THE MOTOR SPORT INTERVIEW Herbie Blash
GIVEN THE FANFARE THAT accompanied his departure as Formula 1’s deputy race director in 2016, you might imagine that Herbie Blash – gofer at Rob Walker Racing, number two mechanic to Jochen Rindt at Lotus and long-time Brabham team manager, among other things – would have spent the past few years with his feet up, looking back on a life he acknowledges to have been “privileged”.
He was barely out of his teens when he began travelling around the world with the sport he loves, but he hasn’t exactly applied the brakes since stepping away. He has always had a habit of wearing different hats, has worked with Yamaha for some 30 years and maintains a role with the Japanese firm as a consultant to its World Superbike team. He is as busy as ever at 72 and it took several months to prise him away from endless conference calls as he and his counterparts fought to shape a workable WSBK calendar in a Covid world.
We meet in West Sussex to chat about his life, some elements of which might surprise. For instance, Chichester University awarded him an honorary business doctorate for services to motor racing. “Not sure why,” he says. “I’ve never mentioned that to anybody.”
Motor Sport: You were born Michael Blash, yet everybody in the sport knows you as ‘Herbie’. Why is that?
Herbie Blash “When I started working for Rob Walker, my first job as an apprentice on the road car side, Tony Cleverly was chief mechanic for his racing team and for some reason nicknamed me Herbie. I thought I had a chance to go back to being Michael when I joined Team Lotus, but I arrived in Norfolic and went with the lads to the pub for a game of darts. When they put me up on the scoreboard as Herbert, I pointed out that my name was Michael and that was the worst thing I could have done. After that I was Herbie and never did shake it off. Away from racing, everybody calls me Michael. My wife’s mum always thought she’d been dating two people.”
M How did you first tune in to motor racing?
“Once each term at junior school we would have an afternoon of films, including the old Shell motor sport documentaries, which hooked me. I was also following motocross – or scrambling, as it was called – on TV. From the age of 12 I was driving tractors through the fields on a smallholding, where I also had use of a Ford Popular and a Triton motorcycle with no rear suspension. I used that for my own version of motocross, so
