The Men Behind the Motor Racing
London, August 1968 by Eoin S Young (Photos from original magazine article)
Grand Prix Racing tends to be a little like the proverbial iceberg with the drivers being the publicized tip that people see and know about, and the important men behind the sport being the bulk of the ‘berg which keeps the prominent minority above water.
Phil Kerr is one of these behind the scenes people who helped shape the Brabham business empire and is now with McLaren Racing looking after administration with Teddy Mayer as joint managing director. Management in motor racing is a complex profession where you have to be both jack and master of all trades. Philip Lawrence Kerr is 33. He’s a lanky, quiet, deep-thinking New Zealander who can be cuttingly efficient in business deals. He combined business training with motor racing in his youth in New Zealand, and he met Bruce McLaren at a shingle hillclimb when he was 17 and Bruce was 15. Both raced Austin Seven specials, McLaren’s a tweaked Ulster model and Kerr’s a much modified Nippy. "Bruce was quicker than I was that day, but it was definitely only the cars that made the difference!"
Accountancy background
At school Kerr did accountancy and business management and when he left college he worked in the offices of the government owned New Zealand Forest Service. "Before it drives you mad, a big office can teach you a lot, but experience and responsibility can teach you a lot more." Kerr left to join Arthur Harris who ran a small engineering business in Auckland and dabbled in the sale of performance equipment to enthusiasts as well as handling the agency for Buckler cars. “I’ve always been far happier in a small concern than with a big company, and being with a small engineering concern I was very lucky in that I gained knowledge and experience of the sort of engineering that New Zealanders are noted for. At the same time I was able to follow my commercial career by looking after the business side. It was getting to the stage where the cars and engineering were of more interest to me that pure accounting. I had never really enjoyed pure accounting because I haven’t got the patience to sit at a desk all day and balance books. That drives me up the wall. But in this game you need accounting as a basic background because you can always fall back on it. It does teach the basic principles and rules.”
Kerr paid £130 for his Nippy and learned the basics of motor racing in his torrid dices with young McLaren. The Nippy gave way to a Ford 10 special, but Phil was also furthering himself on the organizational side of the sport in New Zealand in the middle fifties. “I was on the board of control of the New Zealand International Grand Prix Association at an early age because I was the secretary of the Auckland Car Club – the biggest club in New Zealand. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I was applying to Motor racing what I had learned to do in normal commercial business. It was experience which I didn’t consider to be experience.”
Kerr raced a Buckler while he worked for Harris – “I didn’t do anything very inspiring in it except enjoy myself.” And later raced a supercharged version of the Buckler. Although he doesn’t pat himself on the back about his personal racing, he was good enough on the track to be one of three names put before the committee of the NZIGP for choice as the first “Driver to Europe” in 1958. “As it turned out, they chose the right bloke, Bruce.” The third aspiring racer was Merv Mayo, another Buckler driver, who now runs a flourishing engineering business outside Auckland, and his workshop facilities have been a godsend to teams on the Tasman series.
It was Bruce McLaren who was instrumental in Phil coming to England because Jack Brabham had been talking about establishing himself in England on a business basis and McLaren suggested that Phil might be the man to handle the organization. After a chat in Auckland in 1959 Jack asked Phil to come to England that year.
Eight years ago at Brands Hatch—Phil Kerr with Jack Brabham during their first year of business association.
"The first three years we were all together as Jack and Bruce were driving for Coopers and I was working for Jack trying to establish some other business interests so that he wasn't purely a racing driver. Jack thought it was wrong to have all his eggs in one basket—he knew he would eventually stop racing and when he did he wanted to have something else to do. He has expanded enormously since those early years, so his thinking at the beginning was absolutely right. It became apparent very early on that my job with Jack meant that I had to give up racing, as it was impossible to do both. I accepted this, but I didn't particularly want to because I enjoyed driving—I didn't rate myself greatly as a driver, but I enjoyed it as a sport.
"The first job I did with Jack in 1959 was to get the licenses and permission to convert the bare shell of a pretty dilapidated building Jack had bought in Chessington into a petrol station/garage, and then we set about rebuilding the place. It was small but we did a lot of work and the place was opened in October 1959—seven months after I arrived. Our offices were on the first floor and this served as the basis for Jack's future commitments and gave him a base from where he could expand and be more than just a racing driver. Jack winning the world championship in 1959 and 1960 was a great boost for all of us and it gave me a personal interest insofar as I was responsible for his management.
"Brabham’s determination is quite extraordinary. The difficult years were 1963, 1964, and 1965 when we so nearly won a lot of races. There were many mechanical problems and it was very tempting to give it all up. For a while it looked as through the critics who said Brabham was making a mistake by going it alone, might have been right. But he just kept going and finally won through to prove that it was worthwhile persevering."
McLaren's turning point
"Bruce has gone through the same sort of period with three years of pretty grim frustration, but the great job he and Denny did on the Can-Am series last year was probably the turning point, and now that he has achieved a Grand Prix win in his own car he is reaping the rewards of having struggled for a number of years against heavy odds. Bruce is cast in a very similar mould to Brabham with determination and good practical and theoretical engineering ability. They are both similar in many ways, not necessarily as people, but more in what is required to go motor racing. Bruce learned a lot from Jack in the early stages and this has probably accelerated Bruce’s progress. When I came to England to work for Jack in 1959 he was 32 years old, so even when we had just started Jack was older than Bruce is now, which means that Bruce is in a very strong position to do well in the future. And he has the ability to do it.
"The whole thing has more or less turned full circle for me. I’m grateful to Jack for the years I had with him. I don’t think you’d find a harder task master, and I’m sure you wouldn’t find anybody more determined and with a greater will to win that Brabham. Because of his own attitude and desire to have a go, he was the sort of fellow who more or less forced you to work as hard as you could because you felt it was the right thing to do, and out of loyalty and respect for the fellow you’d do it. With several other people I worked as hard as I could for him and the experience I gained was tremendous. You couldn’t learn from a better chap than Brabham because he does so much on his own and will deal with overwhelming odds. I’ve never known him consider that anything was impossible. Anything could be done…really …including building a car in a fortnight – or a week if necessary. He always believed it was possible and you ended up thinking the same way. He used to come up with ideas that I would have considered impossible when I first joined him. I really did believe them to be impossible. But after the guy goes and does it, you realise that NOTHING is impossible and instead of trying to change Brabham and try to make him be more realistic, I ended up changing myself to become more like Brabham. NOBODY changes Brabham.
"Jack is very careful about the people he employs. Rather than employ someone who was FAIRLY good, he would rather not employ anyone which meant that people at Brabhams were doing the work of 1 and a half or 2 people, simply because if Jack had confidence in six people and wanted to produce something that would require ten on the job, those six would have to do it. He wouldn’t go out and get the other four, because he generally reckoned they could cock it up and then someone else would have to sort it all out."
'How do you know he's any good?'
"Roy Billington, who is now Jack’s chief racing mechanic, came to England in 1962 like many colonials just to have a look and maybe get a job. He asked about a job with us, but Jack didn’t want to know. 'What’s the point – he’ll only go back at the end of the year and anyway, how do you know he’s any good?' I knew he was good because I’d raced with Roy in New Zealand. But Jack still said no. So one weekend while Jack was away racing, I hired Roy, knowing that Jack always had so much on his mind that it would take him at least a couple of weeks to notice that we had another bloke on the staff… When Jack wanted to go racing on his own he was looking round for a good racing mechanic to work with Tim Wall who had been with him since 1960, and I suggested Roy for the job. Then Jack realised that Roy was the one he hadn’t wanted me to employ. But it all worked out well and Roy has grown with the team. He is two men in one, with an abnormal capacity for work – he really does a good job.
"Then there was a fellow called Hulme who turned up from New Zealand in 1960, a boy racer who was a typically quiet country lad when he first came over. I didn’t know him very well at that stage, but I became much more involved with him later. In 1962 I gave him a job working as a mechanic in the garage. I’d seen him racing his formula junior Cooper and I was very impressed. I asked Jack several times if we could get Denny a drive, but Jack would just say 'forget it – I just don’t reckon he’s ready to be given a works drive'."
History now records the fact that that Denny got his Brabham works drive when Gavin Youl broke his collarbone and Denny took his place at Crystal Palace, but the history books won’t show that Kerr was so convinced of Hulme’s potential that he had offered to help Hulme buy a new Brabham – only to find that the Brabham order books were full! Hulme’s tenacity in clinging to his ideal of eventually being a Formula 1 driver impressed Kerr.
"Most of the people who have really got anywhere in motor racing have had to go without for a long time, they’ve had to work like hell, accept financial disasters, be completely dedicated and let nothing stand in their way. The various people I’ve been connected with have been cast in that mould and you have to admire them. Graham Hill and John Surtees are good examples. They started at the bottom and really worked hard to get to the top. Yet there are a lot of people on the outside who think that it’s a piece of cake to go racing motorcars – if only they knew! Those guys racing fast motorcars are in a different world from you or I as drivers. When it comes to controlling high speed equipment they’re so much better that it’s not even funny yet because they are so skilled they make it look easy and everybody thinks they can do it. It’s like watching top tennis. Rod Laver and Kenny Rosewall are so fabulous to watch that they make the difficult shots look easy, but if you or I went on the court with them, you wouldn’t see which way the ball went. Nobody like us could anticipate, we don’t have the reactions, the speed of limb, or the speed of eye to cope with the situations that THEY can control. It’s exactly the same with motor racing.
Two men who moved from the Brabham camp to join McLaren Motor Racing—Phil Kerr and World Champion Denny Hulme. LIke McLaren and Hulme, Kerr is a New Zealander. Eoin Young Photo
Brabham to McLaren
"In my book a fellow has to prove himself and if he hasn’t proved himself he’s no use to me. If he is reasonably intelligent he can tell whether he has the ability or not. If he hasn’t got the ability and thinks he has, he’s a fool. But if he has the ability, knows he has it, and is prepared to sacrifice everything to prove the point, he’s the guy you want."
To the Motor racing world, Phil Kerr’s switch from top management in the Brabham Empire to a similar post with McLaren Racing was something akin to “Bunkie” Knudsen’s switch from General Motors to Ford in America. But it wasn’t a case of Phil leaving Jack in the lurch for a better offer from Bruce. Being a person who has brains and uses them to think with perhaps more than other people, Phil had come to the stage where he had to make a big decision which was to satisfy himself more than anything else. Deep thinking people are sometimes pretty mixed up, but Phil had come to the conclusion that he wanted out, and wanted to start all over again.
Kerr's car—the Formula 1 McLaren-Ford M7A at Brands Hatch. These cars have not continued their early season promise. Peter Mackertich
"Why did I leave Jack? Jack’s growth and his involvement in going motor racing was such that he had achieved largely what he wanted to do when he won the world championship in his own car, something that has always looked impossible until it actually happened. To me this was almost the end of the line because I couldn’t really see what else there was for him to do, and where I could be involved. Irrespective of what happened after that, I would still only be the guy who worked for Jack Brabham, and while Jack is certainly entitled to a good rub-off, people must never lose sight of the fact that Jack Brabham has not achieved everything entirely on his own. He has achieved it because of his own remarkable ability, his own courage and perseverance, sheer determination and willpower, but also because he had a lot of people behind him who were so damned loyal it’s not even funny… Loyalty is a strange thing. It’s an element that not everyone is blessed with. You can’t MAKE yourself be loyal. It’s inherent. You WANT to do it. But eventually even loyalty can be overcome by depression and if it gets to the stage where you are being taken for granted, that loyalty starts to wane a little. While Jack would never knowingly be like that with anyone, he is a thinker, he plays everything very close to his chest, you never really know what’s going on, and you COULD get the impression that you were being take for granted, without this actually being the case because NOBODY is really close to Jack.
"I had made up my mind that I was going to have a crack at something else, but I didn’t really know what. The fact that I was offered the opportunity to work with Bruce was coincidental, but I was delighted at the chance because I admire Bruce, and with him I will have exactly the same aims, objectives, and goals to achieve that were in front of me when I joined Jack ten years ago."