THE MOTOR SPORT CAREER OF VICTOR Henry Elford, who has died aged 86 after a long illness, just goes to show you can never put too much faith in the statistics. He never even scored a podium in Formula 1, let alone won a race. He never won Le Mans either, despite eight attempts. And yet when people think of Elford today, there is one word that springs most readily to mind, ‘quick’ – and only partly because it rhymed with Vic.
And quick he was, in almost anything. And he drove almost everything: rally, rallycross, touring cars, sports cars, Can-Am, even in NASCAR. If it competed, Elford required little encouraging to compete in it.
Behind the headlines that record zero wins in blue riband events, his actual successes were…
