Chevron - The Derek Bennett Story

Introduction

I had fallen in love with John's car at the previous year's Oulton Park Gold Cup meeting, in September 1966, when he wheeled out this sleek new replacement for his Lotus Elan for the first time. When we got to those race meetings there would usually be at least two more Chevrons there, for Derek Bennett and Digby Martland, and there was an infectious feeling of all being part of a big team. As my father worked on John's car, Derek would often wander over, and if there was a problem he would stand there, quietly thinking for a while, his arms folded in front of him, his chin resting in one raised hand. Then he would suggest his cure for the problem.

	John Lepp's B3 leaves the paddock at the 1966 Gold Cup at Oulton Park . . .
		. . . and leads its class at Mallory Park in August 1967.

As John's Chevron continued to win I grew increasingly impressed by the thought that this man actually made Chevrons himself. Never having felt the necessity of giving my support either to Manchester United or Manchester City, I became instead a Chevron supporter. I kept scrapbooks of Motoring News cuttings, filled notebooks with information about the cars, and willed them on to win everywhere they raced.

Volume 1 of the Chevron scrap book, begun in 1967 using Manchester Grammar School Maths exercise books.	Derek Bennett at the Chevron factory in December 1967.

After practice for the two-day Spring Cup meeting at Oulton Park in April 1968, I went up to the factory in Bolton for the first time, and savoured the atmosphere that characterised Chevron's. In amongst the new cars that were being built, the cars that had been brought back from Oulton were being prepared for the next day's race. Mechanics, drivers and Chevron's own staff worked into the night, straightening damaged cars, or solving mechanical problems with others. But the thing that most impressed me was when it came time to eat and Paul Owens took out an old oil can with one side cut out of it, filled it with water, dropped in a can of tomato soup, and set to work on it with a blow torch. This was real excitement!

Whenever I saw Derek after that I would ask what cars he had in the factory, what colour they were, and who was going to buy them, and it all went down in the book. As Chevron's success grew and they built more and more cars, Derek would joke that I knew more about the cars he had built than he did. Then when Brian Redman tested the new B16 with its FVC engine for the first time, Derek gave me a photograph of it that he'd taken himself. It was given pride of place in volume 11 of the scrapbook.

Derek's snapshot of the B16 being tested at Oulton Park by Brian Redman in 1969.	John Lepp's B8 at the Oulton Park Gold Cup meeting in August 1969.

As my own Chevron archives grew I always had it firmly fixed in my mind that one day I would write a book about Chevron's. When they were a world-famous Formula 1 team, I would be the one who could tell the story of how it all started. In the meantime, my interest in racing broadened, I began to write race reports for Motoring News and Autosport and, after leaving university, I went to work for Motoring News. Called upon to write my first feature, in March 1975, I decided I would go up to Bolton and interview Derek about Chevron's first ten years. By this time Derek had a high-powered Publicity Director to save him from the tiresome business of having to talk to the press and it seemed to mystify him that anyone should want to talk to him anyway. But he agreed to do the interview and we sat in his office and talked about the way he had achieved his success and where Chevron might go in the future.

By this time Chevron's successes throughout the world had become too numerous for my scrapbooks to cope with and they had been confined to a box somewhere. When Derek was killed hang gliding three years later, I assumed that was where they would stay. Later that year I moved out of motor racing into the mainstream of journalism and I didn't see another Chevron until 1985, when I went to a historic meeting and was amazed to see a race full of scrapping Chevron B8s. I dug out the old scrapbooks and the ownership records and started trying to fill in some of the gaps in the life stories of the cars. As I renewed old acquaintances, I was constantly asked if I was writing a book. Eventually, I came to think that that was what I should be doing.

When I started work on the book the first person I stuck my tape recorder in front of was John Lepp. "I'm not doing this for you - I'm doing it for Derek," he said with his usual caustic charm. I chose to take the comment as a joke not an insult, but it was a remark that kept coming back to me as I travelled thousands of miles, tracing the people who had known and worked with Derek through his life. Some of them I knew well, some remembered me only vaguely, while others had never met me before. But they all willingly gave their time to talk about Derek Bennett and his Chevron cars.

An old friend of Derek's told me that he felt privileged to have known him, and that feeling seemed to be echoed by everyone I spoke to. Over the years a few people came to know Derek very well, but to most people who met him or drove his cars he remained an enigma - a quiet, unassuming genius, who built racing cars that looked like racing cars were supposed to and that were almost guaranteed to win races.

Because Chevrons always remained so much Derek Bennett's personal creations, I felt that the only way to tell the story of Chevron was to tell the story of Derek Bennett. It's a modern fairy tale of a very ordinary man with a very extraordinary talent, who started out mending cars in a lock-up garage in the back streets of industrial Salford and became one of the world's leading racing car manufacturers. On the way the success of Chevron became entwined with the success of the drivers who raced the cars and the Chevron story contains some fascinating episodes from the careers of many top racing drivers - among them no fewer than six World Champions.

Riccardo Patrese reached Formula 1 having only ever raced Chevrons. This is the B34 in which he was European and Italian Champion in 1976.

Trying to write the story of Derek Bennett was like trying to make a jigsaw when all the pieces are hidden and nobody can tell you how many pieces there should be. I still can't be sure that there aren't some pieces missing, but I hope I have made a picture that is recognisable.

In writing this book, I have tried to establish what happened and why it happened the way it did. Many people played a part in the success of Chevron. I have not set out in any way to place their contributions in some sort of order of importance, but merely tried to acknowledge everyone whose involvement in some way influenced the progress of Chevron Cars.

So many people have helped me in the research for this book that it would be impossible to detail their contributions individually. But I would like to thank Paul Owens especially for finding the time in his hectic schedule to be subjected to some gruelling interviews over many hours, as well as answering endless queries over the phone. I am also very grateful to Derek's sisters, Wendy and June, for being so open with me about their family life and Derek's childhood, as well as letting me use some of their family photographs. I must also thank Brian Redman - in so many ways the epitome of a Chevron driver - for agreeing to write the foreword.

I respect the honesty with which everyone has spoken to me about their relationships with Derek Bennett and their own involvement with Chevron, and I have been moved by the tremendous admiration for him which they all felt. I hope this book does justice to his achievements and to his memory.

David Gordon
Stockport, England
August 1990

© 1991 David Gordon.