Who doesn’t love a good ghost story for Christmas?
The story of a long-forgotten 90s racing driver who barely recorded a blow during a temporary Formula 3000 career on the international stage hardly seems to be a justification for a narrated Mark Gatiss-style yarn.
But you don’t know about James Taylor.
In fact, nobody knows about James Taylor. Was he even called ‘James Taylor’?
Where did he come from to share with Olivier Panis, Juan-Pablo Montoya and Nick Heidfeld Grids in the 1990s? Why was he obsessed with a certain shade of green? And why did he protect his privacy so vehemently?
Motorsport in general is a reasonably social activity. Due to the concentration of people in one place – the paddock – everyone is somehow “known”, especially the drivers. Not Taylor.
Try to trace information about Taylor online. He drove in small F3000 seasons between 1994 and 1998, but you will find next to nothing in the details.
On the island of Malta, you might get October 18, 1955 as your date of birth, and if you’re lucky, you’ll see him in a grainy photo with a scowl into the camera. That’s it. Ghosts leave no traces!
It is so little known that even those who worked with him had no idea who he was, what he did, or where he came from.
He went so far as to protect his privacy that he wouldn’t even allow his own team to get his phone number or contact details.
It has fermented a speculative cult that has built up around it in recent years, but it appears to be a cult that will never be adequately answered.
The teams he drove for in F3000 didn’t know anything about him. He would pay, show up, be slow, and go home.
In researching this real-life racing ghost story, I heard the following from those who met, or at least thought they met ‘James Taylor’: he was the manager of the band Queen; a partner of Duran Duran front man and racing driver Simon Le Bon; an undercover Interpol officer; an Eastern European drug lord; and my darling of all, he was actually Edward Fitzalan-Howard, the 18th Duke of Norfolk, who raced in disguise.
None of this is true, and there is not the slightest evidence that anyone would stand a test to join the pantheon of obscure urban racing legends.
Still, there is a very weak link to the last of these outlandish and baseless rumors.
Edward Fitzalan-Howard, the 18th Duke of Norfolk, also holds the title of Earl of Arundel, and Taylor is believed to have given some of the Vortex Motorsport team members his home address as the magnificent medieval building of Arundel Castle.
The current heir to the Earl of Arundel title is Henry Miles Fitzalan-Howard, known in racing circles as Henry Arundel, who completed two seasons in British Formula 3 in 2008 and 2009.
But a simple search for Mr. Fitzalan-Howard (above right next to a young Marcus Ericsson on a Formula BMW podium) and the only public picture of Taylor suggests that, unless significant plastic surgery has been performed, they are very good are different people.
“To this day I have no idea who this guy was or what he did,” recalls Henny Vollenberg, who was a partner in the Vortex Motorsport team that led Taylor in the early seasons of his F3000 odyssey.
“We didn’t know anything about him, and he liked it that way.
“He always had the money with him, so we really only bothered about it at the time.”
So let’s look at what we know.
Prior to Formula 3000, Taylor had a partial campaign with West Surrey Racing in the British F3 Class B in 1992. This preceded a significant surge in power in the interseries scene in 1993.
That doesn’t sound like much, but here’s the thing. He also bought a Jordan 191 F1, which was equipped with mudguards and a bizarre rear wing with which he could race.
It was believed to be chassis number four, and Taylor then sold it directly to Michael Schumacher in 2002, where Schumacher loaned it to a German museum.
In full original 7UP livery and all, Taylor raced sporadically in 1994 as reported by John McNeil’s McNeil Engineering Organization.
One of those antics was a huge shunt at the Most Round in the Czech Republic this summer, which cut his interseries program and triggered a focus on F3000.
Amazingly, the FIA granted him a license for it, despite zero recognizable results at a nearly reasonable racing level.
Taylor shared the starting grid with drivers of the same age (in racing terms) and generally exhausted drivers in the Interseries and in July 1994 suddenly started alongside Gil de Ferran, Max Papis and, for his first F3000 race in Enna Pergusa, Kenny Brack.
Unsurprisingly, the results were modest. In his first half-campaign with Vortex Motorsport, which was then headed by the current Mercedes F1 sporting director Ron Meadows, he was an average of 4.2 seconds behind the top speed in qualifying.
In the races, Taylor was not as stubborn as his Italian gentleman colleague, the very headstrong Severino Nardozzi, who stumbled into the trail of Hockenheim polesitter Guillaume Gomez on the second lap (and that was the old Hockenheim!).
It peaked with 15th place in Enna and Estoril and barely registered a rash in the media. But he liked it that way because his incognito preferences were all too familiar to his own team.
Paul Heath, who worked as a mechanic at Vortex in the early 1990s, remembers Taylor as “pretty bad” but says he was “not as bad as some of the others I’ve come across”.
“There were various rumors about him that he was involved in managing pop groups and the like. I don’t think they were true, however, and I remember him saying they were nonsense too.
“He once told us, ‘If you try to find out who I am, I’ll stop driving for you.’
“I think he got wind of us trying to find out his background or where he lives or something and he said, ‘I’m not telling you where I live’ and ‘If you investigate me in any way, I will pack in. ‘”
That wasn’t your archetypal racing driver then, and Heath’s memories only add to the mystery of who he was.
Heath remembers someone who “had the mannerisms of an ‘out there’ old rocker hippie like he was Mick Jagger’s brother or something”.
“He also seemed fascinated by a certain shade of green, because he had green clothes and a green road car. In fact, he had those really weird green snakeskin cowboy boots and we joked that they looked like pimp boots. He didn’t like it that much! “
1995 and 1996 there were rather sporadic appearances, but 1997 brought both the high and the low point of his “work” in F3000.
Of the seven races in which Taylor participated, six ended without a race on the overbooked grid because he was firmly DNQ. Then a miracle happened in Spa.
Not only did he make it onto the starting grid at the expense of a C. Horner Knappen, but also finished the race on the refined 12th place.
Granted, it was the last ranked position and he had also benefited from dodging a catastrophic Tom Kristensen shunt at Blanchimont on the first lap that eliminated half a dozen cars.
Another sub-season in F3000 came in 1998 when the (estimated) then 43-year-old Taylor again drove a Bob Salisbury entry Lola.
His last race was perhaps his most notable and it had a narrative that engulfed both Nick Heidfeld and future Red Bull F1 boss Christian Horner in a bizarre encounter at the 1998 season finale at the Nürburgring.
McLaren’s junior team West Competition led Heidfeld, who was then fighting for the title against Juan Pablo Montoya from Super Nova.
The German was deprived of all qualifying time when it became apparent that he had driven the wrong fuel after a team mix-up.
With 33 registered cars and 32 (how many !?) authorized to start, the German was not allowed to start.
West Competition team manager Colin Morgan, who had offered to resign (which Ron Dennis refused to accept) because of the affair, found himself on the morning of race day on an unusual mission.
“We had to hire a few taillights to see if they would make room for Nick, so on the morning of the race I went to pick up this one driver on the team quad to take him from the parking lot and make suggestions.” withdraw from the race, ”Morgan told The Race.
“We’d test it in a McLaren F1 road car and all of those things. That driver was Christian Horner! “
Horner did not fall for the offer and took the race, and although Morgan cannot recall the same plan with Taylor, it is likely that at least his candidate Bob Salisbury and, through his deputy, Taylor, were offered similar incentives.
Neither worked, so West made the decision to pull Heidfeld’s team-mate Bas Leinders, who would have started from 16th on the grid, out of the race and let Heidfeld start from behind.
“Bas was the sacrificial lamb because we couldn’t tempt any of the back-row Charlies like Horner and that guy Taylor,” adds Morgan.
“It’s been a bad, bad weekend. It was the low point of my career, but Ron spoke to me and said he wouldn’t accept my resignation and we went back in 1999 with Nick’s title win, so it all kind of had a happy ending. “
The immobile Taylor started last and finished his usual low profile race two laps behind in 21st place after setting his best lap 5.7 seconds behind winner Gonzalo Rodriguez’s fastest time.
Heidfeld finished ninth, but Montoya drove to the title with a consistent third place and then drove with Ganassi to two successful CART Champ Car seasons in the States.
At the other end of the pit lane, Taylor unbuckled his belts, got out of his car, went to the parking lot, and was never seen again.
Like a ghost, James Taylor hardly left a trace on the international racing scene, as the appearance of modern racing simply slipped away completely unnoticed.
His whereabouts today are unknown, which is entirely in keeping with his image as the ultimate shadow of motorsport.
