Man Coren
Page 82
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
WHEELED OFF
It was with shock, sadness, stunned incredulity. but on more sober reflection deep and touching relief that the world of competitive motoring learned last night of the sudden retirement of Alan Coren.
Announcing the news at his London garage he has always been as much an automotive genius off the road as on just after that little knurled thing that keeps what could well be the throttle linkage in place had slipped out of his barked and bleeding fingers and rolled out of sight beneath an old sink unit on which he subsequently opened his forehead. Coren said: "I'm fifty, I've had a few good years at the top, and I'd rather quit now of my own accord than be forced out of the game at some future date by two independent medical witnesses or some ratfaced bloody magistrate on the take from the Met."
Coren's wife, whose feelings about her husband's driving have gradually clarified over the past few years, did not attempt to disguise them now. "I have prayed for this day for a long time,she told the clamouring horde of reporters and papparazzi, "what wife and mother wouldn't? Every time he slides behind the wheel, I die a little."
Not without cause. In a career which has spanned thirty years, the glittering couple have faced disaster and the prospect of sudden death many times. A man does not get to achieve more endorsements than any other leading British driver and hold the world speed record for both the Measured Oxford Street and the Flying Hard Shoulder without some debilitating cost to himself and his loved ones. Few who were there will ever forget the time when Coren, taking, as ever, car and driver to the limits of their ability, unluckily ran out of road at the notorious Hyde Park Chicane and ended up covered in railings at
the top of the Birdcage Walk Straight.
He was lucky. that time. "It had been a long run from Godalming, and most of the gin had evaporated by the time the bag arrived."
But it takes more than either what experts recognise as preposterous sodding fines, or the ever-present threat of divorce proceedings, to keep a spirit like Coren's off the road, and within hours of passing some eight hundred notes to the trusty financial wizards whom Coren has always retained to keep his cars in first-class condition, he was back on the road again.
Or near it. anyway. An unexpected roundabout on the treacherous A40 circuit, an inexperienced competitor unused to being overtaken on the inside lane, a traffic light that should have been green, and Coren, through no fault of his own, once more found himself faced with one of those situations which call for icy nerve and split-second reactions to avoid ending up in a Beaconsfield ironmongers with non-stick pans crashing down on either side and lightbulbs exploding on the bonnet like hand-grenades.
Again, he was lucky. He walked out of that shunt with little more than a black eye and a loose bicuspid. "He was a big bugger, for an ironmonger." the great driver recalls. "and quick on his feet."
While a nostalgic general public will miss that familiar throaty roar which always signalled that Coren had wound his window down and was passing an expert opinion on pedestrian incompetence, it is the professional world which will most regret his decision to retire. "We shall not look upon his like again." was how one garage proprietor put it, choking back a sob as he glanced through ledger after ledger. -There were very few men who would come in for a simple grease-up and accept an estimate for a major engine overhaul and respray without a murmur. I think it was not only because he trusted us, but also because and all who knew and loved him would endorse this opinion he was perhaps the most mechanically unsophisticated dingbat it has ever been my good fortune to batten onto."
The AA put a similar point somewhat differently. Briefly excusing himself from a small celebration party in the Emergency Services HQ, a red-eyed patrolman said: "He made the night a little brighter. He would heal things in the engine, usually in the small hours. resembling as his expert analytical brain put it the noise of rats running about in old clocks. He would run out of petrol in bizarre places, like his driveway. He used to smell burning a lot, as I recall, usually in fog or on Bank Holidays, when we had little to occupy our time. But I think the beer-bottle in the petrol tank is what most of us lads in the pits will remember. He had run out of lighter fuel, so he had lowered a Worthington bottle on string, but the string slipped off the neck, and he called us in to investigate this curious banging-about in his petrol tank, only he didn't like to explain the reason. It took three different patrol teams seven hours to diagnose It.
"Fearless, is the word I'd use," said a meter maid, sighing. "Fearless, with a dash of thai boyish, headstrong carelessness that sets some men above the common stock. Or, in this case. below. He would leave a car parked five yards from a zebra crossing, with the boot-lid up and a note on the windscreen to the effect that he was just unloading the equipment he required to perform an emergency obstetric operation on a member of the Royal Family he had been told had been taken into a nearby pub, though which one he had been unable to identify. We would wait, and he would come back three hours later. tight as an owl and complaining that the zebra had been laid in his absence.
Will Coren miss it all now'?
-How could I not? It has been my life the wind in your hair as you lie beneath the car on some lonely country road, the noise of rats running about in old clocks as you miss a particularly tight corner.. that uncanny sixth sense which tells the skilled driver that his offside wing has just been struck by a Belisha beacon. It's goodbye to all that. But," and here Coren set his fine jaw a little more firmly, "it's the right decision. The thing is to go while you're still at the top."