Tony Dron
Anthony Middleton Dron (29 August 1946 – 16 November 2021) was a British racing driver, motoring author, and journalist. Racing history. Dron was best known for racing Touring Cars in the 1970s (Triumph Dolomites for the works BL/Broadspeed team) and for competing in Porsches at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in the early-to-mid-1980s, including a class win at Le Mans in 1982 in a Porsche 934, and driving a Group C (Kremer CK-5) in 1983. He was a full-time professional race driver from 1974 to 1979, for teams that included British Leyland, Unipart and  Alfa UK, but his career as a racer first began in May 1968 and continued for a full 43 years. Dron achieved a remarkable range of victories, "winning" events in 24 makes and 41 models of car. (These are actual wins, not all the makes and models in which he competed.) The total number of wins is not known, but is well into the hundreds. Race "wins" have been recorded in: In recent years, he has also been seen racing (and winning in) an enormous variety of historic cars, including the Le Mans-winning 1959 Aston Martin DBR1 and the  1960 Ferrari 246S Dino. In the Ferrari, Dron won the Sussex Trophy at the Goodwood Revival for three consecutive years. Having competed numerous times in the modern Nürburgring 24 Hours, he was known to be a highly experienced competitor on the old Nordschleife, where historic racing victories include an outright win in the 1996 Eifel Klassik in a 1963 Ferrari 330LMB, from pole position in a field of 180 cars. Dron retired from race driving in 2011, although he still worked as a motoring journalist and test driver for "Octane" magazine. Publications. Dron wrote a regular column in "Octane". He  was the author of several books, including "Porsche: Engineering for Excellence" (2008) and "Alan Mann – A Life of Chance" (2012, with Alan Mann).