When I left Team Lotus, it was one of the Team Lotus sponsors (one that I didn’t introduce) – Castrol, that took the chance to grab me to work on their sponsorships of Nissan in rally, touring car and later the Cunningham Le Mans 300ZX team.

(For more info see… Nissan Le Mans 1994 – Cunningham 300ZX).

So I ended up working with Mick de Haas (one of racing’s foremost ‘sponsorship gurus’ of the time) on this project for the balance of 1993 and most of 1994. Touring car really wasn’t where I wanted to be and towards the end of 1994 I took time out to go to Japan and Australia GPs at my own cost.

I needed to find a cheap hotel in Japan and asked my friends at Arai if they could help book a room for me. They got back to me saying they had just parted with their previous F1 Racing Service people and would I be prepared to help introduce their Japanese staff to drivers and teams at Suzuka.

So I did that and ended up doing F1 Racing Service at Suzuka. A full training at the factory north of Tokyo followed and I was asked to look after their drivers in Australia also. For 1995 I was asked to do the full season – F1 Racing Service, R&D, driver contract work etc. for Arai.

This involved looking after Arai’s F1 supported drivers – 17 of them, 2 or 3 helmets per driver – aerodynamic parts, g-strap fitting, drink tube fitting, radio fitting, visor changing, tear-off preparation, helmet cleaning – all this between every practice and the need to be prepared every morning for all these drivers for all weather, sun, rain, cloud conditions.

(Note: this was the era when visors did fog up, long before double screen visors that we have now, you had to work a lot harder to keep the helmets in good shape in those days.)

That is up to 50 helmets and up to 200 visors to be prepared. In those days Arai supported the most drivers (nowadays it is split fairly evenly between 3 or 4 manufacturers and some manufacturers have 2 or more staff at each race). (For more info see… Arai Helmet Japan).

The relationship with Arai Japan continued for many years, I moved from full time to consultancy later. The three main people I knew in Arai were Mitch Arai, Hiro Kimura, Tadahiro Takahashi but also worked with many others – all very good people absolutely dedicated to providing the best they can for racers.

Along these years the word HANS® came up from time to time, no-one seemed to think about it very seriously…

During the later part of my time with Arai I also undertook project work for Bridgestone for six months prior to their entry into F1 and then most of their first year in F1. Income on safety work frankly isn’t very good so there are times where I’ve had to step back into marketing work to get the bills paid.

Private consultancy through 1996, planning their entry into F1

Full time in 1997 – responsible for:

• Team management & logistics aspects of Bridgestone in F1
• Relations with FIA & FOA (now FOM)
• F1 Paddock Club guest programme (through Allsport Management)
• Liaison with Allsport Management on circuit billboards, positioning and monitoring effectiveness of TV coverage
• Teams relations on driver appearances, showcars, factory tours & show tyres
• Team uniform and promotional item sourcing, costing & production.

A period of 3 years back in marketing came again when Interpublic (McCann Erickson) were heavily into motorsport and I got involved on a number of projects involving Jordan F1, Williams F1, Nortel, MasterCard, Vauxhall touring car and rally and others.

This time round I was on the ‘sponsor’s side’ as opposed to on the ‘team’s side’ – it made for some uncomfortable meetings with former marketing colleagues in teams as I pushed them into giving particularly good deals for their sponsors!

Then Interpublic stopped their motorsport operations and I went back to safety work consultancy full time – in the first instance with Schroth and Stand 21 on their start up attempts at understanding the HANS® system. (For more info see… Interpublic / McCann-Erickson).

These years were mostly ‘unemployment’ – or a lot of hard but unpaid work. Earnings were minimal and so I started casting further out to expand my consultancy work. In early 2003 Sid Watkins called me and asked if I would meet him at the NEC where he was doing his safety lecture at the Autosports International exhibition. We met up and the subject of HANS® came up.

It had been clear for some time there were difficulties – the FIA researchers had had a huge budget and a solid 2 years of testing and couldn’t make the HANS® work for drivers and teams. It had got to the stage where teams had even negotiated the right to produce their own in-house team manufactured HANS® (for use by their drivers in F1 only).

Even this didn’t work and the whole project was in trouble. Initially there had been 2 projects in research to try to protect driver’s heads and necks – a) the airbag and b) the HANS®. In simple terms the airbag could get a 100% result but was very unpredictable in how and when it went off, the HANS® had a 70% result but was predictable in the lab.

However here comes the problem with theory and practice – or laboratory technicians and racetrack technicians… Lab techies will almost never work willingly with the people at the track in a way that allows the track people to help the development in a way that accounts for ‘real use’ situations. (There are exceptions – thank you Hubert Gramling for all of your help and willingness to share in both situations).

‘We know best’ was what seemed to be going on. People were simply not listening to each other and the people on the European side of the ‘pond’ weren’t really ‘hearing’ what the HANS® inventors on the other side of the ‘pond’ were saying.

Sid put the real situation to me – ‘the HANS® is dead’, the FIA was giving it up, their techies had had 2 years to solve the issues and failed. Would I be prepared to use my Arai Racing Service knowledge and have a go at working with the teams and drivers and getting the thing to work?

I said yes and heard nothing till a few days later when I was heading to Stansted Airport to deliver some helmet parts. Ian Brown of FIA Geneva came on the phone and asked where I was, did I have any spare clothes in the car, could I get a flight straight away to Barcelona and meet Jim Downing from HANS®? I err, ummed a bit and got on a flight.

Jim Downing’s company Hubbard Downing in Atlanta made the HANS®, so I was able to learn from the boss straight off, a huge benefit. I met Jim and went to the track. We arrived firstly at Williams – Williams had been trying all sorts of ‘home-made by Williams’ HANS® constructions.

As I went into the garage an enraged Juan-Pablo Montoya screamed “I’m not using that ****ing thing again and threw it across the garage into the wall. I’d known JPM for some time and so I left him alone a while. Later things were a bit calmer and I asked him to use a standard HANS® from USA, I adjusted tethers, adjusted padding and his seat belts angles and so forth.

He went out on a long run – maybe 30 laps, came in, got out of the car and started talking to his race engineer. He still had the HANS® on so I tapped him on the shoulder and said ‘was this thing okay this time?’ he looked mystified and suddenly realised he hadn’t really noticed he’d had it on. (For more info see… Juan-Pablo Montoya).

Did similar work with other drivers, Jacques Villeneuve perhaps being the most difficult. Jacques wasn’t winging, he was asking pertinent relevant questions, he knew the dangers of racing, he’d lost his Dad way back in racing, the threat of neck injury was not just a concern for him it was crucial that safety was done right.

So I spent a good amount of time with him. If I could get him comfortable and confident I could do it for them all. In fact I still do Jacques’ HANS® – custom padding, all sorts of special ‘Jacques’ preferences and he is one of those rare drivers who bother to say thank you: an simple email came from him at Indy in 2014 saying ‘thank you’.

A couple of weeks later I was back at Barcelona, this time with Dr. Bob Hubbard. Bob is Jim Downing’s brother- in-law and it was Bob who invented the HANS®. At the time he came up with the idea he was working for General Motors on the Hybrid III dummy head and neck design.

Jim did some serious sports car racing and a friend was killed in a stupidly small accident – not even a fast accident, but one where basilar skull fracture occurred. Bob didn’t want that happening to his brother-in-law and came up with the concept of the HANS®.

So it was a real pleasure to work with Bob at Barcelona for that second test. Primary driver at this test was Michael Schumacher. Michael is a worker – start 7am finish 11pm type work typically – he tried everything, different angles, different tethers at varying lengths, seatbelt settings, padding.

At the end of the day he said ‘okay, its okay, it works, thank you’ and got out his mobile phone. There and then he called all his driver friends in F1 and said ‘the HANS® is okay, it works, get on with it and work with James.” Call after call after call. (For more info see… Michael Schumacher).

Then came the real work – we were about 5 weeks off the first race, the tests had shown we needed not just a 40 degree HANS® that the lab people had been pushing but we needed 6 different models of the HANS® (different angles, different sizes) just for F1, and then more for other seating positions.

We had to make moulds, test pieces, test them, develop them, test again until we had all 6 ready for the FIA homologation tests. Then we had to pass these FIA tests and make sufficient numbers of the HANS® units, padding, tethers, helmet fittings and so on and get them to Australia for the first GP.

From memory I personally invested approximately GBP 120,000 in making that happen – with money I did not have (and had to borrow), this after a period of 2 years of virtually complete unemployment.

I got to Australia, the HANS® arrived and cleared customs and we were set for the first Grand Prix using HANS®. Yes there were a few problems, it wasn’t always easy, but through those problems we learned and made the HANS® what it is today and gave countless racers the chance of not breaking their necks.

It always angers me when I read in a press article that I was the inventor of the HANS® – I was not, I was certainly a part of making it happen, but without Bob’s fantastic idea (HIS HANS® invention), Jim’s company and dedicated staff making them and incredible determination it would not have happened – they created it.

Those guys and girls (at HDI / Downing Atlanta now HANS® Performance Products) were making them and losing money for many many years. They suffered ridicule, but knew they were right and didn’t give up. When I met Jim and Bob through Sid’s introduction I knew they were right and I didn’t give up on them either.

As with Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna’s deaths in 1994 waking up F1 on safety, Dale Earnhardt’s death from a basilar skull fracture in a slow accident on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500 woke up US racing and what had been maybe 250 HANS® sold in 10 years before that day, became 250 more in a month following Dale’s death.

Jackie Stewart was ridiculed for his safety campaigns in the 1970’s, Bob & Jim in the 1990’s. I had gone through it with the radio and helmet concepts and again with the HANS®. It was quite incredible the strength of the vitriol some people came forward with in trying to make trouble and stop the HANS®. But they failed and racing is safer now.

James with a selection of HANS® units in 2010
(Photo Rainer Schlegelmilch)

The result of the early training I had at Arai Helmet Ltd in Japan in 1988 was that my new knowledge came to the notice of Prof. Sid Watkins, the FIA F1 Medical Delegate. Encouraged by Sid I started a number of safety projects (while still at Team Lotus) in my spare time.

• Driver fireproof underwear at the time was horribly itchy and unbranded (no sponsor logos at all on them). As a direct result I saw many drivers with polyester T-shirts given free from sponsors (with their logos on) being used in place of Nomex fireproof underwear. I commissioned the production of comfortable non-itchy Nomex underwear that could also be printed with sponsor logos.
• Development took a year and at Imola in 1989 Team Lotus drivers were wearing the new Nomex undershirts. During that race Gerhard Berger had his horrific fiery accident in the Ferrari F1. Following that accident most drivers changed to the new Nomex and this is almost standard through all formulae in racing today.

• Helmet Chinstrap D-ring tab: While at Arai I saw a motorcycle helmet of one employee who had hand stitched a small leather ‘tab’ to one of the chinstrap D-rings. The result was that it was hugely easier to undo, yet still secure when tight. I proposed the idea to Sid, who got me to make some up and we started using them in F1. After a few accidents where cars were upside down and Sid had to crawl under to rescue drivers he suggested we make this mandatory for all racing helmets and also make them in red to be easier to see in dark conditions.These days these D-ring tabs are almost universal worldwide, not only in racing but also on most street motorcycle helmets.

• Radio systems – in 1988 the standard radio systems consisted of huge heavy speakers mounted by the ears, in close proximity to the temples at the side of drivers heads. (Note: what we consider standard now – moulded very small earplug speakers did not exist.) It was clear that these very heavy speakers could severely injure drivers in a side impact. I initiated a project in conjunction with Arai and K-Tel (a close associate company of Kenwood) to provide thin lightweight radio speakers for helmet mounting in Nakajima’s helmets. Two years of Satoru getting small electric shocks and not very good sound quality eventually paid off and in 1990 we had the first really useful lightweight speakers to try. Ironically it was at the Spanish Grand Prix at Jerez in 1990 that I first fitted the speakers in Martin Donnelly’s helmet not long before the massive accident that nearly killed him. Had he had the old type of heavy speakers in that helmet it is hard to say what the result of that accident might have been – as the helmet was split in four places, such was the severity of that accident. Despite the clear evidence, it was incredibly deemed unnecessary to change anything at all until FOUR YEARS LATER after Karl Wendlinger was in a coma as a result of an accident at the 1994 Monaco Grand Prix – his helmet was fitted with the same heavy speakers I had thrown out at Lotus in 1990.

• F1 Super Helmet / FIA Advanced Helmet / 8860 – I started this project after Martin Donnelly’s accident in 1990. That helmet was the best available at the time and it was split in four places. (Note: a helmet must absorb impact in an accident, and in so doing it will necessarily break in some ways – otherwise the head inside will break). However, the ways it splits and breaks are important and it was quite apparent that very much more needed to be done. The homologation standards of the time were good, but varied considerably – some were good in one way, some good in other ways, but each standard lacked in one aspect or another. So I started work combining different testing standards together and proposed a new standard. It took a very long time for the relevant people to listen, but after the deaths of Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger and the coma of Karl Wendlinger (all in 1994) finally I made some progress. In 1995 with the help of Ferry Brouwer of Arai Europe and Hiro Kimura of Arai Japan a meeting was set up with Ian Brown and Sid Watkins of the FIA and the project started properly. Sadly it took 10 years of ‘research’ and became an excessively expensive helmet. It did achieve the targets I’d proposed at the start and Sid estimated it improved the impact protection by 30% and penetration protection by 30% over the helmets we had had before.

In the late 1980’s I joined Team Lotus to work on sponsorship and marketing. This work was primarily looking after current sponsors, making sure they got the best from their sponsorship of the team.

Car, driver and team personnel branding, driver and showcar appearances, press events, team uniform sourcing and production, guest hospitality programmes. We did pit tours, factory tours, produced merchandise and countless other tasks.

Marketing responsibilities took in the driver safety equipment (as this was the primary ‘face’ of the sponsors imagery). One team driver was Satoru Nakajima who insisted on his Arai helmets being maintained correctly and that resulted in me training at Arai Helmet Ltd in Ohmiya in Japan in 1988 to be fully conversant in this.

Team Lotus was an F1 team of the old school (not many employees), everyone pitched in to help on work other than that in their job description. I think the marketing & sponsorship department was four people when I started (and certainly less than ten when I left in 1993).

In 1990 the writing was on the wall for the team, an appalling car that year, serious accidents, the main sponsors taking their money away. Charlie Crichton-Stuart, one of the key ‘sponsor finders of the time’ had put me in contact with a Canadian business man who might be interested in F1.

I was tasked with ‘looking after’ Lawrence Stroll at the 1990 Canadian GP. The team was really in no shape for anyone to put money into at that time, but we kept in contact. Team Lotus went through massive changes at the end of that season and new management.

Once the management change was complete we had to try to recreate the team from what everyone had thought was over and finished for good. We didn’t even have team uniform, no sponsors, no branding to go on the car. Lawrence Stroll stepped in with his Tommy Hilfiger brand and clothed us and bit-by-bit got more involved with the team (later also with Pepe Jeans).

By this stage I not only fitted radios and drink systems in the helmets but I actually had to solder up complete helmet radio systems from components and bits of wire. I also took on some of the press and pr work when the team had to stop buying in these services.

Nigel Stepney rejoined Team Lotus as team manager in 1991. Between a job at Benetton to working for Nelson Piquet’s new F3000 team Nigel ‘stopped off’ at Lotus for some months between the two jobs. With way too much for any one person to do Nigel started delegating various junior team management jobs to me. It was invaluable experience.

We got through 1991, moved into 1992 with a new car and what seemed to feel like a real team again. I’d managed to bring Hitachi into the team, but we were still way short of the necessary finance to run at the top level. The following year, 1993, I was asked to become assistant team manager, it wasn’t for long as views were split on the future direction of the team and I ended up leaving the team mid-season

Primarily a liaison function, involving the briefing of art directors, copywriters, and film and radio production personnel. Progress chasing for advertisement production as well as cost planning and timetabling. Maintenance of communications with clients, newspaper and magazine publishers and television and radio stations.

Primary Advertising Accounts:

• Guinness
• Pan-Am
• De Beers
• RAF
• RHM
• Kraft
• Findus
• Kodak
• SSAFA
• Hedges  & Butler

International division – account management – Accounts:

• Carreras Rothmans
• Lockheed
• Hilton International
• GM General Motors (Isuzu & NAVO Divisions)

Including motorsport:

• Rothmans Porsche Group C
• Rothmans Opel World Rally Championship Team

During those years I introduced Rothmans to Porsche (through Jürgen Barth & Derek Bell) which resulted in the Rothmans Porsche 956 team. (For more info see… Rothmans Porsche 956 team). This was followed up by the move of Rothmans rally sponsorship from Ford to GM Opel which resulted in the Rothmans Opel Rally Team (and coincidentally out of this new start for Rothmans, Prodrive started its life in David Richards’ home garage).

Planning and management of all Warner Bros. film releases in the UK and Ireland, including briefing advertising agencies and coordinating press and publicity

Films launched:

• Zelig – Woody Allen
• Sudden Impact – Clint Eastwood
• Greystoke – Christophe Lambert, Andie MacDowell, Ralph Richardson, James Fox  – (Hugh Hudson)
• City Heat – Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds
• Star 80 – Marielle Hemingway, Eric Roberts
• The Right Stuff – Ed Harris, Scott Glenn, Sam Shepherd, Dennis Quaid
• Purple Rain – Prince
• Police Academy – the first film – Steve Guttenberg, Kim Cattrall
• Risky Business – Tom Cruise, Rebecca De Mornay – the film that launched Cruise’s career
• Cal – John Lynch, Helen Mirren – (David Puttnam)
• Gremlins – the first film – Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates – (Joe Dante, Steven Spielberg)
• Le Bal – Étienne Guichard, Régis Bouquet, Francesco De Rosa
• The Killing Fields – Sam Waterston, Haing S. Ngor, John Malkovich – (Roland Joffé, David Puttnam)
• The Never Ending Story – Noah Hathaway, Barret Oliver, Tami Stronach – (Wolfgang Petersen)
• Never Say Never Again – (James Bond) – Sean Connery, Kim Basinger

Relaunch of the company after the merger between Reed Stenhouse and Alexander & Alexander. All marketing department activities – advertising, brochures, pr, new business presentations, corporate entertainment & sponsorship activities