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Bon voyage, de Cad, 1945-2022

Bon voyage, de Cad, 1945-2022 2nd July 2022

TV presenter, pilot, photographer, philatelist, classic car dealer, raconteur and, above all, archetypal 1960s-1980s privateer racing driver and car constructor, Alain de Cadenet, has died.

Forever known as ‘de Cad’, the son of a lieutenant in the French Air Force – aide-de-camp to de Gaulle during WW2 – and his English first wife, Alain de Cadenet lived life at the limit. His career behind the wheel of 200mph sports-racing cars was at the time of a fatality almost every weekend. I remember a conversation with Alain when he explained what it was like to race a Ferrari 512 M or one of his own sports-prototypes on the great road circuits of the past such as the Targa Florio, pre-chicanes Le Mans or the original Spa.

“It was a bit like the war: storming pillboxes, throw a few grenades, get the VC. You just did these crazy things without thinking about them too much, though I was terrified at times. The best drivers I have ever raced against were Ickx in the wet, and Jo Siffert and Pedro Rodríguez in Gulf 917s. I once asked Siffert how fast and in what gear he was taking the most challenging corner at the old Spa. ‘200. Top. Flat,’ he said. To watch Rodríguez go past totally on the limit from the cockpit of a racing car was something else.

“And drivers you might not normally think about, such as Desiré Wilson, with whom I shared a car in the early 1980s, were world-class. But some were just good at racing – and not much else – while others were too smooth and refined to do the door-handle stuff in saloons.”

Alain at speed at the ’Ring in 1970. He was sharing GT40 P/1078 with Piers Forrester. The dark blue with DayGlo orange stripe car was not running at the finish but still credited with 22nd place overall (Kurt Wörner)
Alain at speed at the ’Ring in 1970. He was sharing GT40 P/1078 with Piers Forrester. The dark blue with DayGlo orange stripe car was not running at the finish but still credited with 22nd place overall (Kurt Wörner)

Alain was very good indeed at racing and brilliant at the many, many other things he turned his mind to. At one point during school, the legal profession or life in the City were possibilities, but his early working life was as a professional photographer covering the 1960s pop and rock scene for British pirate stations Radio Caroline and Radio London, as well as assisting with studio shoots that featured stars of the time such as Jimi Hendrix and Rod Stewart.

All very glamorous, except Alain found that one profession trumped ‘rock star photographer’ when it came to wooing the opposite sex: racing driver. Something needed to be done. He’d been riding round London on an old BSA motorbike, and then owned a few MGs, but the car in which he first took to the track was an AC Ace-Ford. The venue was Brands Hatch, just outside London; he did OK and he was hooked.

Although certainly skilled enough to race Formula cars, Alain preferred two-seaters because, he later recounted, “You had to buy a [single-seater] car, you had to have a transporter, you really needed someone to help you that’d got some serious mechanical knowledge too.

“It was, for me, out of the question. I could still only race something, really, that I could drive to the tracks, and I was very lucky to know a man who owned a Porsche 904.”

The 904 was Alain’s first “serious car” as he later put it. True to form, it was for sale and, on a ‘try before you buy’ basis, the canny de Cadenet paid for it only after his first race, the May 1967 Martini International, where he and the 904 finished 15th overall. During that year he also ran the Ace a couple of times, but 1968 saw him make the jump straight to big-time international racing.

As the archetypal gifted amateur doing deals along the way, things did not always go to plan, and de Cad’s entrepreneurial spirit is well-illustrated with the tale of racing the first of his two Ferrari Dino 206 Ss in 1968.

Early that year, Alain had been told of a mystery Ferrari sports-racing car, a “P3 or P4” lying disused in Italy. He found the car in a dilapidated shack in the middle of a field near Brescia. It turned out to be the ex-Brescia Corse Dino 206 S, chassis 024. The car was purchased, delivered to Geneva as arranged, and collected there by de Cad in a giant American station wagon towing a trailer. A last-minute entry to the Nürburgring 1,000km had been made and the small car was hauled from Switzerland to the ’Ring for Alain and American driver Anthony McKay to share.

Despite tow-starting it (literally) for miles, the engine would not catch, and the pair packed up and returned home. The injection system caught fire, though – and repeated the performance in dramatic fashion when back at Alain’s Gloucester Rd garage in London. At his debut at Crystal Palace later that year, de Cad began practice ‘after a heavy night’ – according to historian Doug Nye in his book Dino, the Little Ferrari – crashing heavily at the first corner of the tricky South London track. The now-purple Dino was then traded for a Porsche with fellow amateur Jeff Edmonds. Alain later owned Dino 206 S chassis 004, a former works Ferrari entry.

The great de Cadenet on fine form MC-ing for Credit Suisse at the 2019 Goodwood Revival (Sarnia)
The great de Cadenet on fine form MC-ing for Credit Suisse at the 2019 Goodwood Revival (Sarnia)
Lothar Motschenbacher confers with de Cad during a pitstop at the 1971 6 Hours of Watkins Glen. The yellow Ferrari 512 M had retired at Le Mans that year with transmission trouble but finished 4th overall at the ’Glen behind a works Alfa Romeo and the two Gulf-Porsche 917s (Bob Hines)
Lothar Motschenbacher confers with de Cad during a pitstop at the 1971 6 Hours of Watkins Glen. The yellow Ferrari 512 M had retired at Le Mans that year with transmission trouble but finished 4th overall at the ’Glen behind a works Alfa Romeo and the two Gulf-Porsche 917s (Bob Hines)

Such stories are legion and will hopefully one day fill a book – although, without the great de Cad on hand to set the record straight, however tall the tale, it will be a tough task.

From 1969 to 1972, Alain was a regular runner in ever-competitive, top-level machinery. Cars raced and often later traded included a GT40 jointly owned with US oil family heir David Weir, Porsche 908/2, Lola T210 and T212, all generally entered under the de Cadenet/Weir Ecurie Evergreen (later Team Snake Speed) banner. In 1971 he co-drove an Ecurie Francorchamps Ferrari 512 M, subsequently buying it, racing it himself, then trading it to Anthony (now Lord) Bamford.

During 1971, de Cad acquired a Brabham BT33 chassis for Chris Craft to race at the Oulton Park Gold Cup, plus the Canadian and US Grands Prix. The chassis later become the donor car for the Cosworth DFV-powered, Gordon Murray-designed Duckhams-de Cadenet LM sports-prototype. At the Le Mans 24 Hours in June 1972, de Cad and the very quick Craft were running fifth mid-morning on the Sunday, but after a heavy spin into the barriers at Tertre Rouge, they limped home 12th.

It was the start of another career as a race car manufacturer, in part out of necessity – Ferrari refused to sell him an ex-works 312 PB because they “were too difficult to run.” Until 1981, de Cadenets and de Cadenet-Lolas were highly competitive sports cars. Alain, usually paired with Chris Craft, Desiré Wilson or François Migault, often set the pace behind factory Porsche 936s and Renault-Alpines. The de Cadenet/Craft de Cadenet-Lola T380 finished third at Le Mans in 1976. Alain is pictured, top, deep in thought just before the 1979 Silverstone 6 Hours in which he finished second overall behind a semi-works Porsche 935.

In 1980, Alain and Desiré Wilson won the Monza 1000km and Silverstone Six Hours. The races were just two weeks apart, a tremendous achievement for the small team.

The Duckhams-de Cadenet LM rounds Mulsanne corner on its way to 12th place at Le Mans in 1972. It had been placed as high as fifth before leaving the road at Tertre Rouge (Eric della Faille)
The Duckhams-de Cadenet LM rounds Mulsanne corner on its way to 12th place at Le Mans in 1972. It had been placed as high as fifth before leaving the road at Tertre Rouge (Eric della Faille)

Some sponsorship money came from Tate & Lyle sugar and the British Post Office. The latter was due to his connection with the world of philately, where he was a world authority on King George V stamps and owned one of the largest collections in the world. But his racing was mostly self-financed, and he rarely chose wealthy co-drivers for their money; he was in it to win.

Throughout this period, frenzied car trading from his London mews garage saw more than one Ferrari 250 GTO pass through his hands, as well as countless other rare and desirable cars bought for trifling amounts in today’s terms, but always sold for a little more. One GTO went to finance an Alfa Romeo TZ.

As he later said: “You could get a GTO for fifteen-hundred quid and go and race it too. All those cars, back in period, that were no longer competitive on the track but could still be used to race to get experience and track knowledge, you could buy them for nothing. Next to nothing. You could buy a nice 8C Alfa for twelve-hundred pounds or something. Ridiculous now, but that’s how it was.”

Alain’s own Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 – ‘FLC’, a famous ex-Mille Miglia car – was bought from Danny Margulies in June 1972. He also ran a Porsche 356 and was a great proponent of the pre-War Invicta and short-nose Ferrari 275 GTB.

His professional racing career driving modern cars finished in the late 1980s and his last drive at Le Mans was in 1986 at the wheel of a French-entered Cougar C12. The Primagaz-sponsored car finished 18th.

In later years, while still driving historic racing cars very capably, he became famous as a television host and commentator, particularly in North America. His Victory by Design series for Speedvision was standard-setting and set many a young classic car enthusiast on the right road to knowing which really were the best cars ever built. Like Tony Dron, who we lost last year, Alain had the ability to race at the top level and convey to the man in the street what it’s like to actually drive the greats. For Tony, it was writing. Alain’s skill lay in presenting.

And it wasn’t all about cars. A skilled pilot, he is most famous to the wider public for his colourful introduction to a programme on the Supermarine Spitfire, when buzzed at almost zero feet by ex-RAF Red Arrows ace Ray Hanna in a Mk IX Spit’.

Away from the limelight, de Cad was engaging company and always willing to share stories and his experiences of a golden age of motor racing. Ever wondered why serious racing drivers would always choose a 275 GTB over a Miura? Alain, part of the late-1960s Chelsea set that was the inspiration for the Mini drivers in The Italian Job, would tell you, as he spent time in the passenger seat of George Drummond’s P400 en route to Silverstone or Brands Hatch in 1967. He was there. Sadly, he is no longer with us now and will be greatly missed by all.

Alain de Cadenet, born 27 November 1945, died 2 July 2022.

Photos by the author, Revs and Alamy