Mayer remembers one particular race at Monza in 1972, when Fittipaldi secured the title and Ferrari driver Jacky Ickx retired with mechanical failure, leading to an invasion of angry tifosi, “rocking the fencing”. Mayer and his father made a run for the Marlboro motor home, only for his dad to let go of his hand and go it alone.
“I was left outside with all the angry tifosi chanting, ‘Death to McLaren!’ or whatever it was they were shouting. I remember asking him years later, ‘Dad, what the hell were you thinking?’ And he said, ‘Well, I was in team uniform and you weren’t. And I could always have had more children!” I was like ‘Thanks, Dad! That’s great. I’ll send you the therapist bills for that one.”
Mayer later attended Wellington College, the prestigious boarding school in Berkshire, about which he admits to having “mixed memories”.
“I was sent there because that’s where James [Hunt] and his brother Peter went – Dad felt that the education system had failed James, but he liked Peter very much! So I think he thought it was a 50-50 shot that I’d turn out all right.
“It was a tough era to be an American in a British public school. Jimmy Carter being president and so on. And then Ronald Reagan. So we had a peanut farmer and an actor. I got a lot of stick.” But he also “learnt a lot of lessons”, played hooker for the school’s fifth XV rugby team. And cricket. “Actually, I spent more time as a cricket umpire. I liked officiating even back then.”
Mayer returned to his roots for his higher education, attending Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, only to “flunk out” after two years. He admits he had it coming. “I didn’t know what hard work was.” But his reaction was unusual. He enlisted in the US Army. “Just a regular private soldier. I wasn’t anything special.
“It was probably the pivotal moment in my life, coming from a very privileged background and not really understanding much about hard work. I really put myself in a position where I had no choice but to work hard, get up in the morning, do all the things that I didn’t really know how to do. When I later went back to university, all of a sudden, eight o’clock classes weren’t hard at all. I could take a double load of classes. I could do all those things. I worked nights at an emergency room as an ER technician.”
After graduating, Mayer returned to the Army, as an officer this time, in special operations. He was involved in the First Gulf War, helping to prepare US troops for the liberation of Kuwait by running simulations in the Mojave Desert in California. “I was an Iraqi for that one,” he says.
‘Erosion of good governance and transparency’
After leaving the Army, and working for Fittipaldi for a couple of years as his business manager, Mayer formed his own consultancy company in the 1990s before taking on a succession of increasingly senior roles in American motorsport.
In parallel Mayer joined the FIA’s roster of race stewards – officiating not just at F1 grands prix, but also at the likes of World Endurance Championship and World Touring Car Championship rounds.
