Race of Remembrance: combat veterans relish their racing debuts
As far as cars making unscheduled departures from race tracks go, it was as innocuous as it gets. The little Mazda MX-5 twitched through a quick and greasy corner, slid gently on to the grass and into the mud, where it stuck fast. Though car itself was unharmed, the same could not be said for its driver. To the inconsolable Andy Jones at its wheel what was a non-event in racing terms came as a complete calamity.
"For the first time since I was discharged, I had found in racing something that, just while I was in the car, made it all go away. And now I thought I couldn’t even do that." said Jones. He is the size of a house, a former member of the elite Parachute Regiment and one of the two bravest men I have met. The other I will get to in a minute.
Both of them were racing in the fourth Race of Remembrance, a 12-hour race at the Anglesey circuit over the Remembrance Sunday weekend. They were sharing the aforementioned Mazda with me and Nick Trott, my editor at Motor Sport magazine.
Neither had raced before and, in Andy’s case, it was just the fourth time he’d driven a car on a track. The weather was all over the place, as it tends to be in North Wales in November, and, split into two six-hour sections over the two days, would involve a lot of racing at night. For race debutees, it gets no tougher.
The Race of Remembrance is organised and run by Mission Motorsport, a charity dedicated to helping rehabilitate former service men and women who have been discharged due to catastrophic injuries, many of which cannot be seen. "Race, Retrain, Recover" is its slogan and mantra.
Just five years old, the charity has already helped over 1,400 people affected by military operations by rebuilding their confidence, showing how their skills can be adapted to civilian life, helping them learn new trades, regain their independence and providing vocational support. Over 3,000 training days later it has secured more than 200 placements for its beneficiaries and nearly 90 jobs.
My other team-mate is Paul Vice. Paul – or Vicey as he is to absolutely everyone – is a former Royal Marines commando with two tours in Iraq, three in Afghanistan, an Invictus Games gold medal and a Military Cross to his name. In 2011 he was blown up by an IED in Afghanistan that left him with 400 lumps of shrapnel in his body, a broken neck, a severed carotid artery (he only didn’t bleed to death there and then because a fellow soldier thoughtfully put his knee on the wound), broken neck, partial loss of both sight and hearing, brain damage, partial paralysis of his right arm and so much nerve damage to his left leg that three years later he elected to have it amputated.
During emergency surgery on the Chinook that recovered him his heart stopped twice; the helicopter carried 10 litres of blood – over two gallons – and it took every drop to keep him alive. No wonder he became the subject of one-hour documentary called The Commando Who Refused To Die.
Because one is a Para and the other a Marine, the banter between Andy and Vicey is pretty relentless, but they are not the only beneficiaries here today. Up and down the pit lane there are over 40 veterans, a dozen driving, the remainder – including some Americans and Canadians from sister charity Operation Motorsport – working with teams to keep the cars running around the clock.
Among others on our crew we have Kes Bradley, who left the Royal Army Medical Corps with severe PTSD in 2012, an enormous and perpetually smiling American called Ralph who cannot be further identified because he’s still in service, and Jeff from the Canadian Air Force who is very friendly but usually quiet and introspective. All of us are looked after by team manager Ben Williams from Mission Motorsport and Aston Dimmock, our crew chief who prepared the car for racing.
But as qualifying grinds to a close, it is a poor Andy Jones, sitting on his own in a Welsh bog, we are all thinking about. Andy’s journey back to a more normal existence may not have been quite as life-threatening as Vicey’s, but that does not mean he’s not been to hell and back. Andy was also blown up in Afghanistan by an IED. Because insurgents pack these crude, evil devices with anything that’s to hand that might cause injury, he remembers very well looking down and seeing part of a car’s exhaust system buried in his leg. Four enormous bolts had blasted their way into and out of his leg, missing every major blood vessel - to the utter astonishment of his doctors - and, because they were red hot at the time, cauterizing the wounds on their way through. "There was hardly any blood at all," he says simply.
After months of rehabilitation where he showed "incomparable willingness to regain full functionality and fitness", he returned to his regiment but in the end the wounds, both physical and mental, were too great. He was medically discharged in 2013 and his life fell apart. His marriage broke up, he lost his house and ended up homeless, living out of bin liners. For six months he slept in a Vauxhall Corsa.
In 2015 he joined the Veteran Employment Transition Support (VETS) programme and with the help of the likes of Mission Motorsport, life has resumed an upward trajectory and now he has good job and a new and supportive partner who his here this weekend to watch his first race. But now we can see him sitting in the field, but we cannot get to him. We are all worried about him.
When he gets back to the pits I want to tell him his spin made no difference to anything and we’re ready to race, but he’s taken away by Major James Cameron, Mission Motorsport’s car-crazy founder and the reason we are all here. It was his experiences as a tank commander in Afghanistan - and what he saw happen to soldiers under his command - that made him set up the charity.
Andy is distraught, wants to stop, go home, go anywhere other than here. He’s done with racing, before he’s even started. It takes time to talk him round but when he walks back to the pit garage he may be as nervous as I’ve known a man to be, but he’s going to get back in the car.
Vicey, being a man not known for ducking challenges, has volunteered to start and gets a face full of fuel – probably from someone else’s overfilled tank – for his troubles. For the first five laps of his first ever race he can barely see. Does he come in? He does not: he knuckles down, gets on with the job and is soon driving fast and consistently.
One hour later he is called in and now it is Andy’s turn. You’d not think the act of just getting into a car could be construed as being in any way heroic, but watching Andy do exactly that was one of the gutsiest things I’ve witnessed: for him, unlike the rest of us, it was all on the line. An hour later, he was back having completed his first stint in his first race and not put a foot wrong.
Four hours later, and now in the inky blackness, he did another hour and then, on Sunday afternoon, he did the third and final hour that took us to the flag. After failing to get through the first corner in qualifying, he’d just completed three hours of flat-out racing in light and dark, wet, damp and dry. And he’d been flawless throughout.
Amid the beers, laughs and bear hugs that followed I saw another man entirely from the poor, shattered soul who’d left the circuit during qualifying. Though I cannot speak for him, right there and then I’d be amazed if that race had not been the best therapy he could have received.
Of course Andy’s story was just one in Anglesey that weekend, and the Race of Remembrance just one of the more visible of the hundreds of events, team-building exercises and training days hosted by Mission Motorsport.
Ben Williams, our unimprovable team manager, freely admits there are some people they cannot help and others they direct to other forces charities they feel are better suited to their needs. But to see not just Andy and Vicey, but Kes, Ralph, Jeff and others – strangers all - come together to work as a well-drilled team in a common cause, to see their dedication and professionalism but also their humour, thoughtfulness and kindness despite all they have been through, is as powerful an example of the human spirit in action as I have seen first hand.
And where did we come in the race? Somewhere in the middle, which is pretty much where we started. Usually the result the most important thing of all, the reason you go racing. But in Anglesey on Remembrance Sunday it could not have mattered less. To see the smile on Jones’s face as he climbed out of the car was all the victory any of us could ever have hoped for.
If you want to find out more about Mission Motorsport or are interested in getting involved, please visit www.missionmotorsport.org
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