06.07.2010
Robert Reid was Richard Burns’ long-term co-driver and partnered Richard to 10 victories in the World Rally Championship and the coveted drivers’ crown in 2001. He spoke to Neil Cole, the presenter of Dave’s coverage of the WRC, during the recent Goodwood Festival of Speed.
Robert, can you tell us about the aims of the Richard Burns Foundation?
“The aim of the Foundation is to support and inspire people with serious illness and injury. As with all these things it’s reasonably wide. From Richard’s perspective it was generally about the inspiration as much as anything, telling people they need to keep going, dig deep and trying to provide the resource to support them to do so.”
Richard was obviously an inspiration to so many people but can you explain what he was like as a person?
“He was actually quite shy. His way of being creative and brining something to lots of people was by driving. That’s what he loved doing. He was very good at it and he was also a thinking driver. I’m sure you all watch Lewis and Jenson battling it out in Formula One now and I think Jenson is very much like what Richard was like in that he thought about everything. Richard was maybe able to get one over on drivers who were more flamboyant and perhaps even had more skill than Richard had just by his approach.”
Why haven’t you co-driven professionally since we lost Richard?
“When Richard took ill for both of us our careers were coming to a bit of an end. We’d signed a deal with Subaru to do two more years and that was definitely going to happen and then after that it was winding down. I had a back injury caused by a testing accident in Australia in 2002 and it was starting to bother me. When Richard was taken ill for me it was just a natural reaction to try and support him. I spent two or three days per week with him throughout his illness and there was never any thought of going with someone else. I’ve been in a car once since Spain 2003, which was the last event I did with Richard. I did the Richard Burns Memorial Rally with Markko Märtin. Within 10 metres I felt like I’d never been away and really felt very at home. But after a day of a two-day event I’d have enough! We did win the event and it was great and great to experience a World Rally Car two or three years on from the last time I’d been involved in it. I now work a lot with the governing body of motorsport in the UK, the MSA, and also with the FIA involved in running young driver programmes, in racing, rallying and karting. I really feel I can help more young drivers by doing that than I could by helping one rally driver sat in a car.”
So you can confirm 100 per cent that you weren’t one of the co-drivers being tested last Monday by Petter Solberg in his co-driver shoot-out?
“I can confirm I definitely wasn’t!”
What’s your take on Phil Mills leaving midway through the season and leaving a long-term and successful partnership?
“I can kind of understand it and in some ways I’m surprised it didn’t happen earlier just in as much as... I know 18 months after I stopped I was offered an opportunity to get back in a car with a young driver. It can sound really bad but the money I was being offered to do it was less than what I paid as an insurance premium in the last year that I rallied. When you’ve been fortunate enough to compete at the top and take a lot of risks doing so the reward has in some way got to reflect the risk. It’s difficult for Petter and Phil because they’ve gone from a situation of being in a factory team to trying to run a team themselves and it must be very hard.”
What was your scariest moment in a rally car?
“Usually the accident had already started before I even realised. Sometimes you got a bit spooked and look up and see something that was out of character and usually nothing happened in those situations. Then once you thought everything was okay the next thing would be a load of crashes and bangs and you’d be upside down. I do remember one incident, I can’t remember exactly what rally it was, but there was a long crest and then a right-hand corner with a road going off before the right-hand corner. Richard had the car set-up sideways, it must have been on gravel, and just as I decided to look up I could see a road straight ahead of me as we were going sideways and thinking ‘oh s***, there’s no way we’re going up that road’. We got to the end of the stage and I told Richard the time and he said ‘you flinched in there’. He didn’t like me flinching and I asked if he knew why I’d flinched. He said ‘yes, because you looked up at the wrong moment but if you’d kept your head down it would have been fine’. That was pretty scary from what I remember.”
So a common rule for any aspiring co-drivers is to just keep your head down...
“I’ve always said there are two types of co-driver, those that look where they are going and then glance down to read pacenotes and those that look down and glance up very occasionally to reference where they are and I’m definitely one of those people who keep their heads down all of the time. Back in 1999 when we were at Subaru and I was joking with the engineers about how much money they’d pay me if I could tell them how to keep 80 kilos 25 millimetres lower in the car. This went on for a few weeks and they pestered me to tell them. I just told them to put my seat 25 millimetres lower. They said ‘you’d never be able to see’ but I said ‘I don’t want to see. I’d far rather have a performance advantage of having my seat lower’. We worked on the basis that 10 kilograms were equal to 10 seconds over a rally distance. We won three rallies and lost two by 10 seconds so weight is very important.”
What was your favourite season?
“It was probably 2000 and surprisingly for some people because 2001 was obviously championship season. In 2000 we had a new car from Subaru that was a major step forward and Richard always said it was his favourite car. We went to do the first test of the car in Portugal and ran the 1999 car and did some baseline running with the 2000 car. The engineer said he wanted us to do one run in the 2000 car to the top of the road, turn around and come back. So we went up the road and Richard asked what time we did. I told him and he said ‘you’re not often wrong but I don’t think that was the right time’. So we timed ourselves on the way down and he said ‘maybe you were right’. So he handbraked round and went back up to the top and we must have set there for about half an hour with the car switched off. He said ‘I just need to understand why this car is so good’ because the time was nearly a second per kilometre faster than the old car. The engineer was on the road asking if there was something wrong so we went back and debriefed with him. Of the first four rallies we did with that car we won three and finished second on the other one and then we lost out in the championship narrowly that year, probably because we crashed in Finland rather than settling for second.”
Robert Reid was appearing at the Goodwood Festival of Speed on behalf of the Richard Burns Foundation. The charity was established following Richard’s death in November 2005 to help people who are affected by brain cancer and other neurological disorders, giving them the means to face the future with confidence.