01/08/2025
With the latest review of Both Sides of the Barrier arriving last week, we felt it was the ideal time to revisit some past reviews.
The first one to arrive in August last year was by the incomparable David Tremayne, which was published in his e-zine Grand Prix+
Stuart very kindly sent some images that are mentioned in the review.
A MOST ENJOYABLE DENTAL APPOINTMENT
David Tremayne
Even before I opened this book, I was excited. I’d noted the multi-shot cover which included photos of David Purley in the Token, Henri Pescarolo in a BRM P201 and Tom Pryce in a Shadow DN3, so the right boxes were immediately ticked, and I already had a pretty good idea of what to expect inside. But with the first page of the first chapter I mentally yelped ‘Surtees TS5A, in Castrol colours!’ (though I’m damned if I can remember where it raced in the UK in that livery). ‘Lola T300!’‘McLaren M18!’ I was always a huge fan of Formula 5000, and those images whetted my appetite for what was to follow.
Regular motorsport fans will be very familiar with Stuart Dent. He’s very active on social media, oozes passion and a deep knowledge of the sport’s history and heritage, and in a past life
worked very effectively in Autosport’s advertising department. He also has a massive library of photos, many of which he took himself with a trusty Kodak Instamatic 133. And, yes, he
really did get that free with a bag of Liquorice Allsorts… Thank goodness. Some of the images are less than perfect, but for me, that’s one of the great appeals of this book. It’s a genuine, frill-free, diehard fan’s odyssey, and he makes no pretence of it being anything else.
He also has a fund of great stories of his adventures attending races as a punter in his early days, and boy, will so much of that side of this book resonate with those of a certain age who really
started getting interested in the sport themselves in the Seventies. We share the same feelings when it comes to our heroes departing, and I fully got why Stuart felt a helpless need to create images of the helmet designs of Pedro Rodriguez, Jo Siffert, and Gerry Birrell when they were killed, and to pin them on his bedroom wall. As he noted, it was “a form of personal tribute”. Such things come from the heart, and they matter.
Here, in some 180 pages and a similar format popularised by its Tom Pryce and Roger Williamson ‘memories’ books, BHP Publishing facilitates Dent’s excellent recollections of an era of
racing that was so very different from today that they seem to come not just from a different world, but a different planet. The reader is teleported back to that golden age when access to circuits and drivers and other racing personnel was so much less complicated than it has become under the modern-day dictates of security and safety. An age when the cars all looked different from each other, different categories abounded – national F2, F5000, F3, Formula Atlantic, Formula Ford 1600 and 2000, later Aurora F1 – and when you could seek autographs from people who were often all too willing to give them (thankfully, the dreaded and intrusive selfie had yet to raise its ugly head) and, just maybe, speak with them.
Dent tells with delight how Graham Hill swore at him when he proffered his autograph book and the famous champion began to sign in the wrong place – that carefully allocated to Marlboro BRM and Jean-Pierre Beltoise – before he set him right and indicated the Brabham page. And how Denny Hulme broke his flask when Stuart dropped his bag right in front of the rugged New Zealander’s McLaren M23 in order to sn**ch a shot of it emerging from the old paddock-to-pits tunnel (remember that?) at Brands Hatch. A year later a shot of Denis glaring at him from the cockpit (left) made me laugh – and happy that I’d never encountered that side of a man I still greatly admire.
What I loved about all this was not just the images and that obvious passion, but these stories, because I’m sure we all have similar memories of our early days of becoming seduced by such a great sport and nostalgia for a time when everything somehow seemed so much easier and carefree.
Just a photo of Brian Redman and Frank Gardner on the front row of a 1971 F5000 grid, or the sleek little JPS Lotus 73s, Niki in a March 722 in 1972, Frank Gardner’s SCA Camaro, Alan Jones’ F3 GRD or Purley in the Connew, brought so much back in a floodtide. There are countless images too of drivers strapped into their machines, perhaps none more poignant than that of Peter
Revson in the Shadow DN3 at the 1974 Race of Champions at Brands, just five days before his death in a testing accident at Kyalami.
At one stage a typical race weekend for Dent would comprise rising at 03.30 to prepare sandwiches and a flask; walking three miles from home to Sutton Coldfield town centre to catch
the bus to Birmingham New Street station; a train ride to Northampton; a walk from there to the bus station and a ride to Silverstone village; then the final mile trek to Nirvana and arrival there around 09.30… And, presumably, repeating that to get home. That’s enthusiasm!
The kindness of men such as F5000 racer Steve Thompson and his team owner Alan Brodie reminds you of the bond that mutual enthusiasm can forge. Steve gave Stuart a lift in his orange Porsche in the very early stages of Stuart’s amateur affiliation with the Servis Racing Team, while Alan soon recognized and acknowledged the teenaged fan’s enthusiasm and occasional help and support by considering him a part of the team and giving him his own liveried team jacket. It’s not difficult to figure out just what that must have meant and, again, such things matter. Typically, hoarder Dent still has it.
Curiously, on the surface, on another occasion when he’d won a Rothmans competition to pose questions to the podium winners at an F5000 race at Snetterton in October 1973 while being
compared by renowned commentator Anthony Marsh, he admits that he took no photos of his own and has no lasting memories of that event. It should have been an apogee, but that was the day he had caught up with news of the death of another of his heroes, dashing Francois Cevert, at Watkins Glen…
Later in the story come some hilarious accounts of cold-calling people while trying to sell magazine subscriptions door-to-door in Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium; these include door-stepping meetings with both pairings of ABBA, an encounter with a servant who informed him that the Ambassador he had come calling upon had been assassinated three days earlier, another with a man who was unable to speak as he was recovering from being held hostage, and meeting the man who penned The Smurf Song…
The book’s title Both Sides of the Barrier refers to the two stages of Dent’s life, and initially I wasn’t entirely sure why each chapter bears the name of a popular song of the time. But it’s
another clever little device that just adds to the experience, and this tome, sub-titled The A-Side, covers the first stage, usually outside the barrier. The second will record his subsequent career on the inside, from Autosport onwards.
If you love the sport, and especially the Seventies, you’ll thoroughly enjoy the way the A-Side rips along as it takes you to the end of that decade. If the B-Side is only half as good as this, it too will be a great book.
