Driving for the hapless Andrea Moda F1 team: 'I was actually scared'

Once McCarthy had learned what he was walking into, you’d be forgiven for assuming he might have thought twice. Not a chance – the Brit hadn’t worked two year’s worth of 16-hour days swinging metres above the boiling North Sea just to not join the F1 circus. You can’t say he wasn’t warned though.

So poorly organised was this new outfit, they hadn’t even managed to get on track for pre-qualifying in the first two races of the season. This is where McCarthy came in.

“They had actually fired Alex Caffi and Enrico Bertaggia, because they happened to speak out against the team,” he says laughing. “So they needed two more idiots to come in.

“I was told ‘Look, this is a small team, it’s going to be against the odds, but they just basically need somebody who’s going to do whatever it takes.’ Which is why my name came up.

“I went to see Duffy. I think he was convinced because I was looking at him like a piece of steak, I wanted the drive that badly!”

“It was long, slim and black. All you had do was put brass handles on the sides and that would save time”

And so, after a decade of trying, McCarthy was in the grand prix drivers’ club. He was doing it for free and had to pay all his own expenses, but didn’t care.

After borrowing £800 to get an economy ticket to Brazil, the Essex-native began to prepare for pre-qualifying, the torturous session which decided which of the backmarkers would actually make it through to qualifying-proper and a place on the grid.

On arrival, McCarthy wasn’t exactly reassured.

“Everybody looked so tired, there weren’t many of them and the place was really untidy,” he says. “They were trying to get the cars built but seemed completely disorganised.

“I did the cockpit escape test – after looking around that car, I did realise it was going to be a lot easier to get out in the garage than when it was buried inside a wall, because even then it didn’t look great.

“It was long, slim and black. All you had do was put brass handles on the sides and that would save time. I knew I up was against it.”

200mph caskets wasn’t all that was on McCarthy’s mind though.

Whilst AM’s other new driver Roberto Moreno failed to prequalify, managing two laps and setting a time a whopping 23sec off Nigel Mansell’s pole, McCarthy had had his Superlicence revoked for a lack of F3000 experience and didn’t even mak it into the car.

After managing to persuade all the team bosses to vote for it to be reinstated – “Flavio Briatore looked at me like a biology student who’s just dissected a frog, utter disgust” – he had it back in time for the next race in Barcelona.

In Monaco it was a similar same story, but only worse.

“They held me in the pits as long as possible, to keep the car and its parts as spares for Roberto,” he says. “When they finally let me out, I realised this thing isn’t going to hold together. What I was doing was stupid, to be completely honest.

“I took the tunnel flat. I’m sitting there, my head getting smashed around because there was no windshield. I’ve got double vision and I’m trying to remember if it was left or right after the tunnel at the chicane. And after all that, I was still slow.

“I realised on that lap that I was actually frightened. The steering column was shifting a bit; I was getting buffeted around; I couldn’t feel the car; I didn’t know the track. It was unbelievably dangerous.”

Moreno somehow managed to qualify for that race, but that was the highlight of the year for the beleaguered team.

It had no engines in Canada as Sassetti had defaulted on payments to supplier Judd, then missed the French GP after a lorry drivers’ strike prevented the team’s trucks from making it to the circuit.

McCarthy tried to summon an extra strength to pre-qualify at Silverstone, when the team put him out on wet tyres in dry conditions, his car taking to the grass at Copse at full speed, but to no avail.

A large part of the substandard treatment McCarthy was getting from his team stemmed from the fact that previous driver Enrico Bertaggia now wanted back in, and he had $1m in sponsorship to sweeten the deal.

Sassetti wanted to ditch McCarthy for the Italian, but FIA prevented this as the outfit had already reached its quota of four drivers per season, and so the Englishman became persona non grata within his own team.

“I went to Italy to visit the factory, and it all started coming out,” says McCarthy. “Sassetti was saying he didn’t want me, I’d cost him a million dollars. The whole trip was pointless.

“He was actually quite striking – good looking, leather jacket, wraparound sunglasses, but he was really ‘rebel without a clue.'”

Somehow, team relations did manage to deteriorate even further. When McCarthy was sent out for Hungary pre-qualifying without even having enough time to start a lap, he let rip.

“I came in and just let loose on the entire team,” he says. “I wanted to punch everybody.

“Moreno looks at me and says ‘I think you’ve just f***** yourself there mate.’ I said ‘That may well be, but I’m getting quite a bit of help here, aren’t I?”

The Andrea Moda story hit perhaps its low point at the next round in qualifying at Spa-Francorchamps, and McCarthy said a dark cloud had fallen over himself and those who knew him by this point – his most harrowing moment was just around the corner.

“I was with the journalist Tony Dodgins, and he said to me “Perry, don’t get in the car, I’ve got a really bad feeling about this.

“I looked at him and went, ‘Me too, but I have no choice.’ The Brabham team hadn’t turned up, so there was no pre-qualifying. I had to get the car into the race, this was my best chance.

“I went as hard as I could on the first lap as I didn’t trust the car to last beyond a few laps, something might break.

“I came out of La Source and as I went to line it up for Eau Rouge, going extremely fast, and I just felt this stiffness. If it had been any other car I would have thought ‘Who cares?’ and dealt with it.

“But as I was heading straight for the barriers, the steering jammed and I hit the brakes – the best decision I’ve ever made.

“This all happened within half a second, but finally I took enough speed off the car, brushed the tyre barriers, and bounced back onto the track.

“I realised the steering rack was flexing. When I came back in and told the team, the answer was, ‘Oh we know. We tested it on Roberto’s car last week.’

“This was no longer motor racing. This was a complete realisation that they didn’t know what they’re doing.”

As if the weekend hadn’t been eventful enough for the team up to this point, Sassetti was then arrested by the Belgian police on fraud charges, with Andrea Moda thrown out of the championship for bringing it into disrepute.

The squad turned up at Monza in the vain hope of competing in its home race, but was emphatically denied. The Andrea Moda farce was over.

Whilst his grand prix racing career ended in this sorry fashion, McCarthy tested for Benetton and Williams, before racing five times at Le Mans between ’96 and ’03. Two of these entries were with factory Audi squads, finally competing in the top seat which his talent merited.

For an Englishman that has to some degree made his name from this torrid F1 tenure, the infamous Andrea Moda tale is all part of the journey.

“My approach was always to take a half chance and open it up,” he says. “There were so many times when there was no testing for me, I would get seventh or something in a car which was run out of someone’s back garden – that’s a reputational win.

“I was able to make people in the paddock believe in me.”