Let’s start with an apparent level: “By no means look again” is a peculiar, even contradictory title for an autobiography.
Derek Warwick, the previous Renault, Brabham and Lotus System 1 racer – and world sportscar champion – describes it because the motto which noticed him by way of a profession through which as many as a dozen of his fellow racers died.
“All over my profession, there have been some disappointments,” he advised the BBC just lately. “Selecting the mistaken automotive on the mistaken time. Drivers that had been killed, and so forth… and so forth… And I all the time give attention to the long run.
“I by no means look again and need that I used to be driving a special automotive or want that I used to be Ayrton Senna. Ayrton Senna has been lifeless for 33, 34 years, so there’s no level trying again. You all the time look ahead and I believe it’s been a powerful level of my character that’s taken me by way of some fairly tough occasions.”
Warwick and co-author David Tremayne have produced an in depth and illuminating account, one which ought to fulfill his many supporters who carefully adopted a profession which got here tantalisingly near F1 success at occasions. Within the early eighties many thought Warwick, not Nigel Mansell, the likelier guess as Britain’s subsequent world champion. In the long run each took world titles in 1992: Mansell in F1, Warwick in prototype sportscars.
However arguably Warwick deserved extra, and regarded on track to get it when he joined race-winners Renault on the finish of 1983 and got here near successful on his debut for them the comply with 12 months. Renault was heading into sharp decline, nevertheless – Warwick is particularly scathing of Gerard Toth’s calamitous mismanagement – and for 1986 Warwick lined up a transfer to Lotus, just for Senna to notoriously veto it.
He stays phlegmatic about these profession setbacks, little doubt partially as a result of he has confronted the hazards which had been extra obvious within the eighties and nineties than at this time. Warwick’s automotive was the primary upon the grim scene the place Gilles Villeneuve met his finish at Zolder’s Terlamenbocht throughout qualifying for the 1982 Belgian Grand Prix. Then, in 1991, got here the appalling crash which claimed his youthful brother Paul.
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Warwick offers a frank account of this darkish interval in his life, made all of the extra attempting by the expectations of relations who had been longing for him to surrender racing, additional compounded by the difficulties the household enterprise was by now experiencing. His dedication to plough on was vindication by his sportscar success the next 12 months, giving him a second world championship to go together with his inventory automotive success of virtually 20 years earlier.
It’s not arduous to see why ‘By no means Look Again’ is among the many 15 titles just lately nominated for an award by the Royal Vehicle Membership (together with Benetton: Rebels of System 1, reviewed right here beforehand). It avoids the pitfalls of many different biographies by giving the powerful occasions as a lot weight because the glory days. The textual content is awkwardly disrupted in just a few locations by digressive quotes, and the asking worth is on the steep facet, however in any other case that is the newest in a severe of completely pleasing and straightforward to suggest choices from Evro.
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Derek Warwick: By no means Look Again – The racing lifetime of Britain’s double world champion
Writer: Derek Warwick with David Tremayne
Writer: Evro
Revealed: 2024
Pages: 432
Worth: £60
ISBN: 9781910505908
