Finally, I’m writing my lines for this year: ‘Just like last year, I’m going to make sure that any car I’m driving never makes contact with another competitor.’

It was smash, bang, wallop all the way in the 1965 British Saloon Car War. The trail of wreckage reached a spectacular crescendo in the final round at Oulton Park with a multiple shunt at the first corner, sending Minis, Mustangs and everything else flying in every direction from Old Hall bend.

This is nothing new, then – just read those old race reports. It’s sobering stuff. In the supposedly golden, good old days of order and gentlemanly manners, was motor racing the non-contact sport it was always meant to be? No, it was not. Getting on for half a century back, all the clever boys were up to every trick in the book and a hard line in mad behaviour reigned supreme once they got out on the track.
 
As the 2009 season gets under way, I’ve been thinking about this contact business, thanks to something Alan Mann said to me recently. For some time, I have been collaborating with Alan on his life story. Getting behind the scenes of the legendary Alan Mann Racing organisation has been fascinating but it’s one of his observations from even earlier times that grabbed my attention.

Back in the 1950s, before he became famous, Alan started out as a keen amateur racer. One of the many cars he owned and drove was an HWM-Jaguar sportscar, and he told me: ‘I can’t recall ever having to paint our cars after those meetings; the very idea of touching another competitor was a shameful thing and it almost never occurred.’ He raced that HWM for two years without getting a scratch.

The rules were much the same then but we have a more casual attitude now. Contrary to popular belief, it seems that this change  took root in the early 1960s. Yet every year there are calls to return to the clean racing of a past that is recent only in imagination.

Such problems are less common in historic racing than people think, but accidents do happen. It’s not that there are evil drivers around; such incidents are almost always caused by errors of judgement or over-ambitious manoeuvres rather than any deliberate wickedness, which makes it rather tricky to do anything about it.

The unfortunate bloke whose car gets hit by an over-enthusiastic rival nowadays will probably get very grumpy indeed but the rest of us just glance and move on. In Alan’s early days, something like that would have left a big black mark against somebody. Now we dismiss it as a mere ‘racing incident’.
Modern professional racing is different. There, the tactical accident appears to be part of the armoury of today’s top drivers and that’s a very different thing from the shameful spectacle of so-called ‘defensive driving’. When a championship is decided in favour of one driver as a result of an accident he has caused, what are we to think? When one driver crashes all on his own, bringing out the safety car at precisely the right moment to leapfrog his senior team mate into the lead of the race, am I a loony conspiracy theorist to question the timing of that accident? The perfect professional foul is the one that goes undetected.

In the comparatively relaxed world of fun we inhabit, there are obviously no such cunning plots. The problem we face is simply that of the odd silly sod losing it and causing anything between major carnage and a few minor dents.

Lots of people also think that things got worse with safety legislation. Drivers were encouraged, the argument goes, to take more risks because they thought they wouldn’t get hurt. All I can say is that I’d been racing in Formula Ford for six months in 1968 when seat belts and rollover protection came in and it made no difference. It was crazy stuff without the safety kit and exactly the same with it.

The shunt rate has undoubtedly been bumped up by rules that have equalised car performance. One-make championships probably have a lot to answer for. Still, every year there is much talk about stamping out the shunts. Stern action is always cited as the only way, suspending or removing a few licences for the slightest offence, but I reckon that’s a non-starter. History suggests it’s easier said than done. Just touch wood, and try jolly hard not to be one of the silly sods, I reckon.