Tommy Byrne: the best racing driver you’ve (probably) never heard of

Look back through the CVs of many of the great champions in all the major international race and rally disciplines and you’ll inevitably find that on the way up, they were at some point beaten by a rival who would go no further. The metaphoric precipice along which career racing drivers tread is such that the reasons some of them make it and some of them don’t can seem arbitrary and grossly unfair.

What is clear is that very few possess the complete package – ability, cash and opportunity/timing – to make it. And the unpredictability of that filtering process is underscored by the fact very few drivers have reached the summit on talent alone. Cash is king, particularly in the modern game, and opportunity/timing plays a big part. For example, would Damon Hill have got a race seat at Williams if Nigel Mansell had not gone off in a huff to America in 1993? Who knows. Right place, right time counts for a lot in cut-throat motorsport.  

The sport’s egg-timer really is wide-topped and narrow-bottomed.

One such harum-scarum tale of what could’ve/should’ve been – a cash sparsity/talent surfeit rollercoaster of a ride – involves an enigmatic Irishman by the name of Tommy Byrne. He had god-given ability seeping from every pore. His problem was, compared with some of his easily vanquished rivals, he didn’t have a receptacle in which to relieve himself and had a personality that, at the time, ruffled feathers at many a turn. Searingly honest and unbowed by political correctness, he shot from the hip. He let his driving do the talking and then he talked a fair bit more once out of the car.

Double British Formula Ford 1600 champion in 1980, British and European FF2000 champion a year later and British F3 title winner in 1982, his junior single-seater CV was unimprovable. A plum seat in Formula 1 beckoned, surely? Especially after displaying record-breaking pace in a McLaren test at Silverstone at the end of ’82.

That, though, is when things got complicated.

You’d struggle to invent much of the Tommy Byre story, but almost all the toe-curling, gut-wrenching details were compiled in a superb, award-winning biography, Crashed And Byrned, in 2008, and in a recent documentary. Mark Hughes’ excellent book has just been republished with extra chapters and pictures to complement the airing of the film.

On the subject of the documentary, made by Irishmen David Burke and Seán O’Cualain, we won’t spoil it by revealing any details, but strongly recommend – no, insist – that you tune into BBC Four at 9pm tonight to experience Crash and Burn. Reaction to the film has been a bit like that you get from a group of people discussing Marmite – ‘what a shame’, ‘he got stitched up’, ‘… brought it all on himself’ etc. – so do let us know what you think. 

I made up my mind about what I thought about it after spending a fantastic couple of hours with the star of the show at the end of last year, during the various premières of the documentary. Having been mesmerised, as a near-teenager, by Tommy Byrne’s driving in the early-1980s and having got his autograph during that successful British F3 season in ’82, it was a wide-eyed, slack-jawed experience, peppered with uproarious laughter, to hear his recall of exactly what went on 35 years ago and more. Not dissimilar to the film, in fact, although I found the real Tommy Byrne to be a much nicer bloke!

Appropriately, Tommy had the last laugh in our conversation, just as he does in volume two of Crashed and Byrned: ‘I really am happy now!’

Photos by LAT and Stuart Dent