Galway director’s spotlight on ‘mad’ Formula One Driver

Talking Sport with Stephen Glennon

ALL roads may lead to Pearse Stadium for Galway supporters but for one of the county’s senior club football managers, Carna Caiseal’s Seán Ó Cualáin, it will be motorsport that he will be preoccupied with come 2pm Sunday.

It is not that Ó Cualáin is an avid motor racing enthusiast – although he does have a certain affinity for it now – and to say that he is torn between his pre-arranged appointment and the Connacht senior football decider in Salthill is an understatement. He would love to be going. However, duty calls.

For this Sunday the noted Connemara director will premier his latest feature length documentary, chartering the rise and fall of former Irish Formula One driver Tommy Byrne at the Galway Film Fleadh. Throw-in is 2:15pm in the Cinemobile.

Entitled Crash and Burn, the documentary tells the story of Drogheda native Byrne who for a fleeting moment in the early 1980s was the world’s greatest driver, “the motor racing equivalent of George Best and Muhammad Ali all rolled into one”.

In a little over four years Byrne went from driving a Mini Cooper in stockcar racing to the big-time in Formula One but his inability to curtail his wild side saw him later shunned by the racing fraternity and he subsequently ended up racing cars for drug barons in Mexico.

Having previously directed such hit documentaries as ‘Men at Lunch’, ‘RAS Tailteann’ and ‘GAA USA’, Ó Cualáin believes this could be one of his best productions. “It probably is. It is certainly one of the most human stories. ‘Men at Lunch’ was about a time and a place (the workers having their lunch on a beam high up in the New York skyline) and there was a bit of nostalgia thrown in about emigrants.

“This though is a human story which is just so tragic. Tommy really lost out and, in some ways, so did the Irish people on a World Champion. And how many World Champions have we had? I think Ireland could really have done with a World Champion in 1983, ‘84 and ‘85 in the most glamorous sport in the world, particularly in the early ‘80s when the country was a basket case.”

Although largely unknown and unheard of today, Byrne’s story was the subject of a book called ‘Crashed and Byrned: The Greatest Racing Driver You Never Saw’. Co-authored by Mark Hughes, it won the 2009 William Hill Irish Sports Book of the Year.

This documentary though is the brainchild of producer David Burke, who Ó Cualáin had worked with on RAS Tailteann. Burke had the idea rolling around in his head for a while, says Ó Cualáin, but it took time to raise the money to fund it. In the end, RTE, BBC and the Irish Film Board backed the project.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.