Lea-Francis Owners' Club

Click the Lea-Francis logos to return to the previous page

The article and photographs appear with the kind permission of Autocar magazine and may not be reproduced without their express permission.

Enjoy Autocar Online by clicking on the link below.
www.autocar.co.uk

At 94 years old, Tom Delaney won't be challenging for this year's F1 title – but
he will still be racing, using the car he's been driving for 74 years.

Andrew Frankel meets the world's oldest racing driver

WHAT DO YOU hope to be doing when you're 94? Personally I'd settle for retaining the ability to breathe, but Tom Delaney's sights are set rather higher. This man, born a year before the Titanic sailed and Scott reached the South Pole, will be doing the same thing he'd been doing for the past 74 years: racing.

Tom Delaney is the world's oldest active racing driver by a margin so great that no one, least of all Tom, seems able to suggest who might be next. He is older than Roy Rogers, Jean Harlow and Ronald Reagan, and was racing before Yeltsin and Gorbachev were born.

Nor should you confuse Tom with some poor old boy who's allowed to crawl round and get in everybody's way, because no one's yet plucked up the courage to suggest it's slippers and Ovaltine time. Last season he won one race at the start of the season, a sprint at the end and had a monumental accident in the middle, more of which in a moment.

But perhaps most startling is Tom's choice of chariot. In 1930 his father bought him a second-hand super-charged Lea-Francis Hyper that, in 1928, had won the Ulster TT in the hands of Kaye Don. A lifetime later, Tom's still racing it.

'I sold it when war broke out and spent a long time trying to track it down afterwards,' he remembers today. He eventually found it but discovered its new owner had fallen in love with it, too. 'I presumed I'd never see it again, but three weeks later he called saying he felt so bad about not letting me have it back that he couldn't sleep. I've had it ever since.'

(Click on the image for more detail)

Tom's never bothered to tot up how many races, sprints and hillclimbs he and the Lea-Francis have contested, but he usually does about a dozen events a year, so even if you omit the war years and allow for a slow restart to post-war motorsport, they've probably competed together upwards of 750 times.

THE 'BIG ONE'
Understandably, given the available choice, it's hard for Tom to pick one race as his greatest, but he's clearly proud of taking pole position at the 1931 Irish Grand Prix at Phoenix Park. He led for over 200 miles, too, before the Lea-Francis' little 1.5-litre motor started to lose power. Yet I detect he's prouder still of a race at Donington in '32 when he beat Dick Seaman, who would go on to be a works Mercedes grand prix driver, fair and square. 'I was on pole but it was wet and when the flag fell and everyone disappeared I was sitting there with my wheels spinning on wet leaves. I was way down when I finally got going and had to pick my way through the field. I passed Dick's Bugatti for third place, then got second and was heading for the leader when the race ended. If I'd had a few more laps, we'd have had a right tussle.'

But the race that probably brought him more attention than any other was last year at Silverstone. 'It was a baking hot day and grease was soaking up through the Tarmac. At Becketts corner there were cars going every-where, but I thought I'd got through when my car suddenly snapped one way, then the other. I slid straight off.'

Because the car was parallel to the track but travelling sideways, when the wheels hit the grass they dug in and flipped the Lea-Francis, tossing poor Tom out onto the grass: 'I can remember thinking it was a spot of luck landing on the grass, then looking up and seeing the car now back on its wheels - coming straight for me and then thinking, "This is not so good".' He was right: the Lea-Francis went straight over the top of the nonagenarian, running over his shoulder and leaving tyre tracks on his helmet. 'The next thing I remember was the ambulance turning up.'

They took Tom to the medical centre where they discovered that, save a nasty cut on his hand where he'd tried to bat away the rampant Lea-Francis, he was astonishingly and entirely unhurt. 'Must have caught it on an upward bounce,' he muses thoughtfully. The only thing less damaged than Tom was the car which, somewhat bizarrely, survived the entire incident unscratched.

Anyone else might have seen this as a sign to go and do something less lethal instead, but not Tom. He may be 94 but talks the talk of the true racer: 'I don't really care whether I win or lose so long as there's someone to have a good race with. In many ways I'm happy when starting near the back - the Lea-Francis is a very fast starter so I can get into the thick of it straight away.'

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD?
Unsurprisingly Tom has no plans to quit. He will continue to race for as long as he can pass the medical. 'If something happens to make me stop, then I'll stop,' he says rather matter-of-factly. Until then, he races on.

For Delaney is a true enthusiast, a man dedicated to his sport. He is an avid follower of Formula One and regards Michael Schumacher as head and shoulders above the rest. 'It's not just that he's quicker than everyone else, he also puts less strain on the car than anyone else. That's why it never breaks.'

He won't be pushed into predicting who'll emerge from the Montoya/Raikkonen/Alonso/Button axis as Michael's successor, saying it depends more than anything on the car with which each is supplied.

By contrast, Tom never need worry about how quick his car will be at the start of each season. This year, Tom and the Lea-Francis celebrate their 75th anniversary, marking one of the most extraordinary associations of man and machine ever. We wish them both all the best for this season and future. Is there the chance that Tom could become the world's first centenarian racing driver? On this evidence, we'd not bet against it.

© Haymarket Magazines 2005 Autocar
Photography: Paul Hardiman, Eric Sawyer