40 | Pilot September 2017 http://www.pilotweb.aero
nothing was quite as addictive as the
adrenalin rush which something like that
provided. I had aspirations to join the
Royal Engineers independent parachute
squadron, so I joined up. As it turned out,
my army career was short-lived; I was
grounded after a parachuting accident and
I didn’t fancy a desk job, so I left.” I ask
what he thinks about parachuting today.
“Oh, I’d do it today if I could,” he says,
slightly to my surprise.
His next move was a job in quality
control with cigarette maker Rothmans,
“which, incidentally, put me right off
smoking”. He stayed with the company for
seven years and ended up quality control
manager in a research facility. “It was a
good training, actually,” he says. “And
they were a good employer.”
I would have expected him to carry on
flying, given his earlier enthusiasm, but he
had been diverted into his other lifelong
interest: cars. “I was rallying, motor racing
and restoring vintage cars. The focus of
my interest, then and now, is Austins−I
admit to a slight bias in favour of British
manufacturing.” I ask what was the appeal
of rallying and racing. “The excitement,”
he answers, “and the skill in controlling a
vehicle on wheels constantly at the edge
of adhesion.”
How successful was he? “My motor
racing career was hampered equally by
lack of talent and lack of money,” he says.
“A lucky third place was the best I
achieved.” In the mid-eighties he wrote off
the Austin Healey Sprite he was racing.
“The track owner, seeing that I was at a
loose end, asked if I would like to help by
commentating. And that was how my new
career started.”
I am curious about his restoration of
vintage cars and ask for an example. “I
had a 1930s Austin Twelve,” he says, “a
large five-seat saloon, with a−nominally−
twelve horsepower engine. It had a
maximum speed of around 45mph, but it
was ‘long-legged’; you could drive across
town without changing out of top gear. It
had a certain elegance, too: there was a
full set of curtains in the back!”
And the skills he developed at that time?
“I learned to scrape white metal bearings,
de-coking, grinding valves, some welding,
some paint-spraying and how to rebuild
clutches. But I knew my limits too. I
stopped short of gearboxes, for instance.
Part of the know-how was realising when
to get someone more skilled than you to
do the work, who the best people were,
and how to liaise with them and form a
good relationship.”
He was obviously a success at motor
race commentating, because he moved
from addressing audiences at events to
talking on the radio and then on television.
Commentating
was a regular
occupation for
thirty years. And it
led to other things.
“I began writing
for magazines
including
Autosport and
classic car titles,
and then I was
invited to join a
public relations
agency in CoventGarden.” He worked as an account
director in the agency from 1989 to 1995,
mainly with automotive clients, and then
worked in Sweden, the USA and Belgium
before starting his own agency, Kingpin
Media, based in Chesham. When he was
38, he met Jean (they both had previous
marriages) through work−she was in the
same business, and she subsequently
joined him in Kingpin. “She was setting up
England’s ‘Heritage Open Days’ for the
Department of National Heritage and I was
the broadcaster,” he says. Jean then
became Tourism Manager for the City of
Oxford, finally stepping down from
tourism consultancy in 2014.
At this time he was commentating on
Formula One Grand Prix for Star Sports, a
television company based in Singapore.
“In fact for thirteen years I was the voice
of Formula One right across Asia,” he
says. In later years he was beginning to
move into more aviation writing and
voiceover work, but that stopped when he
took up his post with the LAA.
Stephen was in his mid-forties when he
took up flying for a second time. “I had
never stopped going to airshows,” he says,
“and I was a regular reader of AeroplanePilot profile | Stephen Slater
The track owner asked if I would like
to help by commentating. And that
was how my new career started
The Luton Minor (left) formerly owned by SteveA well-read couple: Steve and his wife, Jean in front of one of the many bookshelves in their house