Formula One is more than just drivers and cars: it's also the mechanics, the media and the creative minds that bridge between the sport and its fans. Atlas F1 pays tribute to some of those professionals, as one of the best F1 journalists, Doug Nye, writes about the master, Denis Jenkinson

"Journalism as a Career" is not a 'how-to' book to which the most charismatic motor racing journalist in the English-language - the late Denis Jenkinson - would ever have given houseroom. He never was - never wanted to be - "a professional journalist". As far as he was concerned those free-loading ne'er do wells from the national newspapers were "proper journalists" and "journalism" was pretty much a rude word. It smacked of invention, of twisting the facts, of making mountains out of molehills, of missing the point, of not caring enough to correct past errors…of idleness, negligence, or worst of all, uncaring, uncomprehending negligence.

He regarded "those people" of simply not being what he was, through and through - A Racer. Jenks wrote not because he was paid to do so, not because that happened to be a fulfilling creative way to pay the bills and to keep a roof over his head. He wrote simply because it was something he'd always done, it had simply come upon him around the same time as puberty. He became a lifelong diarist - hardly a day went by without him making a diary record of what he'd been up to. Some days might warrant only three or four lines. Other days, especially during his teens and the years of the Second World War in particular, would be a two- to three-thousand word essay. And even in adolescence those daily essays were beautifully crafted in his tiny, almost prissily neat and consistent handwriting. And from his early teens - again - his overwhelming interest and passion was for motor cars, motor-cycles and motor sport. He was, through and through, every inch, A Racer...

As early as he could he wangled his way onto the active side of the spectator fence, by fixing himself an acting unpaid job as mechanic helping an English Brooklands racer named Bob Cowell to prepare and run his Alta sports car at the famous pre-war British 'motor course'.

He spent the war years bleating at how "all this bloody political nonsense is getting in the way of racing", while working on the development flight at Britain's Royal Aircraft Establishment, in Farnborough, Hampshire. There he really got to know such like-minded enthusiasts as Rodney Clarke and Mike Oliver - who postwar would found the Connaught marque, building sports, Formula Two and ultimately Formula One cars. And he began contributing seriously to 'Motor Sport' magazine, edited by fellow RAE Farnborough employee, William Boddy.

But during the 1950s and '60s 'Jenks' - as he was always known to all and sundry - became renowned as 'Motor Sport' magazine's Continental Correspondent, not just offering monthly reports on the great races of Europe but also building a remarkable constituency of budding enthusiasts who hung on almost every word as gospel, and who drank in his grasp of technicality, and tactic and motor racing strategy, and of driving, and touring, and living hand to mouth around Europe and of soaking up the motor sporting gipsy life.

He had a unique 'in' with the racing fraternity, largely by the coincidence that his period coincided with that in which so many of his postwar British peers not merely made their mark in major-league motor sport, but actually came to dominate it. And it all went back to his involvement, right there, not in the press box, scribbling his notes, "filing his copy" to some bored sub-editor on the end of a telephone line in some drab London office - but Right There... in competition.

This from early in the piece...

Jenks sprawled full-length along the Watsonian racing sidecar, nose inches from the tiny perspex window in its front-cowl, watching the 1949 Italian Grand Prix for Sidecars develop - first-hand - at Monza. It was bedlam. To his right hunched over their bawling 500cc double-knocker Norton engine, rode the Fangio of this form of racing. His name was Eric Oliver - the world's finest combination rider. When he slipstreamed a rival he left him in no doubt who was there. Reaching well above 100mph along the Monza straights he had their Norton's front wheel inserted between the leader Ercole Frigerio's works Gilera '4' and its sidecar. All Jenks could see, inches ahead of the scarred, fly-starred perspex, was the soles of his Italian counterpart's plimsolls...

This was part of his introduction to the motor racing world, which he followed, and loved, and wrote to us about for the rest of his busy life.

For 'Motor Sport' magazine's 150,000-plus readers during the '50s and '60s, and indeed for most enthusiasts, Jenks's lifestyle seemed absolutely enviable. We marvelled at someone actually being paid - we assumed - to follow the circus in his Lancia Aprilia, or Porsche 356 or E-Type Jaguar company cars. He was universally admired and respected - even though some would jib at his written opinions - and occasionally his outspokenness would get his publishers sued, which to us seemed particularly good fun...

In an era when the media pulled punches, the work of 'Motor Sport's fearlessly outspoken editor Bill Boddy and Jenks himself came as a breath of fresh air. As 'D.S.J.' - Continental Correspondent, the readship's alter ego on the scene - Jenks's public life seemed an enthusiast's paradise.

He had learned the ropes of living economically in Europe in his gipsy motor-cycle racing days of the late '40s. Harsh living had never troubled him...he was, and remained, a tough little nut, and one utterly obsessed by motor and motor-cycle racing. As earlier as age three, elder sister Joyce remembers him going missing, before she found him staring transfixed at cars in a dealer's window.

He was 12 when the pivotal event occurred - he discovered 'Motor Sport'. From 1933 he religiously saved tuppence a week to buy the latest copy each month.

His first attempt to ride a motor-cycle came illegally at 14, but at 17 his great boyhood chum Bob Newton taught him to ride a flat-twin Douglas properly in his father's garage at Barnet. From 1938, Bob studied engineering with Jenks at London's Regent Street Polytechnic. He recalls how there Jenks was an outstanding gymnast. "He had superb balance and was frequently selected to show the rest of us how the apparatus should be used". Jenks was very muscular, his personal power-to-weight ratio terrific: "He cycled everywhere, he wouldn't turn a hair at a 30 or 40-mile round trip, rain or shine, and all with a fixed-wheel pulling a fantastically high gear!".

Despite a late start, Jenks's elder brother Harold also remembers him suddenly taking up swimming - "He taught himself, became better than proficient within a few weeks - which was typical - then promptly won a high board diving competition - the first rather daredevil thing he ever attempted".

Then from the day in 1941 when he cycled from his boyhood home in Forest Hill, South London, down to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough for his first job interview, Jenks became a fixture on the Surrey/Hampshire border. At Farnborough he lived in digs, spending some spare time drawing car plans for Percival Marshall which they sold as model-makers' blueprints.

At the RAE Jenks really got to know 'WB' - Bill Boddy - whom he had met pre-war at enthusiast functions and who was then working in Air Technical Publications while editing 'Motor Sport' in his spare time. Jenks wryly noted "Boddy's fantastical stories" but derived great enjoyment from his humour, for shy Bill could be very entertaining too. Also in this wartime RAE/motoring circle were Charles Bulmer, later editor of 'The Motor' and Joe Lowrey - who would become its Technical Editor. These profoundly talented motoring enthusiasts fed off each other's knowledge and expertise - absolutely enthusiasts trained as engineers, not enthusiasts trained as journalists, and it showed...these men really knew their stuff.

Another chum was Holly Birkett, the vet in nearby Fleet, who had an Ulster Austin Seven and a Bugatti plus (vitally) a wartime essential-service petrol allowance. If they felt like motoring off in the middle of the night to see just how steep was Porlock Hill of pre-war Land's End Trial fame, they'd go on Holly's petrol, zooming back tired but happy with the dawn. Joe Lowrey recalls how Jenks was always 'up' for any ride at all in an interesting car: "I was posted down to Davidstow in Cornwall and drove down in my HRG with Jenks as passenger. I'd told him I would be staying there but he insisted on coming for the joy of the ride, and airily caught the train back. The strange thing was that he raved about the trip, yet he'd actually slept folded into the back nearly all the way..."

Typical Jenks traits really developed at the RAE. Bob Newton: "We'd all accepted that racing had to be set aside while we got on with sorting out the Germans, but not Jenks. Although he wasn't an avowed conscientious objector he was totally apolitical and left none of us in any doubt he didn't agree with the need for this; he simply refused to recognise the real world of that period...." - he always simply closed his mind to anything which affected his racing world.

His great vintage motor-cycling pal Mick Wilkins met Jenks at the RAE, and recalls vividly "...we all first knew him as the little feller with the big hat and no socks - he'd worked out that he could swop the saved clothing coupons for petrol coupons...".

He certainly lived cheaply. Once hostilities ended in 1945 he saved money to support his beloved Frazer Nash (recently bought for £250 from Dr John). In 1947 he drove it in the first postwar British motor race meeting, at Gransden Lodge aerodrome. But motor racing was plainly beyond his pocket. He sold the Nash and bought, for £100, a racing Norton International motor-cycle. Renting a lock-up was cheaper than digs, so for some time home became a sleeping bag under the workbench in a lock-up by the railway. Later-Lotus racer Jon Derisley was a schoolboy nearby. He recalls hearing that "...there's an old man in a lock-up round the back who's got a racing motor-bike". In that era this was fantastically exciting, so one lunch time a party of inquisitive schoolboys ventured to take a peek at this new wonder.

And there he was - long ginger beard, hence the "old man" tag (Jenks was barely 26); "And you know how open he was later with interested youngsters? Well, when he spotted us he roared '---- off!' - and we all fled...". Jenks would have loved this story, the unexpected inversion.

With perhaps just one exception he never liked 'Other People's Kids' - until they became old enough to be interesting. He nicknamed one friend's year-old daughter '159' because, when she bawled, she made exactly the same noise as, and her mouth was exactly the same shape as the grille on, a Formula One Alfetta 159.

He loved jazz - traditional of course - but had a higher-brow appreciation of classical concerts, which he'd sometimes attend clandestinely, not to dent his Bohemian image. He also tried to play the clarinet, but had more success from 1947 learning the ropes as a racing motor-cyclist.

He finished last in the Hutchinson '100' at Dunholme Lodge aerodrome and also ran at tracks like Oliver's Mount and Cadwell Park. The long-suffering Bob Newton drove Jenks and the Norton to the Mount, only to be dismissed upon arrival - "Off you go, I don't want you hanging about" - for Jenks this was a new life starting, off with the old, no compromise...

His serious motor-cycle racing career would last five years. Fellow rider David Whitworth encouraged him to join the Continental road-racing circus in '48, and astride the 350 Norton - with his worldly goods in a shoulder pack and a soft bag strapped across its tank - Jenks went off for a fortnight of war. He had planned to compete on successive weekends in three Belgian meetings - only to have his engine seize in practice for the very first, at Mettet.

He was stuck, shorn of both transport and the means to earn a living. He had only a pound or two in his pocket and had been relying upon the £30 start money promised by the race organiser, Jules Tacheny. He worked through the night to patch-up his engine, made the grid, retired early but the friendly Tacheny still paid up. Still the 'bike was dead, but at the prizegiving Manx GP winner Eric Briggs offered to take him on to the other meetings as a 'fettler'.

After the Brussels meeting, Jenks sat at the same table as Eric Oliver, also in his first season of Continental touring. Eric used two regular passengers, but they both had regular jobs and could only ride with him by taking holiday leave. He was looking for "new ballast" after the third Belgian race, at Floreffe. Jenks said he'd like to try - just to stay with this intoxicating European circus - so Eric invited him to appear at Floreffe a day early "...and I'll give you a try-out before practice".

After a few brisk laps on open roads Eric told him "You'll be all right - the right weight and you don't rock the boat; I never felt you move". Minimum regulation weight for a sidecar passenger was 60kg - Jenks in his kit scaled 59.9 - with a few ounces of ballast he was in!

Jenks put all this down to being in the right place at the right time - all his life he believed in Fate - and he learned his uncompromising rules of racing from the fiercely competitive E.S. Oliver. "I learned at close quarters why real World Champions are naturals and not manufactured in a riding or driving school" - he'd write - "On a starting grid he was there for one reason only - to win. If he did not he wanted to know the reason why...but only from himself...".

Eric's favourite remark after a twitchy moment was "I think we were sharing control there for a bit!" by which he meant in the enduring duel between himself and Jenks combined, against their Norton/Watsonian outfit which even then was regarded as a "lethal device".

They learned the European ropes through the summer of '48 then built a new combination for '49 when the FIM launched its Sidecar World Championship. And through that year they began every race they entered "convinced we were going to win" - and were only beaten twice, once by a methanol-burning 1000cc JAP outfit on grass, and secondly in the Italian GP at Monza when the spark-plug which Eric had fitted himself, dropped out because he hadn't pinched it up tight. On that occasion Jenks grabbed the plug spanner tucked into Eric's left boot, and wound in the spare plug carried in his pocket. They restarted and finished 5th, then were hustled up onto the victory podium high in the Autodrome's concrete grandstand to celebrate their World Championship title. "While everyone was waving and cheering we did not feel very proud of ourselves, as we considered we had made a team cock-up...".

For decades following Jenks covered four-wheeled Italian GPs and Monza 1,000Km sports car races from that same grandstand, but he never reminisced about the day that he had stood there on the podium. He was never an Uncle Albert character, no question of "When I was racing...", or "During the '40s..." much less "When I was World Champion...". There wasn't a trace of that in Jenks's psyche, he was too interested in what was happening in the here and now, right before his eyes - and in how he was going to tell us about it.

Oliver was an absolute master at gearing to match a circuit. With Jenks he also researched the idea of the passenger not leaning out to the maximum in every corner, to minimise frontal area and so maximise speed. Eric tried some left-handers in practice with Jenks remaining tucked behind his tiny cowl, staring through the window; "I could feel the chair lifting all through the bends but when we straightened up Eric would give me a quick thumbs-up - on some circuits this meant we could raise our top-gear sprocket half a tooth and if a tail-wind got up we could go up a whole tooth..."

Another time during practice they tested the difference between their standard works Norton engine and one built around their own bottom-end and internals, the surfaces of which Jenks had polished almost to mirror finish to reduce oil drag. They set a baseline time in their first few laps, then pulled off the back of the course to their garage, stripped the engine, rebuilt it with the still-warm head and barrel on their highly polished crankcase and internals and got it together in time to rejoin the second session. First time down the straight Eric stuck his tongue out and grinned - there was 'the unfair advantage' - an extra 200rpm... Pre-race they re-geared the combination to take even 'unfairer' advantage, and another win was almost guaranteed.

At Spa in '49 Oliver and Jenks ran one of their finest ever races - a carburettor fuel feed banjo broke on the first lap and DSJ found the only way to keep the engine running clean was to plug the leak with his thumb! Whenever he had to hang outboard or over the bike with his thumb off the leak the double-knocker engine would starve and stall. While he was wrestling with this dilemma another fast curve was rushing up when he felt Eric's big boot pressing on his back - the signal to keep tucked into the chair. They two-wheeled round that corner, then the next... For 50 minutes Jenks kept up this little Dutch boy act with his thumb against the bawling, buzzing 596cc Norton's carburettor and another World Championship round was their's, although "My right arm was numb well beyond the elbow and it was quite a few days before things returned to normal".

They happily lived rough. Even while dominating their class they still lived under canvas - to rivals' disgust who said "You're letting the side down - we all ought to be put up in hotels" - Eric and Jenks preferred the cash they saved. The bonus was that major motor-cycle meetings were then combined with motor races, so Jenks began to report on both for 'Motor Sport', 'The News Chronicle' and - as 'Our Man in Europe' - for 'Motor Cycling'. He also wrote for 'Iota' as 'Barbarossa' - 'red beard'. So racing paid for his summers and writing for his winters in what Jenks called "The cushiest job I know".

One time at Albi, he was knocked out in a crash. To his alarm he woke up on a slab, surrounded by flowers, women in white and beautifully dressed men; "...then found I'd been carried into a house where there was a wedding party, they'd cleared the lounge table, laid me down on that and were waiting for the quack when I came round!".

Another early-postwar friend was Guy Griffiths, whose daughter Penny recalls returning home to Thames Ditton to find the family dog sitting morosely in the middle of the kitchen floor, because somebody else had commandeered its bed; the beleathered Jenks, worn-out after riding back from the Continent, was curled up asleep in its basket.

Eric Oliver had been very much the Englishman abroad, preferring to nip back home to England as often as possible, but Jenks hankered after a more European lifestyle so from 1950-52 joined forces instead with Belgian motor trader and motor-cycle racer Marcel Masuy ('Mazz-wee')- who went racing in style, and stayed in hotels... Jenks lived in Brussels, polished his languages, prepared Masuy's bikes and cars and was paid £14 a week plus expenses. Always a meticulously organised man he told our pal William Court he had intended to race 'bikes until 1956-57 when he hoped to switch full-time to 'Motor Sport'. But magazine owner W.J. Tee then offered a full-time appointment from the start of '53; "That kind of door opens only once, so I took it" - and his serious riding career was over.

The rest of his motoring life has been well recorded, and of course he made his name beyond the enthusiast readership world when he navigated in the 1,000-mile Mille Miglia round-Italy race classic. He had his first experience of it in 1954 with George Abecassis in the works HWM-Jaguar. As they lined-up for the start on the ramp in Brescia, with crowds seething around and flash bulbs popping, the HWM chief mechanic leaned across in front of Jenks and growled at him "You'll put your comic away above an 'undred and fifty!".

Very, very few ever rode with 'Fearless George' and remained unshaken by the experience. But the tough little Jenks did.

For 1955 Stirling Moss invited him to act as his navigator in the works Mercedes-Benz 300SLR. This was a stupendous opportunity - and Mercedes paid too! Again, the story of how Moss and Jenks committed every iota of their respective talents to training and reconnaissance and preparation for the great race - and how they won it at a shattering average speed of just on 98mph - is well known. Jenks's navigation - using the roller map of notes which he had so painstakingly compiled to warn of every hazard which could kill them - or at which they could make up a second or two - played a critical role in their success. This unique involvement enshrined him for all time in the highest echelons of International motor sport's major players.

But meanwhile the private Jenks was very private indeed.

Around his time in Belgium he camped, when 'home', in a cottage adjoining The Phoenix pub in Hartley Witney (so well known in VSCC circles), and from November '53 he rented Stratford Lodge just outside Odiham. Then for nearly 35 years - from November '61 - home became a saggy-roofed single-storey lodge house hidden behind a dense wood deep amongst Hampshire farmland. It offered peace and seclusion at the cost of no mains electricity, 'modern' drainage and a water supply hosed-in from a farm barely in sight across the fields. What should have been the living room became a methodically-arranged but choc-a-bloc workshop. The other four cramped rooms bulged with books, magazines, car and 'bike parts and filed race data. An open fireplace in one was topped by a chimney flue so open that heavy rain could actually douse the fire.

The tiny kitchen was dominated by a big, black Aga solid-fuel range which Jenks alone knew how to drive. It would light for no-one else. With it pulsatingly radiant, and a wintertime kitchen temperature around 80 degrees he'd sit within Aga-glow, at a tiny table lit from the window above the sink, and write to us. Perhaps that was his secret, he wrote 'to' his readers, not just 'for' us...

Through 1959 Jenks began to appear at races accompanied by a striking brunette, Patricia Burke (later Mrs Pat Surtees). The great Henry N. Manney III - of 'Road & Track' magazine - remarked "Pat's very good for Jenks, she's taught him to wear socks". But Stirling Moss recalls: "Around 1954 I bought him a pair in black with yellow stripes which we called his Colorado Beetle socks because those coloured beetles were big news at the time, threatening the potato crop. And dear old Jenks then wore them through 1954 - and 1955...and 1956...".

And in his later years I might call by the lodge "to see how the gnome is" and he'd be "beavering away", as he would say when busy, or in the workshop "fettling", and his thick derry boots would always be parked by the sizzling Aga while the rail along its front would sport an array of foot warmers - "...you gotta have an endless supply of hot socks" he'd advise - so perhaps the economies of fifty years earlier had finally caught up.

Upon his death, the local 'Farnham Herald' newspaper ran a major story on someone who to them was a freshly discovered, hitherto unsuspected, local celebrity for Jenks had always kept a low profile "in the parish" as he put it. Yet amongst local motoring and motor-cycling men, and to his farming neighbours, he was such a special friend, because when he was around things were never dull - there was invariably something to puzzle over, to analyse, or to trigger gales of laughter. And should a Concorde rumble over en route to far-flung places he'd always break off and gaze up admiringly - then beam "Bloody marvelous, eh?". And in his younger days his little lodge house had plainly been very happy for him, and for his latest girlfriends - one of whom, over many years, really meant the world to him.

Yet while he was non-materialistic, he was always intensely possessive, of property, and people alike. He cultivated separate interest-groups of close friends, yet discouraged independent contact between each group. Many of us only met for the first time since his stroke in January 1996 - and to maintain such separation over 30-40 years was surely incredible, particularly since we found we all got on famously, so how did he do it, why did he do it? Search me... possessiveness is surely the only answer.

After his successful scientific approach to the Mille Miglia with Moss in '55, Mercedes-Benz GB loaned him a 300SL for a 'Motor Sport' road test. He had a favourite public road circuit and in March 1956 Hampshire roads at night were absolutely empty. Jenks took his friend Sandy Burnett along for the ride, they blasted off from Camberley at 3am, saw 128mph across Hartford Bridge Flats on the A30 road through Hampshire, and averaged 72.8mph to Andover before entering a right-hander between Stockbridge and Romsey in which the tail slid wide "and Jenks just failed to correct it", as Sandy vividly recalls: "...the car spun through 180 degrees, dug into the grass verge and toppled slowly onto our left side... We pushed the car back onto its wheels. It was just first light, when we heard this padding sound, and looking up we saw a chap jogging towards us - in his pyjamas! We knew this would all be too complicated to explain, so we jumped in, restarted, and off we shot..."

And after 3hrs 11mins 20secs - all carefully logged by DSJ of course - they brayed round the completion of the chosen course back to Camberley, having averaged 61mph "Time allowance for righting car and inspecting allowed. Rather slow from then on!" reads his 'Circuit Dicing' log - typical Jenks.

Jenks became a standard-setter, and an accessible one to those he felt matched his enthusiasm, and might "make the grade". Amongst those who learned their core-trade, their core-standards, first as his readers, later at his feet or by his side or - in his old age - as his friends and supporters, were Alan Henry, Nigel Roebuck, Maurice Hamilton, myself, Andrew Marriott, and many, many more whose names later adopted some kind of stature in their own right...

One final vignette; at the end of his competitive life he was very proud of his homebuilt TriBSA sprint 'bike. At Shelsley Walsh hillclimb - which he always loved - in 1991, he broke the 40-second barrier for the first time, and then in 1993 at the Colerne sprint he had a lovely day - crossing the line ever-faster on each of his three runs. And at the end of that lovely day our little gnome, in his baggy black racing leathers removed his crash helmet and stroked his beard straight, and told Mick Wilkins "If I die tonight, I'll die a happy man" - and he meant it.

Which says it all...

Denis Jenkinson was not - as you can appreciate - your actual everyday 'journalist'...