Partly because he spends half his life across the Atlantic, I haven’t sat down with Derek in a few years, but the last time we went to a pub during a Goodwood Revival weekend I can hang out for an evening remember that I’ve spent hearing stories that literally made me laugh and that are completely unrepeatable here. He was life and soul and made a handful of journalists feel like his best friends. So when he stopped making a living from racing for automakers, he began serving as an ambassador for them instead. After all, who doesn’t want Derek Bell to represent their interests to customers and the media?
And yet I always discovered a slight vulnerability there, too, an occasional need to explain why he was not even more successful than he was. Could it be because the successes he’s best known for – all those victories in sports car endurance races – not to mention his three Daytona 24-hour victories – were only achieved with the help of teammates? If so, let’s not forget the two sports car world championships. And this: During the entire commitment of Porsche as a works team in the happy era of Group C racing, he had only one driver left from his entry in 1982 to his retreat to Le Mans in 1988: Derek Reginald Bell.
Memories of Derek? As a driver in 1995 Le Mans, where he shared the yellow Harrods McLaren F1 GTR with Andy Wallace and his son Justin. It is known they should have won and would have won without a faulty gearbox, but he still rated getting on the podium with his boy as his greatest moment in motorsport.
What is perhaps less known is what a difficult car McLaren had to drive with almost no downforce, especially in the wet, and this was one of the wettest Le Mans ever. And I remember that filthy night the incredibly talented JJ Lehto staggered at the factory Ueno Clinic F1 GTR in Justin. Years later, a charmingly embarrassed JJ told me that there were laps that night where he was half a minute faster than anyone else on the track. Given that they were about to lose their lead, the Harrods team pitted Justin, put Dad behind the wheel, and sent him outside. And suddenly the rapidly decreasing gap stopped shrinking. At the time, JJ Lehto was 29 years old and had been an F1 driver for the past six seasons. Derek was 53.
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