Getting into journalism

In his Benetton overalls, Michael Schumacher walked past me on his way to the garage. That same weekend I met David Coulthard, went to a dinner alongside the legendary Ken Tyrrell who welcomed this “kid” into his motorhome and spent my days walking around in the Formula One paddock thinking, “This is the life I would like to be part of.” You see, my first Grand Prix wasn’t watching in the grandstands, but it was straight into the heart of the sport. It was the mid-nineties that I went to Magny-Cours, home at the time to the French Grand Prix. I appreciate it was an unusual way to enjoy my first race and was an experience that some race fans never get the chance to enjoy, but for me that’s just the way it was.

I started watching Formula One in 1991 when my father, Bob, a successful and well-known Fleet Street journalist, was sent to the Mexican Grand Prix to cover for the normal F1 writer who was unwell. Off Dad flew, and I was curious as to where he had gone. I watched the race on the Sunday and was hooked. And as for my father, he covered for that race in 1991 and finally stopped in Abu Dhabi in 2014 – so much for “just one race”. In the interim he became close friends with Bernie Ecclestone and most of the paddock and attended Ayrton Senna’s funeral. He wrote books on Nigel Mansell and Damon Hill’s championship winning seasons and famously, after losing a bet with Mark Webber on BBC Radio 5 Live, ended up running round Silverstone naked on the Sunday of the Formula One Grand Prix whilst body painted in silver like a McLaren F1 car with most of the paddock on the grid to watch. Probably enough said about that!

What all of this meant, though, was that I had an in to this exciting world and there was no way that I was going to let it pass me by. Even watching Imola in 1994 on that horrific weekend when Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna were killed, I wasn’t put off; I was just early to understand the potential horrors and dangers of the sport.

I started going to races in my school holidays and spent a lot of time in the paddock, mostly sitting in team hospitalities. I washed the dishes at Ford to help out, chatted to drivers, team bosses and PRs and learned how the paddock “worked”. Whilst at Napier University studying journalism, I worked for Formula One Management on the TV side in the gallery as a PA. The rules were very strict then and we weren’t allowed to go into F1 hospitality or spend time with the teams, but I used that chance to sneak in and see the people I knew. I interviewed some drivers and engineers and then sold my work to newspapers. I also wasn’t a big fan of the food we were given, so some of the teams would shove food out the back of the hospitality for me, as if I were a stray cat!

Working as a PA for FOM wasn’t what I wanted to do, but it had given me a chance to get some experience in that world and, after doing some races in 1998 and 1999 when Mika Hakkinen was dominating for McLaren, I left F1 and got my first “proper” job in news.

I was always told that to be a good sports journalist, you have to be a good journalist, and this is something in which I firmly believe. Of course, you can be enthusiastic and a fan, but you have to be so much more than that and ready to ask uncomfortable questions regardless of whether you know or are friendly with the person you are interviewing. I have been to team bosses and drivers’ weddings, birthday parties, family funerals, and yet I hope that any friendship or acquaintance would never stop me from asking a difficult question should it be needed. It hasn’t yet.

I started young. I used to get a Monday morning off secondary school to go into my local newspaper, The Ayrshire Post, where I would write up my rugby report. From the age of fifteen, my Saturday afternoon was spent at Millbrae watching Ayr Rugby Club in the Scottish first division. I would report on the match, interview the players and then on the Monday morning during a free period, I would head into the office and type it all up. I also had an equestrian column called “Horsing around with Lee McKenzie”; I got £15 per week, but it wasn’t about the money (which is a good job, really), it was the experience which was invaluable.

I was lucky in that I knew what I wanted to do, so I dedicated myself in the way that the driver or athlete dedicates their early years to be the best in their chosen field. In motorsport, very few people in the paddock start in Formula One and will have grafted their way up to that level, earned their stripes and started to hone their craft in the junior formula, just like the drivers.

Before Formula One I had worked in DTM Cars, Champ Car, IndyCar. In its final year in 2004, I presented F3000 on ITV. At that time, the team to beat was Arden, owned and managed by Christian Horner. It was a real family business and since then I have been friendly with the whole Horner clan. Christian used to always ask me about the weather, did I think it was going to rain? It’s a common question to Scottish people, who spend their time in an amphibious state thanks to the character-building climate! At the start of 2005, Christian was announced as the Team Principal of the new Red Bull Racing team. As a good luck gift, I bought him the Collins Nature Guide to weather and wrote in the front: “I think this is the one that Jean Todt uses.” At that time, it had been Ferrari and Michael domination. I like to think my pocket guide to weather and clouds led to Red Bull and Sebastian domination!

Whilst presenting a live motorsport show which, unusually was a chat show with some live motorsport, on ITV 1 called Speed Sunday, I was given the chance to do some co-driving with Tony Jardine for an MG works team. Before I knew it, I was competing in rallies in the UK and Scandinavia up to world championship level. In fact, whilst presenting the Goodwood Festival of Speed 2022 for ITV, I needed to renew my license for co-driving feature, so who knows, maybe I will have another go!

Eventually, though, I arrived in F1 (which I described more fully in the Lewis Hamilton chapter) I will always be grateful to the BBC for giving me the chance when they took the rights back at the start of 2009. It was then that I became a regular figure in the paddock, interviewing the drivers.

I did laugh whilst reading Jenson Button’s autobiography Life to the Limit. I love how he describes the interview pen where I spent much of my F1 career (apparently waving a microphone if you believe him!):

“If you’re not one of the top three, you go straight into your interviews, which are held in something we call ‘the pen’. You’ve probably seen it: it’s like an enclosure at a farm park, except with Formula One drivers instead of goats, surrounded by journalists waving microphones at you. Those interviews are always tricky, again because you run the risk of saying silly things you shouldn’t (mind you, if that happens you can always use the ‘adrenalin excuse’ afterwards). You see someone like Max Verstappen doing it, maybe coming out with the odd thing in the heat of the moment that would have been better kept between him and his dad. It comes with experience, I guess. You learn to calm down, breathe and try to remember that you’re not just speaking for yourself, you’re speaking on behalf of five hundred other people in the team.”

He’s not wrong, however there is an art to that microphone waving, one I hope that I get right more times than wrong! This book will give you an insight into that world and remind you of some of the awkward, hilarious and combative interviews that drivers have done with me over the years – including one of my chosen goats, Jenson Button!

In my time in F1, drivers, people, racetracks have all come and gone. From the colourful and wonderful Indian Grand Prix to the unique love motels of Mokpo and the Korean Grand Prix – I feel I should probably elaborate on this. The drivers all stayed at one hotel the track, the Hyundai hotel. The rest of us stayed in a variety of “establishments”. For some reason, the majority of places to stay were known as “love motels” normally rented by the hour until we came along and booked them for five days. Many of us brought our own bed sheets, sleeping bags, antibacterial wipes – you get the picture. Days in the paddock were passed telling horror stories about what had happened the day and night before. People would return from work and realise their hotel room had been “borrowed”. It was a dreadful, yet shared, experience – very F1. As a travelling circus, we were all in it together. Well, all apart from the drivers!

Singapore is another bizarre experience in that we become night owls. We stay on European time, which means we sleep until lunch time, go to work at 3 p.m., leave the track at around 2 or 3 a.m., pop to a hawker’s market for some food and then go to bed at 5 or 6 a.m. It is totally surreal and the first time you are there, it really throws you, but then you look forward to it and it is, without a doubt, one of my favourite Grand Prix.

I have worked in and covered many sports from rugby to Wimbledon to the Olympic Games but F1 is unique in how we all move around and work. When you cover rugby, you might only see some teams once or twice a season but in F1 we are together over 20 times a year and often we travel on the same chartered flights. There are a few times a year when the Sunday night or Monday is as exciting and as big an occasion as the F1 when some of us let our hair down together. It’s this unusual way of living that unites us.

It goes both ways though. Because we are such a tight knit group, crashes and accidents really affect us. Whether it be Jules Bianchi in F1, Anthoine Hubert in F2 or Justin Wilson in Indy Car, we are a small community, and many of us have grown up together, working our way up through the junior formulae. The losses are the moments that never leave you and are a reminder that whilst fun is everywhere, so is danger. Those who have driven in F1 and been around for a while tend to have an attitude of “we all have a limited number of heartbeats, so use them well”.

I was actually hoping to write this on my flight to Baku, where I was presenting the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, but it was a charter, which basically meant there were too many people around! Firstly, I like to catch up with everyone and secondly, I wasn’t that keen to be writing in case of prying eyes, although I am sure no one really cared. I had Sebastian Vettel, George Russell, Pierre Gasly, Alex Albon and Nicolas Latiffi around me and was sitting next to GP Liambiase, Max’s race engineer, whom I have known for many years and seen socially at friends’ weddings. We did have a good laugh on the flight over and it becomes like a social event with everyone moving around and chatting, which is lovely. There were also several engineers on the flight all trying to hide their screens of squiggles, info and prep from each other. It is a constant in joke of one peering over another’s shoulder and saying “thanks”, and pretending that they’ve just spotted something from their rival’s screen that will make them two-tenths of a second quicker!

The flight back from Baku was equally amusing. I sat alongside Mark Webber and we were surrounded by pretty exhausted team bosses, all with a story of why their cars and drivers finished where they did – these stories tend to be more honest on a flight back with a G&T in hand than those told in an interview situation. There is a lot of trust –and sometimes a drink or two to relax – on a flight home after a race weekend.

Mark manages the incredible young talent Oscar Piastri, who will be in F1 sooner rather than later. He lives near me, so rather than Mark have an extra hour on his trip at 2 a.m., I said Oscar could jump in with me. On the drive home he was telling me how exited he was to be driving the Alpine F1 car at Silverstone the day after we landed. It was the perfect example of the cycle of F1: no matter how big the names are in the seats on the grid, there is always another group of drivers just waiting for their chance; even hungrier, even younger and maybe even quicker. That’s the beauty of F1, it’s a constant evolution in every sense.

But to know and appreciate what we have and enjoy now, you have to know where the sport and those involved came from. The history of the F1 is as beautiful as the cars we have on the track. The drivers all have their own stories of sacrifice, success, drama and, in some cases, devastation. 

Hopefully this book lets you discover or reminds you of what these drivers have put themselves through to reach the highs and how they have come back from the lows. I have been lucky enough to share some incredible moments with many drivers, including Michael, Lewis, Sebastian, Max, Fernando, Jenson and Felipe. It has certainly been a trip down memory lane for me, and I hope it will be for you too. 

Lee x