Stuart Turner, as well as being both BMC and Ford Team Manager, was a great friend of the LAC. Sadly he recently passed away. We thought you might like to read theae words from Ecurrie Cod Fillet about him.
FOUNDED BY ROY FIDLER & JOHN HOPWOOD IN 1955
STUART TURNER (14.01.33 – 07.09.25)
Hello Everyone
Back in 2020, Graham Robson sent us two ‘spoof’ obituaries, both based on The Times format – one Stuart had written about him and vice versa. We used Graham’s in 2021 and now, sadly, the time has come – with some minor edits, obviously! – to use Stuart’s.
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Stuart Turner, the famous ex-rally team manager, and inspiration behind the birth of several important road cars at BMC and Ford, who died on 7th September, was almost impossible to categorise. Not only did he inspire the transformation of British rallying in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (‘If anything, I changed it from the sport of “Gentlemen” to one of “Players”….), but he also became a self-taught expert on cottage restoration, took the art of after-dinner
speaking to a new high level, built several family homes (all of which were named ‘Penny Farthing’ – ‘That was how much money I had left after finishing each one!…’ – and became an indefatigable trustee of the Motorsport Safety Fund.
Not only this, but his way with words -whether spoken, or written down – made colleagues and friends so jealous that it was rare that anyone attempted to match him. He was, however, brief and to the point on the telephone – not only was he used to calling at unsocial hours (any friend receiving a call after 10pm would know who it was from….), but it became one of their unstated aims to close a conversation before he did. Even so, it might have been stimulating, but it was also daunting to be on the receiving end of any call which started with the words : ‘Why Don’t We ….?’ – which it often was.…
In anything connected with his beloved motorsport – particularly in rallying, at World, International, national or merely club level – he was, and remained, passionate about it all and, even in retirement, never lost touch with the trends, with the fashions, and with the ebbing and flowing of events, super-stars and major personalities in this sport. Even so, he happily and voluntarily walked away from three prestigious appointments, and surprised his peers (if not himself), by retiring from Ford at the ridiculously young age of 57.
Born in Stoke-on-Trent in January 1933, Godfrey Stuart Turner and his family settled in Stone, where he eventually became a grammar school boy, took no interest in motoring for 2 years, dabbled with the idea of becoming a doctor, fell in love with the theatre by watching his future stepmother, Jill Summers, become a successful actress and finally carried out his RAF National Service by learning Russian at a camp in Cornwall.
Work as a trainee accountant proved to be unexciting, but a chance encounter as ‘third crew’ with maps, a navigator who was car sick and with Ordnance maps, led to an obsession with British rallying (‘I would go rallying, always as a co-driver, almost every weekend’), at which he soon became supremely successful, and much sought-after. After winning the prestigious Autosport Navigator’s Trophy for the BTRDA Gold Star Championship three times in succession – 1957 to 1959 – while also becoming his local motor club’s magazine editor, he was invited to compete in the RAC rally, in a Saab 96, with the Swede Erik Carlsson, where they won outright. All this activity gave Stuart the ‘intro’ to Motoring News where he became the magazine’s original Rallies Editor.
By then also an experienced European rally co-driver, he was invited to become
Competitions Manager of the British Motor Corporation in 1961, beginning a six-year tenure which not only introduced what were already dubbed ‘beady-eyed Coca-Cola-drinking Scandinavian’ drivers like Rauno Aaltonen and Timo Makinen to the British team, but also encouraged stars like Pat Moss and Paddy Hopkirk to turn the Mini-Cooper range into world-wide successes. Three Monte Carlo rally wins, and one high-profile disqualification from the same event in 1966 helped turn this little car into a legend.
After refining the art of pace-notes, and introducing innovations such as ‘ice-notes crews’, he eventually ‘tired of standing on top of yet another Alp’ (his words), he then took a two- year sabbatical, becoming Publicity Manger of the British oil company, Castrol, but never lost his love of motor sport. When Ford’s Walter Hayes approached him to work the same miracles at Ford, he started a twenty-one year career with the Blue Oval which not only included two separate stints in running the massive motor sport operation, but also in guiding the Public Relations departments in between times.
Between 1969 and 1976 he was not only at the helm of Ford’s Essex-based motor sport operation but was, for some time, also the manager of the specialised Advanced Vehicle Operation. On the one hand, therefore, he saw the ‘works’ Escorts win events as high-profile as the World Cup Rally of 1970, and the East African Safari of 1972, but nurtured the emergence of superstars like Hannu Mikkola and Ari Vatanen. AVO produced the first British 16-valve twin-cam engined road car, the Escort RS1600, and also gave birth to the even more popular Escort Mexico and RS2000 models, but it was also Stuart’s sad duty to
gradually close down the same specialist business in the mid-1970s when the economic times made this essential.
After a seven year sojourn running the Public Affairs division at Ford-UK (a positive pleasure for him at a time when Ford held a secure lead in all the sales charts) he was recalled to run the entire Ford-of-Europe motor sport operation, and started what must have been the most demanding part of his career, when he also found himself initiating, then promoting, the first of new high-performance Fords such as the Escort RS Turbo (Ford’s first 3
turbocharged model), the Group B RS200 (the first to be mid-engined with four-wheel- drive), and the Sierra RS Cosworth saloon (which went on to be a shatteringly successful racing saloon car all the way to world level.
That the RS200 was conceived after a series of those marathon bed-time phone calls, and the Sierra RS Cosworth was really born around a pub lunch in the sunshine close to the Cosworth factory in Northampton, is so typical of the man himself. In 1988, therefore, the birth of the Escort RS Cosworth at the end of an exhausting planning meeting when Stuart started a ‘Why Don’t We…?’ discussion on the basis of mating a shortened Sierra RS Cosworth platform to a new-generation Escort body shell, should come as no surprise.
After retiring in 1990 (‘When I saw that a key company Finance man had also decided to retire under the same scheme, I realised that my timing was right…’), and soon to build a new ‘Penny Farthing’ house in rural Oxfordshire, he was widely expected to start yet another career programme, but never did so. After his much-loved wife Margaret got used to him being more permanently at home, she once said that she dreaded the day when he would come down to breakfast and ask her : ‘What are we going to do today ….?’, but was relieved to know that this never happened.
Instead he concentrated on being readily available to give motor sporting advice to concerns all round the world, to becoming one of the most in-demand public speakers in the business, and being able to go to the theatre much more frequently than before. He refused all new offers of paid employment, but worked tirelessly for motoring charities, and in more recent years worked single-mindedly to help revive the Motorsport Safety Fund. Although
there was a real Penny Farthing bicycle in the house, there were no fancy supercars, though he enjoyed world-wide travel, and meeting motoring enthusiasts all over the world.
Survived by his two daughters, Nicola and Sarah, he will, of course, be missed by tens of thousands of his followers, who came to own the cars which he inspired at Ford, and by the thoughts he may have implanted in their minds when they hear him speak. Although he would hate the description, there is no doubt that over the years he became a ‘National Treasure’ in British rallying.
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