Murray in action: reluctant to criticise on air, he was much less reticent in person
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If you are reading these words on the day that they were published — 10 October 2023 — you are reading them exactly 100 years after the birth in Hall Green, Birmingham, UK, of the one and only Murray Walker. He delivered his final live grand prix commentary on September 30, 2001, aged 77; he died on March 13, 2021, aged 97; and, yes, if he were still alive today, he would have just received a birthday telegram from King Charles III.
When I became editor of F1 Racing magazine in December 1996, Murray was about to leave the BBC to join ITV, which had won the UK rights to televise grands prix from 1997 onwards. Not surprisingly, since he was extraordinarily popular with British Formula 1 fans, I offered him a monthly column — and to my surprise and delight he agreed. So popular did he quickly become with the magazine’s readers, indeed, that I am here to let you in on a remarkable secret.
In those pre-digital days, the key determinant of the sales success of any magazine was the allure of its front cover. We used to agonise over how best to maximise what we called ‘news-stand appeal’. What cover image should we run this month? Damon Hill or Michael Schumacher? Jacques Villeneuve or Mika Hakkinen? Fernando Alonso or Kimi Raikkonen? Action shot or studio portrait? And what about the line? What two, three or four words would best grab the attention of the newsagent browser as he or she made the always important (to us) but usually trivial (to them) decision: should I buy this mag or not? Well, during my 11 years in the editor’s chair, which ran from 1996 to 2007, in positions one, two and three in terms of highest ever sales were issues that carried the cover image not of one of our readers’ Nomex-clad heroes, but that of a bald and bespectacled pensioner with an impish grin revealing wonky teeth. I kid you not: Murray Walker was serious box-office in the 1990s and 2000s.
Murray thought Mansell’s courage made up for his thin skin
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He first commentated on F1 at Silverstone in 1949, before it even existed as a world championship, which was inaugurated in 1950. Only 350,000 UK homes were then graced by a television. That changed quickly — by 1960 the figure had jumped to more than 11 million — but F1 TV broadcasts were still a rarity. The first F1 race to be shown live on UK TV was the 1953 British Grand Prix, but for many years thereafter only a small selection of grands prix were televised in the UK — the British, obviously, Monaco often, Monza sometimes — but not always live and usually only edited highlights. Nonetheless, despite being a busy City of London ad exec working first for McCann Erickson then for Masius & Ferguson, Murray attended any races he could, whether they be for drivers on four wheels or riders on two, his secretly preferred form of motor sport, brought up to love bikes as he had been by his 1931 Isle of Man TT-winning (lightweight class) father Graham; and, as I got to know him via our regular phone calls and lunches in connection with his monthly column, he used to drop wonderful bombshells that he thought little of but I thought the world of.
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.
Commentating partnership with James Hunt was F1 broadcasting gold
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.”
This article uses edited passages from Maurice Hamilton’s book, a tribute to the voice of F1: Murray Walker: Incredible! At the 2000 German Grand Prix, Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari started from…
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.
