Ian Burgess

This Formula 1 driver claimed shadowy connections were responsible for his big block of heroin. No one believed him

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IT WAS A FANTASTICAL yarn and the judge wasn't buying it. Ian Burgess's trial in August 1981 wasn't going as well as he might have hoped, but then you could argue that he was his own worst enemy. The London-born businessman had been collared attempting to smuggle heroin into the UK and claimed insisted that the smack was merely a cash substitute. MIS preferred to pay for services rendered by means of 'nasal party favours'; smack was the currency of espionage, apparently. The 51-year-old had been helping Queen and country in the Middle East and he had been rewarded with Class A pharmaceuticals worth an estimated £1m.

The intelligence service didn't corroborate his story. Nor, it must be said, did it deny it. Burgess was sent down for ten years. This would probably have been another court case consigned to obscurity had he not once been a Formula 1 driver. Born in July 1930 as David William Allan, he was adopted as a baby by a Scottish couple and raised in Surrey. Burgess aspired to become an engineer, only then to be enraptured by motor racing. He first ventured trackside as the 1950s dawned, and was immediately a frontrunner in the half-litre Formula 3 category in a Cooper MkV.