Jonathan Palmer’s Wikipedia entry describes him as “a British businessman”, which is a hopelessly inadequate label when you consider the multifarious patchwork of activities that constitutes his career.
What it especially fails to note is the clear and powerful thread that runs through everything: a lifelong love of cars. As a schoolboy in Sussex, Palmer set a course to become a doctor like his father, the local GP. But he became obsessed with motorsport and soon was doing so well at it that, by the time he had qualified in medicine, he was winning in single-seaters against top-class drivers and eyeing a professional racing career. Within a couple of years of graduating, he hung up his stethoscope and was testing Formula 1 machinery for McLaren, Williams and Lotus.
Most people know Palmer best from either his 83-race, seven-season F1 career or his later appearances as a BBC grand prix pundit. But there were also many successful Group C sports car races, including six Le Mans 24 Hours forays at the highest level. By the time he retired from competition, Palmer, always a planner, had several competing careers waiting: grand prix test driver, chief development driver for the fast-emerging McLaren F1 supercar, founder of what would become the world’s best performance driving experience and BBC F1 pundit. In recent years, he has also breathed life back into five of Britain’s best-known racing circuits with his Motorsport Vision business.
Ford Capri
Palmer’s love of cars underpinned everything in his early life. By the time he was four, accompanying his father on patient visits near home, he was an expert car-spotter. At seven, he was one of those precocious kids who knew every acceleration and horsepower figure and could identify cars by their exhaust notes alone.
In his earliest years, the family owned spacious Peugeots. But driven by young Jonathan’s admiration for rally star Roger Clark, Dr Palmer was soon persuaded to invest first in a Ford Transit van to tote four kids and tow the family caravan, then to join the ‘fast Ford generation’ when choosing the car he used for medical visits. There was a succession of Cortina GTs, a second-hand Lotus Cortina and an Escort 1300 GT (“a bit of a comedown”).
Jonathan also persuaded his father to start going to motor races, often at nearby Brands Hatch: “My dad thought he might as well do something useful, so he became a circuit doctor and eventually the chief medical officer of the BARC.”
Then they made the big leap to a 1972 3.0-litre Ford Capri – Jonathan’s dream car. “It was like owning a Ferrari,” he says. “My father wasn’t wealthy, so we had the most basic spec you could get – hubcaps rather than Rostyle wheels – but it still had that big, lusty V6 engine and could do 0-50mph in 6.1sec. We lived in a cul-de-sac with a field out the back. I had learned to drive in an old Morris Minor Van we bought, and my father started letting me put away the Capri. Soon that meant taking it 300 metres up the road, dropping the clutch, hitting 60mph in the cul-de-sac then handbrake-turning into our drive. I got pretty good at it, but the neighbours weren’t happy…”
