I expect very few of you will remember David Heynes, but he was a formidably rapid ‘gentleman driver’ who raced with great success for many years in historics until one fateful day at Silverstone in 2003 when, outwardly fit as an entire circus of fleas and aged only 56, he had a heart attack and died at the wheel of his Lotus 15.
David was a close family friend and the reason for mentioning him now is that he was the man who first introduced me to the Porsche 911 Turbo. It was around 1978, and I’d have been perhaps 12 years old. I have no idea where we were going nor why I was in the passenger seat of his Turbo. All I recall was the car suddenly going sideways as we entered a slip road that led to a motorway.
This was a new development for me, as while my father was a fine and fast driver, he always operated within the limits of what his car could do. So having never been in a car addressing the road at such an unorthodox angle, I naturally assumed he was about to bin it and braced for impact. Except however strange the behaviour of the car was to me, that of its driver was even more peculiar: he appeared to be giggling. And accelerating.
