Geraint Phillips 1931-1996

Rob Arthur gave a short appreciation of Gerry's life at the prizegiving and has also collected the following tributes to Gerry from the motorsport community.

He was my friend for some 30 years, so full of fun, a one off character; an impossible act to follow. A professional in every way, he did so much to bring rallying to a wider public, particularly as 'Vergias' of Motoring News. He will not be forgotten.

Tony Cox
Mitsubishi MotorSport

Gerry Phillips drove me mad. Nearly everything he did, for me at least, seemed wrong. He changed the spellings of famous Welsh forests, he told terrible jokes in public, we argued endlessly because he could not see my point of view about rallying. But I would never have wanted a world without him. If there was anything we cannot take away from him, it was what he did for the Safari Rally in its early days. He wrote stories about the event that made the event magical. They did so much to get the event off the ground m an international sense. It will not be the same without him.

Martin Holmes
Rally Photographer

On the face of it Gerry Phillips was a benign father-figure in the press rooms of the World Rally Championship, a throwback to a bygone era. But wade through the trademark haze of the Amphora tobacco that was his preferred option in that ever-present pipe and you would find an unrivalled depth of knowledge about the sport both past and present born of research and personal experience. And when the pressure of deadlines was over for the day, Gerry was always ready with some outrageous story, often delivered half in Swahili and half in his native Welsh lilt, that would startle the entire room as he delivered the punchline at several times the volume of the rest of the tale. He was a lovely man and one who will be very much missed. He adored Africa and I guess that, if he could have chosen where his life should end, Kenya would be the place.

Keith Oswin
Rallies Editor, Autosport Magazine

I owe a lot to Gerry for the way my career began. He was my first co-driver when I ventured away from Finland for the first time to contest the 1975 Rally of Jamaica. And he was with me when I did that year's 1000 Lakes Rally and led for the first five stages. It ended on the sixth, of course, but Gerry's help had been enormous. And he helped me find other "foreign" co-drivers when I needed to break away to overseas events. I remember him well. This only serves to show how fragile our lives can be and how much we should live for today. I think Gerry would agree with me.

Ari Vatanen
1981 World Rally Champion

The one occasion that I saw Gerry Phillips worked up was in the small hours in Monaco, when I had lost the keys of the hire car outside the Tip Top Bar (or possibly inside, come to think of it) and he demanded that I break into the boot, because he claimed to have something extremely valuable from South Africa inside. Was he bluffing, or did he mean it? It wasn't easy to be sure with Gerry, who enjoyed conveying a sense of mystery. He never lost that, nor an acute understanding of what made for a good rally. He unashamedly belonged to an age that scorned office hours rallying and cloverleaf routes, which makes it still more of a pity that he never wrote his memoirs.