I was born in Adelaide Australia in 1965 but am actually English, my parents were '£10-Poms' who found reality down under did not match expectation and returned to UK in 1968. So instead I grew up in north Yorkshire on the edge of the NYM national park. I got into motorsport when I was 10 yrs old through the influence of a friend and neighbour who bought Motorsport magazine and had a huge set of scalextric. Soon I was a regular reader of DSJ's grand prix reports and would spend many hours drawing F1 cars and making racing games with dice and track-maps. This was after all small-town yorkshire in the 1970s and leisure opportunities were limited. Our local circuit was Croft and I remember my dad took us to the meetings there a couple of times, once when James Hunt was special guest, my brother even got his autograph. I can still remember the smells of fried onion and burnt engine oil.

In the late 1980's I escaped to art college in Loughborough then upon graduating in fine art I moved to Nottingham where, under the name John Cheall I have worked as a landscape painter for nearly 20 yrs. I live on the very northern edge of the city with my girlfriend and cat and am going to be a father for the first time this summer.

My sim-racing began with 'Chequered Flag' on the ZXspectrum then Revs on the C64. I then moved onto Crammond's Grand-Prix on the old Atari-ST before finally I got my first PC and played endless seasons of GP2 with friends in hotseat mode. I had heard that GPlegends was the way forward but at first I found it unplayable. It was not until I got a wheel and pedals that I cracked it and then I discovered the joys of VROC.
In 2002 I joined the UKGPL league, racing alongside Baz West among others and became quite obsessed with this new sport. There were six divisions of 20 cars each in those days and I slowly climbed the rankings, racing for 8 seasons in 5 years with a few wins along the way, notably at the old Nurburgring in season 12.
I have also enjoyed Nascar2003, GTR and LFS online but mostly I now race Rfactor. As well as the Legends-League I can be found competing in the occasional Rfactorcentral championship.