Murray Walker off mic: 'wonderful bombshells' from voice of F1

Here is just one example. In 2001 I mentioned to him during a phone call that we were planning a feature article to mark the 50-year anniversary of Ferrari’s first ever F1 grand prix victory, which was won by Froilan Gonzalez at Silverstone in 1951. “Oh I was there,” he said, casually.

“Really?” I asked.

“Oh yes. Gonzalez was a big lad. In fact he looked like a barrel of lard with an inverted pudding bowl on top. He was just this great big dumpy figure jammed into the car, flailing away at it. I wouldn’t say he was driving wildly but he occasionally hit straw bales and things.” I loved “and things” then and I love it now.

Murray became world-famous for his malapropisms – “Tambay’s hopes, which were nil before, are zero now”; “Do my eyes deceive me or is Senna’s Lotus sounding rough?”; “This will be Williams’ first win since the last time a Williams won”; “Stewart has two cars in the top five, Magnussen fifth and Barrichello sixth”; “There’s no damage to the car except to the car itself”; and, my personal favourite, “Unless I’m very much mistaken, I’m very much mistaken”, which became the title of his best-selling 2002 autobiography.

To F1 insiders and cognoscenti he was almost as well known for his reluctance to criticise drivers even when they had driven poorly or had made glaring errors — in marked contrast to his languorous yet pugnacious co-commentator James Hunt. But in person he was much less reticent. His popularity soared in the late 1980s and early 1990s as that of Nigel Mansell did likewise, but the truth was that, although he recognised Mansell’s doughty genius behind the wheel, he also found him very difficult. “Oh yes, Nigel really fired me up,” he once told me. “A great, great driver. Balls like melons. But also one of the thinnest-skinned, most easily offended, most prickly people I’ve ever met. But my attitude was: because he’s the driver he is, I’ll humour the bloke.”

Murray continued to fire on all cylinders as a columnist well into his 80s, and in 2005 I remember McLaren’s hard-to-please team principal Ron Dennis stopping me in an F1 paddock somewhere to praise a Walker column that he had read on the plane. On a whim I then suggested to Ron that he could deliver a money-can’t-buy treat to his sponsors and VIP guests, for their benefit alone, if Murray were to be hired to deliver his famous trousers-on-fire live race commentaries exclusively in McLaren’s Paddock Club suites. Ron frowned, which reaction I took to be a no. I then put the same suggestion to Nick Fry, team principal of the Honda F1 team, and he thought it was a capital idea. So, it turned out, did Murray, and throughout 2006 he became Honda’s ‘F1 team ambassador’, delivering live race commentaries exclusively for the team’s Paddock Club guests. As a thank you, Murray sent me a case of good claret and treated me to a swanky lunch at Bibendum (now Claude Bosi at Bibendum) in London’s Fulham Road. When I joined McLaren in 2008 I reminded Ron of my having made the suggestion to him initially. Cue: another frown.

A few years later, I cannot recall exactly when, I was having lunch with Murray at the Augustus John, a pub in Fordingbridge, Hampshire, near where he lived, which has since been prosaically renamed the Railway Hotel. I do not remember what we had for our main courses, but we both ordered parsnip soup for our starters. We judged it very tasty, which consonant verdict we shared with each other. Our waitress cleared our plates, and we chattered on. About a quarter of an hour later, she brought our main courses. “Excuse me, miss, but what about our soup?” Murray asked.

The waitress looked at him, then at me, but said nothing.

“Er, we’ve had our soup, Murray,” I ventured.

“Have we? My goodness. My mind is playing tricks on me these days,” he said with a hearty guffaw.

Well, perhaps it was. He was then closer to 90 than 80, after all. But, even so, it was only his short-term memory that was becoming faulty. When it came to his long and extraordinarily storied life as the greatest motor sport commentator the world has ever known — my words, not his — his memory was pin-sharp almost to the very end. In September 2013, by which time I was well into my 10-year stint as McLaren’s comms/PR chief and he was a month shy of 90, I interviewed him for a ‘Murray on McLaren at 50’ series of videos to commemorate the half-century since Bruce McLaren had founded his eponymous race team. Murray was fluent, witty, conscientious and insightful, and was chummy and courteous with our film crew, which is how I will always remember him.