Thank Frankel it's Friday: Derek Bell, the modest legend

Racing drivers never say they are or were one of the greats, because it’s not the done thing, but one way or another most will find a way of alluding to it, even those without the statistical evidence to back it up. But Derek actually appears keen to understate his achievements, which is a rare commodity, though Richard Attwood is cut from the same cloth.

I remember a conversation I had with him a few years back when I tried to get him to boast about what he thought were some of his greatest races. In the end he plumped for the 1975 Spa 1,000km which he won sharing an Alfa 33 with Henri Pescarolo, with Ickx in second place. ‘To beat Jacky at that track – I hope it doesn’t sound big headed if I say that was one of my better days at the office…’ It doesn’t. Just think about that for a moment: in the same machinery in changeable conditions on one of the fastest, most dangerous tracks ever created, he beat not only the local man but also the greatest wet weather driver of his era. Nor does he mention he put his flat-12 monster on pole with a time almost four seconds faster than Ickx on the last occasion the World Sports Car Championship ran at Spa in its original form.

Bell is famed for winning Le Mans five times, but who recalls now that only one driver stayed on Porsche’s books for the duration of its Group C campaign which lasted seven seasons from 1982. He was also a works Ferrari racing driver and if you believe a man can be judged by the quality of the company he keeps, his team-mates included not just Ickx and Bellof, but Ronnie Peterson, Jo Siffert, Hans Stuck, Mike Hailwood, James Hunt, Henri Pescarolo, Bob Wollek… the list is long and doesn’t end there. And on the Saturday night of the members meeting I got to talk with him again.

This time the subject was sobering: Derek raced single seaters and sports cars through just about the most dangerous era of all, when they had all the power and performance, but none of the structural strength we take for granted today. And he raced them at tracks with safety standards and medical facilities that today would be considered a joke at the lowliest club meeting. He was in the F2 race at Hockenheim in which Jim Clark died. In 1971 alone Porsche team-mates Pedro Rodriguez and Jo Siffert would both be killed, along with Ignazio Giunti at the Buenos Aires 1,000km, a race that Bell won. ‘I was lucky,’ he says, ‘I never saw a driver die. I don’t know how or why but while I was at many races where someone got killed, I was always back in the pits having retired or waiting my turn to drive.’ Among people who raced as much as he did in that era, that must make him exceptionally fortunate.

But Derek doesn’t like to dwell on such matters – his perpetually sunny demeanour always wins through and soon he’s telling stories of what went on at the Kyalami Ranch, when the world’s best drivers headed south in winter for the annual Nine Hours, not to score points for any championship because they were none on offer, but because it was so much fun. Sadly none of them is remotely repeatable here.

Maybe if you sat down with one of modern F1’s more engaging personalities – Daniel Ricciardo perhaps – you’d come away so richly informed and entertained. But I doubt it: their racing lives are far more focussed today, but they have nothing of the breadth. To have known times both as good and bad as those that would visit racing not just in a lifetime, but every single season back then, must leave a feeling of having lived few of us can imagine today. We will never experience such a proliferation of highs and lows, and it is perhaps the greatest privilege of my job that I can still download those who did. Long may it last.