In issue #92 we brought you the story of 1960s and ’70s race ace Brian ‘Yogi’ Muir. We dubbed this big bear of a man the greatest Australian racing export many motorsport fans have never heard of. That’s because in moving to the UK he largely fell off the radar here, despite 23 outright wins in the British Saloon Car Championship, sharing a works GT40 with Graham Hill at Le Mans and victories for BMW satellite team Alpina in the European Touring Car Championship, partnering Niki Lauda. His efforts earned him a place in Pommie motorsport bible Motorsport’s Top 20 Tin-Top Drivers list a few years ago.
AMC scribe Paul Newby carried out no fewer than seven interviews for his Muir profile career to get an accurate picture of him. This included Yogi’s widow Jan and former team owner Malcolm Gartlan, who both supplied items of memorabilia from their personal archives – many more than we had space for in AMC #92’s eight-page feature. Hence, what you see right here.
Jan Muir’s scrapbooks contained many previously unseen gems, including his international racing licence from 1968 and a telex from Alan Mann summoning Brian to the UK to work for the famous Ford team.
The newspaper clippings and accompanying images of the crashed Galaxie were from a particularly memorable time in Muirs’ life – when Jan arrived in the UK to marry her man who was already in the Old Dart.
“I arrived on Monday, got married on the Thursday, we went practising on Friday and he wrote the car off on Saturday!” Jan explained of the battered giant red Ford in the photo. “That’s how it went...”
We were especially taken with the original driver’s armband – sorry, cue French accent, ‘pilote brassard’ – from his Le Mans 24 Hour debut in 1966 as part of Ford’s 13-car GT40 effort.
Not long after this Brian began his long association with Malcolm Gartlan Racing, which picked up sponsorship from paper manufacturer Wiggins Teape.
The company expanded its backing beyond the Muir-driven Camaro to British Saloon Car Championship series sponsorship for 1972. They renamed it the Wiggins Teape Paperchase and produced a ‘ream’ of stickers and paraphernalia to promote it
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“Their NCR (no carbon required) paper was a fast solution which was a good fit with motor racing,” recalls team owner Gartlan. “The only problem was they couldn’t produce it quickly enough. They gave me a few quid but spent four times more entertaining customers, keeping them sweet so they wouldn’t stray!”
It’s what marketers of today would call ‘sponsorship activation’. One PR stunt was to bring the Trans-Am Camaro into the Wiggins Teape offices for a photoshoot.
“That was in 1970 after the team’s win in the Tourist Trophy at Silverstone. What a performance! They had to take the doors off the place to get it in,” remembers Gartlan.
MGR certainly presented as a well-funded UK racing team as its team transporter – not unlike the bus from The Italian Job – and Aussie Falcon Ute support vehicle suggests.
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