5 Minutes With... Graham Bunter

What’s the best thing about where you live?
The views and sounds of the countryside

Tell us a little about Mendips Raceway...
I raced a stock car at the Mendips Raceway on the day that it opened on April 14, 1969. I raced there for ten years, became Race Manager in 1979, and left in 1999. In 2000 my wife and I bought the Raceway, and over the following winter it underwent a major reconstruction, with new safety barriers, raised viewing banks, new pits area, and new Race Control building. Since then we have added a new toilet block and turnstiles, plus a shop and briefing room for our popular arrive-and-drive Xtreme Stock Car events.

What are the highlights of this season’s racing for you?
All of our events are exciting, but the best is usually August Bank Holiday Monday, when we have a caravan Destruction Derby, and a Figure of Eight race for the Reliant Robins.

What do you love about your work and life?
I love being busy. We have a print business as well as the raceway, which my eldest son runs now, and it is great to have my family involved in what we do.

How do you spend your spare time?
Racing stock cars, playing with old tractors, ploughing matches, playing at farming. You can take the boy out of the farm but you can’t take the farm out of the boy.

What’s your favourite meal?
I usually do my track work on a Friday, so we very often have fish and chips collected on the way
 home, which is a great way to relax after a long day. We live 40 miles from the track so every journey has to c
ount.

What’s your ideal day, or night, out?
A good meal with friends or family at a nice restaurant. What events do you have marked in big letters in your diary? As we race every month, and twice on every bank holiday, weekends at home are fairly rare, but having turned 65 last November my wife is determined to get me to take more holidays, so we are hoping to go to Florida in February. Before that we are seeing Fleetwood Mac in June, plus a sneaky racing weekend away in Ireland.

Who, past or present, would be your ideal three dinner guests?
I find Nigel Farage very straightforward and amusing, I love listening to Dustin Hoffman, and not sure if I would be allowed Chrissie Hynde from the Pretenders.

What’s the funniest thing that’s happened to you lately?
Watching Ed Miliband thinking he’s going to be Prime Minister.

Tea or coffee in the morning?
Black tea, half a spoon of sugar.

What five things can’t you live without?
Wife, family, work, friends, old cars.

What, if anything, makes you fume?
Litter on the sides of the road. Untidy people.

Tell us something about yourself that not many people know…
My birthday is November 22 - the day that John Kennedy was shot.

Sum your lifestyle up in three words:
Busy, busy, busy.