MAURICE HAMILTON

(Note: this interview originally appeared in my book Grand Prix People, published in 1990)

MAURICE HAMILTON

Suspended from a cord around his neck is Maurice Hamilton's FIA Formula 1 World Championship press pass, issued to him by the Federation Internationale du Sport Automobile. On the back of the piece of laminated plastic, beside a photo of him grinning through his neatly trimmed beard, is an inscription: 'The holder of this credential must be given free access into the circuit and its confines at all times during the season.' Hamilton, now a highly esteemed journalist writing for several prestigious publications, was once so desperate to gain access to pit lane that he forged his own press pass.

Maurice Hamilton, who was selling plastic underground drainage systems at the time, had the bogus credential made up at a booth in Victoria Station in London for 50p. Beside his photo was the inscription: 'Maurice Hamilton, Motor Racing Features.' On the back was a list of magazines he was supposedly writing for, the last one being Cart & Track. The cart in question was the donkey-powered variety, as found in his native Northern Ireland. Hamilton's theory was that if his credential was called into question he could point to Cart & Track and say the whole thing was a joke. But his ruse worked and gained him entry to the Monaco Grand Prix.

"It's all my father's fault. He'd been a motor racing freak and got me started when he took me to the Tourist Trophy race at Dunrod when I was seven. This was in the early '50s and we went up there, north of Belfast, where an uncle of mine got me a pit pass. And I got into the pits at that age, which was really something. The noise, the smell, all the things that still hit you today, the sensual things. The speed, but particularly the noise and the excitement and the smell. The drama. And I came home thinking this is just wonderful - absolutely incredible! 

"Later on my Dad bought me an autograph book. I still have it, with Fangio's, Hawthorn's, Collins' - all their autographs. Everybody. Jimmy Clark, Graham Hill, Phil Hill, Jackie Stewart, right through the 60's. I kept it then and took it with me right up to when I became a professional writer and then I felt guilty about it. It wasn't the same anyway. When you have access to these people it doesn't seem the same thrill.

"But I'll never, ever forget going to get Clark's autograph, because it was the one I wanted most.  And I chose the perfect moment. '66 Gold Cup, Oulton Park. On the Thursday or the Friday there was an unofficial practice session. Clark was there and the car wasn't ready and he was hanging about. My mate Tim got the camera ready and I went up with my autograph book and asked him for his autograph. Perfect. Yes, certainly. And he started to write it, and my pen ran out of ink!

"Can you believe that?  And the point about it was, he was more embarrassed than I was. And he sort of did it hard on the paper, and then - I was nearly in tears - Tim and I went and got another pen and filled in the indentations.  You can see it in the book."

Hamilton's passion for the sport was still being diluted by occasional bouts of "hooliganism", usually involving girls and drinking. "But the major turning point was when four of us took a Volkswagen Beetle from Northern Ireland and we went to the 1966 British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch, with a tent in the back of the Beetle. And we just hung about, camped in a field nearby, and really got deeply involved in it. I thought: This is it, this is phenomenal!' All these big star names - Graham Hill, Jackie Stewart, Jim Clark, John Surtees, B.R.M.'s - the whole business - a Grand Prix with all the pizazz and the trumpets and the whole show.  I'd never seen anything quite like that before. This was suddenly big time and I was aware of it. It really just swept me off my feet, and from that moment on I was looking at ways of somehow getting involved."

Hamilton was being groomed to take over the family building company when his father retired. On leaving school, where he "hadn't been a particular success," his father got him a position with an accounting firm in Belfast. Young Maurice worked there for two years and "hated every minute of it." Next came an attempt to be a quantity surveyor. Four times he failed to pass the examinations for the first stage of this occupation. "Whereupon my father said, 'Well what are you going to do?  You're hopeless, your heart's not in it'. And I said, 'Well I want to get involved in motor racing.' And he said, 'Don't be so stupid. How can you do that?' And I literally didn't know.

"Then Tim and I bought a 14 day coach tour to the Nurburgring 1000 kilometers and the Monaco Grand Prix. This was the first time I'd ever been abroad outside the U.K. and you can imagine the effect those two races had on me.  Mind blowing, just absolutely and utterly mind blowing!  More determined than ever now, there had to be a job for me in there somewhere." 

On that trip Hamilton stopped in London to seek career advice from a Vocational Guidance concern. His capabilities were assessed and Hamilton came away with a document proving he was entirely unsuited to deal with mathematics. Instead, he was an ideal candidate to work with people and, much to his surprise, he learned he had an affinity for writing.

He had never written anything for public consumption, though English was a favourite subject at school, and the only literature he was interested in at the time was contained in Autosport, Motoring News and Motor Sport. His favourite author was DSJ. "I remember Tim and I saw Jenks at Oulton Park in his lefthand drive E-Type leaving the circuit. Must have been '66 or '67. And we debated whether to rush up to him - he was stuck in a queue of traffic, as we were. And the debate was: do we go up and sort of speak to him and say hello, and we decided against it. We were too shy, to think we could go and intrude on the great man's presence."

Nowadays Jenks and Maurice are good friends but on the day of that Oulton Park sighting his young admirer went back across the Irish Sea to Belfast where he sold Volvos for three years, spending every spare penny on ferrying himself back over to England to watch the races. He answered the ads in Autosport, offering his services as a gopher, team manager in Formula 3, willing to fill any motor racing vacancies that existed. But no one was interested in him. He decided he had to be on the spot, in England.

"The turning point came after I went to the 1969 Oulton Park Gold Cup. I came back across on the Monday morning, drove off the ferry in Belfast and tried to drive up the Falls Road to where the car showroom was. I couldn't, because there were soldiers blocking the bottom of it.  And I'd never seen soldiers in Belfast before. It had been that weekend of the first rioting.  And I drove around the back streets and got in to where the showroom was and it had been blown up. And I remember thinking: this is it.  This isn't going to end tomorrow. The trouble will get worse and worse, and I immediately began making plans to get out." 

He packed all his worldly possessions, boarded the ferry and set sail on a voyage which he hoped would  lead to a career in motor sport. But he was to be blown off course several times, beginning with a stint selling Olivetti tyewriters, door-to-door in London.

"It was cold calling. It taught me a lot about myself and it brought me out of myself, and it did me the world of good.  And funnily enough, going back to the vocational guidance thing, they had said that because I'd failed in so many different ways, I was introspective and lacked confidence.  They said if you could get something which you're quite good at, you'll change.  And they were right.  I did.

"Meanwhile, I'm still looking at motor sport and I can't think of a way into it at all.  I didn't want to be a driver. I knew I wasn't good enough. Couldn't be a mechanic, I'm hopeless with anything like that. I'm not interested in that side anyway.  So, what do I do? Then I remembered the guidance report said maybe I should try writing.

"I went to the 1973 Monaco Grand Prix with my Dad and I thought the secret has to be to write a piece that nobody else has written.  There's no point in trying to write a report because there are guys out there writing reports and I wouldn't know where to start and I haven't got access to the drivers.  So I decided on a piece about the Monaco Grand Prix from a spectators point of view, what it's like going there and what it's like being there - what you see and what you don't see."

So Maurice Hamilton took copious note, borrowed a typewriter and pecked out a story about his adventures at the Monaco Grand Prix.

He sent it to Motor Sport and when they failed to respond he visited the magazine's office. "And I got as far as the secretary, who told me to go away.  She came up with the immortal line, 'Mr. Jenkinson never comes in.' I said, 'Okay.  Is Mr. Boddy in. 'Well, he is, but he's busy.  Anyway, he gets a lot of letters you know, and a lot of correspondence, and some of it isn't very nice!'"

Hamilton was similarly discouraged by several other publications, then tried Competition Car, which was edited by Nigel Roebuck. "So I took the manuscript in. Nobody about. The secretary took it, she said she'd show it to Mr. Roebuck. I thought: Here we go again. I told her, 'Tell him I'll come back next week to see what he thinks.' She said, 'Alright, yes he will read it, don't worry.'  She must have seen the despair in my face!

"Later, I came back to the office, and I thought, I'm going to sort something out here, come hell or high water. I went in, and there's this little fellow in a leather coat wandering about. I said, 'Can I speak to the editor please, Mr. Nigel Roebuck.?' And he said, 'Yes, it's me.' He wasn't what I expected at all.  And I introduced myself. 'Oh', he said, 'Yes.  I read it. We like it.  We're going to publish it!'

"And we became very firm friends from that point on. I held on to him because, suddenly, here was the first person who I'd met in the business who I could sort of cling on to and I did. I started to go to races with him, he fiddled me a press pass, and one thing and another. He encouraged me to write other features and articles.  He then gave me a monthly column in the magazine and then it went bust!"

Before that happened the budding journalist had several Grands Prix under his belt, though he was still employed in the workaday world. His tenure selling houses for Wimpey had little impact on the London real estate market because Hamilton tended to be abroad during weekends, the prime selling time. When he switched to selling plastic underground drainage pipes his company car became a vehicle to escape to the races. "I actually did very well at that.  I was my own boss, worked from home, they give me a company car, so what I used to do was work like mad Monday to Thursday, fake Friday's report, take the company car, fill it with fuel and go to Zolder or somewhere to the Grand Prix. This was when I made up my own credential and used it to get myself an armband at Monaco."

An introduction to Eoin Young, by Roebuck, provided Hamilton with his next breakthrough. "It was at the Nurburgring of '76 where, again, I'd bummed my way there, and fiddled my way in. Eoin Young asked me if I would like to take a ride around the circuit with Jackie Stewart in a BMW, then write about it.  I did that, it was magic that ride, wrote a piece and showed it to Eoin. He said, 'Right, I'm going to syndicate this for you to all my magazines.'  I thought, what's the catch?  Why is he doing this?  And I said, 'Alright, do you want to take a percentage of whatever it earns?' 'He said, 'No, you just seem a likely lad.' He was just giving me a leg up.  So he sent it to magazines worldwide with a covering letter from him saying this is a bloke I know, this is what he's written.  And five magazines published it world wide, which was phenomenal! To me that was a big step forward."

Eoin Young then invited Hamilton to work for him. At that time Young was heavily involved in public relations for Elf and First National City Travellers Cheques, the Tyrrell sponsor, and Hamilton would write press releases for him. "Eoin said, 'If you're keen you can come and work for me, but I really can't afford to pay.'  I said, 'Well I can't afford not to have an income.' And I turned it down, that was in November '76.

"Christmas of that year, I went home and father said, 'Right.  Crunch time.  I'm standing down, I'm going to retire shortly.  If you're going to come into the company, you're to come in now.  You'll have a directorship, house, company car, everything, but you have to decide now, because once I stand down, you can't come in, for obvious reasons, over people who have worked there a long time.  What are you going to do?'

"So I spent three or four days thinking about it, and I thought  I've got to give it one shot, I've got to try.  I said to Dad, 'Look, I've got to go back, I'm going to resign from my job, I'm going to try to become a full time writer. I'm going to go and work for Eoin Yoing and I'll see how it goes.' So I went straight back to Eoin, and on New Year's Eve, 76-77, we shook hands and I became a full-time freelance motorsport journalist.

"It was very slow the first year, made no money whatsoever. He paid me, I think, a nominal sum, but he took me to about five or six races abroad and he paid the expenses. He took me right up into the top level of Grand Prix racing and introduced me around and said, 'This is Maurice Hamilton.' And that was my passport, Eoin bringing me in under his wing,  It was tremendous because I wasn't coming in as a junior and hanging about. He was introducing me to all the right people which was just priceless! Fantastic." 

In 1978 Hamilton was nominated by Eric Dymock to replace him as the motor sport correspondent for The Guardian. Shortly after that he was appointed editor of the annual, Autocourse, and Hamilton held both positions until recently. Now writing for The Independent and several magazines, he still marvels at his good fortune and is somewhat bemused that his scribbling (he is one of the few in the pressroom to write in longhand) is so highly rated. "After all these years I still can't believe that I can do it.  I still can't believe that I can sit down and produce a piece that's actually quite good. It's a gift and it's one of those things that you're ever so grateful for." 

Humour is a Hamilton hallmark and his tongue is never far from his cheek. He believes this is partly an anecestral legacy ("Coming from Ireland, you can't help it because life is a laugh over there.") and partly to make light of some of the disappointment he found in the reality of Grand Prix racing.

"It came as quite a shock when it became a business for me. Your outlook changes dramatically when suddenly it's not a hobby any more and you've got to make it pay.  Sounds terrible, but you do.  And you look upon things slightly differently.  You look upon it from a more commercial viewpoint.  It tends to lose that lovely sort of glossy image which you had when you looked at it from the outside.

"The romance doesn't disappear, it's still there, but it's different because a large part of the romance is wiped out by the sheer commercial side of it. I tended to believe that everyone involved was a one hundred percent enthusiast like I was. Of course when you get on the inside you realize there are some great people involved who are super enthusiasts, but there's a hell of a lot who just treat it as a business and it's a very hard, cut-throat, occasionally nasty business. No point in crying about it or being upset.  My attitude now is that I will never see it the same way again. But I don't want to do anything else, so I accept it.

"Just doing your job, be it a journalist, be it a mechanic, be it a PR person, is so competitive that you have to do it better than the next man. Because that's what Grand Prix racing is all about - it's about winning.  And it filters right down through everything in Formula 1. Everybody likes to do a better job. I want to write a piece that is considered to be the best, it's as simple as that.

"The whole business is so competitive. It always amuses me that some people have to be off the airplane first, and first in the car hire queue. They've got to have a better car than you. And if there are any freebees in the paddock, they've got to make sure that they get them, they don't want to be seen without.  It's very competitive in every respect. 

"From the minute I arrive at the circuit, or even at the airport when you start to meet Formula 1 people, I'm always conscious of not knowing everything that's going on, and I want to know. But you never do know everything that's going on.  That's the frustrating part.  You never do get to the bottom of everything.  The first thing everybody asks when they meet you is 'What's new, what's happening?'  It's not just curiosity, it's competitiveness.  Because you don't want to be caught out not knowing something.

"But there's no point in being totally competitive and spoiling friendships just because you're not going to share a secret.  Because you need to trade off each other. You need help from each other.  Also I don't think it's worth being totally secretive and alienating yourself. You've got to live together.  So you do tell each other things. Alan Henry, for instance, of The Guardian, and myself from The Independent - we're very close friends, but we're rivals.  And I will help Alan if he's in trouble, and he will help me.  But if I find out a little thing, I won't necessarily tell him.  And I would not expect him to tell me. But I wouldn't send him the wrong way, chasing after the wrong story, and I wouldn't lie to him.  

"Inside the world of journalism, you tend to find the guys on the specialist magazines are disparaging about the tabloid press. But once you've become a newspaper writer you respect the job they're doing, because it's different.  It's quite hard. You have to have a very racy style. You have to chase after drivers more and get quotes.  It is more difficult then I had ever imagined watching from the outside, being a tabloid writer.  That's what I like about writing for a quality paper. I can sit down and write a reflective piece, whereas they can't.  They've got to have quotes, saying Nigel Mansell said this, Nigel Mansell said that. 

"I've talked to a lot of drivers and I've learned that they're human beings, just like the rest of us, and that they've got their foibles and phobias and what have you.  But, what hasn't changed is my view that when they get into a car they are somebody special.  That hasn't changed.  In fact, if anything, that has been magnified. Some guys I like, some guys I don't, but when they're in the car I think they're all up there, on a plateau.

"Out of the car the physical and emotional and mental draining they have to go through is phenomenal. All the PR stuff and the debriefs and the dealing with the press. And the pressure they're under all the time to succeed and the mental pressure if they're not doing so well. I'm more aware of that now than I ever was before. 

"When I walk down pit lane I'm just observing the scene generally.  If I have one failing it's that I'm not a very good news hound.  Never have been.  Sounds a strange thing for a newspaper man to say.  Working for a quality it's not quite so vital that you get every last bit of tittle tattle in there. Some journalists thrive on the gossip and the latest piece of news and who's doing what. I don't particularly, and I find all that a little bit tedious and a bit boring. 

"I like to just breathe in the whole atmosphere, take it all in. I watch the way the teams work.  The mechanics never cease to amaze me, just how they do their job.  The drivers, just to see how they're dressed or what they're saying, or how relaxed they are, or otherwise. I'm always looking for insights into the drivers.  I like to talk to them, not of anything particular, just to chat.

 

"Senna is the one driver who won't talk to me and I'm very sad about that. Because it's mainly due, I think, to a misunderstanding over something he thought I wrote. It was during the time of the Senna/Warwick signing controversy at Lotus for the 1986 season. I wrote my tongue in cheek Old Mo's Almanac thing in Autosport and Senna confused that with something else that appeared in Motoring News. That piece Senna interpreted as being insulting to his mother, though I didn't write it. I explained it all to him but from that day to this he still has it in his head that I might kick him sooner or later. It's not true and I'm very distressed about that. So we hardly communicate which is a shame. And I think that's indicative of him, that he's got this thing in his head, so that's sad.  But then it's a reflection of what you have to deal with, with Grand Prix drivers.

"We also have to deal with the public relations aspect. I see sponsorship and PR as a necessary part of Formula 1, but not the vital part, and I take exception to the PR people who try to ram it down your throat. I think that most of the PR people generally know what to do, and they do provide a service. I think though some of them, and some of the sponsors, tend to have an inflated idea of their station in life, in the Formula 1 paddock. About the motorhome syndrome, I have no objection to it. I think it's part of Grand Prix racing today and you have to accept it as such. Besides, without it we wouldn't get a decent lunch!"