Unusually, John’s fascination with American automobiles began not with the cars themselves; instead it was their legendary V8 powerplants which initially sparked his interest. “I would have been around 10 or 11 years old when my parents first took me to watch stock car racing at Long Eaton stadium where most of the cars ran GM, Chrysler or Ford V8s,” 70- year-old John recalls. “I’ll never forget running up the embankment to witness my first sight of the F1 stock cars on their parade lap, snarling and roaring with long blue flames shooting from their unsilenced headers in the fading daylight.” This almost surreal spectacle certainly sent John’s senses into overdrive. “Once they’d begun racing, you could feel the vibrations of the engines going right through your body,” he recalls. “After that evening, I was hooked!”
Predictably, John soon had ambitions to race those same stock cars once he was old enough and although work and family commitments sadly never allowed for this to come to fruition,
