ALASTAIR CALDWELL AFTER EIGHT HOURS AS CLEANER I MADE MYSELF A MECHANIC
There is very little ordinary about Alastair Caldwell. It is extraordinary enough that he was a stalwart of 1970s McLaren, on the frontline for the team’s first Formula 1 golden age of World championship victories with Emerson Fittipaldi and then, as immortalised, with James Hunt.
But in Caldwell’s case you can add that he started at McLaren as cleaner, the only job he could get there and then after just arriving in England from his native New Zealand, but within a day he’d made himself a mechanic. And soon he was running the team.
Caldwell later had spells in F1 at Brabham in 1979 to 1981, and briefly with the ATS team, before he moved on to bestride another sector altogether, and as a pioneer, by becoming the first in Europe to establish a self-storage business.
And it’s not just with his business that he’s kept himself occupied since his F1 days, as he also indulges a passion for classic car rallies, and has even done them with his late mother Dorothy who got into the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s oldest navigator. Plus Caldwell even got involved in Hollywood’s treatment of Hunt’s 1976 title showdown.
As our latest very special guest for our Motorsport News Q&As, Caldwell explains much of this and more in answering the questions submitted by MN’s readers. And with it all, it seems right to start at the beginning.
Question: Where did your passion for cars and motorsport come from? Alex Smith Via email
Alastair Caldwell: “Well I didn’t realise it but probably from my childhood, my mother came from a family that was into cars in a big way, I had an uncle, Peter Scott Russell, who was the commentator at Silverstone, a director of the BRDC, and did the Mille Miglia twice in the ’50s. But I wasn’t aware of this, I was in New Zealand kind of divorced from all this, I didn’t really realise I had English family who were into cars and motor racing.
“But when I was a small child I loved mechanical things and I became an apprentice mechanic in New Zealand just as a way to get out of going to school. My father said I had to go to the university and have a degree or a trade so I decided that a mechanic would be the best because mechanics got to drive cars, and I love driving cars.
“So I was an apprentice mechanic and I was very very good at it, almost farcically good at it, when I was 18 I was working on the Queen’s Rolls-Royce and the Prime Minister’s Jaguar, at the Post Office in New Zealand, I was
