MARTIN DONNELLY: I AM ONE OF THE LUCKY ONES
Ten years ago, a small group of people gathered in a room at the Lotus factory in Hethel in Norfolk. The intention was a surprise party, but it was not to celebrate a birthday.
This was an entirely different reason. It was to mark 20 years to the day since Martin Donnelly survived what was a massive accident in practice for the Spanish Grand Prix in his Lotus F1 car.
It was a celebration of that fact that Donnelly was still alive. Despite the fact the Northern Irishman had no idea the party was being thrown, as soon as he got into the room he wasted no time in holding court, rattling through an off-the-cuff speech which implicated everyone there in some hilarious misdeed or another that had led him to that particular point in his life.
I was proud to have been asked to be there. I had been a fan of Donnelly during the golden years of the rat pack, the glorious group of up-and-coming Brits during the late-1980s, and then had got to know him well as a team boss when he was helping out younger talent in the 1990s.
He is still working hard, grafting for manufacturers and helping to promote their new products. Cars are still central to his life, the life they so very nearly cut short. He took time out of his schedule to tackle the Motorsport News readers’questions.
MN sets the scene: Officialdom on the Emerald Isle was not perhaps as stringent as it could be. When Martin’s father, Martin Donnelly Sr, bought a Crossle for his young son to use in the early 1980s, rules were broken almost straight away… Question: Is it true that you skipped out of boarding school to go motor racing when you were young?
Richard Tilehurst Via email
“Very much so, yes! I would go off to boarding school five times year. It was rough, because you had dorms of up to 60 boys, all 16 through to 18, and you see and hear all sorts of things that were going on. There was corporal punishment and we used to get hit with a leather strap all the time. At 1900hrs on a Friday, after making up some time with extra study, I would have my bag packed and I would throw it over the wall, I would climb over and there would be my father with the with the Volvo estate and the trailer and off we would go.
