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Sir John Whitmore, 2nd Bt, racing driver and management expert – obituary
Sir John Whitmore, 2nd Bt, who has died aged 79, was known as “the racing Baronet”, a British and European saloon car champion; he subsequently became a pioneer of business “coaching”, a management technique which aims to unlock the potential of employees to maximise their performance and develop leadership skills – the subject of his bestselling book Coaching for Performance (1992).
Along the way he directed a film, founded ski and tennis schools, shared a flat with Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart, and was once arrested in Florida for riding in his underpants on the roof of a car driven by his friend Steve McQueen. In later life he became a regular columnist in the motoring pages of The Daily Telegraph.
But he attributed his successes, and his ideas about how others could achieve their goals in life, to his desire to shed the assumptions and trappings of the military and aristocratic milieu into which he had been born.
John Henry Douglas Whitmore was born at Orsett in Essex on October 16 1937, the son of Colonel Sir Francis Whitmore, 1st Bt, by his second wife Ellis. Sir Francis had served in the Boer and First World wars, had been mentioned in dispatches four times, and awarded the DSO. In 1907 he had inherited Orsett Hall, with its large estate, from his father, Thomas Whitmore, a Guards officer who had come by the estate as a result of a gambling debt, incurred by the previous owner. Francis Whitmore served as a JP, county councillor and Lord Lieutenant, was knighted in 1941, and created a baronet in 1954.
John Whitmore’s career began conventionally. Following in his father’s footsteps, he was educated at Eton College, at Sandhurst and Cirencester Agricultural College. But then he caught the motor racing bug, not, he explained in the Telegraph, because he loved cars, “but because I did not love myself. I was insignificant in the shadow of my successful, high-profile parents. Of course, I was unaware of this at the time.”
His first “old-fashioned equivalent of the hot hatchback with skirts, spoilers and big wheels” was a Ford Prefect, followed by an Austin A35 in which he began to compete in rallies. His performance at the 1958 RAC rally was described in Motorsport magazine as “simply terrific, just avoiding the Woodcote ditch each time”. The following year he drove one of the very first Lotus Elites to victory at Snetterton, before turning the car over at Mallory Park. Driving the same car at that year’s Silverstone May International, he finished fifth overall and second in class.
He also gained notoriety by racing Minis when they first appeared. When he arrived in the car at Brands Hatch on Boxing Day 1959, he recalled, “no one knew how it would fare on the track. I found out that every corner could be taken flat-out. A Motoring News reporter wrote afterwards that, ‘I only had to stop at a filling station to hear how fast Whitmore’s Mini was on the corners’. They omitted to say how slow it was on the straight bits.”
In 1961 he bought a clapped-out rally Mini for £350, painted it green and entered it for the 12-race British Saloon Car Championship. Against all the odds, he won. “If ever a Mini suffered more hardships than that used by John Whitmore during the season which has just finished,” wrote one motoring journalist, “we would be most surprised! From Goodwood to Silverstone, from Aintree to the Roskilde Ring, this little green car has thrilled and excited audiences as large as, if not larger than, those found at Wembley on Cup Final Day.”
In fact Whitmore had clinched the title after 11 races and he invited Steve McQueen to drive the Mini in the last event: “three of them [Minis] crossed the line together with about a metre’s distance between them.”
It was only after his victory that Whitmore’s mother told his father (who had six months to live) that their son had become a racing driver.
As a BMC works driver, Whitmore raced a twin-engined Mini (the Twini) in the 1963 Targa Florio; then, driving for Ford, he raced Galaxies, Falcons and Shelby Cobras. In 1965 he won the European Touring Car Championship in a Lotus Cortina, and between 1959 and 1966 he drove in the 24 Hours of Le Mans race every year, finishing in 10th place in 1959, along with Jim Clark, in a Lotus Elite. In 1965 and 1966 he was a member of the famous GT40 team at Le Mans, though he himself had to retire on both occasions with mechanical problems. He also competed in two Monte Carlo rallies.
Whitmore inherited the Orsett estate and the baronetcy on his father’s death in 1962 and, after hanging up his racing helmet in 1966, briefly pursued a career in farming and became a director of several businesses. In 1968, however he sold up, moved to Switzerland and then to hippie-era California where he studied at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, then trained with the Harvard educationalist and tennis expert Timothy Gallwey who had created the “Inner Game” methodology of performance coaching.
Gallwey had noticed that while he could often see the faults in a player’s game, simply telling them what to do to improve did not bring about lasting change. He theorised that in every individual there is a “Self One” and a “Self Two”. Self One provides an often critical running commentary on everything that Self Two does, creating tension, fear and, often, defeatism. He found a way of getting round Self One’s destructive interference with instructions like “focus on the seams of the ball”, instead of “try to hit it in the centre of the racket”, and discovered that by directing the players’s attention towards something inconsequential, he could effectively silence the nagging voice of Self One.
In 1978 Whitmore returned to England to set up a tennis, golf and ski school based on “Inner Game” principles. Soon he began to apply similar techniques to business, and in the early 1980s teamed up with David Hemery and David Whitaker to form Performance Consultants, specialists in coaching and team-working. They adapted the Inner Game theory into a business training model called GROW, which Whitmore popularised in his book, Coaching for Performance (1992). (GROW is an acronym for (G) oals, (R) eality, (O) ptions and (W) ill, highlighting the four key steps in the programme.)
Performance Consultants built up an impressive list of blue-chip clients such as Friends Provident, Standard Life, British Airways, AstraZeneca and Roche, as well as several major retailers, and public sector organisations. The GROW Model, according to one business magazine “has been seen to yield higher productivity, improved communication, better interpersonal relationships and a better quality working environment”.
Whitmore was a trustee of four international charities. His other books include The Winning Mind (1987) and Superdriver (1988). In 2013 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association of Coaching.
In 1990, having emerged from retirement in 1986/7, he drove an 850bhp Can-Am McLaren, and subsequently took part in the Goodwood Revival meeting and the Festival of Speed.
From 2003 to 2008 he wrote a monthly column for the Telegraph’s motoring section in which he campaigned against “auto-excess”, winning support from readers for an article pointing out the folly of sport-utility vehicles (SUVs), while angering some with his support for the scientific consensus “that we humans have and are continuing to create global warming and unstable climatic conditions that may become irreversible”. In 2008 he was awarded the title of the Green Motoring Journalist of the Year.
In his final article, he expressed his mixed feelings about the car: “On one hand, cars are a dangerous, distracting, consumptive, polluting, noisy, hugely time-wasting, inefficient and expensive means of transport relative to what will replace them in a few decades. On the other hand, they have served us psychologically as a mobile and visible means of displaying our wealth, exercising our fantasies and compensating for our inadequacies, while physically and practically they have liberated us, mobilised us and been great boys’ toys. Cars were fun while they lasted.”
Whitmore’s first marriage to Ella Hansson was dissolved. He married secondly, in 1977, Diana Becchetti, who survives him with their son, Jason, who succeeds in the baronetcy, and a daughter from his first marriage.
Sir John Whitmore, Bt, born October 16 1937, died April 28 2017