Starting off in the workshop Martin made the fairly rare transition to the sales office.

  Sadly, Martin passed away in 1991, but, his son Tim has been kind enough to send me the following;

I was interested to read about the Downton Engineering story on your site and it brought back a few memories for me as a small boy. I have memories of summer holidays at various race tracks watching my Dad, and latterly chalking up his lap times in the pits. Just to pass on what I remember.

I believe Martin was at Downton for about 4 yrs - late 60's to early 70's. I thought he was initially a mechanic but he moved onto sales. He left Downton in early '70s to join Richard Longman & Co as the workshop manager and then moved to Weber Carbs in Sunbury in '77 as their UK Sales Manager - where he mainly enjoyed driving the company cars (RS2000s, Cosworths and Audi Quatros!), regular trips across UK and Europe to visit dealers and Weber HQ in Italy and hosting the Weber NEC motorshow stand which gave him the opportunity to catch up with old friends.

He raced in various amateur road rally and hill formats in the 60's but he first started racing 850 mini's in 1969, probably inspired by working at Downton. He then moved to mini se7en in '74 and competed until '78. His mini racing peaked in '77, winning the British Championship and 5 of the 16 races.

The Tiger comic sponsorship was coincidental, someone pointed out to him the story in the comic and he contacted Tiger to see if they could help out with sponsorship, as my Dad found it tough to fund himself, like most of the guys in those days. Luckily Tiger saw the potential and did help out from '76-'78 so my Dad gave his race mini new livery of yellow with a broad, central blue stripe and named it "George" true to the comic story.

After retiring from mini racing Martin still competed in various other forms of racing through the 80's: 750 formula, road rallying and motorbikes. He gave up competitive racing in the late 80's but still remained an avid racing fan, regularly visiting Le Mans and the Weber box at Silverstone or Brands up until his bike accident on the M25 in '91 when he was sadly killed.