Not everyone who drives a Formula 1 qualifies to be called a Grand Prix driver. There have been around 80 drivers who tried to qualify for a race since the World Championship began, but failed to do so, not least a certain Bernie Ecclestone, who tried to qualify a Connaught at Monaco in 1958. These nearly men (and women) come from wildly varied backgrounds. However, quite a few of them came from southern Africa.
Why? Well, back in the 1960s there was a fairly active South African National Drivers Championship which used all manner of machinery, ranging from cars that had been recently raced in the Formula 1 World Championship, to F1 machines that had been modified and then there were a few home-built specials, based on the technology that the locals has seen in action. They would race one another and when Formula 1 visited South Africa each year at the end of the year (summer time in the Southern Hemisphere) there were always a few non-championship races, such as the Cape, Rand and Natal Grands Prix, which appealed to the F1 folk, who could make decent start money from race promoters and could also sell their old machinery at the end of the F1 season. As engines were hard to find, the locals relied on tuned-up versions of the 1.5-litre straight-4s which were used in the Alfa Romeo Giulietta.
Doug (Louis Douglas) Serrurier built LDS cars, based on old Coopers. They were not bad cars and consequently Ray Reed decided to build his own car, based on the LDS.
Reed had been born and grew up in what was then Southern Rhodesia, a self-governing British colony, run by a minority white government. He had recently turned 30 but had a taste for adventure. When he was 19 he had signed up for pilot training with the Southern Rhodesian Air Force at Belvedere Airport in Salisbury. For reasons that are now obscure, he did not graduate and become a jet pilot but rather ended up back at home in the town of Gwelo, halfway between Salisbury (now Harare) and Bulawayo. He focused instead on engineering, making himself enough money to consider building his own racing car. The folk of Southern Rhodesia had to be practical because they were a long way from anywhere and they were willing to give anything a try. Reed’s car was called the RE-Alfa Romeo, named after his business, Ray's Engineering. The car was first raced in local events in 1963 before being taken to South Africa early in 1964. It didn’t achieve a great deal but was in action in Lourenco Marques in Mozambique (now Maputo) later that year. For the end of season races in 1964 it went back to South Africa and competed in the Rand GP at Kyalami on December 12 but suffered an engine failure. It was entered for the South African GP, held on New Year’s Day on the East London circuit, but Reed never showed up. Perhaps the blown engine could not be replaced, or there was no budget left. The car passed into the hands of Peter Huson, who crashed it at Kumalo in late 1966 and although Reed had plans to rebuild it into a sports car for the Springbok Series, which was then becoming the major motorsport series in southern Africa. Whatever the case this was never done. Early in 1970 Reed and his three children were killed while flying in bad weather in South Africa.
