http://www.boatinternational.com | June 2018was something you could do, whereas motor
racing you could watch but for a hard-working
middle-class chap like myself, actually racing
cars oneself was beyond my imagination.”
While at Oxford he’d met Olivier Giscard
d ’Estaing, the brother of the future French
president Valéry, who’d founded a business
school in Paris called INSEAD. Sir Lindsay
was intending to take the Foreign
Oice exam, but “Olivier said,
diplomacy tomorrow is going to be
in business, it’s not going to be in the
embassies; that’s just for cocktails”.
So Paris it was, and that’s where he
stayed after landing a job at L’Oréal.
“It sounded like a wonderful, exciting
thing to do. Doing marketing for
shampoo and hairspray, in French, in
a French company, living in Paris; and
being paid to look at and study women
and their motivations. Of course,
I took to that like a duck to water.”
As his career progressed, so did
the cars and the boats – and the
racing. There were go-karts and
classic cars, and 420 dinghies and
a Bénéteau First Class 10 prototype,
which was the recommendation
of Bruno Troublé, the French
America’s Cup sailor who Sir Lindsay
had befriended while working in the US.
Sir Lindsay loved racing but also wanted
a boat on which he could cruise with
his Italian wife Cristina, and Céleste,
his daughter from his first marriage to
a French woman. Troublé steered him
towards an American-designed, Italian-
built 17 metre ULDB, then a 24 metre
aluminium CNB. “That was lovely but
it was heavy, traditional, and there were
wire cables coming out of everywhere.
“I saw a
photograph of
Genie of the
Lamp. Nobody
had ever told
me that such
a boat existed”
Above: Sir Lindsay
and his daughter
Céleste launch Magic
Carpet in 1997. Right:
with Brad Pitt at Le
Mans 2016 (Sir Lindsay
served as president
of the FIA Endurance
Commission)Sir Lindsay at the helm
of Magic Carpet^3 with
his tactician, Tom
Whidden, alongside him93