DRIVEN TO CRIME PART 1

MOTORSPORTS HAS HAD ITS SHARE of rascals and skullduggery. See, for example, “Smuggling and Motorsports”, “Tripoli Tangles, 1933”, and “Politics and Motorsports” here at SimanaitisSays.

For an entertaining collection of such tales, check out Crispian Besley’s Driven to Crime. 

Driven to Crime: True Stories of Wrongdoing in Motor Racing, by Crispian Besley, Evro, 2023.

Besley quotes Earnest Hemingway: “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.” Driven to Crime describes 66 examples of personages gaming our favorite sport. One of them I actually met, others were during my years of following the sport from race circuits and press rooms around the world. Here in Parts 1 and 2 today and tomorrow are tidbits gleaned from Besley’s book about Charles Nall-Cain, 3rd Baron Brocket.

Lord Charles Brocket. Besley writes, “Polo-playing acquaintance of the Royal Family and friend of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Charles Brocket collected rare Ferraris and Maseratis. The Old Etonian peer was first  betrayed by a former racer whom he employed and later by his wife, which resulted in him swapping his ancestral home for a prison cell.”

The details are complex, with examples of good and bad intentions along the way. 

Like others with country estates, the young Lord Brocket found himself to be Georgian-mansion-rich but Pounds-Sterling-poor. Then, Besley recounts, thanks to a loan from American Express, “By the early 1980s, Brocket Hall had been transformed into one of Europe’s leading conference venues, business was booming, and by the end of the decade it was being hired out for as much as £25,000 per day” 

Bitsa Vintage Cars. Brocket was a car nut and he hired Jim Bosisto, a former 500cc racing driver, to assemble a small collection. “An early purchase was an original Ferrari chassis plate (3565 GT) for £5,500, a crazy amount for a small piece of metal with a number stamped on it, but justified because it belonged to a Ferrari 250 GT SWB (Short Wheelbase) Berlinetta; they believed this gave them the right to rebuild an ordinary, rusty 250 GTE into this different model of much higher value.”

The construction of such a “bitsa” (“a bit of this; a bit of that”) has complicated provenance of more than a few restorations. The Brocket collection grew and became a real asset to the conference venue. What’s more, the enthusiast car market was fast-appreciating at the time and banks were eager to lend Brocket funds to expand.

“Knowing that The Brocket Collection had money to burn,” Besley writes, “the more unruly members of the motor trade took advantage.” 

What could possibly go wrong? We’ll see tomorrow in Part 2. ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023