TDN Weekend December 2016 Issue 9
Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/757593
as I can stick it," he says. "That might be 4 p.m. or it might be 7 p.m. Basically I work when I'm not play- ing. If I do take a couple of days to do something during the week, then I will work through the week- end. I'm a full-time working boy. What the manu- facturers are asking us to do, over the next couple of years, involves an incredible amount of work. We need to be finding sites, buying sites, selling sites, changing formats. I've probably never worked hard- er in my life, on the motor side. "I would like to make more site visits – I used to all the time – but perforce this is keeping me in the office a lot more. Essentially I'm the driver. I don't get involved in the day-to-day running of the busi- ness, I've a team to do that, but I'm there pushing everyone forward all the time. I'm not looking for them to do anything out-of-the-ordinary, but I am looking for satisfactory results. The manufacturers produce a monthly composite and that enables us to measure how our dealers are performing against the rest – and also against each other. Nowadays, of course, a good deal of selling is done not through paper advertising but online. I'd say maybe 80 per cent of people start off by looking online for exact- ly what they have in mind and only then come to us, so it's our job to make sure that they can reach all the information they need." Such time as he permits himself for recreation is devoted to the outdoors: shooting, fishing, golf. Harwood still plays off 16, grumbles that it should be 20. "Unfortunately I can't persuade the sec- retary to drop me," he says. "But then everyone thinks they're badly handicapped, don't they? Espe- cially trainers." And what of that old calling? Some things he does miss. Some things, in fact, he will not relin- quish: the ritual visits to the pre-parade ring at Royal Ascot, for instance, especially the first day. "That's my great joy," he says. "I do love to see those good ones in the flesh, and I don't do enough of it. Training good horses is wonderful. But trying to win races with bad ones is another story. I had a 40