Racing driver who blazed a trail in Irish sports sponsorship
VIVIAN CANDY, who has died aged 61, was a highly successful racing driver – winning Irish National championships in Formula Ford, Formula Atlantic, and Modified Saloons between 1977 and 1980. In later years, he competed in the FIA World Endurance Championship, and non-championship Formula One races in the UK.
Candy scored world championship points in the 1981 World Endurance Championship – but he will be chiefly remembered as one of the trailblazers in the transformation of sport in Ireland into a professional marketing tool. His vision for sports sponsorship has come to be today’s reality.
Vivian Candy was born in Sligo where his father Denis was county manager and his early days were spent in the environs of Rosses Point. At the age of 12, his father was promoted and the family relocated to the Dublin suburb of Ranelagh – less than a mile from where Eddie Jordan, whose life he would greatly influence, lived.
Candy attended Gonzaga and after school his dynamism and imagination – not to mention commercial skills – led to him becoming joint managing director of a Dublin advertising agency at 21. Even at that age he was in love with the glamour of fast cars, especially racing cars.
He visited the British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch in 1967, and the relaxed atmosphere of the paddock in those days led to encounters with established figures such as Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart and the world champion that year, Jack Brabham. Candy returned to Ireland determined to become a professional racing driver, but he now understood the financial demands of motor sport.
He was charming and enthusiastic and had the vision to see that sport, advertising and marketing could be successful bedfellows. He also had skills to sell that vision, skills learned from pitching advertising and marketing campaigns in company boardrooms. Candy bypassed the usual sources of racing finance such as local garages, and haulage companies. Instead, he approached multinational companies doing business in Ireland, such as Coca-Cola, Ingersoll Rand, and Hertz Europe.
In 1980, he raced a Formula One Arrows car in a non- championship race in England using green and white Enterprise Ireland logos devised for Cómhras Trachtála, Ireland’s export board, who Candy was seeking to attract as sponsor of an Irish national formula one team.
Although Ireland was gripped by the international oil crisis and economic hardship of the time, Candy was highly instrumental in laying the foundation stones that enabled Eddie Jordan to establish an international driving career and subsequently his Grand Prix-winning Formula One team.
Jordan spoke about his influence in transforming sport in Ireland in the 1970s: “Vivian was a visionary who really was one of the first to see how sports sponsorship and marketing could be as powerful as, and complementary to, traditional advertising.”
In an era when there were no commercial logos on sports jersies, he set about getting funding for an Irish racing team – and went straight to what was then the world’s top sports sponsor – cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris who owned Marlboro, and sponsored many of the top Grand Prix teams and drivers. As Eddie Jordan explained: “Vivian and I went over in his Ford Capri to see George Macken [Marlboro’s sponsorship supremo] whose office was on the Great Western Road in London. Vivian made a great presentation and Macken agreed to sponsor the pair of us in ‘Marlboro Team Ireland’ for 1978. I learned a great deal from Vivian and he made it possible for me to go racing professionally in England.”
Candyman, as he was known, was a naturally talented driver and won the Irish Saloon Car championship in a highly-modified Hillman Imp in 1978 before acquiring a Formula Ford Crossle 32F and winning a number of races in the Irish Championship in the competitive year of 1978. Candy took over Eddie Jordan’s Formula Atlantic Chevron B29 and captured the senior IRDA National championship in 1979.
Candy and his teammate PJ Fallon were the team to beat in 1979, and attracted huge crowds to Mondello Park as Candy’s publicity machine worked its charm on the Irish sporting public.
Motor racing was then, as now, a very expensive sport, and although he was now in his 30s, Candy looked to the international stage and drove sportscars in Europe and the US in the 1980s.
On August 21st, 1979, he and Danny Keaney, then distributor of Yamaha motorcycles in Ireland, staged a highly publicised duel at dawn on the Carrigrohane road in Cork, competing for the Irish land speed record. Thousands of spectators turned out to see Candy set a new outright record of 169mph using a Shadow Formula One car.
The new speed record attracted front-page headlines for Candy and his delighted sponsors.
He had a sporadic international sports car career in the 1980s – being one the first Irishmen to compete in the World Endurance championship. He raced twice at the Le Mans 24 hour, while the final highlight of his track career was finishing sixth at Watkins Glen in upstate New York in a mighty Porsche 935 K3 Turbo.
He retired from the sport at that time and moved to London for some time before returning to Ireland in 1994.
He attended the memorable 50th anniversary celebrations of the Dunboyne races last July and was as charming and enthusiastic as ever as he recounted how those 1960s races gave him the bug he never wanted to recover from.
He died of a heart attack at home in his apartment and will be long remembered as one of those who helped give the Irish motorsport fraternity the confidence and marketing skills to get to scale some dizzying heights.
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Vivian Candy: born October 6th, 1947; died May 21st, 2009