NOTICE OF DEATH - JACK PEARCE (1933 - 2024)

The Club Office only learned last week of the death of Life Member Jack Pearce who passed away on 13 November at the age of 91. He had been suffering from pneumonia coupled with the effects of injuries which he sustained in his racing career.

Jack was managing director of Kincraft, a metal pressing company based in Tipton, Staffordshire. He started racing in Formula Junior in 1960, making the same mistake as did many others at the time of acquiring a front-engined Elva powered by the BMC ‘A’ series engine at a time when the world of single-seater racing, under the influence of Lotus and Cooper, was switching to placing the engine behind the driver. At the end of April 1960 Jack made his Formula Junior debut in a FJ race on the Silverstone Club Circuit, finishing third but that was the only occasion during the year that he was in the top three. A good few drivers switched from their Elvas but Jack stuck with his for the rest of the season, with experience but no success to show for doing so.

The Lotus offering for 1961 was the Type 20, a slimmer version of the Type 18 which had carried nearly all before it during 1960. Almost immediately Jack was running at or near the front of what might be termed second tier races. His first win came at Silverstone in June while second places became a habit. He was second to the Midland Racing Partnership Cooper T56 of John Rhodes on successive weekends in June/July at Silverstone and second again a week later at long-forgotten Linton-on-Ouse to the late Peter Procter’s Lotus Type 18. A couple of weeks after that Jack won both his heat and the final at Mallory Park against opposition which included the MRD of Gavin Youl, the Ron Tauranc-designed car which became the foundation of Jack Brabham’s eponymous racing car company, making its debut. A couple of weeks later Jack was able to turn the tables on John Rhodes by finishing first at Mallory Park with the future ‘tyre smoker’ a close second.

For 1962 Jack replaced the Type 20 with a Type 22. This was probably the most competitive of all Formula Junior seasons, certainly in terms of the number of drivers in every race even if most of the most important were won by the Team Lotus leader Peter Arundell in his Type 22. Entered under his racing team title of Auto Racing Service, Jack could mix it with the best that Lotus, Cooper, Lola and Brabham had to offer but his race wins tended to be achieved in the second-tier races, for example at Mallory Park where he saw off local hero Bob Gerard’s talented protégé John Taylor. Jack also won the Ouston Gold Cup at the short-lived airfield in Northumberland. At the AMOC meeting in July he twice finished second to John Fenning in a Ron Harris-entered Lotus Type 20.

Remaining a loyal Lotus customer, in 1963 Jack acquired a Type 23B, the prototype for which had been seen racing during the ’62 season from time to time in the hands of F1 World Champion Jimmy Clark who would continue to race one of the Normand team cars, alongside Mike Beckwith and Tony Hegbourne, in 1963 when he had a spare weekend. Jack won the Guards Trophy at Mallory Park just half a second ahead of the similar car of Julian Sutton whilst he was third overall in the Martini Trophy at Silverstone behind the Ferrari 250GTO of Michael Parkes and the Brabham BT5 of Frank Gardner. Jack raced little in Formula Junior during 1963 while concentrating on the sports-racing Type 23B but he did have a few outings in major races at the wheel of the Alexis Mk 4, albeit without any notable results.

As Formula Junior was replaced for 1964 by Formula 2 and Formula 3, Jack dipped his toe in the water of the latter by a rare trip outside the British Isles to Monaco at the wheel of a Cooper T72 instead of his usual Lotus. The Lotus was left behind so as to be available for Aintree the following weekend. At Monaco Jack was fourth in his heat and sixth in the final whilst at Aintree, in the last ever single-seater race on the full Grand Prix circuit, Jack was a comfortable winner with his Lotus.

Jack did not race again in F3 but instead converted the Type 22 powered by the Lotus Ford Twin Cam engine as used in the Type 23B, into a very effective machine for formule libre racing. By July the immaculate Type 22 was ready and Jack took it to Ireland for the Leinster Trophy on the Dunboyne road circuit followed a week later by the Hawthorn Trophy in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. Jack won both events which set a winning trend for the rest of the year.

In 1964 a few, fairly crude but nonetheless effective, V8-powered former F1 cars were starting to emerge in formule libre races so Jack decided to join them and commissioned from Len Terry, whose Lotus Type 33 design was in the process of helping Jimmy Clark to his second world title, to design the ultimate formule libre machine. To avoid upsetting Colin Chapman, who was likely to see Len Terry’s efforts as illicit moonlighting, Martin Waide was brought in to run the project and the outcome was a spectacular, stressed spaceframe masterpiece. Prepared to Jack’s demanding standards, the car, called the Kincraft after Jack’s metal pressing company, only raced twice in his hands. On its debut it was third at Brands Hatch before winning at Snetterton. Tragically on its next outing at the hazardous Dunboyne road circuit, during practice Jack was involved in a collision with the F2 Brabham BT16 of Adam Wyllie in which the young Scottish driver sustained fatal injuries.

Jack was so upset by what had happened that he never raced again. He repaired the badly-damaged Kincraft and sold it to David Bridges who, after a couple of outings, sold it to Robin Darlington who in turn sold it to Jim Moore, both Robin and Jim winning many club races with it over the next few years. The Kincraft has come to be regarded as the inspiration for Formula 5000 which was introduced to the UK in 1969. Ironically the Kincraft only ever made the grid of one Formula 5000 race, at the long-lost Nivelles circuit in Belgium. In the hands of Max Reinhard, the car stalled on the grid, never to re-start.

Unable to totally suppress his competitive urges, Jack turned his attention to the mud-plugging world of Sporting Trials, designing and building a series of trials cars which were also named Kincrafts. From his first British Trials and Rally Drivers’ Association win in 1970 until 1985 Jack, invariably with his wife Brenda as the bouncing passenger alongside him, won some 64 individual events, five MSA Championships and four BTRDA Gold Stars. A somewhat spartan trials car may not offer much scope for elegant design but Jack’s Kincrafts, with their distinctive red front bodywork, set new standards very much in the tradition of the single-seater which had preceded them. In responding to a BRDC questionnaire in 1990 Jack stated that his hobby was ‘building sporting trials cars’.

As a footnote, it should perhaps be clarified that Jack should not be confused, but often has been, with J A (John) Pearce who became well known in the 1960s as the supplier of alloy wheels and the owner of a Formula 1 team of three cars which burned out in mysterious circumstances on Silverstone’s Club Straight on the Wednesday night before the 1967 Daily Express BRDC International Trophy.

Originally elected as a Full Member of the BRDC in 1964, Jack became a Life Member in 1986. He and Brenda were regular visitors to Silverstone, and users of the Members’ campsite, until poor health precluded this. The BRDC tenders its deepest condolences to Brenda, their daughter Susan and son-in-law Nick. At Jack’s request, he did not want a funeral and instead donated his body to the Anatomy Department of the University of Birmingham for the purposes of medical science.