Brian Naylor

24/3/1923 - 8/8/1989

Record updated

A motor-dealer from Stockport and a former merchant navy radio officer who won awards for gallantry in the war. Naylor began racing in 1954 with the very scruffy ex-Horace Gould Cooper-MG. He raced it in the Tourist Trophy race at Dundrod with George Pitt as his co-driver. However he soon switched to a brand new Maserati 150 sports car, which he ran for the first time at Charterhall. He susequently put the Maserati engine into a new Lotus Eleven chassis and regularly clocked up victories the length and breadth of Britain. A report in Autosport in 1956 noted that The five lap scratch race for sports cars up to 2000cc looked a gift for Austen Nurse in the Lister until the last minute arrival of Brian Naylor with his Lotus-Maserati, a combination which was still warm from winning the 1.5 litre scratch race at the BARC Aintree meeting only two hours previously. Naylor won again easily at the day's fastest average of 78.04 mph In 1957 he bought a Formula 2 Cooper, which he was to race in selected events, including Grands Prix, over the next three years. Naylor was never content to drive standard fare, and experimented with a Maserati-engined Lotus before developing his own Cooper-based JBW-Maserati with a designer Fred Wilkinson. He ran this with great success in Libre events but was outclassed in Formula 1 and Inter-Continental racing. Though Jim Clark had to be restrained from walloping Naylor after he was forced off the road during the 1960 Oulton Park Gold Cup! There was also a sportscar version of the JBW. Brian's biggest F1 moment was the boycotted Italian GP 1960, in which he ran 6th for a while but retired. Bill France had been at Monza in 1960 and was quite taken with Brian's handling of the banking and he invited Naylor to visit the 'States in 1961. France got him a Smokey Yunick-prepped Pontiac for the Daytona 500. Thus Brian became the first Englishman to run in the Daytona 500. Naylor retired on lap 85. Interestingly he also tried out Art Arfons Rocket powered LSR car, the Green Monster at Daytona! At the end of the 1961 season a heart condition forced him into retirement and he went to live in Marbella, Spain, where he ran a café. He died there in 1989 after a long battle with ill-health. There is however a report that he was living in Ford Lauderdale in 1988 working in the boat business. Dying a year later when the boat he was working on exploded due to accumulated gas in the bilges.