The late music icon had a well-documented love of motorsport.

Chris Rea was a motorsport fan as well as a music icon (Image: Getty)

Monday marked the passing of music icon Chris Rea, responsible for the Christmas classic ‘Driving Home For Christmas’, but the Middlesbrough-born musician was also an avid F1 fan and a keen motorist.

Rea’s love for cars started with a 1968 Ford Anglia, which he painted red to honour the Ferrari brand. “I then crashed it chasing a Mini across the Yorkshire moors,” he confessed to RAC. “I was 17. I went “off”, as they say. Although you didn’t get write-offs when your dad had an ice-cream factory, the ice-cream van mechanics would fix it.”

He eventually got his hands on the real deal, although by 2016, he had sold his Ferrari collection, settling into a quieter, family life. “The F12 I had was an unbelievably lovely car.

“But I can’t turn left at the bottom of my drive in one, because I’d have to go through my village, and I’m not going through my village in a Ferrari; I’ve got daughters, family, and I’m trying to be normal, you know? Going to the Indian in a Ferrari… I can’t bear all that.”

Rea’s love for cars extended beyond the road and onto the race track. The Brit supported German driver Wolfgang Von Trips, who competed in F1 for Ferrari between 1956 and 1961, his death cutting short a season that contained his first two Grand Prix victories, and had him on course to win the World Championship.

He even wrote songs named after great motorsport events, such as “Daytona”, based on the iconic American 24-hour race that forms part of the IMSA calendar. It was at Le Mans where Rea’s love for motorsport was first born.

Rea worked on Eddie Irvine’s crew for the 1995 Monaco Grand Prix (Image: Getty)

“The year they did the first live Le Mans on TV, I was brought downstairs at a ridiculous time of night,” he explained. “It was 1961, and that was what started it. We switched it on; it was just headlights in black and white. My dad was imagining around the black and white. I’ve never been the same since.”

Rea’s motorsport passion even carried him into the F1 pit lane. A friend of late team owner and businessman Eddie Jordan, the Middlesbrough native found himself working in the garage at the 1993 European Grand Prix at Donington Park as Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost continued their iconic title battle.

He even got his chance to work on a pit stop. At the Monaco Grand Prix in 1995, Rea joined the crew of Jordan driver Eddie Irvine. “I had the whole uniform,” he explained in a recent interview. “He put me in charge of the tyre-warmer for the rear right tyre of Eddie Irvine’s car.”