GEORGE

DONALDSON

The following article was written in 2002 just after George joined Prodrive. And to brink you bang up to date, George is currently employed as a consultant by Subaru Tecnica International Inc. His job title is "General Manager, Group N Motorsport Team, Subaru Group N Project" - a lot of words but this is one of the top jobs in the world of Group N rallying.

Scots and dry

By Jerry Williams, Chief Sub-Editor, The Daily Mail

It is always one of the most up-front greetings in the World Rally Championship. You approach the lanky, 40-something figure. Under the hedgehog haircut, a smile splits his face.

  'George, how are you?'

  'Never better, never better. It's fantastic to see you out again. What's going on? What do you know? How are you?'

  It's the same today as ever. However, to see him striding towards you decked out in blue is a 250-volt jolt. George Donaldson has always, but always, been a fixture in rallying's red corner.

  For what seemed like aeons, he was the one wearing scarlet logos, guiding TTE's Lexus command car into a service point while Ove Andersson and Phil Short looked sinister behind its darkened windows. Then it was just him and Ove.

  Then he disappeared. For a year, as TTE planned its invasion of the solipsistic glitter-world of Formula 1, George was lost to us. Then Andrew Cowan, in urgent need of a new team manager, made an irresistible job offer and Donaldson was back, comfortingly, in the red corner again, albeit the Mitsubishi one.

  This time the chemistry was wrong. George is needs to be in control, but Cowan is the man who built Mitsubishi Ralliart Europe and it is 'my team, my boys, my way'. Neither is Andrew a sensitive flower. It is doubtful whether he knew how rapidly miserable his new right-hand man became under the yoke. For George, the call early last August from Prodrive's Nick Fry and a leap into the blue was salvation. But it left Cowan spitting tacks at what was a sensitive time for the Rugby outfit.

  So: a year of controversy for Donaldson, with a dream outcome. As Subaru Sporting Director he is virtually on a par with the team Director, David Lapworth. Without your own team, you don't get much higher. It is no surprise, really: even in his early days as a jobbing mechanic, Donaldson never seemed likely to be satisfied with life just helping to keep the World Championship ant-hill ticking over.

  For a start, he had a second face, as a talented and aspiring rally driver. Only 15 years ago, George would pulse with intensity as he talked of his still desperate desire for success at the wheel and he came within a hairsbreadth of a professional career. He makes no big deal of it now, but some of the World Championship's fresher faces might be stunned to learn that back in 1987 he beat the likes of Gwyndaf Evans in similar cars on the RAC Rally.

  A year later he took the Group N National title by storm and became the first driver ever to win a British National Championship rally outright in a Group N car. Donaldson still rates that victory, on the Kayel Graphics in South Wales, as one of his greatest moments.

  By then his promised programme was supposed to have seen him doing Group N in the Open Championship as a launch pad. Unfortunately, Ford's motor sport hierarchy had begun to get in all of a tizzy about an emerging young charger called Colin McRae. As a result, with the typically schizoid thinking of a multinational, Stuart Turner's motor sport department was busy killing off Donaldson's burgeoning career at the very moment the Ford marketing department was still constructing an advertising campaign around his exploits.

  Nevertheless, the team's then driving guru John Taylor - a man who could form a harsh opinion of a blade of grass - had told him, 'I've never met a driver who had a feel for a car on gravel roads like you do, except for the very top guys'.

  Praise to die for, but Donaldson was still abruptly dumped and saddled with a huge and totally unexpected debt to a Ford satellite team. Ford simply looked the other way. Nowadays, Donaldson claims to have no hard feelings, but it was a disgraceful episode.

  A huge sacrifice was involved. 'I was finished. I had to stop cold turkey. Look for something else. If you'd have asked me the year before if I could ever stop rallying I'd have laughed at you, I loved driving that much.'

  To do such a thing at all demands steel. To do it and not become shrivelled by bitterness requires success elsewhere in life. So that's just what he sought. He had already made quite an impact working for Andersson's Toyota Team Europe, and after a short, abortive spell with Nissan, he threw himself back into TTE to such effect that he shot up through being workshop manager in Kenya to Team Co-ordinator, then Team Manager - all with the rally team - Formula 1 co-ordinator, Mitsubishi Team Manager and now, Subaru Sporting Director.

  Donaldson has always occupied his own ground and he's always been listened to. Partly it's the ideas, sometimes wacky, sometimes revolutionary, mostly thought-provoking. Partly it's his sheer verbal pace.

  He has that classic, clear Edinburgh accent; but while most Edinburgh people talk like a meandering river, Donaldson has somehow combined clarity with unusual speed of speech. He's also adept at cutting straight to the chase and more at home with long words than your average team manager.

  If he's onside with you the result is warming and reassuring. It's a pleasant sensation that tends to lull you into agreement. But the combination can be devastating to anyone arguing with him. Then the words spit out of his mouth like shells from a Vulcan revolving cannon and such weaponry can make enemies.

  Amazingly, this is news to him. Ask him how he thinks his detractors would sum him up and he blinks in the headlights, startled. Obviously it's not a question he often considers. Eventually, he'll talk about liking people to pull their weight, about insisting on following things through, tying every last knot, of upsetting people with his irreverence for following procedures for the sake of it and habit of asking 'Well, just why do you do it this way?'

  So would it surprise him to hear cocksureness mentioned, or thinking he knows more than he does and possessing an abrasive manner? Well, yes, as it happens, it would. But then he shrugs. George is not in the PR business; his job is control, anticipation, making things happen. Abrasive is part of the deal.

  What sometimes doesn't help is his oblique sense of humour, which is terrific if you're familiar with it, confusing if not.

  Here's a small example from the 2001 Catalonia Rally. As controversy raged over Citroën's Jesús Puras and whether he had been practising illegally, George was among a milling group of journos.

  'What do you think of it all?' someone asked him.

  Instantly, he was off and running, totally deadpan: 'I'm very, very comfortable with it all. I think Puras is driving fantastically well; I'm so happy for him and I'm very, very pleased that Citroën are here and doing things their way. The competition they're bringing us is brilliant, just brilliant, it really keeps us all on our toes...'

  Unfortunately, a couple of hapless hacks were actually scribbling down every word. But when they saw the wide smiles, their notebooks snapped shut and their faces darkened.

  No new friends there, then; but that's a price you pay if you sometimes shoot from the lip.

  What Donaldson says in full spate is often heavily smoothed out on reflection. There's a particular World Championship luminary I've heard him describe in coruscating four-letter terms. But when I reminded him of this, he smiled indulgently: 'Oh, you know, old X isn't too bad really. Yeah, he's got a few problems but, well, I can cope with that. Mind you, I do like to put one over on him.'

  Perhaps it's not surprising he is like sandpaper on varnish to some in the sport. After all, rallying is a world full of big egos. Nevertheless, none could deny he has made a huge success of his post-driving career, given that early obsession with getting behind the wheel.

  His introduction to this madly addictive sport came when he first saw a world-class driver throwing a top car down a dirt track. For most people it is a moment to be watched again and again, but for the likes of Donaldson that first explosive instant is bigger, a kind of epiphany. Even after 25 years, he vividly remembers the 1976 RAC, bustling on down to Kielder with two mates in his mother's Vauxhall Viva HB.

  'We drove into the forest in darkness, parked up and walked in. It was a twisty, downhill section and you could hear the sounds miles away, see the lights in the air.

  'Then this car suddenly just arrived. It flew over the blind crest and I'd expected it to come down this series of twists at perhaps 45 mph. Well, it must have been doing 75 or 80 mph; the noise and sensation were incredible. All the brakes were on fire, all the discs glowing, even the calipers were red. And that was Stig Blomqvist in the Saab 99 EMS. It was just fantastic and I simply stood with my mouth hanging open.

  'I immediately thought, "This is what I have to do with my life. I am going to be that man. I have to drive rally cars like that."'

  George being George, he leapt in immediately, doing 'all the stupid things,' like chucking any chance of an engineering career in favour of being a mechanic just to get cash to drive a rally car, any rally car.

  Such a decision from a crazed 17-year-old couldn't have gone down a bomb at home. After all, he had good qualifications, easily enough for college.

  'My mother was moderately upset,' is all he says.

  At first, of course, there was no direction or focus. Life was simple. Work at Wimpeys - where he served most of an apprenticeship -and a 24/7 immersion in local motor sport.

  His first car was a 998 Mini and he plunged into everything he could, marshalling, helping run the local motor club, autotests, night rallies. Given his limited funds, Donaldson was always looking for more bangs for his buck. So when he went stage rallying, it was the Scottish Rally twice, followed by the Swedish from 1982 to 1986.

  'One big Scottish Rally cost, like, £130 to enter and its competitive mileage was the equivalent of seven or eight Scottish Championship rounds. Same with the Swedish: simple logic.'

  Sweden, 1982 was also a turning point. He had been promised a prized copy of Ari Vatanen's pace notes. But the notes were due to be passed to him via John Taylor's British Junior Team and - surprise, surprise! - failed to appear.

  'It was a grim moment,' recalls Donaldson. 'Then I saw Fred Gallagher in the hotel foyer so I took a gulp and buttonholed him. Within a minute we realised we lived down the road from each other.'

  Fred sorted out the notes - and got Ari to turn up and explain how they worked. Gallagher, he quickly realised, was someone to hang on to.

  'I maintained contact - in all honesty, I was probably in his face,' he says. In fact, Fred plugged away on his behalf at Henry Liddon, then Toyota Team Manager. Eventually, Liddon telephoned with the chance to work on the upcoming Ivory Coast Rally. 'It'll be for three weeks. Can you do it? I need to know in a hour.'

  Today, Donaldson laughs at the idea. 'Well, what could I do? There was no way my employers would give me three weeks off just like that. So I just went into work and quit.'

  Such commitment impressed Liddon and George got work on the RAC Rally that year, driving the team motorhome. He was in. He was still driving, of course, and three years later the 1987 Ford Rallysearch contest put him on the map.

  After storming a regional heat at Knockhill from 700 rivals and the second round, he was through to the final at Boreham: a huge promo media carnival on a glorious summer day. He beat the pants off everyone, including Gwyndaf and I remember being impressed at how articulate he was.

  That year's RAC was a triumph, Group N winner and 16th overall.

  'It was just brilliant. Fred, who co-drove me was fantastic. Afterwards I felt everything was possible.'

  Gallagher says: 'My memory is that he didn't really put a foot wrong. I felt he could really start to go places.'

  But the unravelling was just round the corner and by 1988 it was crunch time. All his best results were at National level, but he needed international success and there success deserted him.

  'I'd known I had to make everything work perfectly that year and I remember wandering around Helsinki after going out of the 1000 Lakes, feeling utterly miserable because I knew I'd blown it. I just couldn't maintain my profile high enough.'

  He had achieved the targets Ford set him. But by then many of Ford's people had McRae stars in their eyes.

  'It broke me up, frankly,' says Donaldson. 'But I re-focused on TTE and Ove was happy to take me back.'

  Out of that came running the Safari workshop in Kenya. Out of Africa and a brilliant streamlining of the team's operation came the main team co-ordinating position ('dropped in the deep water without a lifebelt by a certain person, but I soon learned to swim!') and, in 1994, the team manager's job.

  A driven sort, George. He simply doesn't do relaxed. Ask him about downtime and he'll talk about a bit of DIY and a trials bike he uses three or four times a year. Until he left Germany he 'always read books' and he 'absolutely adores' the cinema, but never finds time to go.

  He mentions, 'I love my wife and daughter, and my idea of having enough time for family life would be not to work,' but immediately wings off about how the compensations for being away half the year are 'a job in a fabulous sport that keeps me fresh and interested'.

  There's his watch project (designing and marketing a ground-breaking rally timepiece with a friend) and flying. Now that does get him animated. Years ago he built his own plane - a Rens S6 Koyote and he tells hair-raising stories of skitting around Perthshire dodging RAF Harriers engaged in mock dogfights.

  On one jaunt he even helped RAF Leuchars identify and 'shoot down' a USAF B2 bomber that was trying to sneak up the Firth of Forth on a NATO exercise. He'd spotted it behind him as he crossed the Firth. 'It's a big, black dart and it looks sinister. I'm pretty sure it's a B2,' he told Leuchars over the radio. The Koyote has since become a victim of time pressures, but he still has a burning desire to go solo in a Spitfire. That's it, so far as relaxation goes.

  The opinions keep pouring out. The World Championship scene is in 'fantastic' shape although it has a 'crap' calendar and 'is still very vulnerable to spectator safety'. He maintains the sport isn't yet clued up on marketing itself, although he concedes that under David Richards there have been strides. 'I just worry slightly that it'll run out of impetus and be stranded before we reach the top level,' he says. It also grieves him to witness how bad some rally people are at schmoozing their sponsors.

  'That matters, even in the littlest things. If someone in the team gets difficult then I'm right in their face with, "Well, let's us both go and explain to the sponsor who's giving us $6,000,000 exactly why we can't have a clean service point when everyone's been sitting around here for an hour".

  'We still suffer from the disease of thinking we're here just because the manufacturers are developing rally cars to get better road cars. In fact, we're purely a branding and marketing exercise with sport thrown in.'

  Marketing is big with Donaldson. It's something he might like to have a crack at one day. Say the word and he'll rattle on for half an hour without pause. He has picked up the promo-speak too.

  'I do give a lot of thought to it and a fair amount of my pro-active time, because we're looking to the future of the sport in an era when branding is becoming ever more important. It's important to be at the WRC party and to be perceived as a top player. It isn't enough just to win.

  'Like with sponsors, some teams still seem to think a deal essentially consists of a few stickers on the car. They don't understand you have to fête sponsors. I always try to maximise whatever I can do for any partner we have: passes, advice, conversation, drive days, dinners, access to the team, visitor groups on-event, just make sure they are properly fêted.

  'I don't care about fabulous Powerpoint presentations and the like. I say 90% of the best sponsorship and marketing deals are done over lunches and dinners with the personal touch, just making people feel valuable and wanted. Someone who does understand all this very well is DR. Prodrive has always been a leader in that field.'

  For someone who makes such a point of mentally filing away everything that could be useful he is astonishingly vague about his own key career moments, though he's fairly sure that the worst one was in 1995 when Toyota was thrown out of the World Championship for cheating.

  'Giving up driving in 1988 was enormously bad, but 1995 I felt absolutely was a stain on me personally. I was so angry with the engineers. It was the price they paid for a car that had been tested to death but somehow just wasn't competitive. But what a stupid cheat to have on the car.'

  Driving highlights were those RAC and Kayel Graphics successes. As a team manager, he rates helping Didier Auriol to win China in 1999 as the best.

  'The 2001 Safari with Tommi was pretty bloody good too. But I wasn't at all pivotal in Mitsubishi although I was trying hard to resurrect Freddy Loix, who'd been more or less written off. It was a work in progress when I left.'

  He has known drivers who were 'hard work' but never one who was 'absolutely horrible'. The best 'by miles' he ever worked with all-round was Björn Waldegård - 'a super all-round talent and super guy'.

  From a mechanic's point of view, he loved Juha Kankkunen's co-driver, Juha Pironen. 'He would always have dinner with the boys, always wait for us to finish.'

  Kankkunen, too, is 'a great human being, always good for a laugh, though possibly too relaxed for some. The bottom line with Juha was that he could jump into any car and make it go fast. Carlos Sainz needs his car to be fast.'

  Sainz, he reckons, is 'an absolutely tireless worker,' but sometimes was allowed to go too far. 'At Toyota it got to the point that no one could tell him: "Stop. We've done everything that's reasonable here. Let's move the test on."'

  But no sooner is the sentence out than there's an immediate qualification. 'Of course, that wasn't Carlos's fault. He was there to drive things forward. And he had good energy for that and I liked that in him, although we did have a couple of philosophical differences in his last two years there.'

  The problem of drivers being treated as gods is, he thinks, getting worse. 'You've got to remember that they now live in a very rarified atmosphere because they're paid so much and deferred to so often. They can start to say things and no one is allowed to disagree with them. Because of that they start to believe everything they say and do is right.

  'Take the time in 2000 when Richard Burns decided he couldn't talk to journalists because they were disturbing his balance. Well, all that did was cut him off from reality and cause him more trouble. But he had to learn that lesson for himself, and he did, and is the better person for it. I can see how it happened. Richard I think is quite a delicate sort of bloke who wants everything exactly right or he's not going to be able to perform.'

  But despite their increasingly common prima donna moments George says we should be grateful top rallymen are still nowhere near as unreal as the people in Formula 1. That time spent setting up the Toyota Grand Prix outfit was, you sense, a more scarring experience than he will admit. On the one hand, he'll tell you he found it refreshing and friendly, that he got a lot of help and support from good people.

  Then he'll say: 'There I was, used to running everything and suddenly I'm being told what I can do and where and when. It wasn't done very nicely either.'

  Finally, he virtually dismisses the whole shooting match as mere fairy lights and window dressing.

  'OK, Formula 1 can be a very exciting event. But, let's be honest, as racing it's just crap. It's all purely marketing driven and as a branding exercise it's very hard work for a car company. Why would anyone want to go into that sport to compete? It's very rarified, it's very hard and incredibly expensive.'

  So, in his heart then, he never really left rallying? Well, he says slowly, 'I suppose I had been at Toyota so long it didn't really occur to me to go when they went to the circuits. But I kept well in touch with everyone in rallying.'

  Now he's back in the sport he never left, with new power and even more vigour. As I write, he's been at Prodrive just a couple of weeks and is already planning to 'poke my nose in a lot of areas'.

  'I'll tell you what,' he says with a mischievous chuckle. 'I also need someone very clever to be my assistant. I might just forget the sort of pretty girl that's expected and get a bloke to do it instead. That would make a few waves, wouldn't it?'

  He'll make waves all right and if he can help pull Subaru out of the trough, it might just write the final line on a hugely impressive CV.

  Because Donaldson still has one unsatisfied ambition - apart from flying a Spitfire, that is. He'd just love to have a stab at running his own team, Malcolm Wilson-style. All he needs is a new manufacturer to come to him waving a very large chequebook.

  In the meantime, he's very happy, thank you, polishing up the blue corner.