Jakob Ebrey Q: You’ve been in this paddock for a long time and have been involved in a motorsport as a whole for a long time, but how did you get into it in the first place? Alan Hyde: Really weirdly. I was a fan of motor racing and I used to come along to race meetings with my old English teacher from school, a guy called Tony Coles, who used to race a clubman’s car and used to do some commentary as well. I used to come along as his lap charter and it was at Thruxton one weekend that they were without a podium interviewer. I’d been coming along listening to Tony doing commentary and I thought maybe I could help out myself. I was already working in radio from a production side and had been doing a little bit of presenting so I filled in at Thruxton on the podium for a race meeting and then I was asked to come back a few weeks later to do the support races for a touring car meeting – which was back in 1993. Q: So just as the series headed towards its hey day…
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Alan Hyde: Yeah. It was fantastic and very exciting for me to be asked to come along and do interviews at a British Touring Car Championship weekend. It wasn’t something I had planned and it’s difficult to describe. Sometimes you do something and all of a sudden you realise ‘this is something I want to be doing all week’. For the week after I had done my first meeting, I was counting down the time to the next race meeting I was going to be at, and then counting down to the next time I was going to be in a pit-lane commentating. There was a little switch that flicked on and I knew this was something I wanted to do on a regular basis. Q: Did you ever envisage it would go on from there to what it is today, where you are working with manufacturers and doing TV work? Alan Hyde: No I never did. I maybe envisaged that I would work in radio, which I’ve done a fair bit of. I’ve worked on national radio at TalkSport and have been a producer, so I had that in mind. I knew when I was a little kid that I wanted to work in radio and wanted to do the talking between records so I had hoped that it would
figure in my life, but I didn’t think it would be taking up so much of my time. I had no idea motor racing and talking would come together and its almost irrelevant that its motor racing. Motor racing is the sport I love and have always had an interest in, but it is about the people and when you end up talking about and commentating on different sports – and I’ve done various things along the way – it is all about the people and building a relationship with them. It’s about understanding what winning and losing means to sports people, so for that reason, I’m just somebody who chats to them. Q: A key part of the job is that relationship isn’t it, because people have their public persona and you need to get underneath that.. Alan Hyde: You make a really good point because it is about getting to know people and perhaps the problem with that is you almost get a little bit too close. You feel their pain and then have to interview them at a time when they don’t want to be interviewed… Q: Inside BTCC 11