really quick, and John and Syd Fox just went by me like I was standing still. And I thought: ‘God! How can you get that quick?’. But you just learn quickly [following] a quick driver.

“I spent a lot of time through that first winter practicing and testing in the wet and that’s how I got to love the wet. To get to know how a car [reacts] when you lose it, which way it would go. And it helped when you’re following somebody that was losing a car to know which way they were going to go.”

Walsh’s first start was on March 9 at Silverstone, in the circuit’s first FFord race of the year, and he finished third. After trading the Merlyn for a Van Diemen, he continued to impress and won the FF1600’s Vandervell Award for novice drivers.

For 1975, he switched to a Hawke DL12 and raced in both the British Racing Drivers’ Club and British Automobile Racing Club championships. They were of equal merit at the time, with the British FFord championship being created in 1976.

Walsh won three races at Silverstone in BRDC FF1600, and two there in BARC FF1600. He also won at Brands Hatch and Oulton Park in the latter.

Future Formula 1 driver Geoff Lees was the man to beat, winning the BRDC, BARC and BRSCC FF1600 titles and the final ever edition of the FFord Festival held at Snetterton before it switched to its current home Brands Hatch. All of that success came in a Royale RP21 drawn up by Rory Byrne, who would later design Michael Schumacher’s title-winning F1 cars.

Walsh got himself into a Royale for an “attack on the championships” in 1976 and was again supreme at Silverstone. Seven of BRDC FF1600’s nine races were held there and he won four of them en route to the title, and in BARC FF1600 another Silverstone win sat between two victories at Thruxton.

His rivals included 1992 World Sportscar champion Derek Warwick and Ireland’s three-time Le Mans 24 Hours class winner David Kennedy and CART podium-finisher Derek Daly in a strong year for Britain’s FFord scene.

Despite his success, Walsh’s funds dried up and he sat out 1977. He returned to action in 1978 thanks to sponsorship from Crompton Lighting and his “great asset”, wife Maureen. Together they “mortgaged the house to keep going” in FFord.

Walsh was BRDC FF1600 runner-up on his return, with an early win at Thruxton and two victories at Silverstone late in the season. He was now driving a Royale RP24, the last of the Byrne-designed chassis.

A Royale adorned in a yellow-and-white Crompton Lighting, and going sideways in a controlled slide, is undoubtedly the archetypal image of Walsh’s career.

Royale was run by Alan Cornock, and Byrne’s successor was Pat Symonds. He was responsible for the angular RP26 which Walsh won the 1979 and 1980 BRDC FF1600 titles in, and has been involved on-and-off in F1 for the last four decades.

He followed Byrne to Toleman (which later became Benetton and then Renault), engineering his title-winning designs and rising up the ranks to be the team’s technical director until ‘Crashgate’ in 2009. He was then chief technical officer of Williams and F1 itself, and now consults the Cadillac team working to join the grid next year.

Walsh did not drive for Royale’s works team, but says his car his deal with the manufacturer made him a “semi-works” driver since “we got a lot of help from Alan on that one”. He found working with Cornock and Symonds to be a “brilliant” experience.

“Alan was very supportive and helped me a lot and Pat was a smashing bloke. He was just starting off at the time and we were good friends. We just kind of developed together and obviously Pat went on to do great things.”

Walsh won 10 more times in the BRDC’s championship in front of its Clubhouse at Silverstone, along with two victories at Thruxton and a maiden triumph at Donington Park. And he was managing his road-surfacing business thoughout.

“Testing was always a bit of a problem with work commitments. A lot of the time you’d use the heats to sort things out. But when I did test it was brilliant. With Pat and Gerry Corbett and Alan we got to the nitty-gritty. I enjoyed the development of the car, trying out different things and getting the car quick.

“I had great help with the development of the car from Gerry at the Jim Russell school as well. Sometimes he would add little bits to the chassis, just to stiffen it a little bit, and that helped with the laptimes.

“Pat was a great help too. We got on ever so well. We helped develop the car and some mornings we were at Silverstone testing in the winter, and it was that cold that the water would freeze when it went outside the garage door when we were changing radiators. He was a great character and he was a great help to me.”

During 1980, Walsh also stepped up to the winged FF2000 as a works Royale driver: “That was a bit ad hoc really because it wasn’t a full team sort of thing, so it was just trying out different races and different cars. But yeah, it was good.”

As part of Royale’s sales drive, Cornock wanted “to promote the car over in Ireland” and Walsh “got invited to race over there at Mondello Park”.

“Never been to the place before, but John Murphy used to have a little racing school there. Cornock had a relationship then with Murphy to promote the Royale car [in both categories],” Walsh explains.

“We went over to Mondello and John walked me around the circuit and showed me the lines and everything. And we were very quick. In fact, first time there we got below the lap record in testing.

“Derek Daly was the top Irish driver at the time, and it was so funny, but I had a bit of a hard time getting accepted there, coming over with Royale and beating [locals]. There were some fun and games, shall we say, with the starting. I think the time I posted for the first race was on the front row and they put me on the third row. So, John went and protested and they agreed in the end to put me on the outside of the front row.

“They had some sort of an agreement that they’d appear to say ‘switch off your engine’ and I went to switch the engine off and they dropped the flag. And of course, I went down to about fifth or sixth, but me and Derek Daly had a great scrap, because I caught up with him and we were having a great dice for the lead and he just did this monumental dive down the inside and took the two of us off…

“But after that we were then taking over the FF2000 car to develop that over there and we went quick. [One race] started off dry, but it was a wet race, and we were all on slicks and we went through and actually won the race and that did a lot of good for Royale. The people of Mondello accepted me then as a good competitor, shall we say.”

Back in the day, there were plenty of tricks that drivers tried to get away with. Nothing nasty but a bit of gamesmanship.

“Looking back at them days, we got away with murder at times. When you think of the regulations now with track limits, it’s incredible, it’s got to be a lot more disciplined,” Walsh says.

“John used to teach me all the tricks of the trade,” he adds. “Because there was a lot of tricks in them days.

“I always remember Syd Fox. He was hilarious [with] some of the tricks he used to pull. He used to have a little cup of oil near the manifold and a wire to the cockpit, and he’d pull that to show smoke, and whoever was following would back off. All little tricks that we used to learn. And that’s what made FFord in them days very fun. It was ever so popular. So many entries, three heats and a final. It was good.”

And Walsh himself? Any tricks that he’ll own up to 45 years later?

“I think one of the naughtiest things I ever did was going into Woodcote once, and I think there was about five or six of us abreast, and I was squeezed onto the concrete. There was a marshals’ post just on the concrete on the inside.

“I went round the marshals’ post on the inside to get round and actually got in front at Woodcote on the last lap. That was very dangerous, actually. On reflection, I should never have got away with that, but I did,” he admits with a smile.

There was never a budget for stepping up to Formula 3 with a top team, and Walsh was still driving for fun while working full-time in his company rather than pursuing a career in racing.

He also made a few appearances in sportscars in 1980, driving in Sports 2000 (prototypes inspired by FF2000 and Group 6 sportscars) for near-neighbour John Robinson who built cars for the category under his own name.

For 1981, Walsh signed up to drive the new Magnum 813 in British F3. Understandably, details of events 44 years ago are hazy, but Walsh remembers “an Iranian company that bought the rights of the Magnum F3 car, the design and everything”.

“The chap who was running the team was a Mr [Farrokh] Darriani, who was connected somehow with the Iranian royal family, I believe. It was all very political, and Jim Wright was going to be the team manager and bless him, he was getting really nervous about the potential of [problems] with this Iranian sponsor.”

The Shah of Iran had been deposed in 1979, fleeing to exile and bringing to an end the rule of the Iranian monarchy. A year later a siege at the Iranian Embassy in London, broadcast live on national television, had gripped the nation’s attention. As such, Britain’s relations with Iran were tense, to put it mildly. Not the best time to set up an Iranian-financed F3 team.

Walsh was invited to test the car at Silverstone alongside FFord rivals David Leslie and Eddie Jordan, a future F1 team boss.

“It started to rain but they said go out anyway, and even as it started to rain, I still posted a quicker lap than Eddie and David. On the back of that, that they signed me for the drive.”

In fact, as Walsh explains, the Automotive Designs team had its sights set on rapid expansion: “They’d signed me for F3 and Formula 2. They wanted to go all the way.”

But it missed the first two rounds after an accident in pre-season testing before making an inauspicious debut at Silverstone where Walsh qualified 17th.

“The race didn’t go too well because the throttle stuck through the race, so I had to retire. It was a bad time. Fortunately, or unfortunately, should I say, the sponsorship couldn’t get put through because of the ties with Iran. But the chap, even though he knew that the deal had just fell through with the sponsorship, still wanted just to race that first race. And that was it.”

The team appealed to the Royal Automobile Club to try “to get the advertising permit through”,  while Walsh was contacted by Howard Groos to test a Pacer FF1600 car at Snetterton. He claims he was very quick in that test, but it ended badly.

“We broke the lap record there at Snetterton; the Pacer was really quick. But unfortunately, the steering bracket broke going into Riches and it was a big head-on [crash], so I was in Norwich Hospital for a while,” recalls Walsh. “It was a real shame for the car because on the back of that, I don’t think they did too well after that.”

With scant marshalling or medical support at the test day, the badly-injured Walsh had to be cut out of the chassis by two fellow drivers and his Pacer mechanics before an ambulance took him to hospital.

“[In hospital, I] got the news that that the RAC had turned down the appeal against the sponsorship advertising. So, the whole deal fell through,” he says matter-of-factly with a slight shrug.

“A big old accident that just put the damper on things and getting the news in Norwich Hospital that the deal had fell through, I thought I’d done enough in FFord [and] that it was time to give up. ‘You only get one shot’, I thought at the time.

“I was a director of a road surfacing company, so I just decided to concentrate on work and give up racing.”

Walsh never changed his mind, although he did consider a comeback in touring cars a few years later.

“Funnily enough, after all that, when I had ‘retired’, I was tempted with an offer to go into touring cars, which I’d never contemplated. I was always single-seaters, really. Crompton were very keen to do it because of the television coverage. I’d let my licence lapse, so I had to go and get six signatures to get my licence back, but unfortunately that fell through as well.”

He has no doubt that had things worked out differently, the speed and grip of F3 would have suited his style.

“I would have enjoyed that. I used to enjoy the speed that you could take the corners, it was brilliant. I used to get frustrated with FFord in some ways because of the restrictions of the tyres, you were sideways a lot of the time. I was trying to get the most I could out of it. I felt FF2000 and the F3, in the short time that I had, it was brilliant to have that extra speed through the corner. That was great.”

Also testing at Snetterton on the day of Walsh’s crash was Van Diemen’s new factory driver, 21-year-old Ayrton Senna.

“He was quick,” Walsh says of following Senna as they lapped Snetterton. “At that time, Russell was a very quick chicane and there were only a few people that could take that flat in a FFord and [this was] his first time on the circuit. He took [the corner], I followed him through [flat], and he was flat as well. I thought ‘he’s going to be quick’, and that proved to be so.”

FFord was an immensely popular category in Britain at the time, and Walsh raced against — and beat — some of the category’s most iconic names: Lees, Rick Morris, John Village, David Wheeler and Warwick.

“There was some great talent around at the time. We always used to have great dices and still shake hands and have some fun afterwards and never held grudges. There was always good, hard racing. But there’s countless ones that have showed potential but never really got the break. And I think that’s the story of motor racing, you know?”

Walsh lived in Northampton, the closest large town to Silverstone, at the time. Why was he so successful at his local track?

“It was all down to slipstreaming,” he says, modestly. “I learnt a lot in the early days with the likes of John Murphy and Geoff Lees. The secret really was not to lead on the last lap, so you had to make sure that you’re in a good position, second or third. It didn’t always work, but there was a lot of respect as well with drivers. There was one time, I think, we went three or four abreast round Woodcote and none of us took each other off.”

Walsh made his name with last-lap moves at Woodcote in its Club layout form, but had as much fun elsewhere on the track and felt Copse – turn one of the Club layout then and of today’s National layout used by FF1600 – also helped set up his wins.

“Some of the biggest enjoyment was the Grand Prix circuit. I used to love taking Club [corner] flat in top [gear]. There were some great races there. You just learn the tricks of the trade with slipstreaming.”

He added: “Copse was a very quick corner, but mentally you would tend to brake and if you’ve got a good line into Copse on the first lap, you could more or less break the slipstream, and that was the key to a lot of races won.” It remains the case now.

“I actually did quite well at Brands Hatch [too],” says Walsh, claiming he matched the lap record of the period in a Royale RP26.

In the 1978 FFord Festival, he won his heat, quarter-final and semi-final, defeating that year’s dominant driver Kenny Acheson each time. In the 20-lap final, Walsh came up against the Hawke-driving Bernard Devaney in a fierce battle at the front.

“We were pulling away, but Bernard was holding me up and I tried to go around the outside of Paddock [Hill Bend], which was a very dodgy move, and I just didn’t make it around the outside. The two of us came together and I went off and that was that.

“I used to enjoy some of the other circuits – Thruxton and Donington. In fact, there was a lot of times we were right down on the pace, and we had lap record times on different occasions. It was always broken shortly afterwards, but you know…”

Walsh stays involved with motorsport, and of course has a trophy named after him. The race is part of United FFord, the national championship for Britain today.

“[Championship promoter] James Beckett approached me with that. He asked me if I would attend and just hand out the trophies for that meeting.”

He is full of praise for Beckett’s efforts in “[bringing] back the spirit and revival of FFord in both the past and present format, and the racing is a joy to watch”. Beckett is responsible for the Walter Hayes Trophy, the huge end-of-year elimination-format event at Silverstone that first ran in 2001 that attracts ex-F1 racers and future IndyCar talent to compete.

“I have no regrets,” Walsh assures as he looks back on his life in racing. “I had a good career. Sometimes you have to believe that some things just aren’t meant to be. I was fortunate to have a very good wife and two lovely girls, and I had a company to be involved with as well. So, no regrets at all. We’ve had a good life and had a good career in racing.

“Fun days, fond memories.”