Driven To Crime: True stories of wrongdoing in motor racing

Product Information

Thanks for sharing ! F1 has always been circled by criminals, fraudsters and shady characters, no question about that. Though there is no centralized resource that tells all the crimes that happened in F1. Maybe the FOM don’t want these stories to come up so they don’t tarnish the reputation of the sport especially for the younger generation. I just hope the book goes into the fine details. Some of the stories that crossed my mind : To prepare and run the McLaren, Munroe had engaged the well-respected team AM Racing, owned and managed by Aston Martin dealer Paul Spires, an accomplished racing driver himself who was also scheduled to race the car. Although AM Racing’s previous experience had been mainly in the preparation and running of historic Le Mans cars, Spires had put together a very strong group of engineers and the operation proved to be well up to the required standard. Munroe announced to the media: ‘We have no pretensions to winning races. We could have put a high-profile professional in the car but we wanted to keep it as a purely privateer team. We will rotate the driving between the three of us and see how it works out. Most importantly, we want to show that we are doing this properly.’

Brabham F1 sale to an investment company owned by a Swiss Banker who scammed investors for millions and fled to the USA before his trial has taken place which left the team in dispute of ownership before being sold to the Japanese company Middlebridge Group. Like so many schoolboys, James Cox was passionate to the point of obsession about cars as a teenager and dreamt of racing them as soon as he was old enough. Typically for his age, his bedroom walls at home were adorned with large posters of the contemporary Lamborghini Countach and Ferrari Testa Rossa models. Inevitably, like most youngsters with similar aspirations, there was neither the money nor the opportunity to fulfil his ambitions. By the time he had reached his 20s, the nearest he had come to owning any kind of ‘performance car’ was very much more modest. It's a very journalistic, non-fiction style, very straightforward and with incredible eye to detail. Could have been a more fun read with a bit more humor, or subtext. First-time author Crispian Besley has both the motorsport pedigree – having spent several decades racing immaculately prepared Formula Juniors – and a career at the top of the finance industry, which is perfectly for succinctly summarising some of the financial crimes covered.I briefly entered the world of motor racing in 1974 (see Sid Miller Chapter 41) and thought my experience bizarre enough. But it was the tip of an iceberg. There’s no doubt that Crispian’s book is a tough read, sometimes depressing, often crushing our idols; people and sportsmen we looked up to. Whether you have been involved in the sport or not, it is a window on the human condition that is rarely demonstrated with such honesty and clarity. But there was plenty new to me: the youthful idiot who joined a Brands Hatch race three-up in his girlfriend’s VW Polo, and the unknown ‘L W Wright’ who blagged cash, car and entry to a major NASCAR race and then vanished for ever. Do you remember Southern Organs sponsoring a race series? Who knew that the two men behind the associated fraud went on the run and lived for eight months in a roofless bothy on a Scottish island. A fascinating and ludicrous story. He bought a Ferrari F355 Challenge, which was a special race-bred version of the F355, the 348tb’s successor. However, the woefully inexperienced driver’s performance was underwhelming to say the least and he found himself consistently and hopelessly outclassed, trailing behind not only all the modified cars in his class but also most of the slower standard cars. His fellow competitors found him a very ordinary, quiet and unassuming man who made no attempt to mix with them. For the next round, at Brands Hatch on 20th June, Munroe again took the start for a short stint before handing over to his ‘pro’ co-driver with the car two laps down. Goodwin managed to reduce the deficit by one lap and bring the car home fourth, his efforts once again rewarded with fastest lap.

Much of the time I could not believe what I was reading; the scams, the drugs, the vast fortunes built and lost; the deceit, the fraud, the double dealing and the burning ambition to get involved - at any cost. The world of motor racing can be brutal. Crispian Besley must have taken many years and had countless brushes with the legal complexities of the system before producing this staggeringly good book. The reality of his life was such that by the time he was in his early 30s he was married with a young family living in suburban Wokingham, Berkshire, and working in middle management in an accounts department. As disenchantment grew with what he felt was a meaningless existence, it simply fuelled his dreams more strongly. He started to make frequent trips to the nearby showrooms of Maranello Concessionaires, the famous Ferrari importer and main dealer. Although his job prospects and personal life didn’t change materially over the next couple of years, he ended up being able to acquire a Ferrari 348tb in the classic and desirable colour combination of Rosso Corsa with cream hide interior. When Munroe appeared at Reading Crown Court in September 2000, the prosecution stated that he had used the stolen money to buy lots of cars as well as to fund the racing team. Besides the cars already mentioned — the two Ferraris and the two McLarens — his fleet of road cars included three Aston Martins, three Mercedes and a Ferrari 550 Maranello. He had also acquired two important historic racing cars, an ex-Gerhard Berger Benetton Formula 1 car and a Silk Cut-liveried Jaguar XJR Le Mans car. He certainly had good automotive taste. I’ve never read anything like it, an extraordinary book of wrongdoing in the world of motor racing. The writing is flawless, the research meticulous. This book should become a classic and essential reading, not just for those taking part in this ludicrously expensive pursuit, but to all those interested in a totally honest, no holds barred insight into the world of such pervasive crime. Andrea Moda team entry and their fraudster boss Andrea Sassetti who was suspected to have links with Mafia. After he was arrested and excluded from the championship, his staff were found to be secretly sneaking his cars into the grid at Monza !!!

Supercar Revolution

His introduction quotes this from George Orwell: “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in violence.” I didn’t expect to see any of the last but it’s here – an appalling serial killer who drove in IMSA. It’s particularly gruesome, and closes with a picture of his dead body. He’s similarly cagey over who organised the Max Mosley News of the World sexposé, quoting from Mosley’s autobiography that “the conventional wisdom… has always been that someone in F1 was behind it”. Besley simply concludes “there are several suspects” – and wisely stops there.

Other misdemeanours: Roy James (Great Train Robbery getaway driver); Bertrand Gachot (jailed after road rage in London); Juan Manuel Fangio (kidnapped by Cuban rebels in 1958); Colin Chapman (the unresolved ‘DeLorean Affair’); ‘Spygate’ (Ferrari design secrets passed to McLaren). Some of these people are the same kind of pure sociopaths that can steal all the money from an elementary school teacher pension fund, and their only thought is, "how can I do the same thing to the middle school?" The kind of white collar criminals we hear about all the time – who just don't happen to get into professional racing. Besley’s writing brings two great qualities. Firstly, his ability to clearly and succinctly explain some highly-complex financial crimes means that would could easily be impenetrable passages are highly readable. Secondly, the nuance to his tone allows him to say a lot while objectively reporting the facts. Unfortunately, for the victims whose livelihoods were affected by his deceit, the story still didn’t end there. Remarkably, he found responsible employment yet again, in March 2015, by which time he was 51 and once again using his real name, James Cox.

For Flux Sake

There are, and yes I’m going to say it, the usual suspects: Nelson Piquet Jr and Crashgate, drug-running John Paul Sr and Jr, Spygate, Jean-Pierre van Rossem who bought the Onyx F1 team before his dubious Moneytron firm imploded (he later bought a refrigerated coffin for his wife). Alarm bells started ringing at AM Racing just a few days after the British Grand Prix when team manager Paul Spires called Chris Goodwin to say that there was ‘a problem with the money’. Spires didn’t know it at the time but Munroe’s assets had been frozen by lawyers. By the time of the next round of the British GT Championship, at Donington Park on 7th August, the AM Racing McLaren F1 GTR had vanished from the entry list. The following month, news broke that James Munroe was under investigation. When Goodwin flew in from America, where he had been racing at Sebring, and topped the official pre-season testing sessions at Silverstone, spirits were high and Spires said: ‘It couldn’t have gone better. We now have a true pro-am [professional-amateur] line-up but I think we can win races.’ As Goodwin’s international career was in the ascendency, this wasn’t a drive he needed or even particularly wanted, but he accepted it on the basis that it would do him no harm, keep him race-sharp and reward him with, in his words, ‘a crazy amount of money’.