Leslie Johnson (racing driver)

Leslie Johnson
Born (1912-03-22)22 March 1912
Died 8 June 1959(1959-06-08) (aged 47)
Formula One World Championship career
Nationality British
Active years 1950
Teams ERA
Entries 1
Championships 0
Wins 0
Podiums 0
Career points 0
Pole positions 0
Fastest laps 0
First entry 1950 British Grand Prix
Last entry 1950 British Grand Prix

Leslie George Johnson (22 March 1912 – 8 June 1959) was a British racing driver who competed in rallies, hill climbs, sports car races and Grand Prix races.

Overview

Leslie Johnson was born in Walthamstow, at that time one of London's poorest districts, and he spent his early years there. His father, a cabinet maker, died soon after starting his own business. Johnson, left with a mother and younger brother to support even though he was still in his teens, took charge of the firm. The employees responded to his enlightened, philanthropic management with a loyalty and dedication which, allied to Johnson's astute business brain, helped create the successful furniture manufacturing business that funded his entry into motor sport.

When competition resumed after World War II he progressed from rallies to hill climbs, sports car racing and single-seaters. Although a prodigiously gifted driver who early in his career won the admiration of senior competitors such as Raymond Sommer and Louis Chiron, he never made a full commitment to racing. Business interests remained his primary focus. Further, as a child his heart and kidneys were damaged by nephritis and acromegaly, and deteriorating health in adulthood imposed its own constraints on his racing.

He specialised in European sports car endurance events, competing in five Le Mans 24-hour races, two Spa 24-hour races and four Mille Miglias. He also took part in five Grands Prix, and broke several world speed records for production cars.

In sports car racing, he achieved Aston Martin's first postwar international victory, and also the first successes for Jaguar's XK120 model in both England and America.

His business ventures included the acquisition of British racing car manufacturer English Racing Automobiles (ERA) after World War II. He also initiated and negotiated Stirling Moss's first commercial sponsorship deal – with Shell.

Among his close friends were Jaguar founder William Lyons (to whom he lent his BMW 328 for detailed mechanical investigation during the planning and design of the Jaguar XK120) and Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix engineering supremo Rudolf Uhlenhaut. (Johnson used three Mercedes-Benz road cars: 300SL "gullwing," 300 "Adenauer" saloon, and 220S "ponton" saloon.)

His worsening heart condition finally forced permanent retirement from competition in 1954. He bought a farm in Gloucestershire that included three houses: one was for himself and his family, one for his farm manager, and one for his bank manager. He still managed to run his Maidenhead-based company Prototype Engineering, which produced precision components for the fledgling nuclear industry. Towards the end of his life he developed a keen interest in the "Sport of Kings" and owned several racehorses.

Doug Nye recorded motor racing photographer Guy Griffiths's personal recollection of Leslie Johnson:

"[Q]uite the most charming, friendly, unassuming and courteous man in motor racing... [His] furniture factory [was] an extremely paternalistic, caring concern, in which long-term employees were looked after virtually to the grave. When they became too old for their regular work they might be put onto lighter duties for a lesser wage, but there'd always be something for them, Johnson made sure of that.
"When he acquired ERA Ltd and re-established it at Dunstable he [employed] a number of old lags from pre-war racing who were looking for a job postwar. When he drove the E-Type, I think in the Isle of Man, Reg Parnell wandered over for a chat with Johnson, and absent-mindedly gave the car's steering wheel a tweak, to discover VAAAST free-play. 'You can't race this Leslie, you'll kill yourself'. 'Oh yes, well, it takes a bit of getting used to but you know, the boys have worked so hard to get it ready I really feel I ought to give it a go...'.
"He apparently never complained, he was a very buttoned-up, stoical, philosophical chap...his final illness was very quick, and extremely painful for him, yet he never let it show [...] He was regarded as being straight as a die...a good fellow."[1]

He was married to the widow of Anglo-French driver Pierre Maréchal, and stepfather to her son Christian Maréchal, an advertising copywriter, UK ultralight aviation pioneer and freelance journalist.

Leslie Johnson died in 1959, aged 46, at Foxcote House, the family's home in the village of Foxcote, Gloucestershire, England.

Review of competition career

Key: FTD fastest time of the day; DNF did not finish; DNS did not start

Rallies

Johnson’s involvement in motor sport began and ended with rallying, and he was a member of the Rootes factory teams in four Monte Carlo Rallies and one Alpine Rally.[2] Rootes Competition Manager Norman Garrad said Johnson "knew more about the geometry of driving than anybody in the business . . . I used to sit beside Leslie and say, 'I don't give a damn who you are, you are never going to get round this one at this speed.' Thank God he always did."[3]

Johnson's rally results included:

Class winner, Alpine Rally, Sunbeam Alpine Mark I.

Speed hill climbs

Johnson competed in numerous British speed hill climbs in 1946. Notable results included:

Racing: sports cars

Johnson's early races were with a BMW 328 and a Talbot-Lago T150C sports-racing car. Louis Chiron had driven the latter to victory in the 1937 Grand Prix de l'A.C.F. at Montlhéry. Johnson fitted extra fuel tanks in the tail and cockpit for long-distance racing.

His name is closely associated with Jaguar; particularly the XK120 model. The extraordinary competition history of his white car, road-registered as JWK 651, made it the world's most valuable XK120 when it sold at auction for £230,000 ($350,000) in 2001.

His various successes with XK120s included the model's first-ever victories in Europe and the United States:

Johnson's Le Mans results:

Scale model by Bizarre 1/43 (Art. BZR090) of the 1952 Nash-Healey lightweight purpose-built for the Le Mans 24-hour race. Driven by Leslie Johnson and Tommy Wisdom, it finished third.

His Mille Miglia results:

Racing: single-seaters

Johnson raced Delage, Talbot-Lago and ERA cars in single-seater events between 1946 and 1950.

In August 1946, in his first drive in a "proper" racing car, albeit one that was already 20 years old, he broke the lap record at the Ards circuit (the Ulster venue of the RAC Tourist Trophy race from 1928 to 1936). The car was the supercharged straight-eight Delage previously raced by Earl Howe, Dick Seaman and Prince Bira. The clutch failed to release at the start so the car had to be pushed off the line. Having lost some 200 yards to the rest of the field, Johnson worked his way up to fourth behind Prince Bira, Reg Parnell and Bob Gerard but a spark plug melted four laps from the end, forcing him out. (He consoled himself with fastest average in the subsequent handicap race with his BMW 328.)[13]

He entered three 1947 Grands Prix with his ten-year-old ex-Louis Chiron Talbot-Lago T150C – Johnson raced it both as a sports car and a single-seater, simply removing the mudguards to convert it to Grand Prix configuration. The results were:

In November 1947 Leslie Johnson acquired English Racing Automobiles, together with one of their prewar ERA E-Type single-seaters. The car was fast but fragile, and Johnson's 1948 results were disappointing despite a lap record and a fastest lap:

ERA E-Type GP2 driven by Leslie Johnson in the 1948 and 1950 British Grand Prix.

1949 saw three promising results from five entries:

But in 1950 Johnson again found himself repeatedly sidelined by the car's unreliability:

Other outings ended in steering failure and another split fuel tank.

Johnson's ambitious and technically advanced E-Type successor, the G-Type ERA, was designed to race in both Grands Prix and Formula 2. The anticipated development funds did not materialise, and the car was unsuccessful even in the hands of Stirling Moss.

In 1951 Johnson was to have driven the new 600 bhp V16 BRM in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, but he was unable to reach the circuit in time for a pre-race test session in the very early morning. Hans Stuck took the drive but the car blew up in practice and did not race.[14]

Record-breaking

Johnson set numerous world records with Jaguar sports cars at the Autodrome de Montlhéry, the banked oval track near Paris; most notably:

The Montlhéry Jaguar XK120 FHC, seen in 2008

For the week-long 1952 marathon Jaguar's founder, mindful of the considerable kudos and advertising mileage that had already accrued from Johnson's efforts, commandeered a brand new gold-coloured XK120 FHC for him: it was Jaguar chief engineer Walter Hassan's car, the second right-hand drive coupé made.[12]

Moss recalled:

"...in mid-summer Leslie Johnson had another of his ideas. Having averaged 100mph for 24 hours at Montlhéry he now talked Jaguar into attempting 100mph for a week!...We again drove in three-hour spells. The speedbowl lap was under a minute at 120mph, so it was quite a strain. After each straight we hit the banking high up near the lip, then plunged off, twice every fifty seconds, night and day. In each spell we would cover about 2000 laps. It was impossible to keep one's mind occupied on a job like that. We had a two-way radio which helped keep boredom at bay. We talked all the time, called each other names, even told stories. One dare not let the mind wander, because we were running within four feet of the banking lip at around 120mph. One had to concentrate on something. I worked out how many million revs the engine made in a day, how many times the wheels turned, things like that.
The weather did not help; hot by day, cold at night. Night driving was a strain too, because we couldn't afford the drain on the battery of extra lights. The headlights had to be set very high to let us see the top of the banking when we were on it, and this meant that on the short straights we could see nothing at all because the beams were playing in the air.
We hit several hares, rabbits and birds, and Leslie swore at one point that he'd seen a huge ten-foot tall figure in a long cloak, wearing a tall pointed hat, striding toward him along the verge. Next time round the figure had gone...it worried the life out of him for the rest of his stint. In fact I had donned a Shell fuel funnel, pulled a tarpaulin around me and sat on Jack Fairman's shoulders as he strode along the verge. After Leslie had whizzed by we ran away and hid...All very childish, but good fun in the circumstances. Leslie then had an extraordinary idea to get his own back during one of my stints. I came whistling off the banking to find him sitting with Jack Fairman in the middle of the track, playing cards!
Then he took the pit signal board and put it out on the track, so that my natural line past the pits took me between it and the timekeeper's hut. He was lounging beside the hut so I waved to him as I shot though the gap. Next time round the board had been moved closer to the hut. The gap was narrower, but I couldn't leave the fast line so I shot through it again. Next time round, he'd moved the board closer still. Each lap he narrowed the gap which made me concentrate harder to pass through it. Eventually he gave in, and the board went back to its proper position, hung on the tent. At least it passed the time..."

Montlhéry's concrete surface was rough, and the Jaguar broke a spring when it was already well into the run. No spare was carried on board. Regulations stipulated that an outside replacement would make the car ineligible for any further records beyond those already achieved before the repair. Johnson drove nine hours to save the other drivers from added risk while the speed had to be maintained on the broken spring. When finally he stopped to have it replaced, the car had taken the World and Class C 72-hour records at 105.55 mph, World and Class C four-day records at 101.17 mph, Class C 10,000-kilometer record at 107.031 mph, World and Class C 15,000-kilometer records at 101.95 mph, and World and Class C 10,000-mile records at 100.65 mph. After the repair the car went on to complete the full seven days and nights, covering a total of 16,851.73 miles at an average speed of 100.31 mph.

In 1953 Rootes commissioned Johnson's company ERA to modify a Sunbeam Alpine for Stirling Moss and Sheila van Damm to drive flat-out through a flying kilometre on the Jabbeke highway in Belgium, where Moss's speed of 120.13 mph (193.33 km/h) established a new Belgian national record for cars of its class. Two days after the record runs, Johnson drove the car for an hour at an average speed of 111.2 mph (179.0 km/h) at Montlhéry, and Moss put in a lap at 116 mph (187 km/h).[15]

High-speed run: 16 countries in 90 hours

In December 1952 Johnson, Stirling Moss, rally driver David Humphrey, and navigator John Cutts crewed a Humber Super Snipe Mark IV on a journey from Oslo, Norway, to Lisbon, Portugal—a total of 16 countries and 3,380 miles—in 3 days, 17 hours and 59 minutes. The purpose was to publicise the car, which Rootes had introduced six weeks earlier as a new model for 1953. The company's Competition Manager Norman Garrad, who had come up with the idea, hoped the trip might be completed in five days.[16]

The team stopped only for meals, refuelling, driver changeovers, and to change a wheel after a puncture. With "heroic driving, particularly from Stirling Moss and Leslie Johnson" they finished at Lisbon 30 hours earlier than Garrad had expected, despite traffic, sheet ice, blizzards, and snowdrifts up to 18 inches deep en route.[16] They took every opportunity to cruise at 90 mph (140 km/h)—Moss recalled that "many times" the speedometer indicated "over ninety for a quarter of an hour at a stretch"—and Johnson drove the last three hours to Lisbon at an average of 64 mph (103 km/h).[16]

Complete Formula One World Championship results

(key)

Year Entrant Chassis Engine 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 WDC Points
1950 ERA Ltd ERA E ERA 1.5l s/c GBR
Ret		 MON 500 SUI BEL FRA ITA NC 0

References

  1. ↑ Nye, Doug. Autosport website, 7 April 2003. Retrieved on 17 November 2008.
  2. ↑ Robson, Graham. Rootes Maestros. Mercian. p. 330. ISBN 9781903088463.
  3. ↑ Robson, Graham. Rootes Maestros. Mercian. p. 10. ISBN 9781903088463.
  4. ↑ Robson, Graham. Rootes Maestros. Mercian. p. 49. ISBN 9781903088463.
  5. ↑ Robson, Graham. Rootes Maestros. Mercian. p. 14. ISBN 9781903088463.
  6. ↑ Motor Sport, December 1946, Page 284.
  7. ↑ Maréchal, Christian: "Learning Curves" Classic and Sportscar June 1966 p.92
  8. ↑ Porter, Philip (1998). Jaguar Sports Racing Cars, p.14. Bay View Books. ISBN 1-901432-21-1
  9. ↑ Boddy, William. "Sports Car Racing in America". Motor Sport. No. March 1951. p. 110.
  10. 1 2 "Jim McCraw, Jaguar XK120C – Brief History Behind Jaguar European Car Magazine". Europeancar.automotive.com. Retrieved 23 May 2009.
  11. ↑ Buckley, Martin: Jaguar: Fifty Years of Speed and Style p.120. Haynes Publishing 2003, ISBN 978-1-85960-875-3
  12. 1 2 3 4 Nevinson, Tim: "Flat out for a week" Thoroughbred and Classic Cars June 2008 p. 84.
  13. ↑ Race report titled "Ulster" by John Eason Gibson in Motor Racing 1946 published 1948 by Motor Racing Publications Ltd.
  14. ↑ Ludwigsen, Karl (2007). BRM V16, p. 59. Veloce Publishing. ISBN 1-84584-037-2.
  15. ↑ Robson, Graham. Rootes Maestros. Mercian. p. 90. ISBN 9781903088463.
  16. 1 2 3 Robson, Graham. Rootes Maestros. Mercian. pp. 75–81. ISBN 9781903088463.

External links

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