Driven To Crime: True stories of wrongdoing in motor racing

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Goodwin admitted that by now, despite being handsomely paid, he was finding it difficult to maintain his motivation when co-driving with someone who was completely out of his depth. He used these companies to submit bogus invoices to his employer and was perfectly placed to ensure that payments were authorised and made to the respective bank accounts, of which he was the sole beneficiary.

Drugs: Ian Burgess (sometime British F1 racer); Randy Lanier (drug-smuggling IMSA champion); John Paul Sr and Jr (talented son dragged into a racing father’s drug-running); Vic Lee (super-successful team owner with a dodgy transporter); the Whittington brothers (more misdeeds in IMSA circles). In the story, Munroe was quoted as saying: ‘I’ve been into fast cars and racing since I was a teenager, but it’s a difficult game to get into. I hocked myself to the hilt just to, albeit briefly, own a MkII Golf GTi 16v,’ he said, ‘sadly ending its days stolen, ransacked and unlovingly abandoned on bricks on Wentworth golf course. For the second round, at picturesque Oulton Park in Cheshire on 3rd May, there was special dispensation for Goodwin to drive solo because the ‘self-made multi-millionaire’, as Munroe had started to describe himself, was reported by Autosport magazine to be ‘away on business’.Behind the wheel at Silverstone, however, was not Lockie but Chris Goodwin, who coincidentally had raced the very same chassis for its previous owners in the 1997 FIA GT Championship and had been drafted in for this session. He started to make frequent trips to the nearby showrooms of Maranello Concessionaires, the famous Ferrari importer and main dealer. The season comprised 11 races, one of which was a continental excursion to the daunting Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium.

Questions had already been raised about the honesty of this ostensibly very ordinary man who took excessive amounts of sick leave so that he could devote time to his extracurricular activities.Lockie’s contract was annulled and paid off in full by the team patron, after which he took up offers of drives in both a Marcos and Porsche in the GT2 class later in the season. Judge Josh Lait was not sympathetic and said when summing up: ‘This was a serious and continued breach of trust carried out over a substantial period, executed by false documentation. In a rather charitable defence, Paul Tweddle told the court that his client was an ‘educated’ single man with a degree in accounting and finance from Bristol University, but that is open to question as the university has no record of him. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

An enthusiastic collector of classic cars, he lives in a 16th century manor house in Northamptonshire, conveniently close to Silverstone. Inspired by James Hunt's Formula 1 exploits with Hesketh and having become friends with the World Champion's younger brother at school, he competed in Formula Ford during the late 1970s but had to face the reality that his results were not going to earn him a place in F1. Serious suspicions escalated when a senior McGraw Hill executive watched television coverage of a British GT Championship race on Channel 4. People in the British GT paddock were intrigued about where this previously unknown driver had come from, especially one who not only owned a McLaren for road use but could also afford to own and race another one. As the director of accounting he was responsible for the management of the payment system and had detailed knowledge of the payment process.The kind of white collar criminals we hear about all the time – who just don't happen to get into professional racing. Indeed, the only recognition he ever seemed to receive over the course of two seasons with the F355 came at Croft, North Yorkshire, when the race commentator lavished inordinate attention on his car just because its red-and-white harlequin livery looked similar to nearby Sunderland football club’s team strip. Immediately after the Brands Hatch race, Munroe funded an extravagant trip to the third round of the American Le Mans Series (ALMS) at Mosport in Canada for Goodwin and several AM Racing personnel. To feed his apparently insatiable appetite for fame and attention, Munroe had hired a public relations specialist, Panic Publicity, at the start of the season, and this company probably organised the original Soho launch.