Paul Warwick was posthumously crowned the 1991 British F3000 champion after a mid-season crash at Oulton Park took the life of the 22-year-old far too soon. On what would have been his 56th birthday, Feeder Series recounts his life with the help of his older brother, former F1 driver Derek Warwick.

By Sean McKean

Shy but rebellious, introverted but fiery on track: this is how Paul Warwick’s family remembers him.

Though he kept to himself on most occasions, Paul’s fervent desire to win shone through the moment he strapped into the cockpit at any racetrack.

From a foundation in Superstox cars that culminated in winning the British championship in 1985, Paul jumped to Formula Ford 1600 single-seaters in 1986 with Madgwick International. He earned the Autosport British Club Driver of the Year award in 1986 after taking a total of 17 race wins during the year.

A challenging year in Formula Ford 2000 across three championships followed, but he continued his ascent up the ladder into the British Formula Three Championship in 1988. Racing for teams strapped with mechanical problems, low funding and uncompetitive cars, Paul never showed the results his talent promised.

But a move to F3000 competition with the spread-thin Leyton House team rejuvenated him and set him up for his finest season in British F3000, one cut all too short by his tragic death in an accident at Oulton Park on 21 July 1991.

Derek was racing full-time in F1 for the majority of Paul’s junior career, but in 1991, he pivoted to sports car racing and had more time trackside to spend with his brother.

“When we get to Formula Ford and even Formula 2000, I didn’t really go because I was just too busy,” Derek told Feeder Series. “I lived in Jersey. It was always a big thing to get me over there and watch. I watched all of his 3000 drives in the British championship where he was killed, except the one where he was killed at. 

“My wife was giving me a bit of a hard time. She would used to joke that I was more in love with Paul than I was with her, so she almost made me have a weekend off, and that was the weekend he was killed.”

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Paul Warwick was born on 29 January 1969 in Alresford, Hampshire – a town 45 minutes north of Portsmouth. He was the second son of Derrick and Beattie Warwick and the younger brother to eventual Formula 1 driver Derek Warwick, born in 1954.

“He was quite shy when he was younger,” Derek recalled. “He was very good at school [but] hated school with a vengeance.

“When he was young young, my mum would often call me and say, ‘You’re going to have to do something about Paul,’ and I would go to the house and drag him into the car and drag him into the school and make sure that they lock him into a classroom.”

Instead of going to school, Paul wanted to follow his older brother into racing. Derek recalled that Paul was motivated to become the best driver he could be.

“He was a driven young boy. He loved training, so I would take him off to Saint Moritz every January where we’d do cross country skiing, we’d run to the gym, do gym work. He used to come out of there absolutely top fit. He enjoyed his fitness, so he’d used to carry that on. 

“Whenever we met, we used to go for long runs or go into the gym. It was something that was very strong in my early days, fitness, and he knew that if you had the capacity to drive the car and still have a lot of capacity left because you didn’t use everything, then you could get more out of the car. It was a simple equation that served us both very well.”

In 1981, Paul felt he wanted to finally start racing in MiniStox at age 12, and he made his debut 28 March of that year at Aldershot. As time went on, Paul picked up the pace and eventually won the MiniStox British Championship in 1983.

“He didn’t really come out of himself until he started stock car racing, or SuperStox around the ovals, and then he became his own person,” Derek says. “He was racing against men. He raced MiniStox for a while and [was] not particularly quick – but then very quick as he got more experienced.”

Paul continued winning in MiniStox for two more years, but as time went on, he felt the challenge of the series was drying up. The next logical move would have been SuperStox, but at 14, Paul wasn’t old enough. 

He did everything he could to enter SuperStox and eventually succeeded a day before his 15th birthday – albeit in an unorthodox manner.

“We were racing for a company called SpedeWorth. They were the promoter on the ovals,” Derek said. “He raced MiniStox, which was just a Mini with a beefed up engine, solid bars all the way around to ensure they weren’t to be injured.

“So it was when he moved up to SuperStox, he wasn’t old enough. He was 15 – I think – and he had to be 16, so we just got a birth certificate and really just fudged it. I did exactly the same when I was 15, but the promoter didn’t care. They wanted Paul Warwick to be driving in SuperStox; they wanted Derek Warwick to be driving in SuperStox. There wasn’t so much sticky tape back in that day – even in Paul’s day.

“Now, you know, with all the regulations, you wouldn’t take that gamble in case he hurt himself, whereas back in my day and Paul’s day, they didn’t give a s***. You just got into a SuperStox racing around the ovals, basically racing on dirt, gravel, tarmac, and concrete, so it was all different kinds of things.”

Despite the age difference between Paul and his competitors, he immediately performed and eventually won the British title in 1985. 

Derek recalls one of his brother’s strongest drives in SuperStox racing in Arlington.

“What I do remember is that when he was racing SuperStox, I was driving for Lotus. I had gone back to the factory to do something at the factory, and he was racing at a circuit called Arlington that evening, so me and about half a dozen mechanics jumped in the car and drove down to Arlington. 

“He was nothing short of extraordinary, sensational. He won both heats and the final. He was absolutely magic through traffic. And it was really, really special.”

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Paul felt ready to jump into single-seaters in 1986. He raced with the family team in Formula Ford 1600 championships in Britain and enjoyed great success, winning both the Dunlop and Autosport junior titles that year.

“He was my hero, and vice versa I was his hero,” Derek said. “He’d know about my negatives and drop them in a bin and pick up on my positives and take them forward. 

“He had a better start, if you’d like. He always had good cars. We made sure he had good SuperStox; he raced in good teams in Formula Ford, Formula 2000, Formula 3, and obviously later on Formula 3000.”

From that first year in single-seaters, Derek knew that Paul was a special talent. 

“His driving style was what I would call perfect,” Derek said. 

“He liked a little bit of understeer but the car had to rotate as well, and so he wanted the car to always rotate. I talked to him very early on in life that even if you’re the best racing driver in the world, you are not winning the races unless you get the car to work for you. So it’s how you work the steering wheel, how soft your hands are on the steering wheel, it’s how you feel the car.

“I always put it this way: someone like Michael Schumacher, when he was racing against someone like Jean Alesi, Michael would use 95% of his ability to drive the car at 100%. So he always had 5% left to think about what the tyres are doing, gear ratios, suspension, whether he needed a little more rear bump, and to know where he was in the race, so he always had that capacity in the 5%.

“Whereas Jean Alesi, he was probably equally as fast as Michael, but he used 99.9% of his ability to run the car at 100%, so therefore, he had 0.1% to think about the car, how to make it better, think about the race, where everybody was, study his tyres, know where the weak link was.

“Paul was like [Schumacher]. He learned from a very early age that if he could sit on top of the car,and let the car work for you … it’s easier to drive. He understood the car well.”

For 1987, Paul moved up to Formula Ford 2000 and took on a double campaign in the British and European series. Given his track record, he seemed destined for success, but he was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

First, Formula Ford 2000 was in a sharp decline. The championships were close to bankruptcy, and manufacturers began pulling out. To compound the series-wide woes, the Middlebridge outfit he joined was uncompetitive at the time.

He thus spent most of the year in the midfield, plagued by mechanical troubles. The highlight came at Zolder in the European championship, when he took his only win that year.

In 1988, Paul took a chance to move up to British Formula Three with Eddie Jordan Racing, the team that carried Johnny Herbert to the championship the year prior. It should have been a dream pairing, but EJR struggled.

Although the Reynard 883 chassis they used was competitive – Pacific’s JJ Lehto won that year’s title with it – the Volkswagen-Spiess engine couldn’t keep up with the Toyotas and Alfa Romeos. Paul spent the year in the midfield suffering with mechanical faults and misfortune. Two major achievements to come from this season were having the upper hand on his teammates and taking two podiums at Thruxton and Brands Hatch.

The 1988 season also catalysed Paul’s disillusionment with the landscape of junior single-seater championships at the time.

“I think, as he went up the grades from Formula Ford to Formula 2000, Formula 3, he didn’t really like [it],” Derek said. 

“He definitely didn’t like Formula 3. He thought they were underpowered and just not fun. And the problem with Formula 3 is unless you had the right chassis at the right time, the right engine, the right tyres, and the right team, you couldn’t compete.”

Knowing the factors at play, Paul made the move to rival squad Intersport in 1989. The team had rich backing – much of it from telecommunications company Cellnet, now O2 – and the team owner, Glenn Waters, was an F1 world championship–winning mechanic with Lotus in 1978.

But contrary to expectations, the move to Intersport backfired. This season was worse than the last for him, and he only scored three points throughout the season. Intersport did everything from drafting in future F1 world champion Damon Hill to changing from a Reynard to a Ralt chassis, but none of them boosted the team’s performance. 

Paul had multiple options for 1990. The first option was a move to the International F3000 Championship, whereby he would have joined a First Racing team already in decline. The second was to move down to Formula Vauxhall Lotus. Even with the success that could’ve followed, Paul knew that moving down a level would limit any career advancement.

His third option, which he took, was to remain in British F3 despite his dislike of the car. He gambled on the new Superpower team, an outfit lacking funds that was headed by John MacDonald, who was also the team principal of the Middlebridge team that ran Warwick in Formula Ford 2000. 

A third-place finish in Brands Hatch in round four showed promise for the pairing, but, as had been the theme of Warwick’s F3 career, they were eventually outpaced by more experienced and better resourced teams. Paul dropped out of the championship halfway through.

His desire to race nearly disappeared with his third British F3 campaign, and he only continued with a few Honda CRX Challenge races in the summer. Still, he sought a move up the ladder into F3000.

He eventually secured four races with the Leyton House outfit. The team was focused on its Formula 1 operations, so for Warwick, completing all of the laps would already have been a solid accomplishment. For three of the races, though, it was as one would expect from a backmarker F3000 team: a non-finish, a non-start and 1tth.

Paul’s second race around the streets of Birmingham was a bright spot in a trying year for the team. In a race marred by attrition, he brought his Leyton House car home in eighth. 

From there, Paul knew he wanted to continue in F3000.

On top of being out of the challenging environment of British F3, Paul could stay in Great Britain in F3000 as well. The British F3000 Championship was entering its third season that year, and Paul returned to Mansell-Madgwick, now in partnership with soon-to-be F1 champion Nigel Mansell, for the 1991 iteration of the championship.

Derek said that Paul felt freed in F3000.

“That’s why he loved 3000,” he said. “When he moved into 3000 with Mansell-Madgwick, he just grew and grew and grew.” 

“And I have to say, that early ’91 season pre-training in Saint Moritz, he had changed from a boy to a man. He destroyed us.

“There was always about five or six of us, and he used to sort of be there or thereabouts or I could out-psych him or push him over or do something for him not to win.

“But ’91, there was none of that, he won everything. He lifted heavier weights; he did more reps; he was faster on the cross-country skis.”

Now more motivated than ever, Paul began the British F3000 season in style by winning the first four races with four poles and three fastest laps. Given his dominance off the bat, he was being noticed in the F1 paddock, particularly by Arrows, for whom Derek raced from 1987 to 1989.

“I had a good connection to Arrows, so that was an easy connection for me to get him into Arrows,” Derek said. “He did some straight line testing when I wasn’t around, and they were just about to set up a full day’s test for him when he was killed. 

“Was there much noise outside? None that came to us, no. Was he being noticed? Of course he was being noticed. You don’t win five races on the drop by a comfortable margin without being noticed, because team managers are up to speed about 3000, whether it’s British or European championship.”

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21 July 1991 was a cloudy day in central Cheshire. Paul had beaten Phil Andrews to pole the day prior by only six hundredths of a second. For most competitors, and especially Andrews, this was as close as they would get to beating Paul on pure pace the whole season.

On race day, Andrews got a poor start, which allowed Paul to scurry into the lead. He looked to continue his dominant form with what would have been his fifth victory on a perfect season thus far.

But, with seven laps remaining, a rod end on the front suspension broke as he approached the Knickerbrook corner at around 240 kilometres per hour, sending his Reynard head-on into the Armco barrier. The impact destroyed the monocoque of the car, launching Paul out of the cockpit and onto an earth bank behind the barrier.

Despite the best efforts of track marshals, medical staff and the heroism of competitor Richard Dean – who witnessed the accident – Paul died upon arrival at the hospital. He was 22.

“When Paul was killed, I spoke to him on the weekend, constantly on the phone to him,” Derek said. “I spoke to him as he came to the circuit. I spoke to him when he’s on the grid, because his best mate James Kingston – we used to call Skippy – was with him all the time. James never left his side. And then I’d ring him when he started the race. ‘Where is he?’ A second in front. Ring him again, two seconds, three seconds, up to seven seconds. 

“And by this time, I was playing golf. I was in a golf course called La Moye here in Jersey, and I remember to this day, we came down at the 15th [hole], and I rang again, he was seven seconds in the lead, and Rhonda [Derek’s wife] said to me, ‘For goodness sake, leave him alone and concentrate on the golf.’ 

“I hit a magnificent drive down 16, and as I hit down at 16, I rang again to James, and James said, ‘Well hang on a minute, Derek, there’s an accident.’

“I said, ‘Is it Paul?’ 

“He said, ‘No, he’s only just gone through, but of course, accidents happen at any corner, he’s only just gone through.’ 

So I said, ‘Alright, keep me informed, let me know what’s going on.’ 

“Rang him back, literally I hit a five-iron to the centre green on par five – I remember it like it was yesterday – and then I rang again, and he said, ‘Oh, Derek, there’s a red flag, but he’s out of the car,’ not knowing that the car had caught fire, the car broke in half and he ended up on the spectator bank basically dying.

“I walked to the green, rang again, and I said, ‘Where’s Paul, what’s going on?’ By this time, he gave the phone to my father, and dad just said, ‘Get here now and call for a helicopter.

“By that time, we knew it was a big accident. … Rhonda and I were on the 16th. We just ran off the 16th with our golf bags. Literally 50 yards from the 16th was a golf shop. We just threw our bags down, both crying our eyes out.

“Anybody that’d seen us would’ve thought, ‘Well, bloody hell, those two have had a big argument on the golf course,’ of course not knowing that it was all about Paul. I then jumped on a private aircraft, flew to Manchester, but he died while I was in the air. 

“And some nice things happened, which is worth commenting on. The police met us when we got off the plane. They took us directly through the exit. We didn’t have to go through passports or security or anything. They took me straight to the back of the terminal, where my father, Bill Bridges, Roland Dane, and Chris Lents and Skippy were. I mean, honestly it was like watching The Walking Dead. Everyone was crying and everyone was in a bad state.”

In the immediate aftermath of the accident, the race was suspended and eventually called off. Paul was posthumously credited with the victory – his fifth in a row and the final one of his career. 

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The story of Paul’s 1991 season did not stop at his death. 

One month prior, at the very spot Paul crashed, Formula Renault driver Andrew Colson was killed in a testing crash, having also experienced an eerily similar suspension failure. Subsequently, a chicane was built before Knickerbrook, a major change headed by Derek Warwick and others. 

In British F3000, Paul had 45 points and led the standings by 29 points over Dean with six races to go. Behind them, Andrews, Julian Westwood and Fredrik Ekblom all had 11 points and chances at the title themselves.

“I was also thinking about, ‘Right, Paul is leading by a comfortable margin. How can I protect it?’,” Derek said. “He had a good friend in Jason Elliott, and so I got them to put a new car together. I paid for the rest of the season, put Jason in the car, because I thought him winning would take points away from the other drivers and still give Paul an outside chance of finishing in the top three.

“He wasn’t as quick as I thought he was going to be, but he was still picking up third places and that sort of thing,” Derek said.

After two rocky rounds at Snetterton and Thruxton, Ekblom’s charge panned out the best. He earned three wins on the bounce at Donington, Brands Hatch and Silverstone to put himself six points away from the points lead entering the season finale at Donington on 13 October.

But come the race, Ekblom only crossed the line in fourth, which allowed Paul to win the 1991 British F3000 Championship. 

Derek recalls the day fondly.

“We all flew to Donington. Everybody was there. It was probably the most emotional time I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve experienced some really tough moments,” he said. 

“The buildup to those last few laps – because nobody really knew where Ekblom was going to finish – the buildup to those last few laps were draining. It was just unbelievable. And everybody, the team, other team members, all come run me up and congratulated us and hugged us. There were tears everywhere, it was massive. 

“The drivers that were competing against Paul – Richard Dean, Andrews, Ekblom, all those sort of guys – came up afterwards. Even though Ekblom still had a chance at winning the championship, [he] was happy, was happy that they finished second, was happy that Paul won the championship. 

“It was an amazing moment, winning that championship, because I so much wanted him to win it. It would’ve just finished off and capped off an amazing season.”

Paul’s legacy lives on in the Warwick family.

“He is somebody that will stay 22 for the rest of my life. He’s idolised by my three sisters, by my brothers-in-law, for my nieces, my nephews,” Derek said. “Anybody that Paul came in touch with still to this day brings tributes to the grave for his birthday, Christmas, and the anniversary of his accident, so his grave looks like a flower shop. My sisters also put flowers on the grave every single Sunday.

“I got pictures of him everywhere, I got every crash helmet, every pair of overalls he ever wore hung up in an office here in the garage. I got all his helmets in my house. 

“He is cemented in concrete. He is someone that’s so special. I go over to see my sisters every six weeks and we reminisce, and their love for Paul is as great as mine. He was special.”

Editor’s note, 12 February 2025, 03:46 CET: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Formula Ford 2000 was rebranded to Formula Vauxhall Lotus. The two were separate series. Paul Warwick’s relationship to John MacDonald, the series in which he won at Zolder in 1987, and the spellings of Bill Bridges and Roland Dane’s names were also corrected.

Editor’s note, 22 July 2025, 08:06 CET: Feeder Series has altered several passages of this article after gaining access to an extensive collection of archival materials courtesy of Witolda Maruszewska providing additional information about Paul Warwick’s life and career. Of note from these discoveries is that Warwick began racing in Junior MiniStox in 1981 aged 12 rather than in 1977 aged eight. He then won the British MiniStox Championship in 1983 – there was no world title at the time – and made his SuperStox debut aged 14 and 364 days, not aged 15. Upon moving to single-seaters, Warwick did not compete in Dutch FF2000 in 1987. His original International F3000 option for 1990 was with First Racing rather than Madgwick International, while his eventual mid-year destination of Leyton House came because of the departure of Andrew Gilbert-Scott, who was never his teammate that season as previously written.

Cover illustration by Gavin Guthrie