David Parkinson, the public relations manager who laid the foundations of what became UIM F1H2O, has died. Most people watching the championship today won’t know his name. Before Nicolo di San Germano, before H2O Racing, before Grand Prix weekends in the UAE and China, there was David, working the phones out of a Bond Street office, trying to build a single unified championship for inshore powerboat racing almost from nothing.
I first met him in Chalon-sur-Saone, at the 1992 French F1 Grand Prix, and the introduction could not have gone worse. I was there in the middle of a boardroom battle that was playing out back in David’s Bond Street office. Part of his team had decided it was time to update the series photographer, and I was the one lined up to replace his long-standing friend, Brian Dewey. You can imagine the reaction I got when David clocked me in the pits.
Building the Championship
David had come to powerboat racing sideways, as an experienced PR manager rather than a racer. In 1978, one of his clients, Mercury Marine, asked whether he could put together a single unified championship for inshore powerboats out of what was then a scattered, manufacturer-driven scene. He built the Canon Trophy, sponsored by another client, Canon Inc., and that became the starting point for everything that followed.
It landed in the middle of an engine war. Mercury and its rival, Outboard Marine Corporation, pushed each other hard through the early eighties, and the result was the OZ class, built around monstrous 3.5-litre V8s, running alongside the more standard 2-litre ON class. OZ boats dominated on raw power, and the imbalance did not sit well with a lot of the grid.
In 1981, David worked with Jackie Wilson to form FONDA, the Formula ON Drivers Association, built around the fairer 2-litre formula. The UIM gave official Formula 1 status to the higher-powered OZ championship instead, backed for a time by John Player Special, and left FONDA’s series carrying the secondary World Grand Prix title.
The OZ era did not last. Rising costs, promoter trouble and a run of fatalities in the mid-eighties brought it down, and Europe had no official Formula 1 championship at all between 1987 and 1989. FONDA’s World Grand Prix Series, sponsored for a while by Budweiser, kept going regardless, and picked up drivers as OZ faded away.
By 1990, with no rival series left standing, the UIM turned back to David and reinstated Formula 1 World Championship status, folding it into the FONDA structure he had built. He carried on running and promoting it until the end of 1993, when he finally handed it over to Nicolo di San Germano, who leads it to this day as F1H2O.
Jazz, Boogie and Swing
One time I drove up to London with the 500-print colour run of the winning Mercury-powered raceboat that, along with a single-page press release, went out around the world on Mercury’s behalf. Over a very boozy lunch, I finally asked David what the agency name JBS actually stood for.
David Parkinson, on what JBS stood for:
Jazz, Boogie and Swing.
When it came to choosing race venues, David was particular. He always made sure there was an excellent restaurant near the pits, a golf course close by and, most importantly of all, a good range of shops nearby for the drivers’ wives and girlfriends.
The Surprise Party
David eventually lost a battle with the then UIM president, Ralf Frohling, over the future direction of the F1 World Championship, and stepped away from promoting it. His wife, Muriel, together with Eric Michell, whose production company FM Television had put the series on the world map through the Powerboat World programme, organised a surprise party for him in Maidenhead. Among the guests was Guido Cappellini, who presented David with the original FONDA World Championship trophy to keep.
If it happened in powerboat racing during the last forty years the chances are that Chris Davies was there either photographing it or writing about it.
During that time, he has travelled the globe covering both offshore and circuit racing for series promotors, race teams, PR companies, and a whole raft of publications.
