Imagine seeking out the Guinness World Record for the fastest water skiing while being towed behind a car along a canal?
Back at a time when not everything was recorded or surveilled, this madcap endeavour is exactly what Alec Poole was contemplating.
“We found that, down near Mondello Park race circuit, there was a stretch of canal with no trees, and no lamp-posts, and the towpath was just the road,” says Poole.
“It all turned to dust when Arnie, my brother, fell off at about 80 miles an hour and broke his arm, and we couldn’t get any other volunteers to take over ...”
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Poole reckoned they “only needed another 20 miles per hour or so to take the world water skiing record”, but sadly, Arnie being out of combat prevented any further exploration of the aquatic records. Perhaps it was for the best.
Alec Poole is one of Ireland’s unsung racing driver heroes. Born in 1943 and raised in Dublin, he was lucky in that he had far more access to cars than most people in Ireland when he was a teenager in the late 1950s.
Poole’s father, through the Booth Poole company, held the franchise to assemble Riley and MG models in Ireland.
Poole acknowledges his lucky start in life, and as was something of a tradition in the Irish car industry at the time, sons of the men who’d started up these car-making businesses would be sent off to learn their trade at the “mother ship” in the UK.
Poole would start winning soon, and by 1969, he was quick enough to take the British Saloon Car Championship in an Arden-run Mini
“I was dispatched to that, from a sheltered life at home, into the depths of Birmingham. Back then, they used to have those dreadful fogs, and we had to be working at 7.30 in the morning, so you were up at six.”
There were ways around the early working hours, though. “Every morning, you had to be at work on time, clock in, and clock out.
“But one of the guys had twigged that where we got on the bus, the conductor got off, because in the bus shelter was a time clock. That clock was the same as we had at the factory. So he’d get out of bed, go down, clock us all in at the bus shelter, and go back to bed,” said Poole.
At the time of his apprenticeship, the trick was to get transferred to the MG factory at Abingdon, as it was home to the Competition department.
“I certainly never set out to be a professional driver. You just do it because that’s your sport, the one you gravitate towards,” said Poole.
“I got transferred to Competitions for a while, and I was really amazed, because there was no demarcation.
“And so you could be beside Timo Makinen, or Rauno Altonen.”
Run by Stuart Turner, Poole went on to replicate his boss’s team-building and bonding approach in future endeavours.
“For instance, the chief accountant guy in the MG factory, he always rolled along with us. And of course, what would happen when they would do the Monte Carlo Rally, they’d always take him with them, because he paid all the bills, and he sorted it out through the budget.”
How, though, does one go from boyish apprentice to full-time racer? Well, in Poole’s case, it was simply an assignment.
“It was literally my third week as an apprentice, and it was a Friday, and Dougie Watts, the foreman, says to me: ‘Poole, on Monday, bring in your helmet. I want you to go and spend a week at Silverstone working on the Sebring cars before we ship them’”.
For Poole, it was simply a new task. “No one else wanted to do it,” he laughs. “You might call it testing today, but really it was just bedding in brakes, making sure that when the guys got into the race cars at Sebring, everything was pointing the right way, and the seats weren’t twisted, and the belts were all in place, and the wipers weren’t lifting.
“Or in particular, things like at full throttle, the pedal, when the pedal was on the floor, the linkage was such that the butterflies were wide open and there was no stretch in the cable.”
Upon the variables of such mundane things, races are won or lost. Poole would start winning soon, and by 1969, he was quick enough to take the British Saloon Car Championship in an Arden-run Mini, becoming the first Irish driver to take a major UK championship.
Yet Poole, unlike many racing drivers, remains modest about this success. “I’d always regarded the driving as a hobby, and then if you got paid for doing it well, you trousered the money, and you progress that way, but I never really considered it as a long-term thing.
“You might call it testing today, but really it was just bedding in brakes, – I played rugby around about that time, and I was second row forward.”
Nonetheless, Poole would score more successes in sports car racing in cars not known for their roominess or friendliness to taller drivers: the streamlined Austin Healey Sprite.
“I was lucky to do Le Mans in the late 1960s for Donald Healy in a streamlined Sprite, and you had to be a bit more than a little careful, especially down the Mulsanne.
“The speed difference, down the straight where the GT40s, the Mirage, and whatever Porsche was there, would have another 70 miles an hour on you going down there in the dry. Okay, in the wet they came back a bit towards us, you know, so, but what a great thing to do.”
Not many drivers find equal success once they’ve hung up their driving boots and put on the headsets of a team manager, but Poole is one of the few who has, returning to what was by then called the British Touring Car Championship to help Nissan sort out its competitions department at the height of the 1990s Super Touring boom.
Poole took inspiration from Stuart Turner’s egalitarian way of running MG’s racing three decades before, in a manner which many might have ascribed to Japanese ‘kaizen’ practices.
“One of the things that I tried to work on was that, as we did at Abingdon, we instilled that there was no demarcation,” says Poole. “What I started was every Monday morning we would have a meeting, and we’d go through our various problems, figure out who was dealing with what and so on.
“What you’d try and do then, if someone was wanting to complain about something, you’d try to turn it back at them, get them to look into it and give us all chapter and verse next week. It stopped an awful lot of bitching, and it made people work together.”
Poole freely admits that Nissan dropped him into the team with little to no experience or warning. “I knew the Nissan Europe PR guy at the time, having raced with him, and he’d told me that they’d just been wasting so much money and getting nowhere.
“But I didn’t have a bloody clue, which is sometimes an advantage, because you start looking and listening more. What I found was that there was a bit too much of following what everyone else was doing, rather than looking to ourselves.
With the help of Michelin, Nissan was suddenly sprinting ahead of bigger, better-funded teams
“I was introduced to Derek Gardner, the Tyrrell designer, and I showed him what we had and what we were trying to do. So Derek produced this brilliant blueprint of where we should work on stuff, where we should throw things out and so on.”
Poole quickly found that there really was something of a magic bullet for success in the BTCC at the time: “It’s not rocket science, it was the tyres,” he says. “We were using a control tyre from Michelin, and I quickly realised that we needed to get close to those guys. They were using cars from the manufacturers for testing. But the brilliant thing was that you could send them the car, at no cost, and they’d analyse it for you. You got back this report like a telephone book, and no one else was doing it.
“I guess the chief engineers of the opposition teams figured they didn’t want their baby being criticised, but I didn’t know what I was doing, so this was all hugely helpful. So you’d get the car back, and Michelin would have identified all the areas you needed to develop.
“It also meant that, even though everyone was using the same tyres, because of that closeness, we kind of became Michelin’s favourite son, so if there was ever a panic over tyres or getting stuff fitted, we were at the head of the queue.”
There was more help from Derek Gardner, too, who hammered home for Poole that the Nissan Primera needed a stiffer bodyshell and that there was leeway within the electronic regulations for a bit more performance to be found.
Concentrating on those areas, and with the help of Michelin, Nissan was suddenly sprinting ahead of bigger, better-funded teams such as Renault and Ford, and taking home titles in 1998 and 1999.
Poole still, sort of, competes. The day we chat, he is driving an Austin 7 in the International Gordon Bennett time trial between the towns of Carlow and Athy.
The speeds are low – it’s a mere 28km/h average – but the scorekeepers and timekeepers are ruthless, and it’s easy to notch up penalties.
Yet as with all of Poole’s endeavours, it’s never simply down to speed. Success in all forms, whether it’s waterskiing on the canal or steering to victory in the saloon cars or securing the Touring Car Championship, is more about collaboration and careful teamwork. That’s what provides the win. Proof, if it were needed, that going fast is only half the job.
