The Son Of The Wind

The Son Of The Wind

Ricky Warwick

When I was a boy, I grew up on a farm on the old road between Belfast and the town of Newtownards. A fairly nondescript country road that a mile or so however beyond our farm opened up into a vista that encompassed the most wonderful of views across to Scrabo Tower and Strangford Lough.

To the uninitiated, the road meant nothing, but back in the days before the war and before rock ‘n roll that road for one day only was a racetrack of world renown. The Ards Tourist Trophy race was the Formula One Grand Prix race of its day in the late twenties and early thirties, and it passed by both the windows of my house and the pub that both Sam and I consider to still be our local even though we’ve moved away in the years in between.

For one day every year almost half a million people, some travelling on ocean going liners arrived into Belfast to watch the race. They lined every hill, hedgerow and field on the route. My grandfather is well recorded as having rented his fields out as car parking spaces for the great and good who owned such contraptions as motor vehicles in the thirties.

The two sons of the King of Siam who were studying at Oxford and who raced in the event rented the farmhouse and outbuildings on the Ballyrogan Road, just around the corner from my house for a week before the race.

Tazio Nuvolari was the king of the Ards T.T. the Michael Schumacher of his day. An Italian race ace he was known as the “Son of the Wind” With rugged good looks and a death wish he earned notoriety on the road outside my house. He won the race twice.

A legendary driver of his day he was once asked by the MG race team what he thought of the brakes on the winning MG Magnette in the Ards TT? he replied laughing, “I don’t know; I didn’t use them”

Often when we’d sit in the Elk looking out the window we’d imagine the cars screaming around the most perilous of hair pin bends outside the pub and what it would be like to drive in the race.
“Son of the Wind” was written as a tribute to the rock ‘n roll, don’t give a fuck lifestyle of Tazio Nuvolari and the spirit of speed, adventure and a reckless will to win that sadly doesn’t exist anymore in a sterile world.