“He was at his very finest running his own team,” says Brundle. “With his own name over the door. Everyone knew who was running the show and he was such a natural leader. Everyone wanted to be in Pricey’s gang. I think Patrick Head once offered him the job of running the Williams team, but I don’t think that would have fitted him very well. The razzamatazz of F1 wasn’t him.”
Brundle’s introduction came through Les Thacker of BP, who was charged with co-ordinating the petrol company’s motorsport activities. Brundle had raced alongside Stirling Moss in the 1981 British Touring Car Championship in a BP-backed Audi team and it was Thacker who reckoned Brundle probably deserved a shot at F3 – in the BP-backed Dave Price Racing Team.
“I first walked into Pricey’s office, a Norfolk boy. He looked me up and down and said, ‘Marty, you need to get some smart pumps and f**kin’ jeans son,’ because he obviously thought I looked like the Toyota salesman I was. If it wasn’t for Pricey I reckon I’d still be selling Toyotas for a living now.”
For all that he was “the most unthreatening, friendly guy imaginable,” Price was a tough taskmaster. Brundle found this out to his cost after crashing the F3 car at Dijon. “It was a round of the French F3 championship and was supposed to be preparation for the Monaco F3 race,” he recalls. “We would stop by at Dijon, then go on to Monaco. It was on an in-lap after qualifying and I tripped over one of the French boys who hadn’t taken kindly to us showing up and being quick. I ended up with the car in the wall, very heavily damaged and that meant I couldn’t do Monaco. There wasn’t time to rebuild it. But they had another car to run there so we still went. Pricey had me as the team gofer all that weekend. So I’d have to collect the mechanics at 5am every morning in the mini bus, go off to collect the food, bring the mechanics back. He had me doing everything. That was my penance.”