When Dave Brodie succumbed to his long battle with aggressive blood cancer shortly before Christmas at the age of 81, British motor racing lost one its great characters.
Generally known as ‘the Brode’ or simply ‘Brode’, David started racing with his road car – a humble Austin A30 – in 1963, winning his first race, a five-lap handicap on Silverstone’s Club Circuit. A couple of Special Saloon Ford Anglias and a Turner followed, before the influence of his flatmates – Chris Irwin, Richard Attwood, Charles Lucas, Frank and Jonathan Williams among others – persuaded him to acquire for 1968 one of Lucas’s Titan Mk3 1000 cc Formula 3 cars. Although the experienced American Roy Pike was a regular winner in the works Titan, Brodie rarely finished in the top 10 and decided that his future lay in cars with a roof over his head.
And so the iconic ‘Run Baby Run’ Ford Escort Mk1 was created, so called because the three-word slogan ran across the front of the car to let other drivers know what was behind them. The Escort’s distinctive black-with-canary-yellow pinstriping was imitated by the John Player Special Lotus Formula 1 and Formula 3 cars a few years later, with gold substituted for yellow.
Much of Brodie’s success in the immediate post-F3 years with the original Escort were at national level, with ‘Run Baby Run’ not homologated for the British and European Saloon Car Championships. But by 1972, with the support of Ford, he had built an Escort RS1600 with which he had some great battles with the Broadspeed-prepared RS1600 of David Matthews, who won the two-litre class of the BSCC.
For 1973, Matthews and Broadspeed moved up a class with a Ford Capri RS2600, Brodie staying with the Escort. For the first part of the season they enjoyed some great battles until a fateful day at Silverstone in July. In the BSCC race that followed after the British Grand Prix, the two Davids were locked in combat when a misunderstanding while lapping a Mini Cooper S on only the seventh lap resulted in a massive accident. Both Matthews and Brodie sustained serious injuries and were unable to race again for more than a year.
When he returned to the tracks in 1976, Brodie was now in a Mazda RX3 Savanna, which he shared in that year’s RAC Tourist Trophy – a round of the European Touring Car Championship – with Matthews to finish 10th overall. In the BSCC, Capri 3000s now ruled the roost; the Mazda couldn’t beat them, so Brodie joined the Capri gang with mixed results.
By 1983 he was once more looking for something different from what most other drivers were using and took to a Mitsubishi Colt Starion Turbo, which in 1985 gave Brodie his best season in the BSCC. After a season-long battle with Andy Rouse’s Ford Merkur (‘Sierra’) XR4 Ti, Rouse took the title, but Brodie finished fourth overall in what was then a multi-class series. When Mitsubishi pulled out, he had little choice, if he was to remain competitive, but to acquire a Ford Sierra RS500 run by his own team: Brodie Brittain Racing based in Brackley.
As what had become the British Touring Car Championship moved into the Super Touring era in the early 1990s, Brodie explored other projects including an entry for the 1994 Le Mans 24 Hours with a Harrier LR9 powered by a turbocharged two-litre Cosworth BDG engine prepared by BBR, and run by the late Hugh Chamberlain with William Hewland and Rob Wilson as co-drivers. The car retired with suspension failure on Saturday evening. In his later racing years, Brodie continued to develop his Sierra RS500 rocketship and had fun with a Volkswagen Vento VR6.
Brodie’s infectious enthusiasm for motor racing meant that he was involved in quite a number of off-track activities. As a life member of the British Racing Drivers’ Club, he was a director of the Club for the full permitted nine years, and during this time was instrumental in the establishment of the BRDC Rising Stars scheme.
Brodie had become a close friend of the late Frank Williams back in the days of the Pinner Road flat, and was a director of Williams Grand Prix Engineering Ltd for a number of years after Williams had set up his new team in 1977 with Sir Patrick Head. He was a trustee of the Gunnar Nilsson Cancer Treatment Charity, and a director for 27 years of the Springfield Boys’ Club in London’s East End.
Paying tribute to Brodie, Head told Autosport: “David Brodie was an outstanding touring car driver. He was always a very positive character, a ‘bundle of energy’, and was a friend to many. Initially he was running his father’s metal plating shop, coming across many in racing who wanted their suspension plated ‘via the back door’.
“He held a very close friendship with Ronnie Peterson, who sadly died after an accident at Monza in 1978, and David and his then wife Cathy called their second son Ronnie, who sadly died at a young age. Both of these events were, I am sure, shocking for Dave, and I have no doubt had a heavy impact upon him in his later life.
“At the time that Williams Grand Prix Engineering was started on 28 March 1977, Frank asked Dave to be a director of the company, and he provided solid guidance in the very early years. He was ‘irrepressible’, and even that word barely describes his energy and approach to everything he undertook.”
Brodie also derived great pleasure from welcoming the new Rising Stars to the BRDC and was always ready with pearls of wisdom based on his 50-plus years in motor racing. Only in the past 12 months, as his illness increasingly took its toll, did he fail to be available for meetings of the BRDC Rising Stars’ scouts, when he would invariably regale everyone with hilarious stories that can now be found in his monumental autobiography CTX500 Last Train to Cockfosters, a motor racing epic of 1,500 pages.
Brodie was one of a kind and a much better racing driver than he is often given credit for. He will be much missed. To his wife Peggy, son Jimmy and his many friends and acquaintances in our sport, Autosport sends its most sincere condolences.
