Mostly Motor Racing

How do you describe a man who looked decades younger than he was, who bubbles with enthusiasm for life, who has natural charm in abundance, who is an English gentleman in the mould of David Niven and who has crammed more into his seventy-plus years than most people could into several lifetimes? Extraordinary? Yes, that's the best word. Alec Francis Rivers Fletcher, known universally as 'Rivers', had an ambition at the age of ten to fill his life with cars and motor racing — and that's just how it's been . . . A boyhood dream come true. For most of us Malcolm Campbell, Woolf Barnato, Henry Birkin, Raymond Mays and Whitney Straight are names from the past: names without character and life outside their legendary exploits. Not for Rivers; he knew them all and talks of them today with warmth and as if their adventures and achievements occurred yesterday. Brooklands is an industrial estate in Surrey surrounded by a ribbon of broken concrete. Not for Rivers. To him it's a premier racing circuit alive with the burble of people: the air, smelling of burnt rubber and Castrol R, is torn by the whine of straight-cut gears, the scream of superchargers and the bellow of megaphone exhausts. Bentleys of the golden era, classic MGs, BRMs and ERAs, are museum pieces, monuments to the past and our automotive heritage: cars to be cosseted and occasionally used with great care and due reverence. Not for Rivers. To him they are alive, vibrant: cars to be used every day or to be raced hard and long, to be repaired with baler twine if necessary and even to be modified, bought, sold and crashed — just like ordinary cars.