► Russell Bulgin profiles Perry McCarthy
► Epic self-belief – matched with epic bad luck
► Original feature from CAR, August 1992
Perry McCarthy still makes racing car noises over the phone. He’s talking about pre-qualifying at Imola for the San Marino Grand Prix, doing the engine note – zweeeeeeeee! – the gearchanges – baaaarp-barp! – and the verttt! of hard braking. So Perry is, to cut a long story short, on his second lap, tyres still cool, zwee-ing and barp-ing and verttt-ing around, when what he thinks is a very fast corner turns into a very slow corner and Perry puts his Andrea Moda Formula One car sideways and barrels through, missing the kerbs, keeping his toe down. It was brilliant, he says. Sideways – no, make that completely sideways, like you wouldn’t believe – in a Formula One car, but safe, spectacular. Just brilliant. Oh. Gotta go. Squeaktoyalaterruss.
I once asked Perry McCarthy if he really had been christened Peregrine. I wanted to count a racing driver from Essex called Peregrine among my friends: the notion seemed highly unlikely and vaguely mad. No, said Pel – you do call him Pel, don’t you? If Terry contracts to Tel, then Perry must be Pel, right? – Perry is my given name. Local papers love it, he said. Sports page headlines are made of this. Champagne Perry. Geddit?
And now Perry McCarthy is a grand prix driver. This wasn’t in the programme. This wasn’t going to happen. When he called me one morning early in 1984, Perry McCarthy was never going to be a Formula One racer. I knew this for a fact: I would have bet my house on it. But Perry McCarthy was always convinced he would be up there sparring with Mansell and Brundle. According to Perry McCarthy, then as now, Perry McCarthy was going to make it big-time.
I love him for his determination. He hasn’t changed. Thinning blond hair – Pel, typically, does a good line in going-bald jokes – a musculature which is tight, hard, solid. He’s fit. Watch him walk. A medium-sized man with a big guy’s stroll: head high, shoulders snapped back, looser than the stereotypical tight-cheeked toe-out Nomex-wrapped paddock crawl of Formula One, but always alert. Looking around. Checking it out. On the case. Sussing. Thinking. Plotting. Ducking and, indeed, diving.
McCarthy called me when I was sports editor of Motor. Gave me the standard spiel, the flannel he used when cold-calling around Essex trading estates to source a Formula Ford budget. Knock on doors, get blanked, try again. And again. Day after day. He was going Formula Ford once more and he was going to win. Would Motor like to sponsor him?
No. No budget. Sorry. Pel persisted. You promise to write about me regularly, put a Motor decal on my car and go and tell my other sponsors they get guaranteed ink in the rag. Deal done. Simple.
I didn’t back McCarthy because I thought he was spectacularly talented, the next Ayrton Senna. I helped Perry because he was the only driver who ever rang up to ask. Think about that: big-circulation magazine, serious grand prix coverage, history of treating racing thoroughly, and P McCarthy, small-time Formula Ford champion, was the only bloke who ever called to see if a deal, any deal, could be done. And Pel was great: used to pop into the office, give it loads of smooth with the secretaries, chat to everyone, do his stuff. Be professional. Didn’t win many races, though.
Five years later I was talking to a Formula One team manager friend. He said he was thinking of giving Perry McCarthy a testing contract. (At this time Pel was out of work. No drives. No nothing. Trapped in a chasm between being a has-been and a never-was.) Why? I asked. Guy hasn’t set the world on fire, dominated championships. He’s just another thereabouts Brit. I like his attitude, said my pal, fumbling slightly.
What you mean is, I said, Perry is the only bloke who has ever rung you up and talked about a testing contract. All his contemporaries expect to be given things because they are oh-so-talented and think motor racing revolves around them. Pel actually had the front to say, well, how about it? Why not me? Er, yes, said my man. Exactly right.
There’s a live-in girlfriend in his life now. Karen. Quiet, pretty and, you must assume, stoic. Two daughters. Poppy and Frederica. (Meet the family: Kaz, Pel, Pops and Fred). I suspect he’s a massive pain in the arse to live with. He’s utterly possessed by this racing driver business. He’s retained the silly sense of humour, the quippery, the maximum-revs motormouthiness, but there’s steel underlying it all.
I don’t know how far in a hole he is now but he has been hundreds of thousands of pounds in debt. He made some money doing up a house in the ’80s – Pal is practical above all – and then sank the proceeds into racing. Buying drives. He might wear one of those reflective Stone Island jackets – the expensive red ones which mix a post-rave aesthetic with a hint of urban workman, Billericay-stylee -and the kids get fed, but you sense there are still worries about making the mortgage at the end of the month. Life is never simple for Per. For one reason. He wants to be a racing driver. He thinks he can do it. And rigorous self-belief has got him a long way. Into Formula One.
Eighty-four he remembers as the year of the crashes. Just two races. Oulton Park, a shunt so big they had to stop a race at Silverstone. (Or so he says). A case of talk-gibberish concussion. A long recovery. He then did Formula Three with a decent budget. He found the money, in Essex too, but the results were poor.
Things happen to McCarthy. Somebody up there is having a great time with me, he says: in Formula Three, a vital year in any driver’s career, he kept banging his right leg on the side of the cockpit, causing severe nerve damage. He was out of racing for three months. It took years for him to regain career momentum. He won one qualifying race – but the history books don’t record qual-ifying successes. The victory was hollow, effectively worthless.
He scuffed around Formula 3000, trying to hustle drives. He had gone past the stage of trying to drive harder instead of learning how to make the car go faster. Technically, he was sharp. Trouble was, no-one wanted to employ him without a fat cheque to accompany his hunger, what he calls his ache inside.
He was called one evening. Could he go to Brands Hatch the following day and substitute for an F3000 driver who, ironically, hadn’t paid his bills? He could. He qualified third, finished second. This was prime Pel: with no testing, getting a good starting position was down to treading the fine line between sticking it in the wall or sticking it on the grid.
But, at one stage, he had been out of racing for eight months. He deputised for other drivers, took over poor F3000 seats no-one wanted. Got into races. Drove flat-out for 14th place. From 1988 through to 1990 he seemed finished as a racing driver. Going nowhere fast, He spent time chasing serious sponsorship. Which never came through. Perry McCarthy looked like an ex-racing driver who couldn’t quite say no.
Did a few Formula 3000 races in 1990. Tiny team, no budget. Mates in other teams who admired his persistence loaned tyres, fuel and – believe it or not – a crownwheel-and-pinion. Spa, in Belgium. Fast in the dry. Hollow-eyed scary in the rain. But McCarthy has always been quick in the wet, where sensitivity and guts count for more than chassis set-up and a fresh engine.
Spa. In the wet practice session he was second fastest to Erik Comas – then the track dried and he slipped back to 11th. Bad start, finished seventh. Le Mans. The race car got stuck on the tail-lift of the transporter, 12ft off the ground – this is typical McCarthy – had to be craned off, and he missed most of practice.
Banzai to last place on the grid, out-driving 10 non-qualifiers. Pre-race warm-up? Third fastest. Ahead of Jean Alesi. The race? Riotous. Brought the car home 14th with no clutch, a couple of gears gone west, steering skewiff and body damage after a crash. There was, he says, no way he was going to pit and waste time. No way at all.
He got a deal testing the Footwork Formula 3000 car. It was uncompetitive, but Perry was quick every time it rained. He didn’t get to race it: the drive went to Damon Hill. Footwork liked his attitude. They gave him a run-the-gearbox-in Formula One testing contract. A check-nothing-falls-off deal. Blatting around a grey Silverstone on cold tyres in four-lap bursts. It was a lifeline.
I can remember Pel calling me one night. You’re not gonna believe this, Russ, he said. I’m a Formula One driver. Really? Yeah. Then Pel explained he had been bedding-in gearboxes for Footwork: zip along the pit straight and then hack back down the pit lane. The wrong way. Only Perry McCarthy could make a Formula One debut like that.
And Pel said he loved it. Formula One. He was there. (Almost.) And, he said, what Formula One really needs is drivers who can hang their arse out of the window and aren’t afraid to get wiped. (Translation: drive very quickly and put the fear of injury out of their minds.) Now he says he’s changed his views. Sometimes a racing driver needs to have a limited imagination in certain situations, yes. But you don’t carry that process through to outside the car. Then it’s a technical, almost intellectual, activity: analysis, interpretation and, of course, getting a result.
Another chance. To race in the United States. IMSA sports cars. A 675bhp Spice-Chevrolet. He won at Mid-Ohio. He was so fast he annoyed his co-driver, who couldn’t match his pace. Pel wasn’t paying for the drive and the team wanted to replace McCarthy with someone slower – so as not to annoy the lead driver – who could bring funds. There were pole positions, a race in the rain where he caught and passed the leading Jaguar in the first 10 laps.
Go natural, he told himself. That was the phrase. Go natural. Just drive. You know you can do it. You always could. Roundy-round America loved McCarthy. But the team eventually axed him. For being too fast. And too poor. He had progressed, but got nowhere. Unemployed again.
Earlier this year a contact called to say that the Andrea Moda Formula One team was about to fire its drivers and needed some replacements. Pel’s name was in the frame. For a Formula One drive, A British solicitor with racing connections had put him forward. He went for an interview: Perry reckons his intensity came across. He had little else to offer.
Plus, of course, his career had been so stop-start that he had to drive every race – no, every lap – as if this was the last opportunity to prove himself. That attitude is ingrained now. And Andrea Moda was a peculiar team, formed out of the ashes of the Italian Colon’ squad. An operation for which actually making the race was, all too often, a mystery. This was a team of trying to prequalify on Friday morning and then heading homewards by the time Senna and Mansell were going for pole position.
Andrea Moda, Perry reckoned, needed someone who could motivate. Get people working. Someone who would never slag them. Someone who wasn’t interested in protecting his fragile ego at the expense of the team. Someone who would get out there and do the job.
His first attempt at qualifying came at Barcelona. He got 10 yards, the car stalled, and, due to an arcane Formula One rule about mechanics not being able to work on the car out of the pits, that was that. He kept cool. One of those things. One of those things that happen to McCarthy.
Imola. Did seven laps in pre-qualifying. He couldn’t use his car for the whole session in case lead driver Roberto Moreno needed it as a back-up. Felt the understeer increase, knew the diff was on the way out. Didn’t make the race. But seven laps. At Imola. In Formula One. Got given a little trophy for he knows not what. Engraved with his name and Gran Premio di San Marino. The only other pot he has kept is his Formula Ford championship one. The rest he doesn’t care about. He’ll keep the Imola memento and hope to God that there might be a few more.
He’s in Formula One now. He’s loving it. It’s almost Boy’s Own-ish. He always knew he’d get there. He just wasn’t sure how. It’s brilliant. A mate at Ford has loaned him a 24-valve Scorpio: it’s a great car, Russ -have you driven one?
Perry McCarthy does not get paid to drive in Formula One. Instead, he has to settle his own expenses – air fares, hotels, hire cars to the track. Coming back from Imola he blagged a lift from Heathrow into London and then got the train home, Ten days before the Monaco Grand Prix, a week before he, Perry McCarthy the grand prix driver from Billericay, was due to strap himself in the Andrea Moda and, please God, make the grid at Monaco, the event, the one he’s always dreamed about, Pel tied up a sponsorship deal for the race.
A friend who runs a wine bar stumped up £300 so he could, at last, take Karen to a grand prix and they could eat over race weekend. That, he says, is progress. He’s on the up. He’s got nothing to complain about. Christ, he’s a Formula One driver. Squeaktoyalaterruss. Good luck, Perry.