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Me and my motors: Nick Mason
Now this is what I call music
When I was 14 I had the best job in the world. While my mates eked out their summer stacking shelves, filing papers or picking fruit, I worked for a rock star. Better still, this rock star was mad about cars, so mad in fact that he owned a garage whose only purpose was to look after pre-war Aston Martins. That’s where I worked, sweeping the floor, painting engine blocks and making tea for Nick Mason, the drummer with Pink Floyd.
It’s strange to think that the rock star is now 60, stranger still to meet him again and rediscover that this rock legend is as modest as ever. Yet he is a founder member of a band that can count Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall and around 200m album sales among its many claims to fame.
Mason’s first love was not music, but cars. “The cars came first,” he remembers. “My dad used to race a vintage Bentley and from my earliest memory, cars and racing were part of my life. I went to watch him at Silverstone in the early 1950s and I’ve still got the car he was in.”
Not that it’s here. Mason’s car collection is so big that it has to be kept in hangars, and even then there isn’t enough space in one place for them all. “I have about 40 cars of which 25-30 are what you might call ‘serious’,” he says.
This, in Mason-speak, means racing cars of the very highest quality that span all eras from the turn of the century almost to the present day.
If I run through a list of my favourite racing cars of all time it is as uncanny as it is depressing to note how many are in his collection. Type 35 Bugatti? Check. D-type Jaguar? Yup. Maseratis 250F and Birdcage? Of course. Ferraris 250GTO, 512S and F40? Do you have to ask?
We’re chatting in his garage in the Cotswolds, surrounded by some of his mouthwatering collection, discussing Into the Red, a book published just this week, that Mason has written about his cars. It’s actually a second edition of the book, updated to take into account changes in his collection. In it, Mason and test driver Mark Hales thrash 22 of his cars around Silverstone, testing their speeds, handling and acceleration, and — in true petrolhead style — recording their engine noises on the CD that accompanies the book.
But Mason is not a magpie, collecting trinkets for no apparent reason, and the thought of storing the cars away to gather dust appals him. He decided that he needed the cars to pay for at least part of their upkeep and says the decision was “like sending your children out to work”. Now anyone can hire any of his cars — none is off limit — for use in films, videos or promotional work. Which is why he also has some less than serious cars in the collection, such as a Trabant and an original Model T Ford Clown car as used by the Keystone Kops. The doors still fall off to this day.
When the proper cars are not working, they’re racing. For 40 years Mason has raced all over the world, including competing at Le Mans five times, and he is a stalwart of the British historic motor-racing scene. His wife and two daughters race, too.
“I started in the early 1960s with an Austin 7, but didn’t really have the money,” he says. “Then the band started up and I didn’t have the time. It was only during the early 1970s, when royalties started coming in, that I was able to take it more seriously.”
Mason has done little racing of late, ostensibly because he has been working hard on a book and a DVD about the band, but also, you feel, because the need for speed is not quite what it was. “I went to the Goodwood Festival of Speed this year and for once I wasn’t driving. We had three cars there: a Bugatti for my wife, the Porsche 962 for Bruno Giacomelli, and Gilles Villeneuve’s Ferrari 312T3 for Jacques Villeneuve to drive. I sat down to lunch with a glass of wine — it was lovely.”
Jacques Villeneuve’s last-minute appearance in his father’s Ferrari was the highlight of this year’s festival for many, and Mason clearly derived a colossal kick from persuading the former F1 world champion to pay homage to his legendary dad. “Before Goodwood he’d never even sat in the car and always shied away from comparisons with his father’s career. Yet there he was, putting on his father’s helmet, driving the car and clearly loving every minute of it.”
Mason now has plans to rationalise the collection. Having raced for four decades without hurting himself — “It probably means I’ve not been trying hard enough” — he wants to concentrate on cars his family can enjoy, “and those that don’t frighten me”. He has already sold his fearsome BRM V16, described by Stirling Moss as “the worst car I’ve ever driven”. Of the remainder, two cars will never leave Mason’s side. One is the 1960 Maserati Birdcage in which he scored his finest victory: “It was the support race for the 1990 British Grand Prix and I got the lead on the last corner of the last lap, overtaking Frank Sytner to take the flag. Just perfect, really.”
The other is the 250GTO. “I saw one racing at Goodwood in the early 1960s and thought it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. Years later I was able to buy one and it was only when I’d got the log book that I realised it was the same car.
“It is as close to perfection as you can get: it looks fantastic, has the heritage, you can race it, you can rally it, and you can even get the kids to school in it.”
The GTO dates from an era when racing cars of its type were required to be road-registered. One freezing morning, Mason discovered none of his modern cars would start, so the children went to school in the GTO (worth several million pounds). “It’s surprisingly good in snow, too.”
So is racing or music the greater passion? “The music is clearly more important. I’ve had great fun in cars, but on a more personal level. In music I look back and think about Dark Side, The Wall and so on and that’s clearly very special.
“But when you go racing you find things you don’t find in music: the people have a more level-headed approach and tend to be more self-effacing. Also, when you’re in the car, how well you do is down to you and you alone — no band, no management, no marketing.”
You can order Into the Red from The Sunday Times Books Direct for £20 plus £2.25 post and packaging (RRP £25) on 0870 165 8585