I think it was a race at Orange Kart Club… it was half wet, half damp, and I won by like half a lap. He thought, ‘Okay, I can see the kid can drive, he’s committed to it’, and then he got more involved.
I had his support leading up to the point I left Formula Ford in Australia. I then went into a team to do Formula Atlantic and Formula 2, and they were already established, they had budget and so forth, so I was chosen as one of their drivers and I came over to Europe.
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After that he would just rock up at a race, watch me, and he might look at something and go, ‘You need to do something different there, David’. He didn’t say much, but when he said it, it really was spot on. It was awkward because it came from your father telling you you’d done something wrong, so it was that dynamic.
If I was more like him on the engineering side, I think I would have tapped into a different Jack, because he was so into that. I think we would have had a different relationship. That’s where dad was brilliant, he could think outside the box from an engineering point of view, make it and fix it.