Insider

My real name is Sean Tyla and I'm 70 this August. You can always Google me - you will learn more about my life than I can write here. I live in rural Hampshire nowadays but spent most of my adult life living in France, Kent and Northants. I went to Oxford University, [and actually got a degree!] and then started playing in rock bands in 1969, much to the chagrin of my father, a career army officer. I had a reasonably successful career as a rock musician but due to ill health, I retired in 1985. Having recovered, in 1986, a friend offered me a job at Alpine, the Renault subsidiary in Dieppe. He had worked for RCA Records in France and knew I was a petrol head. They wished to recruit someone who was bi-lingual to help construct and operate a sales and marketing system in the UK to sell a new sports car - the Alpine-Renault GTA. I got the marketing slot. A great car, performance-wise but a turkey in terms of sales - it was dropped after two years! Moral of the story: you can't sell an F40 to someone who came into the showroom to buy a Punto! It was pretty boring work. Fortunately, in 1987, I was drafted into the F1 Support Race team as Driver Co-ordinator for the ALPINE GTA V6 Europa Cup Some great shots here! At the end of the 1988 F1 season, and the termination of the GTA Europa Cup, Renault returned to F1 proper as an engine supplier and I was transferred to Renault Sport's Viry-Chatillion set up as part of the support and liason team working with both Williams and Benetton F1 until 2000 when the Regie acquired the latter. Though Renault had officially pulled out of F1 in 1997, [when we went private, as a placating gesture to the new shareholders], we kept supplying engines which were variously re-badged. I then moved to the F1 marketing and PR team for the two-year transitional period until Renault F1 was officially launched in 2002 when sadly, I became one of several redundancies. I was offered a senior position at Mecachrome in Canada but with the buzz of actually 'going racing' no longer on offer, I took a generous golden handshake and my Renault pension and headed back to the recording studio. That's me.