Tommy Byrne had the potential to be one of the Formula One greats, but even an astounding McLaren test couldn't keep the Dundalk man's career on track, he tells Justin Hynes
IN ONE OF the most dramatic season finale’s Formula One has ever witnessed, last season’s Brazilian Grand Prix saw Lewis Hamilton finally fulfil the potential that had been nurtured since he was old enough and big enough to clamber into a go-kart. Firstly Hamilton was coached by his father, Anthony, and later by McLaren boss Ron Dennis, who saw in a 13-year-old Hamilton something rare – a spectacular talent that if given the right tools could deliver championships. Ten years later, Hamilton delivered.
Dial it back more than two decades and the same set of circumstances is converging in a similar moment of massive potential. Take a hotshot young driver, a winner of multiple championships, with a solid belief in his status as the best of the best. Add to it a McLaren team that must test him as part of his prize for dominating that season’s F3 championship. The result: astonishing lap times around Silverstone, times that demolish those of the team’s regular race drivers, times that should make the world sit up and notice. Except they don’t. Instead of those times being a shot heard around the world, they fall on deaf ears.
The focus shifts and Tommy Byrne, a working-class kid from Dundalk, a race driver as prodigiously gifted if not more so than the current world champion, is left behind. Instead of Hamilton-esque glory, fame and riches, the tale takes a different, more chaotic, twist.
Byrne’s award-winning book Crashed and Byrned: The Greatest Racing Driver You Never Saw tells the story of how a penniless kid from a country with little F1 pedigree rose to being a pace setter for the great Ayrton Senna and a potential McLaren driver, before his career subsequently spiralled out of control. He is philosophical about his see-saw career.
“I felt that I’d done everything I needed to do. I felt I had one chance. I did everything. I’d won all those championships, got to Formula One, and it hadn’t worked out. After that I didn’t have a lot of choice. There was nothing for me, I was going nowhere. Simple as that.”
The road to that one shining chance, the moment that came to define Byrne’s career and his life, had started long before, in rural Dundalk in the 1970s, a million miles removed from the Grand Prix streets of Monaco. Byrne, one of six children, began his racing career on tractors, helping out on a farm as a way of escaping the dull routine of school. By 15 he had left school and was helping run a stock-car-racing mini for an acquaintance. At 17 he was in Kildare, lining up with a bunch of other hopefuls at Mondello Park, paying £25 for 25 laps of the circuit in a beat-up racing-school car.
Six years later and Byrne, by now a double British Formula Ford 1600 champion, a British and European Formula Ford 2000 title holder, and the newly crowned British Formula Three champion, is climbing into a McLaren F1 car as if it’s his birthright.
“I was the best,” he says matter-of-factly. “As a driver you have to believe that. Ayrton Senna absolutely knew he was the best. I knew I was the best. I deserved to be there. You have to believe you are the best, but to do that you have to back it up. I had done that.”
It was a claim rubber-stamped by all who saw him. Eddie Jordan said of him: “In terms of raw talent he’s up there with the best. With the Sennas and Schumachers.” Former Jaguar, Stewart and Jordan technical director Gary Anderson, who ran Byrne in F3 in Europe and later in the US, reckoned Byrne was “fantastically naturally gifted”.
But it wasn’t enough. “He lacked that last little bit of focus,” Anderson says in the book. “He’d come from nothing to become a kingpin and he was enjoying that so much that the focus just slipped. It’s easily done.”
Byrne, though, disputes the suggestion. “I had a lot of fans and a lot of friends and sure, we had a lot of good times, but I was very serious deep down about it. Every morning I’d wake up thinking, how am I going to get to the next level? So, yes, I had commitment, I know Ron Dennis said I didn’t have commitment, but I did –right up until that test. Afterwards? Well I think I just became a little happier, there was a little more drinking a little more partying . . . ”
The story of Byrne’s October 1982 McLaren test has grown into a Formula One legend, which, over many tellings, now has Byrne telling team boss Ron Dennis that the car “is a piece of shit” and that Byrne’s arrogance derailed his career. But he says otherwise.
The truth, according to Byrne, is that, despite setting phenomenal times in the McLaren even though, he claims, the team wound the throttle of his McLaren back and misrecorded his times, his was simply a face that did not fit at McLaren.
“Maybe it would have worked if I had learned to be a different person, to be a Lewis Hamilton – because that’s what Ron needed. Ron didn’t need me,” he says. “I was proud of where I came from, I was proud of where I got to and I told him and I didn’t even think that you have to speak differently or act differently. I was just a happy, funny guy and Ron Dennis wasn’t looking for that guy.”
And with that, Byrne’s chance was gone. “I did dust myself down but the chances of getting back into F1 were . . . I’ll give an example: we talked to Tyrrell. They wanted a million pounds. A million! There was just no way. I was realistic. I knew I wasn’t a sponsor-getter. I was good at hustling for drives and making friends but as far as getting a million – it never would have worked.”
After that the US beckoned, but while Byrne was pursuing romantic notions of the land of opportunity, notions fostered by the Hollywood movies of his childhood, his escape across the Atlantic was actually the beginning of a long, slow descent. Byrne squandered his talent on a series of pay-cheque drives in disparate series, becoming an ageing gun for hire. The drives slowly began to dry up. “They didn’t like me in ARS [which later became IndyCar Junior series IndyLights] because I was winning too much and I was the old guy from Formula One and they wanted to show the new kids coming up. So it was slipping away. By 1990 I started to figure it was all over. And then I got a deal in Mexico for a couple of years.”
Where once he had been feted as a possible world champion, Byrne was now reduced to battling for drives in junior series in the wild racing backwater of Mexico. While Byrne was partying hard and fending off the bisexual advances of his gun-toting Mexican sponsor, at home his marriage was falling apart and his finances were in ruins.
“There was definitely a point where I thought I’m sinking here,” he admits. “In Mexico I was still a star and I could still party and have fun. It was when I came back from Mexico that I realised it had to stop. I came home with $100,000 and one month later it was gone. I lost my house, I lost my marriage, everything. That was the lowest I got, I just got myself down into a hole and I couldn’t get out of it.
“That was when I went to work out in the woods with my friend Scott, smoking pot and drinking all day. After that a friend got me the job in mid-Ohio and that’s suddenly when I shaped up and started again. It wasn’t like a big saving moment, more a gentle rescue.”
Since then, Byrne has worked as an instructor at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course in the US, a role he now enjoys massively. So is there an object lesson in his tale? For a moment Byrne struggles to find one. “Nothing really. It’s just my story. I’m glad it’s out there now and that’s me. The only regret I have is not thinking ahead, not thinking about tomorrow. I should have been thinking about my retirement 20 years ago.
“But other than that, life is pretty good,” he says, searching for words, “I’m . . . I’m finally getting organised.”
'Crashed and Byrned: The Greatest Racing Driver You Never Saw'by 'Tommy Byrne and Mark Hughes is published by Icon Books, £10.99