Driven To Crime: True stories of wrongdoing in motor racing

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A serial conman and deluded ‘Walter Mitty’ fantasist, James Munroe — born James Cox —appeared to typify dull, unremarkable respectability but led a very public and extravagant double life. During the week he was the bespectacled manager of an accounts department but at weekends he became an attention-seeking, self-styled ‘millionaire businessman’ and ‘gentleman racer’ of a McLaren F1 GTR. Through his extraordinary duplicity, the ultimate vanity project was unwittingly financed by funds embezzled from his employer.

When Munroe appeared at Reading Crown Court in September 2000, the prosecution stated that he had used the stolen money to buy lots of cars as well as to fund the racing team. Besides the cars already mentioned — the two Ferraris and the two McLarens — his fleet of road cars included three Aston Martins, three Mercedes and a Ferrari 550 Maranello. He had also acquired two important historic racing cars, an ex-Gerhard Berger Benetton Formula 1 car and a Silk Cut-liveried Jaguar XJR Le Mans car. He certainly had good automotive taste. Crispian Besley takes us on a fascinating behind the scenes tour de force of real-life corruption and shady dealings within the world of professional motor racing. Despite more than thirteen years working in this industry, I was unaware of many of the stories featured. At times I found it a difficult read, but only because so many of the characters that I did know were/still are my boyhood heroes, people I’d naively looked up to and tried to emulate… some may say I did a pretty good a job in that respect, because after all my years as both a driver and Team Owner, I also found myself accused of dastardly financial deeds and yes, my alleged “crimes” are in fact featured in Chapter 9 of Driven to Crime! Like so many schoolboys, James Cox was passionate to the point of obsession about cars as a teenager and dreamt of racing them as soon as he was old enough. Typically for his age, his bedroom walls at home were adorned with large posters of the contemporary Lamborghini Countach and Ferrari Testa Rossa models. Inevitably, like most youngsters with similar aspirations, there was neither the money nor the opportunity to fulfil his ambitions. By the time he had reached his 20s, the nearest he had come to owning any kind of ‘performance car’ was very much more modest. Much of the time I could not believe what I was reading; the scams, the drugs, the vast fortunes built and lost; the deceit, the fraud, the double dealing and the burning ambition to get involved - at any cost. The world of motor racing can be brutal. Crispian Besley must have taken many years and had countless brushes with the legal complexities of the system before producing this staggeringly good book.First-time author Crispian Besley has both the motorsport pedigree – having spent several decades racing immaculately prepared Formula Juniors – and a career at the top of the finance industry, which is perfectly for succinctly summarising some of the financial crimes covered. For the next round, at Brands Hatch on 20th June, Munroe again took the start for a short stint before handing over to his ‘pro’ co-driver with the car two laps down. Goodwin managed to reduce the deficit by one lap and bring the car home fourth, his efforts once again rewarded with fastest lap. Other misdemeanours: Roy James (Great Train Robbery getaway driver); Bertrand Gachot (jailed after road rage in London); Juan Manuel Fangio (kidnapped by Cuban rebels in 1958); Colin Chapman (the unresolved ‘DeLorean Affair’); ‘Spygate’ (Ferrari design secrets passed to McLaren). Unfortunately, for the victims whose livelihoods were affected by his deceit, the story still didn’t end there. Remarkably, he found responsible employment yet again, in March 2015, by which time he was 51 and once again using his real name, James Cox.

He’s similarly cagey over who organised the Max Mosley News of the World sexposé, quoting from Mosley’s autobiography that “the conventional wisdom… has always been that someone in F1 was behind it”. Besley simply concludes “there are several suspects” – and wisely stops there. Drugs: Ian Burgess (sometime British F1 racer); Randy Lanier (drug-smuggling IMSA champion); John Paul Sr and Jr (talented son dragged into a racing father’s drug-running); Vic Lee (super-successful team owner with a dodgy transporter); the Whittington brothers (more misdeeds in IMSA circles). Vijay Mallya who is still to this day the subject of an extradition warrant by the Indian government with regard to charges of financial crimes in India. Force India were put into administration and then saved by a group of investors led by Lawrence Stroll. He bought a Ferrari F355 Challenge, which was a special race-bred version of the F355, the 348tb’s successor. However, the woefully inexperienced driver’s performance was underwhelming to say the least and he found himself consistently and hopelessly outclassed, trailing behind not only all the modified cars in his class but also most of the slower standard cars. His fellow competitors found him a very ordinary, quiet and unassuming man who made no attempt to mix with them. To prepare and run the McLaren, Munroe had engaged the well-respected team AM Racing, owned and managed by Aston Martin dealer Paul Spires, an accomplished racing driver himself who was also scheduled to race the car. Although AM Racing’s previous experience had been mainly in the preparation and running of historic Le Mans cars, Spires had put together a very strong group of engineers and the operation proved to be well up to the required standard. Munroe announced to the media: ‘We have no pretensions to winning races. We could have put a high-profile professional in the car but we wanted to keep it as a purely privateer team. We will rotate the driving between the three of us and see how it works out. Most importantly, we want to show that we are doing this properly.’

Valentino Rossi, Revised and Updated

But there was plenty new to me: the youthful idiot who joined a Brands Hatch race three-up in his girlfriend’s VW Polo, and the unknown ‘L W Wright’ who blagged cash, car and entry to a major NASCAR race and then vanished for ever. Do you remember Southern Organs sponsoring a race series? Who knew that the two men behind the associated fraud went on the run and lived for eight months in a roofless bothy on a Scottish island. A fascinating and ludicrous story. Over the next few months, Munroe was highlighted in several magazine articles, including an interview in Boys Toys, a so-called ‘lad’s magazine’ whose erroneous headline proclaimed: ‘James Munroe: he’s filthy rich and owns a racing team’. In the story, Munroe was quoted as saying: ‘I’ve been into fast cars and racing since I was a teenager, but it’s a difficult game to get into. I’ve never had the chance until now. Yes, this is a dream come true, definitely.’ Panic Publicity continued to prove its worth by ensuring that its client made a series of television appearances, the most notable of which was on BBC2’s The Car’s The Star in an episode featuring the McLaren F1. After trying unsuccessfully to entice various high-profile owners to take part, the programme’s producers had to look elsewhere. In his quest for fame, Munroe needed no persuasion and gleefully accepted the invitation to participate. During his short appearance, he ill-advisedly boasted to presenter Quentin Willson that he had once driven his McLaren F1 at 170mph on the M40 motorway. The reality of his life was such that by the time he was in his early 30s he was married with a young family living in suburban Wokingham, Berkshire, and working in middle management in an accounts department. As disenchantment grew with what he felt was a meaningless existence, it simply fuelled his dreams more strongly. He started to make frequent trips to the nearby showrooms of Maranello Concessionaires, the famous Ferrari importer and main dealer. Although his job prospects and personal life didn’t change materially over the next couple of years, he ended up being able to acquire a Ferrari 348tb in the classic and desirable colour combination of Rosso Corsa with cream hide interior. The March sale to the Leyton House whose CEO was involved in money laundering and fraud. He was later jailed and the team was gone.