When The Beatles made it big, John Lennon used his new flow of money to buy cars and began encouraging Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison to race him. Lennon’s longtime friend, Pete Shotton, said these races were exhilarating but terrifying. They always seemed to be at risk of a crash. The risk didn’t bother Lennon at first, but he watched Starr narrowly avoid a deadly accident. The experience shook him so much that he stopped asking his bandmates to race.
John Lennon almost watched Ringo Starr get into an accident while racing
While visiting Shotton on Hayling Island, Lennon suggested they race cars. He brought his Ferrari and thought the small island would make a perfect race track.
“We then set out on the most hair-raising drive of my life (indeed, I’m still surprised that it didn’t prove to be the last drive of my life!),” Shotton wrote in the book The Beatles, Lennon, and Me. “Only a few miles out of Hayling Island, as we screamed onto the Portsmouth-London road, a man in a white E-type Jaguar saw what we were up to, and joined in our little game. For the next forty-five miles, each of us deliberately strove to outdo the others in sheer recklessness.”
Lennon called the race and his ultimate victory the “most fantastic kick” he’d had in years. He insisted they do it again soon. He also began inviting his Beatles bandmates to race him. This came to an end after Starr nearly got into an accident while racing Lennon.
“Their enthusiasm for amateur drag racing was to be abruptly dispelled when Ringo, hurtling along in his Facel Viga at one-hundred and fifty miles per hour, managed barely to avoid slamming directly into the back of a car that had suddenly switched into his lane at a mere seventy miles per hour,” Shotton wrote. “Though nobody was seriously hurt, both Ringo and John were deeply shaken by the experience, and John, at least, seemed content to let others do his driving for him from that point on.”
John Lennon nearly got into an accident unrelated to his race with Ringo Starr
Despite Lennon’s penchant for racing cars, his bandmates said he wasn’t very good at driving.
“We used to race together but I always regarded myself as slightly better because, first of all, John was blind as a bat and, secondly, he was never really very good at driving,” Harrison said in The Beatles Anthology. “But he wanted to drive his Ferrari and I would always be fearing some huge crash.”
While Lennon didn’t crash his car, he once narrowly avoided one with the help of his passenger.
“Once John was driving his Ferrari with Terry Doran in the passenger seat,” Harrison explained. “Terry was a car dealer from Liverpool (a ‘man from the motor trade’), and an old friend of Brian Epstein; he was with us all the time around that period. He and John were coming down the M1, doing about ninety, when a bird flew across their path and splattered itself on the windscreen. John instinctively ducked and threw up his hands — ‘Whoa! — and Terry was forced to grab hold of the steering wheel and steer the car out of a crash.”
The Beatles drummer got into a dangerous accident years later
Lennon managed to avoid accidents while racing. Starr wasn’t as lucky, though. While driving with his future wife, Barbara Bach, his car skidded on wet pavement, hit two lamp posts, rolled, and ended up on the other side of the highway.
Per the book Ringo: With a Little Help by Michael Seth Starr, the crash threw the drummer from the car. Still, he only walked away with minor injuries. Starr took this as a sign that he and Bach were meant to be together. They married less than a year later.
