Original Le Mans Deep Sanderson mechanic speaks

After the historic Le Mans Mini Marcos mechanic of Monday (here), over to the next one! Billy Williams was part of the Deep Sanderson team at Le Mans in 1963 and 1964 (full stories here and here) and I got in touch with him recently. This is what he told me: 

"The people at Le Mans were Bob Michel and myself and we were at Mulsanne on the pit board and timing. Mechanics were Rod Cooper, Jim Gavin (Jim started lawn mower racing in this country and competed in I think the London to Sydney rally) and Terry Hobson (these three guys started super sports racing and later on in my career I worked for them building rally cars). There was also Nick Arousof, a Russian name but I'm not sure of the spelling, he was ex-Lola and our foreman was John Harvey."

"I do remember working late for several days getting the cars together. We had a Mk7 Jaguar with a caravan converted to a trailer and some of the boys slept in it at Le Mans. I didn’t travel down with the cars as I travelled with John Terry and Jim in Chris Lawrence’s own road car which was a Chevy Corvair he had bought from the Motor Show at Earls Court London. We had terrible trouble on the way down with a smell of automatic gearbox fluid leaking on the exhaust."

"At Le Mans Jim Donnelly did crash the car in practice. His nickname was Twin Min Jim, as he was the only guy who could link the gear changes on the deep Sanderson twin engined single seater with Mini engines. What happened was the fan belt came loose on the car and in those days you had to do 13 laps before you could do any work on the car. It did only 11 laps before it overheated so that was that end of the race."

"After Le Mans Chris and his wife and also Jim and wife went to the south of France for a holiday. A few weeks later driving back it appears that Chris fell asleep at the wheel due to fumes from the gearbox and had a huge accident. They were all in hospital for a few weeks we were back in the garage keeping it running but I think that was the start of the end of LawrenceTune. Months later I was poached to go to an F3 team, Charles Lucas Engineering, and the three boys started Supersports Engines. Cheers, Billy."

Thank you very much Billy!

A young Billy Williams behind the just finished Le Mans racer in the UK

Picture Jeroen Booij archive

Chris Lawrence with the Deep Sanderson Twini at Mallory Park. Billy behind again

Picture PA Images / Getty Images