Radoye Posted January 20, 2020 Share Posted January 20, 2020 (edited) Quote Bubby Jones - John Mahoney Photo BUBBY JONES PASSES AWAY AT 78 By: Richie Murray - USAC Media Speedway, Indiana (January 19, 2020)………Norman “Bubby“ Jones, a 27-time winner in USAC National competition during his National Sprint Car Hall of Fame career, passed away Saturday night, January 18, 2020, at the age of 78. Nicknamed Ol’ Bub, the racing barber who originally who hailed from Danville, Illinois, established himself as an “outlaw” racer around the country, winning from coast-to-coast until notching his first career USAC victory, in a Silver Crown car, in 1976 at the Du Quoin (Ill.) State Fairgrounds for car owner Roger Beck. Jones concluded the 1976 season with his first career USAC National Midget victory in the prestigious Turkey Night Grand Prix at Ascot Park in Gardena, Calif. for car owner Doug Caruthers. However, Jones made his biggest impact with USAC on the National Sprint Car trail during the late 1970s, winning 22 total feature events, 20 of which came during a three-year span between 1977 and 1979. He won seven total USAC Sprint races in ’77: three at Eldora Speedway, twice at Winchester (Ind.) Speedway in consecutive days and once each at the Terre Haute (Ind.) Action Track and at Indianapolis Raceway Park, finishing 5th in the standings. Jones won twice in 1978 in the USAC Sprint division at Eldora and Terre Haute, but 1979 would prove to be his breakout year with the series, winning on 11 occasions in one of the prolific years in the history of the division: four at Terre Haute, thrice at New Bremen (Ohio) Speedway, twice at Eldora and once each at the Indiana State Fairgrounds and at Santa Fe Speedway in Illinois. During the 1979 season, he became one of just two drivers to win at least four consecutive USAC Sprint Car races at Terre Haute, and the only to driver to do so in a single season. His prowess at Terre Haute extended to the midgets where he captured the 1977 Hut 100, and added to his tally of four career USAC National Midget victories with additional scores at Eldora in 1977 and Springfield (Ill.) Speedway in 1979. Jones also made his one and only start in the Indianapolis 500 in 1977, starting 33rd and finishing 21st for car owner, Bobby Hillin. Jones made a second USAC National Championship start the following year in 1978, finishing 27th at Pocono Raceway in Pennsylvania. Following his second-place finish in the 1979 final USAC National Sprint Car standings by 32 markers behind champion Greg Leffler, Jones migrated to southern California where he became one of the premier drivers of CRA, winning sprint titles in 1983 and 1984. In his retirement from behind the wheel, Jones remained heavily involved in the sport, helping to develop California’s Perris Auto Speedway and becoming one of the top crew chiefs in USAC Sprint Car racing during the 2000s. Quote Vale: Norman "Bubby" Jones Image by Gene Crucean By: Robin Miller 19 hours ago He went from the anonymity of cutting hair in a little town in Illinois to a respected national stylist in a sprint car. His library consisted of Speed Sport, USAC News and Carl Hungness Indy 500 yearbooks, but nobody could read a dirt track better. He made it from motorcycle scrambles to the starting field at Indianapolis. Nobody talked slower or drove faster. And he finally figured out marriage on his third attempt and raised six great kids throughout the years. Norman “Bubby” Jones, who died Sunday at the age of 78, was an old-school racer who should be remembered as one of the great sprint car drivers of all time and an endearing character that always gave you a helping hand as well as his unfiltered opinion. “I was fortunate enough to go up and down the road with him and he won hundreds of races, but his greatest achievement was picking up two mph on the last day of qualifying at Indianapolis on his third and final attempt to make the show,” said Tim Coffeen, one of Jones’ best friends for the past 50 years who worked on sprinters and Indy cars for him. “There are a lot of different adjectives to describe the guy, but the easiest way is that he was as honest as the day is long, and he didn’t always tell you what you wanted to hear but he wouldn’t lie to you. And there was no finer person.” ‘Ol Bub would have probably been happy as an 8-5 barber in Danville, Ill. that raced super modifieds and sprints on the weekends until 1971 when trucking honcho M.A. Brown offered him a ride on the outlaw circuit. He quit his day job and became a professional racer as well as a prolific winner, averaging 35-40 wins a season. From Little Springfield to Eldora to Knoxville to West Memphis, Jones carved out a reputation as a smart, smooth and fierce competitor. He became friends and rivals with the great Jan Opperman as his success spread to Manzanita Speedway and Ascot Park. “I always figured Bubby was the guy to beat if I was going to win,” said Opp back in the mid-70s. The cruel irony of Jones’ career came in 1976. Opp had convinced him to start running USAC, and after winning his initial Silver Crown race at DuQuoin, Bub watched his pal get gravely injured in the Hoosier Hundred. When Jan tried to make his comeback in the spring of 1977 it was obvious he wasn’t ready, so he asked car owner Bobby Hillin to put Jones in his Longhorn cars – which also included the Indy 500. A dirt specialist, Jones only had five previous pavement races when he got to the Speedway, and admitted that when the turbocharger kicked in the first time going down the backstretch at IMS he seriously thought about pulling in. But he bumped his way into the field, and stormed from 33rd to ninth in the race before his engine pitched. Image by Gene Crucean Jones excelled in the Longhorn sprinter, racking up seven victories and also taking the prestigious Hut Hundred midget race. “He had such a passion for race cars and not just driving them, but he was a big proponent of making the car do the work. His mechanical ability was second to none,” continued Coffeen. “Nobody knew more about tires, gears and suspension and how to make a car go fast.” In 1979 he scored 11 wins for Don Siebert and Jim McQueen, but lost the USAC championship in the final race. Disillusioned by that and the reality that you needed money to get an Indy car ride, Jones packed up and headed west. ‘Ol Bub didn’t suffer fools and his hometown friend and longtime car owner Larry Henry once said that if he ever wrote an autobiography it should be titled: “Assholes, jerks and s*** boxes,” because that’s how he looked at racing and didn’t throw many compliments around. From 1980-87 he became a master at Ascot Park’s famed half-mile and the California Racing Association – piling up 90 wins and two titles before “retiring” after ‘87. He returned briefly in 1990 and scored his final Ascot win in 1991 before taking over management of Perris Speedway. Jones returned to Indianapolis in 2004 and worked for Tony Stewart’s team among others, sharing his knowledge with anyone smart enough to listen at Kokomo, Gas City, Bloomington, Putnamville, Paragon and Haubstadt. He built his own cars and they were always fast, but he began slowing down a few years ago with a myriad of health problems. A cigarette and cup of coffee were his constant companions, along with a wry sense of humor. At a team lunch a couple years ago Lee Kunzman, Pancho Carter, Bill Vukovich, Merle Bettenhausen, Gary Irvin and Johnny Parsons were reminiscing about how much fun it was to race on the high-banked quarter mile of Little Springfield where Jones grew up and was a four-time champion. Asked how many races he won at Joe Shaheen’s famous bullring, Jones replied: “All of ‘em.” He was a lover, not a fighter, and was knocked unconscious in his first and only bar fight at Champaign, Ill. by Bill Brown (the former Minnesota Viking). In between marriages, Jones was sweet-talking a woman one night and she suggested he come over and bring some coke, so he stopped at the 7-11 and got a six-pack. We laughed for days. Third wife Patti was his rock and the best thing that ever happened to Jones and she gave him three daughters, Ashley, Jessica and Emily, to go along with his earlier children Gina, Davey and Tony. They cherished their old man like we all did. There was only one ‘Ol Bub, and he certainly was an original in every way. Edited January 20, 2020 by Radoye Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted January 20, 2020 Share Posted January 20, 2020 Quote In the 19th Century the village of Cascais became a favourite place for the Portuguese royal family to go bathing. The locals soon built a railway to the pleasant fishing village and it became a fashionable place to go. The penultimate stop on the railway was in Estoril, which was then little more than scrubland, but very rapidly a series of mansions were built. The overthrow of the monarchy in 1910 led to a republic being declared but plans continued to develop the area, leading to the construction of the Hotel Palacio in 1928. When it opened it hosted Nobuhito, Prince Takamatsu, the brother of the Japan’s Emperor Hirohito, for his honeymoon. During World War II Portugal was a neutral country. Its ruler Antonio do Oliveira Salazar was anti-communist, but he didn’t like the nationalism he saw in the Axis countries. The result of this was that the country became a hub of international espionage and intrigue. Intelligence agents on both sides rubbed shoulders and hundreds of locals worked for one side or the other, gathering whatever information they could. Among those who passed through was Commander Ian Fleming, a British officer attached to the Naval Intelligence Division, who was en route to the United States. He claimed that he lost money at the casino, playing chemin de fer with the chief German agent in Portugal. In the 1950s, Fleming wrote a book called Casino Royale inspired by his adventures, introducing the character James Bond. In 1969 the Palacio would be used to film scenes in the James Bond movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service. By then Estoril was famed as a place where exiled royals settled. These included the exiled heir to the Spanish throne, the Infante Juan, Count of Barcelona; there was also Umberto II of Italy, Carol II of Romania and Miklos Horthy, the regent of Hungary. The Duke of Windsor (the former King Edward VIII of England) also spent time there after he escaped the Nazi invasion of France in 1940. The Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar was also fond of the place and had a house there and ordered the construction of the coast road from Cascais to Lisbon to speed up access. At the start of the 1970s, the mega-wealthy heiress Fernanda Pires da Silva, owner of the Grão Pará group decided to fund the construction of a racing circuit on the rocky plateau behind the town of Estoril. This opened in 1972, with the first international event being the Grande Premio do Estoril a non-championship Formula 2 race in October 1973, which was won by tha factory March of Jean-Pierre Jarier. The second race had to be cancelled because of a military coup in early 1974 that overthrew the country’s ruling party and so the first European Formula 2 Championship race did not take place until early in 1975 when Jacques Laffite won in his Elf-sponsored Martini MK16. The championship returned in 1976 and 1977 with Rene Arnoux winning the first race and Didier Pironi the second. There was also a sports car race called the Grande Premio Costa del Sol, which was won by the Alfa Romeo T33 of Arturo Merzario. After that things went quiet as the country was in political turmoil and it was not until 1980 that the new President of the Automovel Club de Portugal, Cesar Torres, began to push for a Grand Prix. As South Africa was also in trouble because of its apartheid policies, the F1 teams were looking for somewhere to test with money being found to pay for some renovation work, Estoril becam the primary testing venue of the sport. This led in 1984 to the track being granted the final round of the World Championship, with Alain Prost and Niki Lauda battling for the title, with the Frenchman winning the race but Lauda’s second place giving him the Drivers' title - by just half a point. For 1985 the race was scheduled for April and it was raining but Ayrton Senna scored his first F1 victory, driving for Team Lotus. The race went back to September after that and became a favourite race at the end of the European season. The track tended to promote close racing and the weather was usually good although as Estoril is only a few miles from the westernmost point of Europe it tended to be affected by stiff breezes and rain storms coming off the Atlantic Ocean. A bigger problem, however, was the attitude of the locals. Torres was by then a big player at the FIA and was Max Mosley's deputy, and while Bernie Ecclestone was always pushing for better facilities, the Portuguese seemed to think that they had a right to a Grand Prix. It was one of F1's favourite events, but nothing was happening. In 1996 there was a strong hint that Portugal should watch out when Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad paid a visit to watch the Grand Prix at Estoril. In the end, Ecclestone ran out of patience and the race was not included in the calendar for 1997. This convinced the Portuguese government to come up with money, but the disapperance that year of Torres, who died of cancer, meant that the country's influence in the F1 disappeared. The government bought control of the track to try to speed up improvements but nothing was done in time for 1998 and the upgrading was not completed until February 2000. By then F1 had begun to embark on its global expansion. There was no room for the race with the Malaysian GP having joined the schedule, and the revival of the United States GP. The music has stopped and there were not enough chairs left... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted January 21, 2020 Share Posted January 21, 2020 Quote The French Grand Prix was always an itinerant event. The venue changed from year to year, the race often being used as a political tool to keep the different regions happy. In the early years after World War I the European nations began building huge speedways to match the British and the Americans, who had built Brooklands and Indianapolis in 1907 and 1908. The Italians built Monza, the Spanish Sitges-Terramar and the French somehow managed to build two speedways: Montlhéry to the south of Paris; and Miramas, on the plain of the River Rhône, near Marseille. The autodrome at Montlhéry was built on a wooded plateau. It is a steep climb up from the valley below and there is only one access road, although down below the circuit is a major junction where the RN104, the outer ring road of Paris, and the RN20, which was once the main road to Orleans, Toulouse and Spain, meet. This is just 16 miles from the centre of Paris. Once there was a tram that ran to the nearby village of Marcoussis, built to carry fruit and vegetables from the farms to the market at Les Halles. When the speedway was built this was still in operation and allowed huge crowds to get out to the facility. The track was built entirely with private money. It is a 1.5-mile high-banked oval with straights of around 180 metres in length and then huge banking at each end, which gets to 49.3-degrees (yes, you did read that correctly). It was built from concrete. It cost a fortune and the track struggled financially from the very start. The construction of the road circuit that goes from the oval out into the woods and back again cost so much that the track ended up in administration. But, Montlhéry was the closest thing the French GP had to a home before World War II, hosting races in 1925, 1927, 1931 and from 1933 to 1937. Reims hosted the race for four consecutive years between 1958 and 1961 but it was not until the 1980s that the race had its first long-term contracts, primarily with Paul Ricard from 1985 until 1990. And then, of course, Magny Cours from 1991 to 2008. When the money ran out in the late 1930s, Montlhéry was acquired (cheaply) by the French government and large sections of the estate were transformed into a military camp. This was used by the Germans as an internment camp. By the end of the war, the entire property was in a mess. The new government had more important things to worry about and agreed to lease the speedway to the Union Technique de l’Automobile et du Cycle (UTAC) on condition that the organisation repaired and maintained the facility and ran motor races. It took two years to get the track operational again and even then the concrete was becoming a problem as bumps had developed where the concrete sections met one another. The track faded from the international scene and there were a series of nasty accidents leading to the deaths of Guy Mairesse, Louis Rosier and several others. In 1964 there was an even worse crash when two drivers and three marshals were killed in a single incident. But the circuit continued to host French Formula 3 races until 1989. The concrete might have made the track difficult, but it also made it strong. The FIA President at the time was mercurial Frenchman Jean-Marie Balestre, a man who was keen to keep France at the top of motorsport as a time when British influence in F1 was growing more and more. At that point, there were still several French F1 teams and a string of French drivers. It is a little-known fact that Balestre dreamed of bringing the French GP back to Paris, and came up with an imaginative project of using Montlhéry. That might sound completely bonkers given the nature of the track, but his idea was to revive the facility by converting the banking into grandstand seating and creating a modern road circuit in the old infield, using some of the forest sections as well. It was a brilliant idea, but the government of François Mitterrand was not interested. It had a project to rebuild Magny Cours and use F1 to boost the economy of the Nievre region where the President and some of his closest allies were strong. There were also problems with cutting down trees and there remained the thorny question of access. Perhaps with government backing it might have been possible… Montlhéry lost its racing licence in 2004, although UTAC continues to use the facilities for its testing programmes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted January 21, 2020 Share Posted January 21, 2020 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted January 22, 2020 Share Posted January 22, 2020 Quote Most F1 fans will know the story of Peter Revson, a talented, successful, wealthy, good-looking Formula 1 driver, who was engaged to Marjorie Wallace, the first American to be crowned Miss World. That was in late November 1973. She was 19 and Revson was 34. She was much in the newspapers at the time, not only because of her relationship with Revson, but also because she was bsuy having affairs with the football star George Best AND the celebrated Welsh singer Tom Jones. This rather controversial behaviour led to her being stripped of her Miss World title in early March 1974 for conducting unbecoming for a Miss World. Two weeks after this drama, Revson was killed in a crash while testing before the South African Grand Prix. A few weeks later she was rushed to hospital in Indianapolis after taking too many sleeping pills, although she said that it was not a suicide attempt.. It was all very lurid stuff. What few people know is that Peter Revson was NOT the heir to the Revlon fortune, as he was often billed. He was from a wealthy background but his parents were bitterly opposed to his racing and so he had to find money of his own to become a racing driver. The Revson family had its roots in Lithuania where Samuel Revson was born in 1874. The country was then part of the Russian empire and, not wanting to serve in the Imperial Army and keen to seek a new life in the United States, Revson emigrated in 1903. He worked as a cigar roller for RG Sullivan, living in Manchester, New Hampshire, where he married and had three sons: Joseph (1905), Charles (1906) and Martin (1910). Charles left school at 17 and went to work as a salesman for the Pickwick Dress Company in New York. In 1930 he decided to switch jobs and began selling nail polish produced by the Elka Company of Newark, New Jersey. Revson was ambitious and wanted to sell the company's unique opaque polish across the entire United States, but the company refused that proposal and so Charles and his brother Joseph and a chemist called Charles Lachman set up their own nail polish business. They wanted to market an opaque polish but initially had trouble because their polish took a long time to dry and did not last very well. It was only in 1935 that they managed to get hold of a sample of a European product, used by the socialite Diana Vreeland, who was told tat Revlon could produce a similar product for her, that they finally found the formula they required. Martin joined the firm that year and was put in charge of promotion. They took a single advert in The New Yorker, using their entire advertising budget for the year, and claimed that their product had been "originated by a New York socialite". The results were astonishing and within five years Revlon had become a multi-million dollar company and one of the US’s top cosmetic firms. Nail polish was followed by lipsticks, fragrances and other cosmetics and by 1947 the firm was headquartered on Fifth Avenue in New York. Martin married a singer called Julie Phelps in 1938 and they set up home in glamorous Westchester County, outside New York. In the years that followed they had four children: Peter (1939), Douglas (1941), Julianne (1943) and Jennifer (1949). In the post-war era Revlon boomed, in part thanks to use of TV advertising, although relations between the Revson brothers were not always easy. Joseph left the firm in 1956 and Martin quit two years later. Later, there was later legal action between Martin and Charles. In the 1960s Revlon expanded internationally but Martin was no longer involved, indeed he had become the chairman of a rival firm Maradel Productions in 1963, later changing the name of the business to Del Laboratories. Martin was not short of money and his children grew up in the wealthy York suburb of White Plains, attending all the best prep schools and Peter was sent off to Cornell University in upstate New York, to study mechanical engineering. He lasted a year and a half before dropping out and then spent some time at Columbia University in New York City. He was just not interested and so his parents agreed that it might be a good idea to try again at the University of Hawaii. While he was there he acquired a Morgan sports car, uisng his savings and took it racing in an event on the abandoned Kahuku airfield, on the northern tip of O’ahu. His mother was there and thereafter disapproved of his racing activities. But he was then 21 and could do as he pleased. He dropped out of university again. After a brief period trying to please his father working at an advertising agency on Madison Avenue, he bought a Formula Junior car and started racing. He soon switched to a Cooper and in 1962 teamed up with Tim and Teddy Mayer, who he had known at Cornell, and created Rev-Em Racing, which led to a string of good results. They decided for 1963 to go to Europe and race in Formula Junior. Revson did well and by the end of the year had had his first taste of F1 in the Gold Cup at Oulton Park. Timmy Mayer also impressed but he was killed early in 1964 when racing in the Tasman series. Revson pushed on and created Revson Racing, run by Reg Parnell, which fielded a Lotus-BRM for him in a string of races, including six Grands Prix and he then began to spend more time in the United States, returning to Europe occasionally to race F2 and F3 cars, including winning the Monaco F3 race for Lotus. He concentrated more on the big US sports cars in CanAm and also raced IndyCars. In sports cars he often found himself competing against his brother Doug who had followed him into Formula Junior and then into the USRRC series and CanAm. In 1967, shortly after Peter had finished fifth at Indianapolis, Doug decided to follow Peter’s lead and went to Europe, planning to race in Formula 3 events with a Brabham BT21. At the Djursland Ring Revson was caught out in a rainy practice session when Ray O’Connor, another American, moved into his path while trying to get out of the way of a faster local racer. The two Americans collided and both went off into the infield where there were 12 spectators, officials and marshals. Revson and circuit owner Jens Christian Legarth, were both killed and five others were seriously injured, including Legarth’s wife. Peter continued to race and in 1970 finished second at Sebring, sharing a Porsche 908 with movie star Steve McQueen. He joined McLaren for the Indy 500 and raced a Lola-Chevrolet in CanAm for Carl Haas. The following year to was pole for the Indy 500 and finished second to Al Unser Sr. In CanAm, driving for McLaren, he won five races and the championship, beating his team-mate Denny Hulme. This got the attention of F1 once again and he did a one-off race with a third Tyrrell at Watkins Glen, as team-mate to Jackie Stewart and Francois Cevert. He was offered a fulltime drive with McLaren in 1972, with backing from Yardley and the following year he won the British and Canadian Grands Prix. He decided at the end of 1973 to join the UOP Shadow team for the following season. He drove the brand new DN3 retiring in the first two races of the year, but finishing sixth the Rac of Champions at Brands Hatch in March. He then flew out to South Africa for a test before the next Grand Prix at Kyalami. He was testing the new car when it suffered a suspension failure at Barbecue Bend and hit the steel barriers beside the track. Although pulled from the wreck by other drivers, Revson had suffered fatal injuries and died on his way to the hospital. The two Revson brothers are interred together at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale in Westchester County. Their father Martin lived until May 2016, dying just a few weeks before his 106th birthday. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted January 23, 2020 Share Posted January 23, 2020 Quote Property development is a risky business but there are big rewards at the end if things go well. However it requires money to buy properties and to fund construction or refurbishment. In order to raise the money required, a lot of property developers look for someone willing to lend them money. The only problem with this is that they usually require some form of security before taking the risk of lending money. Lenders may be satisfied with the property being used as collateral in such circumstances but many prefer the promise of cash. So, it is generally a business for those who have money. Japan’s Akira Akagi was fortunate in that his father had already built a property development company called Kenzai before he joined the firm, after studying business administration at university. His background is rather unclear with several birth dates and suggestions that he was Korean, which is something best left unsaid in Japanese business circles. At some point he also spent time in England, living in the London suburb of Leyton (near the Olympic Park in Stratford). When he returned to Japan, Akagi took over Kenzai and soon began expanding the empire. He created a holding company called Marusho Kosan, which dealt with real estate, leasing and property management. Japanese property was booming at the time, and Akagi then decided to create a lifestyle brand, similar in concept to Virgin, which Richard Branson built up a few years earlier. His idea was for the brand to be active in many different businesses expanding the portfolio into restaurants and clubs, retail, travel, sportswear and even the record business. The name he chose was Leyton House because he wanted a cosmopolitan-sounding name, something which was considered to very cool in Japan at the time. For his branding he chose a vivid aquamarine blue colour and decided to use motor racing to brand the brand. Akagi was very keen on racing and had, supposedly, done some rallycross in his youth. He met an up-and-coming racing driver called Akira Hagiwara and decided that he would take him to F1 and the first Leyton House racing car was a Mercedes 190 touring car which was entered in the Japan national series. Sadly, Hagiwara was killed very early on after he crashed while testing at Sugo. Akagi then decided to look internationally and found a deal to fund Italian racing entrepreneur Cesare Gariboldi’s Formula 3000 team, known as Genoa Racing, with a young Italian driver called Ivan Capelli. Ivan won the International Formula 3000 title that year and Leyton House money took him to Formula 1 in 1987 with March Racing. At the same time Akagi sponsored Kazuyoshi Hoshino in Japanese Formula 3000 and he finished runner-up in the title. In 1988 Akagi bought into the March F1 team and a year later took control of the whole business, including all of March’s racing assets, including the windtunnel and the Formula 3000 operations. It was all going rather well. Akagi even bought the German fashion house Hugo Boss. Then the Japanese property market collapsed and soon a number of scandals began to emerge. At the same time Adrian Newey’s CG901 chassis proved to be a very sensitive car, which was difficult to set up. There was no money to do development and the team decided to dump the young designer. As things developed in Japan, the focus was on Fuji Bank, which had issued fake deposit receipts to 23 of its clients, so that they could use these as collateral for loans. These entrepreneurs borrowed a total of $1.9 billion from 16 finance companies. When this came to light, the bank dismissed four employees. Police later arrested two of them along with two of the businessmen involved: Akira Akagi and Masato Yajima of Marusho Kosan. In jail, pending a trial, Akagi was in no position to fund an F1 team. He sold it to a consortium of interested parties but the team had disappeared by 1993. Akagi remained in prison for some time but later emerged and went back to doing business, although with less ambitious goals and with more sensible funding options. He also kept a lower profile. Akagi died in August 2018. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted January 24, 2020 Share Posted January 24, 2020 Quote Formula 1 in the early 1970s was extremely dangerous. The cars had become faster and faster but the circuit and car safety was not keeping pace with development, despite the safety campaigns initiated by Jackie Stewart and the Grand Prix Drivers Association (GPDA). Watkins Glen in New York was a particular problem and following Francois Cevert’s death there at the end of 1973, the GPDA complained about the state of the steel barriers. Two weeks before the 1974 race, Denny Hulme, the president of the GPDA warned track officials that the barriers needed to be moved back in a number of places. Cevert had literally been cut in half by the barriers when his car landed upside-down on top of them and the drivers wanted action. But nothing was done. That year the sport had already lost Peter Revson, killed in April while testing at Kyalami. In Jarama soon afterwards Arturo Merzario’s Williams went over the barriers but luckily he was unhurt and no-one else was injured. In Germany both Mike Hailwood and Howden Ganley crashed and each suffered serious leg or foot injuries. At the end of the year, the F1 circus took off to North America for the last two races: at Mosport Park in Canada and then two weeks later at Watkins Glen, where the World Championship would be decided between Emerson Fittipaldi of Team Lotus, Ferrari’s Clay Regazzoni and, with an outside chance, Tyrrell’s Jody Scheckter. It was a clear warm day one the Sunday in Watkins Glen and there was a crowd of 105,000 to see the title decider. It was the first anniversary of Cevert’s death, as the Frenchman had been killed in practice the previous year. At the start of the race pole position man Carlos Reutemann took the lead for Brabham, chased by James Hunt’s Hesketh, Carlos Pace in the second Brabham and Niki Lauda’s Ferrari. The title contenders were all behind the Austrian but Regazzoni was dropping away from the fight with a damper problem. On the 10th lap, Helmuth Koinigg, the 25-year-old Austrian driver who had made a big impression when he finished 10th in Canada for Surtees on his F1 debut, crashed at the southern end of the circuit, in the corner known as The Toe, understeering off the track because of a slow puncture. The car went through two rows of catchfencing and then hit the three-layer steel barrier head-on. The impact was such that the bottom layer gave way. The middle rail did not give way and the car passed beneath it. Koinigg was decapitated, his body remaining in the cockpit, but his head, still encased in his helmet, ended up on the gearbox at the back of the car. In those days there were different ideas about accidents and as the marshals realized that there was nothing that they could do, they placed a tarpaulin over the car and the race went on… The news reached the Surtees pit 25 minutes after the crash and Big John withdrew the second car, being driven by Jose Dolhem, as a mark of respect. There were plenty of theories about what had happened but it was clear that the posts that secured the barriers had stayed in place and had not lifted out of the ground. Others suggested that the securing bolts used to secure the metals rails to the were fitted without vital large-diameter washers that help to spread the loads when there is an impact, which meant that the bolts were torn through the wood, which allowed the bottom rail to move. It was against this background that the Spanish GP in April 1975 took part only after the drivers went on strike and refused to practice because they found that the barriers were not properly bolted together. Teams helped marshals fix the barriers overnight but the drivers were still not convinced and only backed down when they were threatened with legal action and threats that the local police would seize the cars. Even then, the World Champion Emerson Fittipaldi refused to start the race. The race was stopped after 29 of the 75 laps after Rolf Stommelen suffered a rear wing on his Embassy Hill and crashed over the crash barriers. Five spectators were killed and Stommelen suffered a broken leg, cracked ribs and a broken wrist. Koinigg is buried Vienna’s Heitzing cemetery, not far from the Schönbrunn Palace. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted January 25, 2020 Share Posted January 25, 2020 Quote The 2020 season is the 70th anniversary of Formula 1 this year and thus far a total of 29 different venues have hosted the race at which the World Championship was decided. And you might be hard-pressed to guess which venue has had the most title showdowns. It depends, to some extent, on the calendar but there have been seasons in which one driver was incredibly dominant and so the title has been done in the summer. There are some which is a little bit dodgy in that in 1955 there wasn’t really a title decider because when the British GP took place in July Fangio did not know he had won the title. Prior to the race at Aintree the French GP had been called off and subsequently the Grands Prix in Germany, Switzerland and Spain were all cancelled, which meant that by the time F1 got to Monza two months later, Fangio had a big enough points advantage over Stirling Moss to have secured the title. And, one can argue that having a championship showdown in 1970 was not really correct as Jochen Rindt had been killed at Monza and so could not fight for the title. Jacky Ickx (Ferrari) was still in a position to overtake Rindt with three races remaining. He won in Canada, but Emerson Fittipaldi’s victories for Team Lotus in the US put paid to his chances, not that he would have wanted to take the title in that way. The other factor that changed things was the scoring system, which was complicated in some years, with only a certain number of scores counting in each half-season… The answer to the question is the Autodromo Nazionale at Monza, which saw the World Championship decided there on no fewer than 12 occasions. However, as F1 became increasingly global, the race ceased to be one of the last races (today it is the 15thof 22 races) and so it hasn’t hosted a title deciding race since 1979. The second most frequent venue for the World Championship deciding race has been Suzuka in Japan, where since the 1980s there have been 10 title showdowns in Japan, and much post-race celebrating in the once-famous Log Cabin karaoke hut. These included the infamous title won by Senna in 1990 by driving Alain Prost off the road, which was in truth, simply revenge for what Prost had done to him the previous year. But these days times have changed and Suzuka has not hosted a showdown since Sebastian Vettel won his second title in 2011, almost a decade. There is then a big gap back to the venues that have hosted five title deciders: Mexico City and Interlagos. Mexico held three in the 1960s, including John Surtees’s last-minute victory in 1964. It was a three-way fight that year between Graham Hill (39 points), John Surtees (34) and Jim Clark (30). It looked simple enough for Hill but a collision with Lorenzo Bandini left Clark in a position to take the crown. On the penultimate lap his engine failed, leaving Hill as World Champion until Ferrari switched second-placed Bandini with third-placed Surtees on the last lap – and so Surtees won… by a point.In the modern era, Mexico has added two further title-deciders thanks to Lewis Hamilton in 2017 and 2018. Interlagos was where Jenson Button won his title in 2009 but it will always be remembered for the 2008 race when the title was decided after the chequered flag when Felipe Massa had won the race (and seemingly the title) until Lewis Hamilton overtook fifth-placed Timo Glock in the final corners to get the place he needed to take the title… Wow! Abu Dhabi has hosted four title deciders, all in the modern era, with Vettel winning a four-way showdown in 2010 and Hamilton in 2016 trying everything to stop Nico Rosberg winning the title, backing up the field hoping that his team-mate would tangle with other cars. Hamilton was not the type to drive another racer off the road to win, which is not something one can say about Michael Schumacher, who took Damon Hill off in 1994 in Adelaide, and tried to do the same to Jacques Villeneuve in Jerez three years later. Adelaide has hosted three title deciding races including the amazing race in 1986 when Prost came from nowhere to take the title after Nigel Mansell suffered a tyre failure and Nelson Piquet was called in to check his rubber… There were three championships settled at the Nurburgring in the 1950 and 1960s but that was only really possible if a driver had been really dominant, as happened with Alberto Ascari in 1952, Juan Manuel Fangio in 1957 and Clark in 1965. Watkins Glen in the US was where three titles were decided while Austin in Texas has recently hosted two showdowns in 2015 and 2019. Double showdown status also goes to Estoril in Portugal, where Niki Lauda won the title by half a point in 1984 and where Prost wrapped up his successful 1993 campaign. Hungary was twice a showdown venue when Mansell and Schumacher had dominant seasons, while Las Vegas’s two deciders were because it was the last race of the year in 1981 and 1982. The others, for the record, were Aida (1995), Ain-Diab (1958), Brands Hatch (1985), Bremgarten (1954), Buddh International (2013) East London (1962), Fuji (1976), Jerez (1997), Kyalami (1983), Magny-Cours (2002), Montreal (1980), Osterreichring (1971), Pedralbes (1951), Porto (1960), Sebring (1959), Aintree (1955), and Spa (2004). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted January 26, 2020 Share Posted January 26, 2020 Quote With one or two notable exceptions, one doesn’t hear much about the race promoters in the world of Formula 1. They are often government types, who know how to work the system and who understand that one has to be careful when dealing with public money. At the end of the day, however, their job is to create value from the events and while not all Grands Prix promotions company can be profitable given the costs involved and the fees that must be paid, the benefits from an event comes in a less tangible form: as global recognition for a city or region; as tax revenues from the new visitors that the event draws to the region, not just in terms of spectators but also in visitors who hear about the place because of F1 and decide to visit. In many respects it is a thankless task, as there are always folk standing on the sidelines shouting that the event is not worth the money spent. When all is said and done, an F1 race has value if one makes use of it correctly. Those who do it right create races that stay on the calendar for years. Those who do it wrong last a few years and then slide away. Australia’s celebrated race promoter was Ron Walker, who died in 2018 at the age of 78. Walker was a fixer who knew people in sport, politics and business. He made things happen. But he couldn’t do everything himself and behind him, as deputy chairman from 2006 until 2015, was John Harnden. Harnden is a civil engineer, a graduate of the University of Adelaide in South Australia. He joined the wellknown Kinhill Engineers in 1986 and very quickly became involved with Formula 1, beginning as a manager of engineering projects on the Adelaide street circuit. In 1990 he was named as track manager, overseeing the construction of the circuit each year and making sure that everything was as it should be. This was so successful that he was then sent off to develop other new tracks, working on the Zhuhai International circuit in China, on a Malaysian project for a Formula 1 race that didn’t happen and doing a study for a street race in Buenos Aires, Argentina. When the Australian Grand Prix left Adelaide to move to Melbourne, Harnden was on Ron Walker’s shopping list and did much of the work to set up the Albert Park event, including some of the circuit design. After the new race kicked off successfully, he was appointed deputy to chief executive Judith Griggs and he then took over from her when she departed Melbourne in 1998 to return to Europe to work for Paddy McNally’s Allsport Management. When he took over the role, Harnden was only 32 and was clearly a man with a big future. Four years later he was plucked out of the Grand Prix to become head the organisationto put together the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in 2006. After that he was named deputy chairman of the Grand Prix Corporation, while also running the theme park firm Village Roadshow from 2007 until 2010. His next role was as head of South Australian cricket and was then appointed as the chairman of the organising committee for the 2015 Cricket World Cup. He became chairman of the Australian Grand Prix Corporation that same year as Walker was very ill with cancer and he served in the role until last September when the government of Victoria appointed him CEO of the Melbourne and Olympics Parks Trust, the body which oversees sporting facilities in the city and runs the Australian Open tennis competition. He was replaced at the Grand Prix Corporation by Paul Little, the founder and managing director of transport and logistics group Toll Holdings, who is also a former chairman of Essendon Football Club and has been chair Visit Victoria, the state’s tourism and events organisation. One of Harnden’s last deals was to secure a new contract for the Grand Prix, until after the 2025 event. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted January 27, 2020 Share Posted January 27, 2020 Quote John Judd was born in Kidderminster in 1942, but he grew up in Coventry, the centre of the British motor industry, even after being heavily bombed during World War II. When he left school he started applying for apprenticeships with some of the local companies but was rejected by Jaguar and then by Coventry Climax. Fortunately, the latter had second thoughts and took on Judd as an apprentice, sending him to study at the local technical college before assigning him to work on the company’s Formula 1 programme, with the celebrated engine designers Wally Hassan, Harry Mundy and Claude Bailey, who were then developing the 1.5-litre Climax FWMV V8, working with Cooper driver Jack Brabham, who had won the World Championship in 1959 and 1960. Brabham had a variety of businesses, one of which Jack Brabham Conversions, based in Woking, which installed Climax engines in road cars, and Brabham Racing Developments (BRD) which manufactured the first Brabham Formula Junior racing cars. The first Brabham F1 car – the BT3 - arrived in the middle of 1962 and the relationship with Coventry Climax – and with Judd – continued. With new three-litre rules coming for 1966, which the FIA announced in November 1963, Brabham began to look around for other options. There was also the new Tasman Series in Australia and New Zealand which had a 2.5-litre engine formula, which kicked off in January1964. Brabham asked the Australian components company Repco to develop a Tasman engine for him and together they chose an Oldsmobile block as the starting point. At around the same time, the Swiss F1 journalist Jabby Crombac was contacted by Yoshio Nakamura of Honda and asked to suggest a team to run a Honda engine in Formula 2. Jabby then approached Brabham and asked if he was interested. Black Jack was always interested in free engines but was also always looking for an advantage. Honda seemed like a good gamble. Brabham and Nakamura met in October 1964 in Paris and five months later two Honda engines appeared at the Brabham factory, with two engineers who spoke no English at all. The results were poor and so at the end of 1965 Brabham went to Japan to meet Nakamura and told them that he needed a new engine. At the start of 1966 totally new engines appeared at the factory, designed by Tadashi Kume himself. That year Brabham and Denny Hulme won all the championship races bar one. By then Brabham has won another F1 World Championship as well, thanks to his friends at Repco. In Early in 1965, after Coventry Climax announced it was quitting racing at the end of the season, Brabham suggested an F1 engine, based on an Oldsmobile block. Repco liked the idea and despatched Phil Irving to Britain to work with Jack on the design of the new “Australian” power unit. The small size of the engine meant that it could be used with the existing chassis but most importantly it was light, powerful and reliable. Brabham was ready for 1966 when most of his rivals were not. Judd was recruited to help the programme and in 1966 and 1967 Brabhams won two consecutive Drivers' and Constructors' Championships. Importantly, Brabham also met an important young engineer from Japan, who turned up to help the Formula 2 development programme: Nobuhiko Kawamoto, who spoke good English. He and Brabham became firm friends. During 1967 Repco discussed doing its own purpose-built 3-litre engine but the Ford Cosworth DFV, which had just arrived in F1 was so good that Repco decided that it would not be worth the risk. Brabham did a deal to use DFVs in Formula 1 and Jack Brabham Conversions switched to become a Cosworth-tuning business. At the end of 1969, intending to retire and to sign Jochen Rindt to replace him, Brabham sold his shares in the business to his partner Ron Tauranac. Then in October Lotus boss Colin Chapman made Rindt a big financial offer to keep him for another year and Brabham could not compete financially and so decided to stay on for one final season as an F1 driver. The various companies were reorganised with Jack Brabham Conversions bcoming Engine Developments and Brabham Racing Developments (BRD) changing its name to Motor Racing Developments (MRD). Brabham kept his shares in the engine business but left it to Judd to run. In the years that followed Engine Developments prepared Cosworth engines for teams Williams, Lotus, Fittipaldi, Arrows and other F1 teams. In the late 1970s the business expanded to include Cosworth DFX Indycar engines, but then Honda’s Nobuhiko Kawamoto, by then head of Honda Research & Development, suggested to Brabham that Engine Developments develop a new Honda F2 engines that would be used by Tauranac’s new business Ralt. The Ralt-Honda F2 cars were very successful and won the European Championship in 1981 with Geoff Lees and then with Jonathan Palmer in 1983 and again in 1984 with Mike Thackwell. The cancellation of Formula 2 at the end of 1984, saw Judd continuing to work with Honda but he also built the first engine of his own design: the Judd AV, a turbocharged V8 which first appeared in 1986 with a Galles Racing entry for Geoffrey Brabham (Jack’s son), with an engine which was initially badged as a Brabham Honda. It became a Judd in 1987 and Brabham scored several podium finishes and in 1988 in Pocono, Bobby Rahal gave Judd its first Indycar victory. By then, however, Engine Developments was involved in F1, using a variant of the AV, badged as the Judd CV which he supplied to Williams, Ligier and March. This continued to be used by various teams until the end of 1992, but in 1991 Judd unveiled a new V10, which would be used by Scuderia Italia in a Dallara-designed car. During 1992 Judd agreed to work with Yamaha, which was struggling to build competitive engines for Jordan Grand Prix. Judd and Yamaha worked together to produce the OX10 family of engines for 1993, 1994 and 1995 and in 1996 built the OX11, a new generation V10. This was not very reliable but Mika Salo finished fifth on two occasions in a Tyrrell-Yamaha. Tom Walkinshaw spotted the potential and in 1997 he put together a package with with World Champion Damon Hill and Pedro Diniz, using Arrows-Yamahas and Bridgestone tyres. Hill came close to winning in Budapest that summer… But Walkinshaw had bigger ambitions and in 1998 put together a deal to run its own engines (which were basically Hart V10s). Judd continued to develop his V10 that year and in 1999, but there were no customers. And Judd turned his attention to sports cars and touring cars. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted January 28, 2020 Share Posted January 28, 2020 Quote There are lots of Peter Jacksons in the world. Most folk these days will instantly think of the New Zealand film director, famed for his Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies. However, there have been plenty of other Peter Jacksons who achieved success. There was, for example, the British cigarette maker which began operating at the start of the Twentieth Century and became best known for his du Maurier brand. After a series if takeovers, the company became part of British American Tobacco and began producing Peter Jackson-branded cigarettes in Canada and Australia. The brand even sponsored some celebrated Nissans in the Australian Touring Car Championship in the mid-1980s, being very competitive in the hands of drivers such as Glenn Seton and “Farmer George” Fury. There was also an Australian fashion designer called Peter Jackson. This was started in 1948 as a barber shop on Little Bourke Street in Melbourne. They began to sell ties and gradually moved into menswear and today is a fashion brand with outlets across Australia. There is a British academic of the same name, who is an expert in the medieval crusades. Another Peter Jackson is a British High Court judge, who had been in the papers for a number of his rulings. There was a famous boxer with the same name, a heavyweight from the Danish West Indies, now known as the US Virgin Islands. There have been a lot of footballers with the same name and fiction writers such as Stephen King and Michael Crichton have both used the name in their books. Oh, and Ernest Hemingway used to go by the name of Peter Jackson when he was trying to avoid being noticed (which, by all accounts, was not very often). So, to be quite honest, it’s quite a common name. However, there are not many folk in the world who have heard of the Peter Jackson who was the force behind a once-celebrated motor racing company called Specialised Mouldings. Jackson started out as a humble upholsterer in the suburbs of South London. In the late 1950s he was asked to fit out glass-reinforced plastic (GRP) Triumph Adventurer motorcycle sidecars. As a result of this he became interested in the possibilities of fibreglass and found a backer to build miniature plastic Vanwall pedal cars for children. It was the time when the pedal car business was switching from metal to plastic and Jackson saw an opportunity to challenge companies such as Triang, who dominated the market. The prototype model was exhibited at the International Plastics Exhibition at Olympia in June 1959, but soon afterwards his partner pulled out, leaving Jackson without money to go forward. However, the pedal car had come to the attention of Eric Broadley of Lola, who asked him whether it was possible to make similar bodies for proper cars. Broadley lent him money and gave him moulds that Maurice Gomm had used to create aluminium panels for the Lola Mk 1 and work began in a basement beneath a shop in Thornton Heath. Peter’s brother David joined the business, which they called Specialist Mouldings. Not long after that Jackson approached the Cooper Car company and began working with them as well, and soon there was a huge demand for his fibreglass bodies. As business expanded, so the business relocated in 1960 to a better facility in Crystal Palace. Seven years later the whole company moved to a new purpose-built factory in Huntingdon - not far from Lola. Arch Motors, a tubular chassis maker set up in Tottenham by Bob Robinson and Ted Young moved in next door and the two companies often worked together manufacturing chassis and bodies for all manner of racing teams, including several F1 operations. Jackson realised that Specialised Mouldings could get more business if it provided additional services, including aerodynamic testing before his bodies were manufactured. At the time aerodynamics was becoming important. Over in the United States Jim Hall was developing new aerodynamic ideas on his Chaparral sports cars, while Jerry Eisert was experimenting with his Harrison Special Indycars, which featured concepts by Shawn Buckley, who as a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, a couple of years later began researching under under-car aerodynamics. Later, when he was a mechanical engineering professor at MIT, Buckley would be briefly involved with Team Lotus as it developed ground-effect for F1. In Britain, Professor John Stollery, a former de Havilland engineer who worked in the aeronautics department at Imperial College London, was looking at similar concepts, while BRM’s Tony Rudd sent his bright new assistant Peter Wright to work with Barnes Wallace, the famous inventor of the bouncing bomb, used by the Dambusters in World War II, to develop new ideas about under-car aerodynamics. Wright was soon busy in the Imperial College wind tunnel in London looking at new concepts. But at the end of 1969 Rudd left BRM and Wright departed soon afterwards, having been offered an interesting role by Jackson to design, commission and operate a quarter-scale wind tunnel for racing car development. Once the tunnel was running Wright worked with March’s Robin Herd to create some of the aerodynamic surfaces for the March 701. And then in 1974 he went back to Team Lotus. The rest is history… As for Specialised Mouldings, it moved away from motorsport as teams developed their own in-house wind tunnels and composite facilities, although as recently as 1991 built the Jordan 191 bodywork. The facilities were later taken over by Paxford Composites. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted January 28, 2020 Share Posted January 28, 2020 1938. godine na danasnji dan u pokusaju da obori apsolutni brzinski rekord za vozila zivot je izgubio Bernd Rozemajer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted January 28, 2020 Share Posted January 28, 2020 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted January 29, 2020 Share Posted January 29, 2020 Quote Henry Ford’s first manufacturing plant outside the United States was opened in 1911, using an old carriage works at Old Trafford in Manchester, England, with the parts for the Model T Ford being imported from the United States, using the famous Manchester Ship Canal, and being assembled when they arrived. The site was close to the then new stadium used by Manchester United... Once the cars were finished they were whisked away by delivery companies that transported them to garages, dealers and customers across the country. Thre was plenty of opportunity and so in 1926 Edward Toleman decided to set up a delivery company, to transport Ford around the country. Soon afterwards Ford decided to move its operations to Dagenham, Essex, on the River Thames, where there was more space available and it was easier to access by water. Toleman decided it was best to relocate his business to stick with Ford. The business grew and in the 1950s was taken over by Edward’s son Albert, by then it had 400 trucks and 2,000 employees and was delivering a million cars a year in the UK. People were used to seeing Toleman trucks on the roads. Albert Toleman fancied doing some rallying – and could afford to do it. Sadly, he died in 1966 at the age of only 56, leaving the business to his two sons Ted and Bob. Two years later the firm hired a young entrepreneur called Alex Hawkridge, who soon began to find ways to make the company more and more money, primarily from helping Ford with storage for its body shells, by offering them a cheaper deal than existing storage facilities, yet giving Toleman a healthy profit. He then masterminded the purchase of a rival that was bigger than Toleman but had run into trouble. In the same period the firm began to get involved in motorsport sponsorship, initial on a small scale but gradually interest grew with Hawkridge and the Toleman brothers both trying racing. Bob became more and more involved as a driver in Formula Ford. But then in the autumn of 1976 disaster struck. Bob was involved in a crash at Snetterton, suffered a fractured skull and was in a coma. He was transferred from Norwich General Hospital, to the specialist head injuries unit at Adenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, but died a couple of weeks later. It was a huge shock. But Ted and Hawkridge kept the racing going, running a team in Formula Ford 2000 for Rad Dougall and sponsoring various other drivers. They then decided to move to Formula 2 in 1978 with a March. It was not a success but for 1979 they did a deal with Ralt and Brian Hart and signed up Brian Henton alongside Dougall. Henton won twice and finished runner-up to Marc Surer, who was driving the leading factory March-BMW. It was then decided to build their own cars, designer by Rory Byrne, who had joined from Royale. Derek Warwick was taken on to partner Henton and the pair finished 1-2 in the European Formula 2 Championship, with sponsorship from BP and Pirelli. There was only one way to go after that. Toleman decided to go into Formula 1 with a turbocharged version of Brian Hart’s F2 engine. The TG181 was a pretty poor car and neither Henton nor Warwick qualified until the Italian GP in the autumn. The second season was better but nothing special with Henton replaced by Italian Teo Fabi. It was not until the end of that year Byrne built the TG183, the first composite chassis, and things began to look up. By the end of 1983 Warwick and Bruno Giacomelli became regular points scorers. That was enough to convince Ayrton Senna to sign for the team in 1984 alongside Johnny Cecotto and the brilliant Brazilian scored three podiums. Cecotto was badly injured in crash in the mid-season and was replaced by Stefan Johansson, who finished fourth at Monza, where Senna was left on the bench, having decided to sign for Team Lotus in 1985, thus breaking his contract. It had been a promising year but the team ran into serious trouble that winter. There was no sponsorship and, more importantly, no tyre contract. Toleman had ditched Pirelli to join Michelin in 1984 but then Michelin pulled out and neither Pirelli or Goodyear were interested in doing deals. The team missed the first three races but then Benetton agreed to take over the team and bought the Pirelli contract that Spirit Racing had had. In Germany Fabi put the car on pole around the new Nürburgring, a big surprise. At the end of the year the team was bought from Toleman by Benetton… It exists today, 34 years later, as Renault F1, having been owned by Benetton, then Renault, then a company called Genii Capital, during which it ran as Lotus, before being taken over again by Renault… Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted January 29, 2020 Share Posted January 29, 2020 Dzodi Sekter, sampion sveta za 1979. godinu danas slavi 70. rodjendan! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted January 30, 2020 Share Posted January 30, 2020 Quote Can you explain the significance of the following list? It begins – for this purpose – with Felipe Massa, followed by Fernando Alonso, Christian Klien and Nico Rosberg. Sebastian Vettel is on it, but Lewis Hamilton is not. Then there is Jaime Alguersuari, Jean-Eric Vergne and Esteban Gutierrez. Are you getting there? OK, it finishes off with Dany Kvyat, Max Verstappen, Lance Stroll, Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris? Some of the names might appear twice on the list and Alguersuari appears three times. Give up yet? Well, the explanation is pretty simple. Each one of these drivers listed was what the French would call the “benjamin” of Formula 1. The youngest driver who competed in each given year between 2002 until 2019. The ages differed by six years, with the oldest being Klien at 22 in 2005, the youngest Verstappen at 17 in 2015. The other teenagers were Stroll at 18 and Kvyat, Vettel and Alguersuari at 19. Massa, Leclerc and Rosberg were all 20, while Alonso, Gutierrez and Vergne were all 21. If it proves anything, it is that if you want to get into F1 when very young, it’s good to be a Red Bull driver. When it comes to be being the oldest driver in a season in the same era, Michael Schumacher wins the game in five seasons, with his oldest season being in 2012 when he was 43. Kimi Raikkonen has been the old man of the grid since 2014, a period of seven years. He is now 40 and we will have to see if he go further. Of the rest, Luca Badoer notched up 38 back in 2009. Olivier Panis did two seasons at 36 and 37. David Coulthard did one year at 37 while Mark Webber and Eddie Irvine were both 36. In recent teams as the grids have become younger, Raikkonen’s 34 in 2014 was the youngest old bloke, which probably explains why he has stayed around so long. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted January 30, 2020 Share Posted January 30, 2020 U cast preminulog Dzona Andretija: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted January 31, 2020 Share Posted January 31, 2020 Quote Chris Bristow was a rising star in the racing world in 1960. At the wheel of a British Racing Partnership Cooper he qualified fourth on the grid at Monaco in his first real World Championship event, although he had previously raced a Formula 2 car in the previous year’s British GP at Aintree. Imagine if that were to happen today. But, the F1 world was a fickle place and just three weeks later Bristow was dead, at the age of just 22. His father William had done some racing at Brooklands in his younger days before marrying the exotically-named Lotteliese du Helon. As the name suggests, she came from French roots, although she was born in England and her father ran a shop in Kennington, called Lewis and Company. The couple had three children: Sonya, Valerie and Christopher, but unusually for that era, they divorced and Christopher grew up with his father and grandmother in Kennington. William had gone into the car business and owned a garage on the A23 in Streatham. It was perhaps inevitable that Christopher caught the racing bug. He was driving when he was eight, moving cars around the garage parking lot. The business did well, selling used cars and renting vehicles, while also renting out workshop space. In 1956, when Christopher was 18 his father arranged for the well-known MG tuner Lionel Leonard to build a sports car of his own in the Bristow workshops. Chris liked what he saw and convinced his father to buy the car and he finished building it himself. He delayed doing his National Service by becoming an apprentice in his father’s garage. The work was completed that summer and Chris Bristow’s name first appeared in the racing world over the August Bank Holiday weekend - at Brands Hatch and then at Crystal Palace. He retired from the first but won the second. Success in sports car races in the months that followed led him to try some Formula 2 races early in 1959, and that drew him to the attention of Ken Gregory, Stirling Moss’s manager, who ran the British Racing Partnership F1 team. Bristow made his debut with BRP at Reims that summer and followed up with fifth at Rouen and then won the F2 class in the British GP at Aintree. Officially his F1 debut, albeit in an F2 car. Then in August he won theJohn Davy Trophy F2 race at Brands Hatch, beating Roy Salvadori and Jack Brabham. He was promoted to BRP’s F1 team in 1960, by then called the Yeoman Credit Racing Team, and travelled to South Africa in January and started his adventures in an Alfa Romeo in a production car race on the Sacks Circle track, a loop of road in Bellville, in the western suburbs of Cape Town. This ended with the car rolling off the track and across a railway line. The roof was ripped off in the crash and Bristow suffered cuts and bruises that required 11 stitches. But he raced on won the False Bay 100 the following day in his Formula 2 Cooper-Borgward. He then went on raced in Formula 1 and Formula 2 races, with races in Britain or Europe almost every weekend. His first Grand Prix of the year – his first real Grand Prix - was at Monaco, where he qualified fourth behind Moss, Brabham and Tony Brooks. He retired with gearbox failure. In Holland he was disappointed to qualify only seventh and went out with engine trouble. He then had a weekend off before heading to Spa, where he qualified eighth. He was battling for sixth place with Willy Mairesse when he lost control of his car at Burnenville. The car ran into the earth bank and began to roll. It flew into barbed wire and Bristow was decapitated, his body then being thrown from the car back on the race track, where Jim Clark narrowly avoided hitting him. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted January 31, 2020 Share Posted January 31, 2020 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted February 1, 2020 Share Posted February 1, 2020 Quote Aston Martin is not new to Grand Prix racing. In fact, it has been involved with its own cars TWICE before: in the pre-World Championship era in 1922 and again in the World Championship itself, in 1959 and 1960. The first foray began when Herbert “Bertie” Kensington-Moir drove an Aston Martin in the International 1500 Trophy on the Isle of Man in 1922. A month later Aston’s then owner Count Louis Zborowski and his chief engineer Clive Gallop raced Astons in the French GP at Strasbourg and, later in the year, there were three cars in the Junior Car Club 200 at Brooklands for Zborowski, Kensington-Moir and George Stead. The cars reappeared on occasion in 1923 but the company suffered a serious blow in 1924 when Zborowski was killed when his Mercedes hit a tree at Monza. Aston Martin is also a company that has had a long history of financial difficulties, dating right back to the early years when Singer Motor Company dealers in Kensington, Robert Bamford and Lionel Martin, decided to fit a 1.4-litre Coventry Simplex engine into a 1908 Isotta Fraschini Tipo FENC chassis, derived from the cars that were built for the 1908 Grand Prix des Voiturettes at Dieppe. Racing was always a core element for the company although after Zborowski Aston Martin was primarily involved in sports car racing. There were several financial crises along the way and in 1946 the then owner Gordon Sutherland put an advertisement in The Times offering “a high class motor business” for sale. David Brown saw the advertisement and decided to see what it was all about. He was then 43 and already a very wealthy man. He had inherited David Brown & Sons, a transmission business which had been set up by his grandfather. He had built up the business – and diversified into the manufacture of tractors. Brown visited Aston Martin’s factory, the former Whitehead Aircraft works on Victoria Road, Feltham. He drove the prototype Atom and decided that he would buy the business. The deal, completed early in 1947, quickly resulted in a return to sporting activities with St John Horsfall and Leslie Johnson winning the Spa 24 Hours in an Aston Martin in the summer of 1948. By then Brown had also acquired the Lagonda firm, which had a brand new 2.5-litre straight-six engine, which Brown felt would be perfect for his Aston Martins. Soon there was a factory team, trying to win the Le Mans 24 Hours. It took a long time but in 1959 Aston Martin finally finished 1-2 in the celebrated French endurance event. In the mid-1950s a single-seater version of the DB3 was raced in Australia and New Zealand and in 1959 Brown decided to take Aston Martin into Formula 1 with the DBR4, a front-engined car designed by engineer Ted Cutting. The timing was awful, as Grand Prix racing was then switching to rear-engined cars and the front-engined Aston was just not competitive, despite the efforts of Roy Salvadori and Carroll Shelby. The cars were redesigned and lightened for 1960 and Salvadori was joined by Maurice Trintignant, but the performance did not improve and the company had little choice but to give up F1 at the end of the year. Despite the setback Aston Martin did well in that era, in part because of the firm’s association with James Bond, which started in 1964 with the movie Goldfinger, which boosted sales of the DB5.In 1968 Brown was knighted for his services to the automotive industry. And then Aston Martin hit trouble again… Brown sold the business in 1972 to Company Developments, an investment banking consortium, chaired by William Wilson, but the firm went into receivership just two years later. And so it went on… Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted February 2, 2020 Share Posted February 2, 2020 Quote No-one ever remembers Ronnie Austin. There are various different versions of when the Concorde Agreement was agreed, but what is on the record is that a key player in making it all happen was Ronnie Austin, a partner in the law firm Clifford Chance in Paris. He had been based in Paris for 11 years and he was asked to take part in the talks on behalf of Renault. It became necessary in December 1980 when Goodyear announced it was terminating its involvement in F1 because of the political battles between the governing body FISA (a part of the FIA) and the team organization FOCA. Over a three-week period Austin, Max Mosley (representing the Formula One Constructors’ Association) and Marco Piccinini (representing Ferrari and the other grandee teams – except Renault) met on a regular basis to go through terms that would be acceptable to all those involved. There was no FIA involvement in this part of the proceedings, but at a breakfast meeting in the Hotel Crillon – the building next door to the FIA – F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone, Mosley and FISA President Balestre agreed on the basis of the deal. Balestre insisted that it be called the Concorde Agreement. The others did not care what it was called. That was not early enough to save the South African GP. The promoters had been told that their race could only be given World Championship status if it was run in April and so the promoter decided to go ahead as a Formula Libre race, held on February 7 at Kyalami. It was supposed to be the opening round of the 1981 championship and while it was supported by the FOCA teams, who mustered 19 cars: two each from Williams, Brabham, Lotus, McLaren, Tyrrell, Fittipaldi, Arrows and March, plus one car entries from ATS, Ensign and Theodore. The other teams (known as “the grandees”) were aligned with the federation. There was an announcement on March 5 that FISA and FOCA had reached an agreement, with a communique which revealed that there was a 93-page document that had been drafted and agreed on January 30. It did not mention whether the agreement had been signed. The signing date slipped back into March, but of the signatures were done by March 11, four days before the Long Beach Grand Prix. Although Ferrari raced in California, Enzo Ferrari did not sign the document until after the event. At Long Beach there were 29 cars, with the addition of two cars apiece from Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, Renault, Ligier and Osella. Balestre got his way with the name of the deal. The Concorde Agreement recognised the FIA as the owner of all commercial rights related to the Formula 1 World Championship, but gave the right to negotiate all commercials deals to FOCA - in exchange for a percentage of the profits. The teams agreed a scale of payments to share the revenues between them, but it all remained ultra-confidential, particularly the financial schedule (Schedule 10). The deal required the teams appear and compete in every race and guaranteed their right to do so, so as to provide FOCA to sell the sport to TV companies. So the Concorde Agreement was named after the Place de la Concorde, where the FIA had its headquarters, once part of the Automobile Club de France, which had acquired both number six and number eight and had integrated them into one building. They have since been separated again (to some extent), with the FIA leasing parts of number 8, including the entrance hall, which today houses the FIA Hall of Fame. So it has nothing to do with the Anglo-French supersonic airliner that flew between 1976 and 2003. Concord in English and Concorde in French are basically synonymous, meaning agreement harmony and union. There is, of course, a certain irony given that one of the first battles in the American War of Independence took place at Concord, Massachusetts, in 1775, where assuredly there was little concord going on… Goodyear, by the way, returned to F1 in June 1981, having achieved what it set out to do. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted February 3, 2020 Share Posted February 3, 2020 Quote Since 2016, Formula 1 has been listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange in New York. This means that it is a publicly-traded company and so in theory anyone can buy shares and become a co-owner in the business. In fact, it is listed on the NASDAQ and on the OTC exchanges, as there are actually three different classes of shares: There are Series A, Series B, and Series C stock, with the ungainly ticker symbols of FWONA for Series A, FWONB for Series B, and FWONK for Series C. The difference between them is that FWONA is on the NASDAQ and one vote equals one share; FWONB is on the OTC and one share equals 10 votes and FWONK (on the NASDAQ) means that there is no voting power, just money to be made. So how did the super-secretive F1 world end up being listed on an American stock exchange, having to answer to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)? Well, it involved some fancy footwork which amounted to a kind of reverse takeover. The already-listed Liberty Media bought a minority stake in the Formula One group holding company, known as Delta Topco, and then transformed itself into a new company called Formula One. This involved a lot of tidying up because F1 was not a transparent business, but there are still many confidential elements which have been carefully disguised in the numbers. On the day the purchase of Formula One was announced (September 7 2016) the company was worth $1.817 billion. Nine days later that had shot up to $2.320 billion, which meant that the business had theoretically added more than $500 million in value. In other words, the firm spent $1 billion and gained $500 million in additional value as a result of the deal. This was all done in parallel with Liberty’s ownership of the Atlanta Braves baseball team and Sirius XM, the satellite radio group, each of which has its own stock, although they are all divisions of Liberty Media. When the deal was first struck, Liberty Media offered the 10 Formula 1 teams the chance to buy 10 percent of the shares in FWONK. The goal, according to Chase Carey, was “to create much more of a long-term partnership, not a partnership that has a point in time where you go out and renegotiate the next eight-year partnership”. Carey said that he wanted to create a situation in which there would be a shared vision of how to develop the sport and to share the benefits of working together. There were 19 million shares set aside (worth just over $400 million) at the original sale price of $21.26. The teams had six months to accept the deal. The shares did not include voting rights and none of the teams took up the opportunity, arguing that they should be given the shares and not have to pay for them. Looking back, they might feel that they made a mistake as an investment of $40 million in 2016 would be worth around $90 million in early 2020, as the share price had risen to $47. Who knows where it could be in the future? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alberto.ascari Posted February 3, 2020 Share Posted February 3, 2020 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted February 3, 2020 Share Posted February 3, 2020 Vec onda je bio zreo za samare. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radoye Posted February 4, 2020 Share Posted February 4, 2020 Quote Talk to old F1 fans and they will wax lyrical about the jolly old Cooper-Bristols, which put Britain on the map (vaguely) in racing terms in the early 1950s, even if Ferrari dominated in Grand Prix racing. No-one ever mentions how it was the Bristol Aeroplane Company, famed for its multi-role Beaufighter, of which more then 5,500 were built during the war, acquired the design of its 2-cylinder engines. Nor do they mention the fact that the engine was designed by a German. Rudolf Schleicher was actually born in Basel, Switzerland, in the summer of 1897, where his parents Rudolf and Clara owned a flooring business. When he was two the family moved back to Munich where a new business was launched. Where his passion for engines came from is not clear, but his maternal grandfather Leonhardt Gürster was a master watchmaker and perhaps inspired the youngster in precision-engineering. While at school, he also drove trucks for his father’s business before being called up to serve with a Bavarian motorised unit on the Western Front, largely providing the frontline troops with supplies. When the war ended he won a place at the Technical University in Munich, studying mechanical engineering and after graduating in 1922 he joined the Süddeutsche Bremsen-AG firm, which had taken over the remnants of BMW. The was manufacturing pneumatic brakes for Bavarian railways and had no use for the old BMW engine department, which was banned from making aero-engines under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. So this was sold to Bayerische Flugzeugwerke AG, which was manufacturing industrial engines and farm equipment. BFW decided to rebrand itself BMW and went public the same year, planning to create a strong new business, based on motorcycle manufacturing. The chief engineer Max Friz designed 500cc boxer twin M2B33 engine, which went into the BMW R23 motorcycle, which made its first appearance at the Berlin Motor Show in September 1923. Schleicher work not only on the design and development of the engine but was also the lead rider of the BMW factory team, scoring the firm’s first sporting victory riding a prototype R32 on the ADAC Winter Rally in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, early in 1924. Friz was more interested in aero-engines and went back to them as soon as he was allowed and Schleicher was left in charge of the motorcycles. He developed the R37 for 1925 which doubled the power of the engine and would go on to win over 100 races. For the next few years BMW dominated all 500cc racing in Germany. The R42 that followed was very popular, with 6,500 bikes sold, but Schleicher had bigger ambitions and was recruited by Horch in Zwickau, to be its head of engine testing, developing road car engines designed by Fritz Fiedler, who created a V12 for the Horch Type 600, a V8 for the Type 830 and a straight-eight for the Type 850 roadster. By 1931 BMW was looking to build its own road cars and Schleicher was lured back to Munich and designed the 2-litre straight-six M78 engine, which would be developed into the M328 which was used in the BMW 328, which was released in 1936. The engine was years ahead of its time, featuring aluminium-alloy cylinder heads fitted to a standard production cast-iron engine block because BMW insisted that the firm did not waste money on racing specials, so Schleicher, who had been join by Fiedler, built a car that could race and be used on the road. The war saw Schleicher put in charge of BMW motorcycle production, the motorbikes being widely used by the military. The BMW factories were, naturally, targets for the Allied bombers and by the time the war ended the BMW factory at Milbersthofen had been largely destroyed by bombing raids. Schleicher decided to leave to start his own business. The factory was to be demolished with anything useful being shipped back to the United States, as Bavarian was in the American Occupation Zone. It was at this point that Harold Aldington, who had run the AFN company before the war, selling BMW 328s, branded as Frazer Nash BMWs arrived on the scene, having flown from England in a Short Stirling heavy bomber. With the blessing of the War Reparations Board, Aldington turned up at Milbersthofen looking for plans, engines and any available staff. He was doing so on behalf of Bristol, which was planning to go into car manufacturing, as demand in the aircraft business was low and money was short, and had bought AFN as a starting point. Aldington met BMW’s managing director Kurt Donath, who was trying to keep the company together, and bought the rights to manufacture three BMW models and the 328 engine. He also hired Fiedler. He flew home with rolls of drawings and a truck set off to England laden with 328 engines. Donath then turned to using the money raised to begin to manufacture pots and pans, agricultural equipment and bicycles. As things began to return to normal, Schleicher’s 328 engine proved to be the best-suited for racers and a string of BMW Specials began to appear in voiturette events. These became Formula 2 in 1948 and then in 1952, when it became clear that there were not enough engines for F1, the FIA decided to switch the World Championship to Formula 2 rules. The BMWs, Bristols and all the other engines based on Schliecher’s 328 were all eligible for use in F1. Ferrari dominated but the 328 did a pretty decent job, given that the design was by then 15 years old… As for Schleicher himself, he set up his own business called Schleicher Fahrzeugteile GmbH. Initially it did what was needed to survive, rebuilding engines and producing parts, but it gradually moved towards a core business of manufacturing camshafts. In the mid-1950s Schleicher was lured back to BMW as a consultant engineer for a number of years but his focus was on his own business, which he handed over to his sons during the 1960s. He died in the autumn of 1989. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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