Mike Hawthorn took his first WC F1 win on this day at the 1953 French GP after a breathless duel with Juan Manuel Fangio. In today's Great Read, Doug Nye remembers a racing hero who lives just miles away from where he was born
I grew up in Guildford, Surrey, which is 10 miles east of where Mike Hawthorn lived, in Farnham on the Surrey/Hampshire border. About the only thing he and I otherwise had in common was that we both caught the motor racing bug in childhood; in my case from a photo of Reg Parnell driving an Alfetta seen in a copy of Autosport brandished by my big brother, Rod – and Mike from his father, Leslie, who ran his TT Garage business in East Street.
Now forgive me if I digress a little, but another – much earlier – car buff was author Kenneth Grahame – creator of the classic Wind in the Willows. While I was 16 years Hawthorn's junior, Grahame was 70 years older so he lived through the horseless-carriage revolution 1890-1908 (ish), which was when his masterpiece was published.
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