Driven To Crime: True stories of wrongdoing in motor racing

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The car was devoid of any signs of external sponsorship except for a strip across the top of the windscreen sporting allegiance to Veuve Clicquot, presumably in deference to the copious quantities that had been quaffed at the launch party. Munroe was jailed for five years after he admitted 17 charges of transfer by deception and three of procuring the execution of a valuable security. The next outing for the AM Racing McLaren F1 GTR was back at Silverstone, this time for the biggest British GT Championship event of the season, as one of the support races for the British Grand Prix on 11th July.

His long and creative list of excuses included the claim that he suffered from chronic kidney problems. After trying unsuccessfully to entice various high-profile owners to take part, the programme’s producers had to look elsewhere. Crispian Besley takes us on a fascinating behind the scenes tour de force of real-life corruption and shady dealings within the world of professional motor racing.During the week he was the bespectacled manager of an accounts department but at weekends he became an attention-seeking, self-styled ‘millionaire businessman’ and ‘gentleman racer’ of a McLaren F1 GTR.

Remarkably, he found responsible employment yet again, in March 2015, by which time he was 51 and once again using his real name, James Cox. The book is 500 pages but made up of profiles of 66 different profiles, all independent of each other, so you can read it like a book of collected short stories. However, the woefully inexperienced driver’s performance was underwhelming to say the least and he found himself consistently and hopelessly outclassed, trailing behind not only all the modified cars in his class but also most of the slower standard cars. He started to make frequent trips to the nearby showrooms of Maranello Concessionaires, the famous Ferrari importer and main dealer. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.Unfortunately, for the victims whose livelihoods were affected by his deceit, the story still didn’t end there. Through his extraordinary duplicity, the ultimate vanity project was unwittingly financed by funds embezzled from his employer. In subsequent interviews with Thames Valley Police, he admitted all the charges of fraud, saying that he did it because he was ‘disillusioned with his job’ and wanted to ‘step up’. In the case of James Cox (aka James Munroe), his craving for attention suggested that he received his highs not so much from racing one of the fastest and most desirable sportscars ever made but more from the publicity and kudos that went with it. To feed his apparently insatiable appetite for fame and attention, Munroe had hired a public relations specialist, Panic Publicity, at the start of the season, and this company probably organised the original Soho launch.

This prompted sympathetic colleagues to arrange for flowers to be delivered to the hospital only for their kindness to be repaid with the discovery that no child of that name was at the hospital. Description Description People lie, cheat, steal and even kill for a variety of reasons, one of which is to go motor racing, a particularly expensive and egotistical sport. Whether you have been involved in the sport or not, it is a window on the human condition that is rarely demonstrated with such honesty and clarity. Murder: David Blakely (the driver killed by his lover Ruth Ellis); Franco Ambrosio (F1 sponsor of Shadow and Arrows); Elmer George (American racer who married into Indy ‘royalty’); Ricardo Londoño-Bridge (Colombia’s first F1 driver); Mickey Thompson (1960s American drag-racing icon); Nick Whiting (casualty of the biggest gold bullion heist in British history). It's a very journalistic, non-fiction style, very straightforward and with incredible eye to detail.It was while Munroe was away on a two-week family holiday in Spain that his life of subterfuge began to unravel. Now going by the name James Munroe, he fooled himself that he was ready to live the second part of his childhood dream: he was going to become a racing driver. In defence of his 36-year-old client, Peter Warne told the court: ‘Munroe describes himself, or his creation, as “a monster which he could not stop”. In the story, Munroe was quoted as saying: ‘I’ve been into fast cars and racing since I was a teenager, but it’s a difficult game to get into.