ALAIN MENU I HAVE NO REGRETS
Alain Menu: those were two words that were guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of any on-track rival in touring cars. The Swiss man bestrode the tin-top scene as one of the most sought-after talents of the 1990s and if any racer was partnered alongside him, they knew they had a job on their hands.
The up-and-coming racer stumbled on his path to the top of the single-seater world but there was life after F3000 – and it had a roof on it.
Menu was the benchmark in the British Touring Car Championship for so long: his clean and clinical style was perfectly suited to extracting the maximum from the two-litre breed of front-wheel-drive Super Touring cars. Two BTCC titles were the zenith of his UK career before stints in the DTM, driving GT cars at Le Mans and an eight-year stint in the World Touring Car Championship, which took him to the cusp of the global crown in 2012.
Menu himself says he has no regrets about a career that allowed him to race and earn a living at the highest level for nearly two decades.
Motorsport News caught up with him as he was in between jetting to and fro from his homeland and his now native Scotland. He tackled the MN readers’questions from the comfort of an airport waiting room. It’s one way to kill the time, we guess…
Question: Why did you decide to go motor racing in the first place, because that is not a normal thing for a Swiss person to do [given that motorsport was banned in that country]?
James Hilton Via email
Alain Menu: “Yes that is right. There was nobody in my family that was into motorsport and they weren’t even into cars or anything like that, so I don’t know where my passion came from. My dad was a pig farmer so I don’t think you could find anything that was further away from what he was doing! But as far back as I can remember, when I was four or five years old, I wanted to be a Formula 1 driver. I was born in 1963 and Jo Siffert was a Swiss driver in Formula 1. He died in 1971. I remember it very well, even though I was only eight years old at the time. I was distraught: I had pictures of him on my wall in my bedroom, all that kind of thing.”
MN: Did you ever get taken to any motor races when you were young by friends or family?
“No. I didn’t go until I was old enough to take myself when I had my own driving licence. I remember that the first proper race I went to was the French Grand Prix at Dijon in 1984. Before that, in
