Warwick’s autobiography reviewed · RaceFans

Let’s begin with an obvious point: “Never look back” is a peculiar, even contradictory title for an autobiography.

Derek Warwick, the former Renault, Brabham and Lotus Formula 1 racer – and world sportscar champion – describes it as the motto which saw him through a career in which as many as a dozen of his fellow racers died.

“All the way through my career, there were some disappointments,” he told the BBC recently. “Picking the wrong car at the wrong time. Drivers that were killed, etc… etc… And I always focus on the future.

“I never look back and wish that I was driving a different car or wish that I was Ayrton Senna. Ayrton Senna has been dead for 33, 34 years, so there’s no point looking back. You always look forward and I think it’s been a strong point of my character that’s taken me through some pretty difficult times.”

Warwick and co-author David Tremayne have produced a detailed and illuminating account, one which should satisfy his many supporters who closely followed a career which came tantalisingly close to F1 success at times. In the early eighties many thought Warwick, not Nigel Mansell, the likelier bet as Britain’s next world champion. In the end both took world titles in 1992: Mansell in F1, Warwick in prototype sportscars.

But arguably Warwick deserved more, and looked on course to get it when he joined race-winners Renault at the end of 1983 and came close to winning on his debut for them the follow year. Renault was heading into sharp decline, however – Warwick is especially scathing of Gerard Toth’s calamitous mismanagement – and for 1986 Warwick lined up a move to Lotus, only for Senna to notoriously veto it.

He remains phlegmatic about these career setbacks, no doubt in part because he has confronted the dangers which were more apparent in the eighties and nineties than today. Warwick’s car was the first upon the grim scene where Gilles Villeneuve met his end at Zolder’s Terlamenbocht during qualifying for the 1982 Belgian Grand Prix. Then, in 1991, came the appalling crash which claimed his younger brother Paul.

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Warwick gives a frank account of this dark period in his life, made all the more trying by the expectations of family members who were eager for him to give up racing, further compounded by the difficulties the family business was by now experiencing. His determination…