Alain de Cadenet, who has died aged 76, was a racing driver who became a fixture at Le Mans, where he attempted to defy the dominance of the factory teams, in cars reconstructed to his own designs; he later became well-known as a television presenter.
With his lupine grin, laconic wit and patrician style, “de Cad” seemed the beau idéal of the freebooting amateur – “a throwback really to the British Racing Green gentlemen heroes of the 1930s, and not at all the modern businessman driver,” as he was described in the 1982 BBC documentary 24 Hours at Le Mans.
Yet his laidback persona belied his determination to win the 24-hour race on his own terms, competing in cars assembled in the garage of his mews house in Kensington, with no financial backing other than the few thousand pounds he could winkle from such sponsors as Duckhams oil, Tate & Lyle or the Post Office.
He raced at Le Mans 14 times between 1971 and 1986, and came closest to victory in 1976, when he placed third in a modified Lola T380 powered by a Ford-Cosworth DFV engine that had helped Bruce McLaren to victory in the 1968 Belgian Grand Prix.
De Cadenet and his regular co-driver Chris Craft both finished in agony with heavily blistered right feet, and were denied a formal moment of glory as they were unable to find the podium. “We never even knew where it was,” he recalled. “No one came to get us.” (Subsequently, however, they were permitted to inaugurate the British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch with a lap of honour.)
The winner was Jacky Ickx, for Porsche. “Ickx used to say that when he drove for Porsche … it ‘was like going to the Ritz hotel for tea’,” de Cadenet told Petrolicious magazine in 2017. “‘And Alain, when I look at your car, oh,’ – you know, shards of fibreglass on the seat and rattly old body, and mechanics all unshaven – he said, ‘I look at your car, Alain, and it is like going to prison.’”
Nevertheless, de Cadenet maintained that “these factory men who just showed up and parked their bum in a nice warm seat missed out on so much – the struggle to get your car bought, the struggle to find sponsorship, negotiations left, right and centre … I was absolutely exhausted by the time I got in the car, but the feeling of euphoria when you got a result was truly magnificent.”
Alain Maxime de Cadenet was born in London on November 27 1945. He had no memory of his French father, Maxime, who abandoned the family when he was a baby. His English mother, Valerie (née Braham), was an actress who lived and sporadically worked in Hollywood, leaving Alain to be brought up in England by her parents. De Cadenet claimed that he had once let himself into his mother’s house on a visit to find her in bed with Elvis Presley.
He was educated at Framlingham College and began his working life in the City, but when his girlfriend left him for a photographer he decided to pursue the same glamorous profession. He worked mainly for the pirate stations Radio Caroline and Radio London, photographing bands, and produced album cover photos for the musicians he befriended.
De Cadenet had no interest in motor racing and had barely heard of Brands Hatch when, in 1967, a friend invited him to watch a race at the famous Kent circuit. In an echo of de Cadenet’s previous career change, the girlfriend who accompanied him went off with a driver, and de Cadenet realised that here was a profession that would secure him even more attention from women.
A week after his first visit he bluffed his way into taking part in a race at Brands Hatch, despite having no competition licence; he drove an AC Ace-Bristol. “That was my baptism by fire,” he recalled. “You go out of the tunnel, you go out to the pits, you follow everybody else, the next thing you know there’s a mad rush. Everybody buggers off and you just join in! Guess what? Now I’m a racing driver!”
He established himself as a proficient racer and toyed with racing in Formula Three, but lacked the funds to buy a transporter; needing a car he could drive to races, he bought a Porsche 904 cheap from a friend and in 1973 became team manager for Graham Hill’s Formula One team. He rapidly fell out with Hill, however, and resigned.
Meanwhile, he had developed a taste for endurance racing and first took part in Le Mans in 1971, driving a Ferrari 512M for the Belgian team Ecurie Francorchamps. He faked the eyesight test, as his sight was still not fully recovered from an accident during the Targa Florio a few weeks earlier when he had to be pulled from his burning car.
The following year he approached Ferrari with an offer to buy his own car to race at Le Mans, but was rebuffed. So he decided to construct his own model, adapted from a Brabham-Cosworth BT33, with the help of Gordon Murray, then a young designer at Brabham.
It was the acquisition of a Lola that brought de Cadenet his best results, and in 1980 he and his new co-driver Desiré Wilson won two rounds of the World Sportscar Championship – the 1,000 kilometres of Monza and Silverstone six-hour events – in their Lola-based De Cadenet-Ford LM-4: an astonishing achievement for a non-factory team.
After failing to finish at Le Mans in 1981, however, de Cadenet wound up his own team and thereafter raced for the British GRID and Charles Ivey Porsche squads. Witnessing the fatal accident suffered by the Austrian Jo Gartner at the 1986 Le Mans spurred him to retirement.
In the 1990s he looked ready to become best-known as the father of the “wild child” television presenter and tabloid favourite Amanda de Cadenet: he declared that, while he did not “approve of some of the things Manda has done”, he was very proud of her. He courted controversy himself when in 1994 he admitted that he had test-driven cars at more than 200mph on British motorways, as no British track had straights long enough to gauge speed properly.
He re-emerged in his own right, however, as a well-liked television presenter, bringing his refined charm to Channel Four’s rumbustious Ride On; his assignments ranged from riding a lap of honour at the Isle of Man TT to challenging a biker gang to a shopping-trolley race round a deserted Safeway.
For the Speedvision channel, de Cadenet hosted Legends of Motorsport and enthused about great racing marques in the popular Victory by Design, described by The New York Times as “car pornography”.
“I believe that what people like about my stuff is that I am very loquacious and verbal and excited about driving the kind of stuff that I do,” he declared. “I treat the camera like a bloke sitting next door to me.”
Latterly he was best known for a clip from a 1996 documentary in which a Supermarine Spitfire flew towards him so low after he had just finished a piece to camera that it came close to taking the top of his head off; after resurfacing on YouTube, it has been viewed more than seven million times.
Apart from collecting cars, de Cadenet’s passion was, implausibly, philately (“the best balance I know between the pressures of life and sanity”). He began collecting aged 10 when a relative gave him a batch of stamps from letters which had been addressed to Gladstone, and his collection of George V stamps won him a Gold Medal at the 1973 Stampex.
Alain de Cadenet is survived by his wife Alison Larman, whom he married in 2002, and their son, as well as the son and daughter of his marriage to Anna Gerrard, which ended in divorce.
Alain de Cadenet, born November 27 1945, died July 1 2022
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