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One Grand Prix and Still Going

Widdows qualified the Cooper-BRM 18th for the 1968 British Grand Prix, but retired with ignition problems on lap 34. Photo: Ed McDonough Collection

One of the things that comes up is a little record I am very proud of that there are only four people in the world, to my knowledge, who have taken part in the Olympics and in a World Championship Grand Prix event. One of the others was Alphonso de Portago, and it’s a record, which I don’t think will be equaled. I competed for the British team in the bobsleigh in the Olympics in 1964 and 1968.

I have not been around motor racing events very much in many years. My friend Michael Campbell restored a magnificent Bentley, and we plan to take this car on the 2007 rally from Peking across Mongolia and the Gobi Desert through Moscow and down to Paris. It will take about 35 days and we thought that we had the car but we had to get ourselves “rebuilt” and in shape to do an event like that, so we used the Tour Britannia very much as a training exercise. I’ve done nothing in racing or historic racing at all since I retired. I had been invited by Lord March to be on the “dream grid” at the first Festival of Speed and he was going to source a car for me which I had driven, but I couldn’t get away and have not been to Goodwood. Doing this kind of event [Tour Britannia] does seem completely different to what I did in the past, and I see rallying and motor racing as completely different.

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