When you’re sat at your desk or enduring the daily drudge of your commute, sometimes you can’t help but let your mind drift off to a professional life where you relish every single day at work – it’s a form of escapism for many, but there are people out there who live that dream and get paid for it. You’ll wish you had a job like Jamie Morrow’s.
His is a life of high-octane thrills, international travel, fast cars and influencing the designs and engineering details of some of the world’s most coveted automobiles. Even more annoyingly, he’s handsome in a terribly British way and happens to be a really nice guy.
Morrow is a “lead track driving consultant and instructor for Bentley Motors in Europe, Middle East and North America” and home for him is the Sunshine State of Florida – not that he spends much time there. When I share a car with him for an hour or so in Dubai, he’s flitting between races and customer events, where he’s pressed into service to show Bentley drivers what they and their cars are capable of with a bit of expert tuition.
He also plays an integral role in the development of Bentley cars, honing, fine-tuning and steadily evolving them to become better with each iteration. The results are tangible, I tell him, because the company’s products are the best it has ever produced. Whisper it: they could now be considered proper drivers’ cars. He smiles and nods approval.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Morrow began his career in motor racing. “A bit of open wheel, Formula Ford, Formula Three, Formula Renault – that kind of stuff,” he says. “I ended up in Bahrain when their F1 circuit opened, and within a couple of years, I was living in America.”
He was soon competing in European events and, in particular, 24-hour endurance racing.
Unlike many, however, Morrow actually gets paid to go racing. “I do four or five a year,” he says, “and then that tends to lead into all sorts of other stuff that keeps me busy throughout the year.” Stuff like being paid by Bentley to rag its cars senseless? Yep, stuff like that.
I go back to the matter of Bentleys now being more focused as driving tools than ever before, and ask him if he had the pick of the current crop at his disposal, which keys he would pick? “A [Continental] GT3R for on track,” he says, “and a GT Speed for the road.” That, I tell him, is hardly fair, because the former is a limited special edition, and he agrees, before getting a bit flustered. I wonder what his employer might want him to say right now. So I tell him how much fun I had on a racetrack in spring last year in the new GT V8S. “Yes,” he nods, “it’s a brilliant thing to drive” – with typical British understatement and reserve.
His development work includes pounding the world’s fastest and toughest tracks at full lick, sensing through the seat of his pants how cars feel, how they might be improved, feel “more Bentley”, perhaps. To maintain that quintessential Bentley feel requires a great deal of weight, so brute force and clever electronics assist in the small matter of extreme speed. “These cars weigh two-and-a-half tonnes,” he says. “And that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.”
For all the glamour and excitement of his day job, at heart, Morrow and others like him remain simple car guys. They’re scientists and engineers, doing what they can to improve cars and the abilities of their owners. And they’re working at the coalface whenever they can, racing flat out in the world’s most gruelling competitions. We owe these men and women a great deal – our new cars just wouldn’t be the same without them.
