Luigi Musso:

He was one of the best drivers of his time and I think obviously he would have improved with experience – he died really rather young.

Do you think that the relationship between Collins and Hawthorn did him a disservice at Ferrari?

Possibly, I don’t know how the politics went at Ferrari, because he certainly wasn’t an easy man, but in truth I just don’t know.

Masten Gregory:

He was a funny bloke, quite amusing. Very competent driver, mostly in sports cars, though he did of course do Formula 1. Just one of those guys who made up the season, you know, another person who came in, there were only about 18 cars so I got to know him quite well.

Stuart Lewis-Evans:

Well Stuart Lewis-Evans was one of the fastest drivers in the world, I mean he really was exceptionally fast and in fact, unfortunately as you know he had an accident and maybe he was going a little bit too quickly. But he was a very competent driver – even though he was quite a small guy, he was pretty wiry.

I think that was the reason Tony Vandervell gave up – once he’d beaten the red cars he’d done what he wanted to do, and the tragedy made him think ‘well, I don’t want to go on anymore’

Archie Scott-Brown:

Well Archie, the fact that he only had a stump for an arm didn’t make any damn difference at all. He was exceptionally competent, a very nice guy and a great loss to the sport, really.

Innes Ireland – do you think his reputation as a bon viveur belied his talent?

Yes, well Innes was a character – motor racing needs characters – and he was also a very fast driver. I mean he was, for quite a long time, as fast as Jim Clark when he was driving the same cars at Lotus. He was such a fun person to have around. I think Colin Chapman handled him very badly, quite honestly, but I think I can understand why, because Innes was a sort-of take it as it comes sort of guy and I don’t think Colin liked that sort of thing – I think he liked to feel that people were a bit more dedicated, which of course Innes was, but it just didn’t show in the same way as with Jim Clark.

Perhaps similar to Kimi today?

Yes, good analogy.

Mike Hawthorn:

Hawthorn was very fast, when he was on form. People always cite it as being a great race when he beat Fangio at Reims, which is really not correct, because what happened was he was smart enough to be in front of Fangio coming into the last corner, and he waved him past. Fangio took the bait, and went around him, then Mike dropped back and coming up to the start/finish line he just pulled out and passed him. So he outsmarted him. I mean he had a lot of ability as well, but that was not the way people painted him – his ability concealed many other events. You know, Mike was a great character, he was blonde and tall, drank beer. You were either a Hawthorn fan or a Moss fan. I was dedicated, teetotal, just chased crumpet and went racing. Mike had a more expansive life, let’s put it that way!

The thing you’ve got to remember is that these guys were playboys, but once they got out there that all went by. Some were introvert, some were extrovert, just because you’re one way or the other doesn’t affect, in any way, your driving skills.

Were the number of mechanical failures and breakages you’d experienced whilst driving for Lotus and Maserati a reason for joining Ferrari in ’62?

Quite honestly, if the Maserati had been made by Ferrari it would have been a much better car, because I think Ferrari engineering is the best and Maserati design is great. I wanted to go to Ferrari because he’d asked me to drive his car, had agreed to paint one in Rob Walker blue and was going to give it to me for the year. It would have been a great thing if I only hadn’t had my crash.

Ferrari had a difficult time in ’62 – do you think you might have given them a competitive edge?

Yes, but I think if I’d been there I could have helped them sort it out, because I’d had so much experience in driving cars, figuring out how to remedy things. I like to hope I could have got a better car than they had.

How did Rob Walker feel about having to cope with the politics at Ferrari?

Well there wouldn’t have been any. That’s the great thing: they were going to paint the car in his colours, give it to us to run. Alf Francis would have been there when it was being built, therefore we’d have had our group and he’d have had his. And obviously he would expect us to try and beat him in the same way we’d expect him to try and beat us, so I think it would have been a very amicable arrangement.

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“It was off and on a years’ work – still racing in between. Funnily enough I got involved with the trial for the movie John Sturges and Steve McQueen were going to do, Day of the Champion. You had two camps – the MGM and the Warner Brothers’, and they were both running around signing people up – effectively I signed for Warner Brothers. They did some trial footage at the Nurburgring, but at a certain point Warner Brothers decided there wasn’t room for two movies and scrubbed theirs, which I think was probably a wise decision, though it would’ve been interesting to see what they actually came up with, because Sturges had made The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven, those sort of movies, so it would’ve been a serious effort. It was interesting actually, meeting John Sturges and comparing him to John Frankenheimer – they were very different sorts of people. Sturges appeared to be very matter-of-fact, very down to earth, whereas Frankenheimer was a much more artistic type of person. But both were obviously great in their own right.

The whole moviemaking thing was a bit of an eye-opener to somebody like myself, coming in from the outside – you sort of got the impression that there was an awful lot of time wasted, but really when you think about it, it was such a huge project with so many people going in so many different directions, that to actually make it happen was a huge achievement. In hindsight Frankenheimer must’ve been a great organiser because things always seemed to happen – there didn’t seem to be a great deal of panic, which there was certainly a great deal of potential for, because you had a professional group of people: cameramen, make-up and lighting and actors, then you had a big group of total amateurs – in terms of the film world – and to coordinate all of that was obviously a fair achievement.

I didn’t do any direct to camera stuff as an individual, but to have all that stuff pointed at you in such a controlled atmosphere, it wasn’t easy. I think that the most relaxed footage they got was in that pub somewhere near Brands – basically everyone filled themselves up and had a great party. Frankenheimer was struggling a bit to get people to relax and not look wooden, and I think one of the ways to do that was to actually get some beer flowing. Graham was almost a stand-up comedian, and that’s the surprising thing in the film – if he’d just been himself it would’ve been great, but it’s not easy having a camera put in front of you and being told what to say, and how to say it. It definitely wasn’t Graham because it’s not just the camera, it’s all the people and the lights and everything else. Phil was probably – as far as the drivers went – one of the better actors, he sort of played himself, really.

James Garner was great, a really nice down to earth guy – he wasn’t particularly ‘Hollywood’. He was a very capable driver, a very keen driver, too – he liked racing and he liked cars, which made a big difference. I found him a really nice, pleasant guy.

Sabato could barely even drive, from memory. Montand wasn’t capable, but watching him, he was certainly very professional. Sabato we had some very funny moments with. We had this GT40 with a trailer hitch on the back of it, which it became my principal job to drive, Frankenheimer used to sit beside me and work the cameras – he had television lenses strapped on beside the camera lens, so he could see what he was shooting from inside the car via monitors. It was basically a Formula 3 car, or Formula Junior car with the front wheels cut off it and the trailer hitch attached, so the camera was just focusing on the driver. I got the distinct impression he didn’t like Sabato, and when he put him in the trailer hitch we’d be doing some scenes and Frankenheimer would say ‘Hang it out a bit’ and you know you could hang the GT40 out and it would hang the trailer out into the ditch basically – it was very obvious, after a while that Frankenheimer wasn’t very impressed with Sabato, and the more I hung him in the ditch, the better. But Montand did a lot in that trailer car too and it was interesting watching him work because he’d, you know, get going and you could see it must’ve been bloody terrifying – you could see it was bothering him – but then he’d pull himself together and act again, so very professional. I mean I wouldn’t have wanted to sit in the thing for all the money in the world! I tend to think that occupational health and safety these days wouldn’t fully approve it!

Francoise Hardy was very interesting, she was quite aloof on the movie, but probably that was a deliberate thing in that first of all she didn’t know all these motor racing people – probably had no interest in motor racing and sort of kept to herself. But after the shoot was finished – in fact it might have been after the premiere – I had dinner at the Dorchester, where Frankenheimer was staying, and Francoise came. She was just a totally different person – relaxed, chatty, friendly, and I think that was the true person. She obviously got on very well with Frankenheimer.

A lot of the driving was very compromised by the cameras and all the paraphernalia that they sort of crammed into and onto the cars, but it wasn’t really a major issue because we weren’t really going hard out. Some of the stuff on the banking at Monza would have been 100/120mph, but quite often the fastest you went was going back to start a take again. We didn’t do whole laps, but there were sequences of corners and things, then you know, you’d all turn round, go back in the other direction, and sort of hoon it, whereas the stuff that was actually shot tended to be quite controlled. If you get a bunch of racing people in that environment then every now and then they want to break out, certainly was in terms of repositioning cars! I mean at Clermont they shot on various different parts of the circuit, and you know, because it’s quite a long circuit, a bit of hooning used to go on between the various shooting spots.

I spent two or three weeks at Clermont, quite a lot of time at Brands too, and Monza. We actually did some of the Monaco stuff in the town of Clermont – I remember there were scenes going up the hill at Monaco, and a lot of what appeared in the film was actually shot at Clermont. My hotel room was next to James Garner’s and they were using that part of the hotel for some of the scenes between him and Jessica Walter. There was probably a lot more done at Clermont than just the racing scenes, but they were identified as somewhere else.

We saw the odd clip, or rush, whatever they call them, but it wasn’t until it was all put together that I really got a grasp of the storyline. I guess the initial reaction, and not just from me, was that it was all a bit over the top. But to be bluntly honest – I’ve watched it a number of times since – looking back, it was all pretty much as it was. Slightly embellished in what people were saying, in that I don’t think we used to talk that way, but what the people were saying in the movie was what I guess people were thinking privately at the time. So in that regard it was probably fairly close to the truth, but as I say, we didn’t tend to talk about it quite so much…”

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