Klasika

[Radoye]

Quote

 

In the mid-1960s the venerable old Spa Francorchamps circuit was becoming a place that Formula 1 feared. Driving through the open countryside on roads with no protection at average speeds of 150 mph was challenging and the drivers, who were becoming increasingly worried about safety, began to demand changes. It meant that Spa was living on borrowed time. In 1969 the Belgian Grand Prix was called off after the Spa organisers refused to pay for work that the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association insisted was necessary. Across Belgium, the reality began to dawn that Spa might be dropped from the World Championship and if that happened the Belgian Grand Prix would likely end up at Zolder, which was in Flanders, the Flemish part of the country.

 

Belgium is an odd country, with two predominant cultural and linguistic groups: the Flemings in the north (who represent 57 percent of the population) and the Walloons in the south (who constitute 32 percent). The rest are in Brussels. The Flemings speak Flemish, which is a form of Dutch, while the Walloons speak their own version of French. Not surprisingly, there is intense competition between the two communities and the politics of the country is wildly complicated.

 

Back in the late 1960s Jules Bary, the mayor of Nivelles, a town to the south of Brussels, not far from Waterloo, was a leading light in Wallonian politics. He wanted to make sure that the Walloons held on to the Grand Prix and so suggested the idea of a F1 track, near the village of Baulers, north-east of Nivelles, on the road towards Waterloo. The local council liked the idea and the local chamber of commerce thought it would be a great idea. They got together and established a company called Circuit Automobile Permanent Européen de Nivelles-Baulers (CAPENB). The local authorities were keen to help and was granted the firm a 69-year lease on public land on which to build the circuit, on the understanding that the facility would remain a permanent racing circuit for at least 27 years. With the agreements in place, CAPENB approached Robert Benoît, a member of the Royal Automobile Club of Belgium who was in the construction business, and also ran a karting facility in Brussels, and asked if he would build the new circuit.

 

The design, which was soon nicknamed “The Revolver”as it looked a little (but not a lot) like a hand-gun, was laid out on flat land. The track was relatively quick, with a long curling corner at one end, two fast straights, with fast esses in the middle of the back straight, which led down to a hairpin. There was plenty of run-off area, something that pleased the F1 drivers.

 

While all this was going on, Spa held another race in 1970, with a temporary chicane installed in the Malmedy corner to slow things down, but a year later the circuit failed to meet new FIA safety requirements and failed to get a licence for F1. The Grand Prix was cancelled again. Spa did not have the money to do the work...

 

By then Nivelles was under construction and it was decided that in order to keep everyone happy the Belgian Grand Prix would alternate between Nivelles in Wallonia and Zolder in Flanders. The first race at Nivelles took place in the summer of 1972, with a huge crowd of around 100,000 turning up to watch Emerson Fittipaldi winning the race for Lotus.

 

The race had a couple of important side-effects: many of the fans that day felt that the cars were a long way from the public. The drivers were ambivalent. The track was not very interesting. The second impact was that a local association was formed to fight for the circuit to be closed, because of the noise and local disruption.

 

However the real problem came in 1973 with the Oil Crisis when the Arab oil producing states refused to sell oil to countries that had supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The price of oil quadrupled and the crisis did serious damage to the world economy hard. Early in 1974 CAPENB was declared bankrupt. Bernie Ecclestone, the boss of the Formula One teams organisation, agreed to promote a race at Nivelles that summer. It was won by Fittipaldi again, but this time driving a McLaren. The Grand Prix went back to Zolder in 1975, but there were hopes of hosting another Grand Prix at Nivelles in 1976 although money was still hard to find. The track had started to deteriorate and there was no money to fix the surface and so the Grand Prix switched to Zolder. It did not help that André Cools, a Wallonian socialist, who was a big player in the provincial politics in the 1970s and 1980s, came from Liege and was keen to see Spa revived. That needed money. However in 1978 the old Spa track was abandoned and by the early 1980s the circuit would be reopened in a shortened form.

 

Nivelles continued to host events for bikes, cars and karts and in 1980 played host to the World Karting Championship in which Peter de Bruijn defeated a youngster called Ayrton Senna da Silva. The following year, however, the track’s licence expired and it was closed. By the end of the year the site had been reclassified by the local authorities. It was no longer a racing circuit. The site would remain abandoned for nearly 20 years until the land was acquired by a regional authority and transformed into the Portes de l'Europe-Nivelles Business Park. Some of the roads in the park follow the old circuit... but the rest is abandoned.

 

 

[Radoye]

Quote

 

Henry Costin was a bit of a character. He joined the army in his youth, serving with the Rifle Brigade before being promoted to the rank of Corporal and transferring to a role as a gymnastics instructor. In 1910, tired of army life, he answered an advertisement to join an expedition to explore the jungles of South America, with Colonel Percy Fawcett. The two did a number of expeditions together, mapping uncharted territory before returning to England when the First World War broke out in 1914. Both served in the Royal Artillery on the Western Front.

 

Towards the end of the war Henry married and although Fawcett wanted to return to the jungles when the war ended, Costin decided not to join him in an expedition to find the fabled Lost City. Fawcett disappeared without trace.

 

Costin settled in the London suburb of North Harrow and set himself as a marbler and grainer, painting walls to look like marble and wood. Such was his skill that he was soon much in demand and was commissioned to undertake work in residences of the wealthy and the famous, including Buckingham Palace. In the years that followed four children arrived: Frank (1920), Eric (1922), Michael (1929) and Mary (1932). The three boys all attended Salvatorian College in Harrow Weald.

 

Frank was fascinated by flying and at 16 joined General Aircraft at the London Air Park in Hanworth as an apprentice fitter. In 1937 he moved into the drawing office and studied for a BSc at Acton Technical College. After completing his apprenticeship he moved on to join Airspeed Ltd in Portsmouth in 1940, working for the celebrated aeronautical engineer-turned-novelist Nevil Shute Norway. He stayed for three years before being recruited by Supermarine, where he worked with Joe Smith on the later development of the Spitfire, specialising in wing design.

 

At the end of 1944 his brother Eric, who was training to be a bomb aimer in the Royal Air Force, was killed when the Lancaster in which he was flying broke up in mid-air while on a training mission over Lincolnshire.

 

When the war ended Frank moved to the Percival Aircraft Company in Luton for a couple of years before setting up his own consulting business. Then in 1951 he was hired by de Havilland to be its had of aerodynamic flight test engineering, in charge of the experimental department at Christchurch, near Bournemouth, before transferring to a similar role in 1953 to Hawarden, near Chester.

 

His brother Mike, nine years his junior, was then working at De Havilland but he soon departed to join Colin Chapman at Lotus and this led Chapman to approach Frank, as he was looking for an aerodynamicist to help him produce faster cars. Frank agreed to become a consultant for Lotus and designed the bodywork for the Lotus Eight. He then moved on to the Lotus Eleven. In 1955 Chapman and Costin were asked by Tony Vandervell of Vanwall to design the 1956 Grand Prix cars, which set the company on its path to a string of F1 victories and Constructors’ Championship success in 1958. He also worked on the roadgoing Lotus Elite, establishing himself as the leading automotive aerodynamicist in Britain.

 

This led to him working with Zagato on the Le Mans Maserati 450S and then joining forces with Jem Marsh to create a sporting special, called the Marcos (a combination of their names), with a chassis built from marine plywood. The relationship did not last and Costin returned to building gliders. He created the Protos Formula 2 car, with a wooden chassis, and worked on the unusual March 711 Formula 1 car. This was powered by a Cosworth DFV engine, which was produced by a company set up by his brother Mike and Keith Duckworth (hence Cosworth).

 

He began to lose interest in motor racing after that but was later involved in the Thompson Motor Company in Ireland, designing the TMC Costin, a lightweight sports car built in Wexford between 1983 and 1987, aimed at the Lotus Seven, Caterham, Westfield market. After that enterprise closed down Costin retired to the west coast of Ireland, where he designed and built his own house, primarily using wood, while continuing with some consulting and also doing charity work.

 

 

[alberto.ascari]

Ferrari nekad




Odesláno z mého BBF100-1 pomocí Tapatalk

[Radoye]

Quote

 

In 1982 there were three Formula 1 races in the United States of America. It was logical as the US was the world's largest consumer market and F1 was keen to attract consumers...

 

But things began to change quite quickly. Las Vegas dropped out that year because it was not making money from the race and then Long Beach fell by the wayside in a dispute over race fees. F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone did a deal for a street race in Dallas in 1984 but that lasted just a year and so in 1985 only the Detroit Grand Prix remained on the F1 calendar - and the relationship was not great. Bernie wanted the city to build a permanent pit facility but the City of Detroit was not interested.

 

In the autumn of 1988 the contract between the two parties was cancelled and suddenly there was no F1 at all in America. Bernie started looking elsewhere. A few years earlier, he had had discussions with the city of Phoenix in Arizona, which wanted to change its image of being a place for old folks, where retirees played golf in the sunshine. The mayor , Terry Goddard, who was first elected in 1984, wanted to change that image. He was thrusting 37-year-old with a family steeped in politics. His great-grandfather Ozias M Hatch had been the Secretary of State on Illinois in the 1850s and 1860s. His father served as the Governor or Arizona in the 1960s, while he was busy graduating from Harvard, serving with the US Navy and then getting a law degree before joining the Arizona Attorney General’s office, prosecuting white collar criminals. Once elected mayor he wanted to get Phoenix moving and a local businessman Guy Gonyea had suggested hosting an F1 race. Goddard decided to conduct a feasibility study and concluded that it was probably a good idea. Ecclestone was not really interested but without other options he offered Phoenix a deal in the autumn of 1988. By January 1989 the city council had approved a five-year contract with F1 to promote and run a Grand Prix. The only available date that season was the old Detroit date of June 4, which was not a great idea because Arizona is baking hot at that time of year.

 

Phoenix decided to go for it and then try to get a better date in 1990. It was ironic that Ecclestone did a deal for the race to be sponsored by the Italian fashion house Iceberg…

 

The circuit ran through the downtown area which was a problem in that like most US cities, the central business district is designed as a grid of streets, which meant that all the corners were 90-degree turns. There was a certain amount of opposition to the idea as well because of the road closures that were required to get everything ready. With the hot weather the crowd for the first race was just 31,000 and many of those fans went home unhappy either because they could not see much, or because they had grandstand seats and were baked by the end of the day.

 

It was clear that a new date was required and so it was agreed that F1 would return in March 1990 for the opening round of the new World Championship. Resistance was growing and when F1 arrived in town the local newspaper headline was “Move the Grand Prix”. Qualifying for the race on the Friday was a little bizarre as Pirelli arrived with highly competitive soft qualifying rubbr and Pierluigi Martini qualified his Minardi second, with Andrea de Cesaris third in his Scuderia Italia Dallara and Jean Alesi fourth in a Tyrrell. Olivier Grouillard in the Osella was eighth. On Saturday there was a massive rain storm and so the grid did not change. The race proved to be quite entertaining as Ayrton Senna fought his way to the front as the Pirelli cars faded, despite a lively battle with the new boy Alesi.

 

The crowd was small but the City was confident things could improve. However later that year Goddard resigned as mayor in order to run for governor in November. His place was taken by another political rising star Paul Johnson who was just 30 when he took over.

 

Goddard was sure that if he was elected governor he would have sufficient influence to continue his plan to liven up the city. But that autumn the election resulted in a tight finish with Republican Fife Symington winning 49.65 percent of the vote, compared to Goddard’s 49.24 percent. As neither had a majority a run-off election was held in February 1991. Symington won.

 

The city decided to modify the circuit to reduce disruption and to create better racing. The problem was that the folk of Phoenix just didn’t get excited about F1. This point was driven home in March 1991 when F1 turned up to open the new season and drew a crowd of only 31,000. This was not great, but the fact that an Ostrich Festival in the nearby City of Chandler attracted 70,000 spectators to watch ostrich races was the last straw for Ecclestone.  That autumn when a bid for a race arrived from South Africa, offering more money, Bernie cancelled the Phoenix contract – and even paid a cancellation fee…

 

 F1 did not return to the United States for nine years…

 

As for Phoenix, the city now has a population which is four and half times what it was in 1991. It is one of the few cities that has franchises in all four major professional sports leagues: with the Phoenix Suns (NBA), the Arizona Diamondbacks (MLB), the Arizona Cardinals (NFL) and the Arizona Coyotes (NHL). It has hosted Super Bowls in 1996, 2008 and 2015 and the Phoenix Open golf tournament is now one of the best-attended events in golf with a four-day total of around half a million...

 

 

[Radoye]

Kapetan danas slavi 83. rodjendan!

 

[Radoye]

Quote

 

Richard Lea and Graham Francis began manufacturing bicycles in Coventry in 1895 and having enjoyed some success they took on sub-contract work, building cars for Singer Motors. Having learned how to make cars, Lea-Francis launched its own model but it was not a great success and the automobile division was soon closed down and Lea-Francis went back to bicycles in 1909.

 

Two years later they began making motorcycles and this led to a return to car manufacturing in the years before World War I. The car business did not survive the war, but in the 1920s Lea-Francis did a deal with Vulcan Motor and began to manufacture some very successful light and sporting cars, using Meadows engines. In 1928 Kaye Don took a Lea-Francis Hyper sports car to victory in the Ulster TT, while the Ace of Spades model enjoyed much success.However the company fell victim to the Great Depression after the Wall Street Crash in 1929 and spent most of the 1930s in dire financial trouble.

 

In 1936 it went into receivership and former Riley employees George Leek and Hugh Rose bought the assets and launched Lea-Francis Engineering, which went public in 1937 to raise money in order to design its own engines. Leek organised the business and left Rose to do the engineering.

 

Rose was a seasoned engineer in car design and in racing, having started his career as an apprentice at Humber, working for a young Louis Coatalen. The pair then moved on to Hillman and later to Sunbeam before Rose went his own way with a string of roles with small companies before being commissioned to design a straight-four, 1.5-litre engine for Riley in 1933. This was known as the 12/4, which was used in Falcon, Kestrel and Lynx models with much success in the late 1930s.

 

After moving with Leek to Lea-Francis Rose designed an engine similar to the Riley but much lighter and more efficient. The 1.4-litre Twelve engine and the 1.6-litre Fourteen that followed were used in Lea-Francis road cars until the war when production stopped and the firm switched to doing war work. Production restarted in 1946 with the company manufacturing revised versions of the pre-car cars and these soon became very popular, particularly with motor racing folk, who saw potential in the engines and used them in a number of different specials.

 

Jack Turner felt there was more than could be achieved and persuaded Lea-Francis to produce a limited series of aluminium alloy cylinder blocks for racing and a dozen or so were built. Most of these ended up in the hands of Connaught Engineering, which worked with Lea-Francis to modify the engines for the new two-litre Formula 2.

 

It was something of an accident that Lea-Francis ended up being involved in Formula 1, as the FIA decided that for 1952 the World Championship should be run to Formula 2 regulations. Connaught began competing with a factory team and soon picked up a number of customers as well, including Rob Walker. The cars enjoyed a fair bit of success in British Formula 1 races but were never really powerful enough to compete with Ferrari and Maserati.

 

And when the new 2.5-litre Formula 1 regulations began in 1954 Connaught switched to Alta engines.

 

By then Lea-Francis production had ceased, the company unable to compete with Jaguar, Triumph and Aston Martin.

 

 

[Radoye]

Quote

 

At the end of the 1951 season, after Juan-Manuel Fangio had secured his first World Championship title on the streets of Pedralbes in Barcelona, Formula 1 found itself in a state of flux. Alfa Romeo, unable to fund a new car, and faced with increased opposition from Ferrari, indicated that it would not return in 1952. BRM was still struggling and Talbot-Lago’s cars were no longer competitive. That meant that it looked like Ferrari would be the only serious contender. The FIA’s Commission Sportive Internationale (CSI) has met during the Paris Salon de l’Automobile in the first few days of October (before the Pedralbes race) and had decided that there would be a new 2.5-litre Formula 1, starting on January 1 1954 and it was expected the 4.5-litre formula would last until then, but the CSI had made no ruling on the matter, saying that the races counting towards the World Championship could be for Formula 1, Formula 2 or even Formula 3. It may seem odd, but the CSI nominated the races that would be part of the World Championship for Drivers, the so-called Grandes Épreuves, but they did specify what cars would be used. In part this was because of the inclusion of the Indianapolis 500 in the championship, despite the fact that it was run to completely different rules to all the other races.

 

The uncertainty over the future continued until January when rumours in France began to suggest that the major races would be switching to Formula 2 rules in 1952.

 

In the middle of January BRM issued a press release saying that it was going to enter a team of its V16-engined cars in all of the Grands Prix and also in non-championship events between them. The problem was that BRM didn’t have a very good reputation after not showing up at events which it had committed to be at.

 

The French were still particularly important in the sport because France not only hosted the Grand Prix de l’Automobile Club de France – scheduled that year for Rouen in early July - but also a series of races known as the Grands Prix de France, including events at Pau (April 14), Marseille (April 27), Paris (May 25), Reims (June 29) Rouen (July 6), Les Sables d’Olonne (July 13), Saint-Gaudens (August 10) and La Baule (August 24). It was announced in mid-February that all of these events would switch to Formula 2 because the promoters were not convinced that F1 regulations would result in good races. Other race organisers began to consider the same thing.

 

Alfa Romeo did not officially pull the plug on Formula 1 until the second week of March when the board decided that the company should do only sports car races, while working towards a new Grand Prix car for 1954.

 

The first non-championship race of the year took place a few days later in Syracuse, resulting in a 1-2-3 for Ferrari 500 Formula 2 cars.

 

At the same time the Swiss GP – the World Championship-opening race – announced that as a result of Alfa Romeo’s withdrawal it could not guarantee spectators a decent race unless the race was run to Formula 2 rules. Ferrari was dominant in F2, but at least running with F2 rules would mean bigger entries. If the World Championship was run to F1 rules, Ferrari would dominate with its 375, but the entry would be smaller. The one hope was that BRM would mount a serious challenge and so all eyes were on the Valentino Grand Prix on April 6 where BRM said it would race. The team did not show up and the race was a Ferrari walk-over, with Gigi Villoresi dominating in a Ferrari 375 - exactly as race promoters had feared. The Belgian GP had been planning to stay with F1 rules but after Turin the Belgians switched, while the British followed.

 

The weekend of April 14 saw the opening round of the French Grands Prix series at Pau, with Alberto Ascari winning in a Ferrari 500, while in England the Richmond Trophy at Goodwood ran to F1 rules and was won by Froilan Gonzealez in a Ferrari 375 F1 car.

 

Ascari won again in Marseille two weeks later and on May 10 HWM-Alta Formula 2 cars dominated the International Trophy with victory going to Lance Macklin. That same weekend Ferrari finished 1-2 in Naples with Formula 2 cars for Giuseppe Farina and Piero Taruffi.

 

A week later – on May 18 – the World Championship kicked off with the Swiss Grand Prix at Bremgarten in Berne. Ferrari arrived with three 500s for Farina, Taruffi and Frenchman Andre Simon. Alberto Ascari was missing as he had gone to Indianapolis to take part in the 500. There were two customer Ferrari 500s for Rudolf Fischer (Ecurie Espadon) and Louis Rosier (Ecurie Rosier). Maserati had planned to send two cars but did not appear, but Gordini had three entries for Jean Behra, Prince Bira and Robert Manzon while HWM appeared with four cars for Macklin, Stirling Moss, Peter Collins and George Abecassis. There were a number of local entries, notably Hans Stuck Sr's AFM and Toni Ulmen's Veritas-Meteor and a trio of Bristol-engined cars with a Frazer Nash for Ken Wharton and two Coopers entered by Ecurie Richmond for Eric Brandon and Alan Brown.

 

Ferrari dominated, of course, with Farina leading until his car broke down and Taruffi taking over to win, while Fischer came home second with Behra third.

The CSI never actually decided to switch the World Championship to Formula 2 but that autumn when the body met in Paris, it was decided that all Grandes Epreuves would be run to the new rules, as long as there were more than three manufacturers committed to race…

 

 

[Radoye]

Danas bi mu bio 71. rodjendan...

 

[Radoye]

Quote

 

When it comes to American Formula 1 teams, people remember Carl Haas’s operation, Roger Penske’s efforts, Shadow and the Eagles of Dan Gurney, but few remember the adventures of Vel’s Parnelli Jones Racing, which took part in 16 Grands Prix between the end of 1974 and the early part of 1976. They forget that the team finished 10th in the Constructors’ Championship in 1975, an impressive first season.

 

It was a story that began in the unlikely setting of Trebinje in Bosnia in the early years of the 20th Century. At the time Bosnia was not a happy place with ethnic and religious divisions. The Bosniaks were predominantly muslim, the Serbs were largely followers of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Croats were catholic. It was under the control of the Ottoman Empire, which was crumbling, but there was a strong nationalist movement, and in 1908, keen to stop any revolutions, the Austro-Hungarian Empire annexed the region. Thousands of locals decided to depart, to avoid being conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army – and to find a better life. Dusan Miletic was one of them. He went first to France and from there sailed to New York on the SS La Touraine, which ran the Le Havre to New York. He ended up in a mining town in South Dakota called Lead, where he settled. He met and married another immigrant called Stane Spich in the early 1920s and they started a family.

 

In the mid 1930s they decided to move to California, to a new development called Torrance. Their son Velko, who was 10, enrolled at Torrance High School. Despite his roots in the Balkans, Velko was a very American youngster and was excited about the automobiles which were becoming more and more widespread. After school he started doing odd jobs at local automobile repair shops. It was what he wanted to do.

 

He graduated from high school at 17, a few months after Pearl Harbor and the following year, when he reached the age of 18 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and serving as an aerial photographer in the Pacific Theatre in the final part of the war.

 

He then returned home to Torrance and went to work for the Oscar Maples Ford dealership, rising to become the manager and then in 1954 raised money to buy the business.

 

In order to promote the dealership Miletic began sponsoring local racers in all manner of different events and happened upon a promising youngster called Parnelli Jones. He was soon sponsoring the youngster, supplying him with engines and chassis for stock car races. In 1956 they decided to compete in a programme of stock car races, in the Pacific Coast Late Model series and NASCAR Grand National races. On the west coast Parnelli won at Huntington Beach and Gardena and showed well in the Cup races at Merced and San Mateo and so in September they headed off to Darlington, South Carolina for the Southern 500. By 1960 Parnelli was trying his hand in USAC Indycars, with help from Miletic, who introduced him to JC Agajanian. This led to Parnelli joining Agajanian in 1961, scoring his first victory that year and going on to win the Indy 500 in 1963.

 

As Parnelli grew more successful he and Miletic became business partners, selling Firestone racing tyres from the dealership, a business which grew to more than 40 stores in the years that followed, while also diversifying into road car tyres and other automotive products.

 

In 1969 they decided to set up their own racing team, which was called Vel’s Parnelli Jones Racing. They hired Al Unser to drive and George Bignotti to run the team. Unser finished second in the championship. They expanded to TransAm in 1970 and Jones won the title while also building offroad machines with which Jones won the Baja 1000. That year, backed by the Johnny Lightning toy company, Unser won the Indianapolis 500 and the USAC title in a VPJ Colt. In 1971 Unser's team-mate Joe Leonard won the title, though Unser won another Indy 500 victory.

 

In 1972 Parnelli hired Team Lotus designer Maurice Philippe and switched from Ford engines to Offenhausers but the result was not a great success. However at the end of 1973 the team announced that it would be entering F1 in 1974. Philippe designed the VPJ4 and Mario Andretti raced the car. The car was developed the following year by Andretti and he scored a couple of useful placings, while the team also ran a successful Formula 5000 program with Viceroy-backed Lolas for Unser and Andretti, the pair finishing second and third in the championship.

 

Much of this was funded by Firestone and so when the company withdrew from competition in 1975 it was a big blow. The  team took on John Barnard to design an F1 car but money ran out and the F1 programme came to a close. Barnard designed the VPJ6 Indycar and Unser won three races and he and new team mate Danny Ongais won a couple more in 1977. The cars would remain competitive in 1978 and 1979 but with CART and USAC splitting up that year the team withdrew from the sport.

 

Miletic and Parnelli stayed in business until Vel’s death in 1995.

 

 

[Radoye]

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If you go to the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna you will be able to see the Fontana di Nettuno, a larger-than-life bronze statue of the god Neptune, which has stood there since 1567. It may seem an odd story, but this was the inspiration for one of the best-known motor racing emblems, which fatured on Grand Prix cars from the late 1920s until the 1960s.

 

It is a story which begins in the town of Voghera, to the south of Milan, but still a long way from Bologna, where Rodolfo Maserati worked in the late Nineteenth Century as a train driver for the Italian state railways. Rodolfo was passionate about machinery and new technology and he passed this passion on to his six sons, five of whom grew up passionate about engineering.

 

The eldest, Carlo, was born in 1881 and when he was 17 had already designed his first internal combustion engine for a motorised bicycle. At 19 he joined Fiat but then moved on to Isotta-Fraschini three years later. He recommended that his brother Alfieri join the firm but he then departed and Alfieri followed him. Carlo's dream was to set up his own engineering business. Alas, in 1910 he was struck down by tuberculosis at the age of only 29.

 

That year another brother Bindo joined Isotta-Fraschini and convinced Alfieri and another brother Ettore to work for the company. But Alfieri had acquired Carlo's ambitions to start his own empire and after three years he left Isotta-Fraschini and moved to Bologna in order to set up his own firm in league with Ettore. Bindo stayed at Isotta-Fraschini. The timing could not have been worse. World War I broke out and soon both Alfieri and Ettore had been called up into the military, leaving their 16-year-old brother Ernesto in charge of the workshop, until the war was over.

 

It was four years before the were able to start building their first racing specials, which Alfieri drove. The first was a Diatto chassis fitted with a 6.3-litre Isotta-Fraschini engine. This showed well in early events after the war and as the car was developed, Diatto became more and more interested and commissioned the Maserati brothers to prepare a car for Diatto for the 1922 Italian GP. This was promising and so Diatto agreed to fund more racing machines and Maserati designed a new 2-litre engine. But then Diatto ran into financial trouble and had to stop the whole programme. The Maserati brothers decided to buy 10 Diatto 30 Sport models in order to use them as the basis for their own cars. The problem was funding.

 

Through his racing, Alfieri had met the Marquis Diego de Sterlich, then in his early twenties. The last survivor of a dynasty that could trace its roots back to Austria in a round 1100, the family had settled in Lombardy in the Sixteenth Century, with the main branch then establishing itself in the Abruzzo region. Diego had emerged as the sole heir to the estates of not only the De Sterlich family but also the barony of Aliprandi, as a result of a series of tragedies when he was growing up. His estates amounted to 23,000 acres, with a string of castles and palaces, farms and mills.

 

He had soon discovered motor racing and had helped to fund the construction of the Autodomo Nazionale at Monza, was a founder member of the Automobile Club d'Abruzzo, which organized the Coppa Acerbo in Pescara, and had began racing himself in 1923.

 

He agreed to provide the money for the Maserati brothers to buy the Diattos, which were transformed into the first Maserati Tipo 26s, a highly successful racing machine that created demand for customer cars for the road and for racing. This all meant that the company needed a proper emblem and it was de Sterlich who suggested that the Maserati brothers adopt the trident from the fountain of Neptune. It was decided that Mario Maserati, the only Maserati brother who was not mad about cars, and worked as an artist, should be commissioned to design the logo based on the trident.

 

Twenty years later, although the Maserati brothers had long gone from the company that bore their name, the trident logo became an integral part of the Formula 1 World Championship, notably with the celebrated Maserati 250F…

 

 

[Radoye]

 

[Radoye]

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France's Michel Costa was a man who looked like he was going to have a major career in the automobile industry. He was a talented student and won a place to study mechanical engineering at the prestigious Centre d'Etudes Superieures des Techniques Industrielles, nowadays known as Supméca.  He then picked up a Diplôme d'Études Supérieures Techniques in aerodynamics from the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, another top engineering school. In 1972 he was then recruited by the research and development department of Chrysler France, which had been named Simca until two years before. He would spend eight years at the firm's R&D division at Carrières-sous-Poissy, to the west of Paris, becoming head of testing. In 1978, however, Chrysler Europe was sold to PSA Peugeot Citroën for $1, taking on the company's debts in addition to the factories and product lines. Peugeot decided to rebrand the firm as Talbot.

 

Costa decided that he had had enough of politics and decided to give it all up and go racing. He would spend the next five years working as a designer and a team manager in the French Formula Renault championship. He made a sufficiently good impression to be approached by the AGS Formula 1 team and agreed to work alongside Christian Vanderpleyn on the Gonfaron team’s 1986 Formula 1 challenger – the AGS-Motori Moderni JH21C. This was built around an old Renault Sport RE40 chassis, dating back to 1983, cobbled together with other old Renault parts. This was mated to a Motori Moderni V6 turbo engine. It was not a good car but Costa revised the design and the team fitted a Cosworth engine for 1987. At the end of the year, the team replaced driver Pascal Fabre by Roberto Moreno and the Brazilian scored a point in the end-of-season Australian GP.

 

The 1988 car was the JH23 and was a much better car and Philippe Streiff scored a number of promising results, but failed to score a point. In August that year Costa, Vanderpleyn and team manager Frederic Dhainaut all quit the team to go to work for Enzo Coloni in Italy – a major blow to AGS,

 

Vanederpleyn and Costa designed the Coloni C3 which was driven by Roberto Moreno and Pierre-Henri Raphanel. The Coloni was not bad, but with pre-qualifying necessary it rarely made it through into the races and at the end of the year the three Frenchmen left Coloni.

 

By then AGS had been sold to French businessman Cyril de Rouvre and he turned to Costa to be technical director and went to work on the design of the JH25 for the 1990 season. De Rouvre poured a lot of money into the team, setting up a completely new factory at the Circuit du Luc. The problem was that de Rouvre began to run out of money. The team still had to get through pre-qualifying at each race and the talented duo of Gabriele Tarquini and Yannick Dalmas both struggled, although Dalmas managed to finish ninth in the Spanish GP at Jerez. Costa staretd work on the JH26 for 1991 but the money ran out and the team went into receivership. The new car was never built. The assets were bought by Italians Patricio Cantu and Gabriele Raffanelli who decdied to replace Costa with his old boss Vanderpleyn.

 

Costa got involved in the awful Andrea Moda Formula F1 team, trying to develop the very poor Simtek-built cars, but it quickly became clear that there was little that could be done and he gave up and moved into sports car racing, working with Gerard Larrousse, ORECA and later with Paul Belmondo Racing.

 

He then faded out of the sport…

 

 

[Radoye]

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Syracuse is a city that dates back 2,700 years. It sits on the east coast of Sicily, to the south of Catania, looking out to the Ionian Sea. For many years it was the port that was used to sail to Italy’s colonies in Africa, notably Tripoli, where in the 1920s and 1930s there was a major Grand Prix race. That ended in 1940 and after World War II the local Lambretta dealer in Syracuse Vincenzo D'Amico Urso took out one of his scooters for a test at the edge of the city, close to the vast cemetery and the new war cemetery where 1,000 Commonwealth troops are buried, victims of the amphibious and airborne landings in Sicily in July 1943, which marked the start of the Italian campaign. As he rode through the countryside he pondered the idea of how great it would be to have a racing circuit on the roads, to replace Tripoli. He won the support of the local authorities and the Automobile Club of Italy and paid a visit to Enzo Ferrari and convinced him to send cars to the first race, which took place in March 1951. It was timed to offer the teams a touch of Mediterranean weather at the end of the winter and to attract cars by giving them the chance to test new machinery on a fast and sweeping circuit. They would arrive early, test the cars as much as possible and then race in the Grand Prix. It was run to Formula 1 regulations most of the time, although switched to F2 on occasion. The list of winners was impressive with Gigi Villoresi, Alberto Ascari, Giuseppe Farina, Juan Manuel Fangio, Peter Collins, Stirling Moss, John Surtees and Jim Clark all featuring on the list of winners. There was also Tony Brooks, who took a Connaught to an unexpected victory in 1955 and also witnessed Giancarlo Baghetti winning on his F1 debut in 1961, before going on to victories in Naples and at the French GP. In the 1960s the race moved into May and in 1967 it was scheduled for May 21.

 

It had started out as a good year for Ferrari with a 1-2 in the Daytona 24 Hours, with Lorenzo Bandini and Chris Amon leading home Mike Parkes and Ludovico Scarfiotti. There was another 1-2 in the Monza 1000 at the end of April.

 

The European F1 season kicked off on March 12 with the non-championship Race of Champions at Brands Hatch, the race being won by Dan Gurney in an Eagle-Weslake. A month later, on April 15 Denny Hulme won the Daily Express Spring Cup at Oulton Park and a fortnight after that Mike Parkes gave Ferrari a victory at the BRDC International Trophy at Silverstone. The following weekend (May 7) was the Monaco GP, won by Hulme but this was overshadowed by the fiery crash of Ferrari’s Lorenzo Bandini at the harbour chicane on the 82nd lap. The Italian died three days later from burns.

 

It was against this backdrop that the Syracuse GP took place. It was timed that year to follow the Targa Florio sports cars race, which took place on the Piccolo Madonie road circuit, on the north side of the island, on May 14. It was World Sportscar Championship round but the only Grand Prix drivers involved were Jo Siffert, Scarfiotti and Jo Schlesser.

 

The later than usual date caused a problem in that it clashed with the Grote Prijs van Limborg Formula 2 race at Zolder, where there was some good start money on offer. This meant that Team Lotus, Brabham, McLaren and Matra all opted to race in Belgium rather than travelling all the way to Sicily. This meant that John Surtees, Jim Clark, Jack Brabham, Bruce McLaren, Jean-Pierre Beltoise and Johnny Servoz-Gavin were all in Belgium.

 

Other F1 drivers, including Denny Hulme, Jochen Rindt, Pedro Rodriguez, Jackie Stewart, Graham Hill, Dan Gurney, Richie Ginther and Chris Amon were all at Indianapolis, taking part in the qualifying for the Indy 500.

 

All this meant that the entry for the  Syracuse GP was very poor. Ferrari sent two cars, one for Parkes and the other for Scarfiotti. Siffert was there with with his Rob Walker Cooper-Maserati. Chris Irwin and Mike Spence were there with Reg Parnell Lotus-BRMs, while Jo Bonnier ran his own Cooper-Maserati and Silvio Moser was there with an unusual Cooper-ATS. Schlesser was present too but crashed in practice and did not race. The race was run over 56 laps of the 3.5-mile circuit and quickly (and not surprisingly) developed into a fight between the two Ferrari 312s. It was close all the way but on the last lap the two cars arrived at the finish line side-by-side. They were so close in fact that the timekeepers were unable to separate them and it was declared a dead-heat, both being given the same race time – 1h40m.58.4s. It later emerged that they had done it as gesture to honour their fallen team-mate Lorenzo Bandini.

 

The Formula 1 World Championship has never had a dead-heat, despite an attempt to do it in 2002 when Michael Schumacher backed off in the final metres of the race to allow Rubens Barrichello to draw alongside. The Brazilian ended up winning by inches as the timing registered a difference between the two cars of 0.011sec.

 

 

[Radoye]

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Not many people know that Bugatti competed in the FIA Formula 1 World Championship. The company is associated with Grand Prix racing in the 1920s and 1930sl when the Type 35 and its successors dominated the sport. But Bugatti did reappear in 1956 at the Grand Prix de l'Automobile Club de France at Reims, with a car driven by Maurice Trintignant. It qualified 18th out of 20 cars, and broke down after 18 laps. The team was not seen again.

 

Today the last Bugatti resides in the Musée National de l'Automobile in Mulhouse.

 

Bugatti had slipped out of contention in Grand Prix racing in the early 1930s when the German car companies - funded by the Nazi government - rose to dominance. Unable to compete, the Bugatti competition department turned to the Le Mans 24 Hours and created the celebrated streamlined T57G sports cars, known as the "Tanks", which won Le Mans in 1937 and again in 1939. They did not compete in 1938 because company founder Ettore Bugatti did not see the point, unless someone could beat the distance record set in 1937 at 2,043.02 miles by Jean-Pierre Wimille and Robert Benoist, the great 1920s champion who was by then Bugatti’s head of competition.

 

Delahaye won the race in 1938 but did not beat Bugatti’s record, while Benoist and his team decided to build a car for the new Grand Prix formula, which mandated a maximum engine capacity of 4.5-litre, or a supercharged 3-litre power unit. Wimille did his best but there was not enough budget to build a competitive car. The Bugatti Type 59 continued to appear in various different forms until the war broke out in 1939.

 

Ettore's son Jean Bugatti managed to convince his father to enter a new supercharged T57G sports car at Le Mans in 1939 and Wimille and Pierre Veyron won the race, completing 2,079.17 miles, a new record. But that autumn Bugatti suffered a terrible tragedy. Jean was testing a Type 57G which was being prepared for the Le Baule Grand Prix, a race on the sands of the fashionable Atlantic resort in southern Brittany, where Wimille was due to drive the car on September 3. The test was done at 10pm at night on public roads near the Bugatti factory in Molsheim. There were only two junctions to worry about and Jean posted people at each one to stop anyone getting on to the road. But a cyclist was let through. He was warned to stay off the road but forgot the instruction, having had a few drinks, and when Jean arrived behind him at 125mph he could only swerve. He lost control and the 57G went straight into a roadside plane tree, killing Jean instantly. Ironically the La Baule race was called off as World War II began that day.

 

Ettore Bugatti was still mourning his son when the Germans invaded France in 1940. As an Italian he was expected to assist the German war effort and, faced with the threat of having his factories seized, he came up with a novel solution to the problem. He sold his factories to the Germans for half their real value, bought the La Licorne car company and began building small vans, which he felt might sell during the war. He set up an experimental department in Paris and began work on cars for the post-war era. His staff, led by Benoist, were very active in resistance work, which led to a number of them being arrested.

 

When the war ended in 1945, one of the pre-war Type 59s, which had been fitted with 4.7-litre engine and used for hillclimbs in 1939, was taken out of its hiding place and raced to victory by Wimille in the Grand Prix de la Liberation in the Bois de Boulogne. But there was little good news for Bugatti in that era as the new government seized the Bugatti factory in Molsheim, believing that Bugatti had been a collaborator. He battled against the judgement against him and in 1947 the factory was finally returned to the family and Bugatti was cleared. A few days later he died at the age of 62.

 

The company he had founded continued, but switched to manufacturing aircraft parts to stay afloat. This was lucrative work and in 1955 it was decided to try to restart the automobile business and revive the Bugatti name in Grand Prix racing. The company hired Italian Gioacchino Colombo, who had designed the Maserati 250F, and he created a new car called the Bugatti Type 251. The team appeared at the French GP in 1956 but the car was not competitive. Worse still, it didn't seem to have any potential to be competitive.

 

At the same time, there was a big reduction in French military spending after the country’s withdrawal from Indochina, after its defeat at Dien Bien Phu. This meant that there was no money for Bugatti to invest in cars.  The firm struggled on until 1963 before being sold to Hispano-Suiza and eventually becoming part of the Messier company, a subsidiary of the French government's Societe Nationale d'Etude et de Construction de Moteurs d'Aviation (SNECMA).

 

Although since revived as a car company, there has never been any suggestion that Bugatti will try to return to F1 again…

 

 

[Radoye]

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Colin Chapman is always remembered as the engineering genius who ran Team Lotus, but few people remember that he actually drove a Grand Prix car – and qualified fifth for the French Grand Prix in 1956. He was then 28 years of age and had enjoyed some success in sports car races in Britain while climbing the ladder to Formula 1 as an engineer. At the end of 1955 he was commissioned by Vanwall to design a new F1 car, this would be the basis for the successful models that followed, but Chapman still had the ambition to be an F1 driver. The team was running  Maurice Trintignant and Harry Schell in 1956 but when BRM decided not to go to the French GP in July, Tony Vandervell decided to ask Mike Hawthorn to drive for him. He needed to replace Trintignant, as he had been contracted to drive for the revived Bugatti team, which made its first (and last) appearance at Reims.

 

Vandervell also decided to run a third car at Reims and asked Chapman if he would like to give it a try. Chapman accepted and did a terrific job, setting the fifth fastest time in qualifying, ahead of the Maseratis of Jean Behra, Stirling Moss, Gigi Villoresi and Olivier Gendebien. Quite an achievement. On the second day of practice, however, he was following Hawthorn around when they arrived at the Thillois hairpin, at the end of the long back straight. They braked but Chapman’s left front locked on, which led to him crashing into the back of his team-mate and punting him off. Hawthorn described “a terrific crash at the back of the car”, which sent him up the escape road, while Chapman’s bonnet flew off and his car went off on to the grass and hit a small concrete post before bouncing into a rather larger one.

 

Hawthorn got out of his car and ran back to see if Chapman was OK and was relieved to find that he was unhurt. But the car was a mess. The chassis was bent, the radiator smashed and the bodywork was mangled. Chapman was very upset but when they got back to the pits team boss Tony Vandervell simply shrugged, said “that’s motor racing” and began to organise getting the two cars fixed. The problem was that the team could not fix the damage at the circuit. Things were so bad with Chapman’s car that it would need to go back to the factory to be straightened out. So he was out for the weekend. The team pulled the fuel tank out of the car and put it into Hawthorn’s and thus there were only two cars ready to race on Sunday. Chapman had to watch.

 

After the crash, Chapman’s insurance company said that it would be best if he did not race cars any longer, and so he decided to focus all his efforts on running his car company and designing great racing cars…

 

 

[Radoye]

Mario i Aldo Andreti su danas napunili 80! 🙂

 

[Radoye]

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Fifty years later, Andretti’s 1970 Sebring win still incredible

Images by LAT

 

By: IMSA Wire Service | February 28, 2020 5:06 AM

 

 

Celebrate today’s 80th birthday of racing legend Mario Andretti with this recounting of just one of his achievements, which ranks as one of the most remarkable stories in sports car racing history.

 

Our protagonist is motorsports legend Mario Andretti. Our antagonist — at least one of them — is Hollywood superstar Steve McQueen. The scene is Sebring International Raceway and the Twelve Hours of Sebring on March 21, 1970.

 

Three years after winning his first Twelve Hours in 1967, Andretti was well on his way to a second Sebring win in the No. 19 Ferrari 512S Spyder that he co-drove with Arturo Merzario. Andretti put the car on pole by a healthy margin in qualifying, and he and Merzario dominated most of the race for the Ferrari factory team.

 

They led by as many as 12 laps before gearbox troubles forced the No. 19 Ferrari to stop. Disappointed, Andretti was ready to head for home.

 

“We’re out of the race and I was pretty much ready to leave because I had my plane there,” said Andretti, who the year prior had won the Indianapolis 500 and the IndyCar championship. “The next day, on the Sunday, I was racing a sprint car race in Reading, Pennsylvania, so I figured, ‘Well, I’ll just leave a little early.’

“I was ready to go, say my goodbye and Mauro Forghieri, the team manager said, ‘No, wait, wait, wait! I might want you to go and finish the race with the third car with (Nino) Vaccarella and (Ignazio) Giunti. I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’”

 

The Andretti/Merzario Ferrari 512S Spyder dominated early, but that was just the beginning of the story…

 

Andretti was torn. On one hand, after spending all day dominating the race in the No. 19 Ferrari, it’d be nice to have something to show for his efforts.

 

But at the same time, the No. 21 Ferrari 512S Coupe was quite a bit different from the No. 19 Spyder, which had an open cockpit. It also was running third, a lap down to the leaders with less than two hours left in the race.

 

Jo Siffert was leading the race for the Porsche factory-supported team in the No. 5 Porsche 917K and was looking mighty strong. Running second was Peter Revson in a privateer No. 48 Porsche 908 he was sharing with McQueen.

 

“All of a sudden, the leading Porsche had some issues with a front hub, so they’re in the pits a long time,” Andretti recalled. “And Revson was in the (No. 48) car and he had been in the car for over eight hours — not consecutive — but McQueen did the minimum amount.”

 

A few weeks before the Sebring race, McQueen had broken his foot in a motorcycle race in Lake Elsinore, California and was sporting a cast on his left leg. But with Siffert’s misfortune, Revson moved into the lead and track announcers were sensing a big Hollywood ending for McQueen.

 

“As Revson goes into the lead, they’re saying, ‘And Steve McQueen takes the lead!” Andretti remembers. “They’re screaming, ‘Steve McQueen!’ and I’m looking at it and that pissed me off, actually. So, I told Forghieri, ‘If you want me to go, I’ll go in the car,’ because I felt that I had a better chance against that Porsche rather than the factory Porsche.”

 

But before he did it, Andretti also spoke with Giunti, who was due to take over in the No. 21 Ferrari from Vaccarella.

 

“It was his turn to go back in the car and finish,” Andretti said. “He was sitting there, and I asked him — because Forghieri was adamant that I get in the car — but I wanted the other driver to accept that. I didn’t want to be that forceful. I asked him, ‘Ignazio, is it OK if I go?’ He goes, ‘Yes. Yes. OK.’”

 

Andretti got another chance with Ferrari No. 21, and carried it to victory through sheer force of will.

 

With Giunti’s blessing, Andretti climbed into the cockpit of the No. 21 Ferrari. It was a car he had never driven before, in the pitch-black dark of night.

“I didn’t fit worth a damn, because both guys were a little bit taller than me,” Andretti says. “But I was determined.”

 

He was more than five miles behind the leader with 90 or so minutes left in the race. And, he’d already driven more than five hours in the No. 19.

 

“Physically, I was not fresh,” he said. “So, to go out there and run qualifying laps at the end of the 12 hours, it was a little bit tough.”

 

On top of that, the No. 21 likely would need a late splash of fuel to make it to the finish, whereas the No. 48 Porsche was good to go to the checkered flag.

 

“I had to really, really hoof it,” Andretti said. “I had to qualify every lap. That’s what it was and that’s why I used up more fuel. I think under normal race pace, we probably could have made it to the end, but I was like qualifying every lap. That’s the only chance I had.

 

“I think that’s the first time that I did Turn 1 flat, and I couldn’t do that with the Spyder. Actually, the Coupe felt and handled even a little bit better. I think it was because of torsional stiffness. The Coupe actually felt better than my Spyder, but the Spyder was lighter, so it accelerated a little bit better.

 

“But lap-time wise at that point, I think I was running as quick as I could have ever run, even with the other one if I needed to. The car felt good to me, and that’s why I just really took it to the limit. Somehow, it paid off.”

 

Indeed, it did. Andretti caught and passed Revson, putting the No. 21 Ferrari into the lead.

 

“I knew that I might have to stop, so I just kept driving like it was qualifying,” he said. “Sure enough, the reserve light comes on. In those days when you came in for fuel, you had to get out of the car quick and then get back in and turn the engine off.

 

“So, I came in — there was no pit road speed, so I came in totally sideways, nearly killing people. As soon as I hit the ground, Forghieri threw me back in, because they put about maybe two liters of fuel in there.”

 

The late splash-and-go cost Andretti the lead, but not for long. Andretti quickly chased Revson down again.

 

“It was a lap later, I passed him going on the back straightaway,” Andretti said. “Then, I think at that point, he gave up. Poor guy. I felt bad for Steve, actually.”

From there, Andretti pulled away, winning by 23.8 seconds.

 

“You know, I’m credited with a win, but I don’t feel bad taking it,” Andretti said. “Because I felt we deserved it with the other car, and this was a team car. I felt that if those guys (Giunti and Vaccarella) would not have stepped up their pace, they wouldn’t have won.

 

“I thought that I was kind of a man possessed out there a little bit. So, I consider that one of the good wins of my career in that sense. To be able to extract that much out of the car right at the end of a 12-hour race – Sebring at that – I felt pretty satisfied.”

 

That’s saying something. This is a man who’s won the Indy 500, Daytona 500, the Formula 1 World Championship, IndyCar championships and countless other F1, IndyCar, stock car, sports car, sprint car and other races.

 

“I would say the way everything happened at the event, I don’t think you could duplicate it,” Andretti concluded. “With our regular car, we pretty much dominated to be that far in the lead, and then have to drop out. And then jump in a sister car, to be able to win, everything was amazing. It was like the perfect storm. Yeah, it’s never happened again in my career, for sure.”

 

This year’s Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring Presented by Advance Auto Parts falls on Saturday, March 21 — 50 years to the day since Andretti’s historic victory.

 

 

 

 

Edited February 29, 2020 by Radoye

[Radoye]

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British motor racing leads the world, particularly in Formula 1, where most of the teams are British-based, even if they fly foreign flags. McLaren, Mercedes, Racing Point, Red Bull Racing, Renault and Williams are all headquartered in the UK. AlphaTauri and Haas have significant departments based in the Britain. Today, only Alfa Romeo and Scuderia Ferrari have no British department, although both have a significant number of British staff members. Given that Britain’s automobile industry is today nothing to compare to what one finds in France, Germany and Italy, that is perhaps a little strange, but it is clear evidence of the importance of industrial clustering, where local competence and know-how leads to a specific area becoming the centre of an industry.

 

A similar example, perhaps, would be the marmalade industry which for many years was centred on the Scottish port of Dundee because it was there that marmalade was first invented, after a Spanish ship loaded with oranges took refuge after being damaged in a storm. The cannot Scots figured out to preserve the fruit – and started an industry as a result.

 

What very few people know is that British motor racing did not begin at Brooklands, the world’s first permanent racing facility, which was built in 1907. Five years prior to that the first British motor racing event took place in the unlikely setting of Bexhill-on-Sea.

 

Bexhill-on-Sea is a seaside resort on the south coast. The original village of Bexhill was a mile inland from the sea but the Earl De La Warr, who owned the entire place, decided to transform the coast into an exclusive holiday destination. A sea wall was built, followed by De la Warr Parade, and then luxurious hotels and houses. After the Earl died in 1896, his son, Viscount Cantelupe, became the new Earl, at the age of 27. He was an investor in the Dunlop tyre company and decided to create a bicycle boulevard along the seafront from the Sackville Hotel to Galley Hill, a slight rise to the east of the new development, to help promote the resort and to spread the word about Dunlop tyres. In 1902, as a further piece of promotion, he turned the road into a race track, which being on private land was not affected by Britain’s speed limit of 12 mph, which effectively meant that there could be no road racing. The Great Whitsuntide Motor Races took place on Monday May 19 1902, a bank holiday and there were more than 200 entries. Thousands of curious spectators arrived to watch the races and to see visiting French driver Leon Serpollet winning on one of his steam cars, which recorded the highest speed of 54mph. The event was a huge success and the Earl continued to organise an annual event until 1907.

 

It all seems rather unlikely these days, with Bexhill being a very sedate resort with shingle beaches, with wooden breakwaters with some good hard sand when the tide is low. There are beach huts and in places a greensward. It’s not overcrowded like nearby Hastings and is calm and peaceful.

 

Not motor racing country at all…

 

 

[Radoye]

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Name a British driver who competed in Formula 1 and in the Daytona 500. Tough one, huh? Well, here’s a clue. He built his own Formula 1 cars as well. OK, he was decorated during World War II. He came from Manchester. Not an easy one, is it?

 

The answer is Brian Naylor, or at least JB Naylor was he was known. He was born in the village of Leigh in Lancashire, to the west of Manchester, but moved to Stockport on the eastern side of the city. When war broke out in 1939 he was 16 and two years later he joined the merchant navy and served as a radio operator, returning home decorated for his exploits. After the war he went into the automotive business and established a string of companies including a successful car dealership on the A6 road, which ran from London to Carlyle, passing through Stockport, where it is known as Wellington Road. This provided the money he needed to start competing and in 1953 – when he was 31 – he bought a MG TD and went racing. He waltzed through a number of other cars and was soon scoring some good results in British races. This led to the purchase in 1955 of a Maserati 150S sports car. He would later take the Maserati engine and used it in a Lotus Eleven, which was a great success and he won 27 victories in Britain with the unusual car. He also went aboard and competed in various European events. The following year he upgraded to a Maserati 200S engine, which was a 2-litre unit. This was also quite successful but he ended the season at Goodwood when he suffered a suspension failure and crashed heavily, breaking a leg. The car was a write-off and so Naylor and his mechanic Fred Wilkinson built their own version of the Lotus for 1958, beefing up the tubular chassis. The car was called the JBW-Maserati, the JB coming from Naylor’s initials and the W from Wilkinson. It was quite successful in minor races, winning 14 times. Naylor even shared the car with Stirling Moss in one race at the Roskilde Ring in Denmark when Moss's own Maserati failed.

 

They then decided to build a JBW Formula 1 car, while also putting together a Ferrrai-engined sports car. The F1 car was based on the Cooper F2 design and was fitted with a Maserati 250F engine. It ran in three British F1 races, retiring in the International Trophy and the British GP and being a non-starter in the Gold Cup at Oulton Park after a crash in practice. It had some success in Formula Libre events. That year Naylor was invited to co-drive Graham Whitehead’s Aston Martin DBR1 at Le Mans. This resulted in a big accident when Naylor rolled the car at Maison Blanche, but he escaped unhurt.

 

The F1 programme expanded in 1960 with more races, some of them on the Continent and was even shipped out to California for the United States GP at Riverside, but it was unreliable and never scored any decent results.

 

At the Italian GP, which was boycotted by most of the British teams because of the danger of the Monza high banking, Naylor met NASCAR boss Bill France and the two hit it off. This led to an invitation from France for Naylor to try to lap Daytona at more than 180mph in a Cooper Monaco-Ferrari sports car. As a result of this, France organised for him to drive a Pontiac prepared by Smokey Yunick in the Daytona 500 in February 1961. He qualified seventh in the qualifying race but retired early. He seems to have then bought a ride in a Ford and started 58^thand last for the 500. He raced for 85 of the 200 laps before going out with an engine failure.

 

There was a second JBW in 1961 for the new 1.5-litre Formula 1 regulations, with the old Maserati 150S engine being used. It was off the pace. For the Italian GP Naylor fitted the car with a Coventry Climax engine but this blew up after a few laps. That summer he returned to Daytona and tested Art Arfons’s Green Monster land speed record car at Daytona…

 

Towards the end of the year, however, Naylor was diagnosed to have a heart problem. He was only 38 but decided it would be best to retire from racing.

In the years that followed he spent much time messing up in boats, having retired from business due to his poor health. He ran a café in Marbella in southern Spain until 1989 when he was killed in an explosion while working on a boat, believed to have been caused by a build-up of gas.

 

 

[Radoye]

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In 1966 an imposing and rather elegant 1931 Rolls-Royce Phantom II rolled into the paddock at Silverstone. It featured a Sedanca de Ville coachwork, painted bright yellow, created by the Barker company in South Audley Street in Mayfair. This was no ordinary car. She a movie career behind her, having co-starred with Rex Harrison, Omas Sharif, Ingrid Bergman, Shirley MacLaine, George C Scott, Alain Delon and Jeanne Moreau in the 1965 movie “The Yellow Rolls Royce”, released by MGM, directed by Anthony Asquith and written by Terence Rattigan.

 

The car featured curtained compartment behind where the chauffeur sat and a large box on the back for luggage. The car drew to a stop and the chauffeur jumped out and proceeded to busy himself with the luggage box, extracting a card table, four folding chairs, a table cloth, silverware (proper stuff), bone china and crystal glass. He then opened a bottle of champagne and returned to the car and opened the door. Four racing drivers emerged, wearing their overalls, although each sported a yellow bowtie and a black top hat. They sat down and enjoyed a impromptu lunch of cavier and crackers, with champagne whenever their glasses were empty. No-one paid them much attention. People didn’t go to national motor races in those days to have picnics. They went to watch racing…

 

It was a Formula 3 event and Charlie Crichton-Stuart, Piers Courage, Charles Lucas and Jonathan Williams were all taking part. The chauffeur was another racer called called Anthony Horsley, known as “Bubbles”. They were a wealthy group: Crichton-Stuart was one of the Bute family, who owned most of Scotland. Charlie was slightly older than the others and had been an RAF pilot. He was often to be found in the company of the stunning model-turned-movie star Shirley Anne Field. Lucas, who was known as “Luke” came from a wealthy land-owning family, which had a fortune based on construction, his great-grandfather having built the Albert Hall, Covent Garden Opera House, Cliveden House, Alexandra Palace and many other celebrated landmarks. He had been at school (Eton, of course) with Courage, who was the heir to the Courage Brewery, although he was known as “Porridge” to his pals.

 

Piers was soon to be married to Sally Curzon, daughter of BRDC President Earl Howe, the former Grand Prix driver. Jonathan Williams was less well-heeled but lived in Crichton-Stuart’s apartment in Pinner Road, Harrow, where Lucas, Courage, Horsley and Williams were often to be found, when not racing. This was also the home of a youngster called Frank Williams, who slept on the sofa, when he wasn’t off racing. Other visitors to the establishment include Innes Ireland and Jochen Rindt.

 

Crichton-Stuart would go on to be one of the early members of Williams Grand Prix Engineering, when Frank finally managed to land some money for his F1 team. Courage, alas, tied in a crash in 1970 at Zandvoort, driving a Williams de Tomaso.

 

Lucas ran the Lotus Formula 3 team for a while before deciding to give up racing and sold the business, which later became Titan Cars. He would go on to become the van driver for Hesketh Racing, the Formula 1 team run by Lord Hesketh, which helped James Hunt on his way to success, and was managed by Lucas’s “chauffeur” “Bubbles” Horsley…

 

 

[Radoye]

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For centuries Germans settled in the Czech-speaking Bohemian crown lands in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, to the south of the Sudeten mountains, which formed a natural border between Poland and the Czechs. They made up around 30 percent of the population in these regions and were known as German Bohemians, and later as Sudeten Germans. The region became part of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1867. The town of Novy Jicin, known to the Germans as Neutitschein, was not far from Ostrava, between Brno and the Polish border, was home to a furniture-maker called Karl Neubauer. Novy Jicin was close to the village of Kopřivnice (known as Nesseldorf to the Germans), where in 1897 the Nesselsdorfer Wagenbau-Fabriksgesellschaft was founded, to build wooden carriages for the road and for the railways. In 1897 the firm decided to build an automobile named the Präsident, to be powered by a Benz engine. This was at the instigation of Baron Theodor Liebig, from a wealthy textile family, who was one of the early owners and racers of Benz machinery. The company was always looking for help from skilled carpenters and so Karl Neubauer was often to be found there, helping to create the wooden bodies required for the Präsident. Karls’ son Alfred, who was nicknamed Friedl, saw his first Präsident when he was seven and was fascinated by automobiles from then onwards.. After attending the local schools he attended the nearby imperial cavalry cadet school in the famous garrison town of Hranice na Moravě (Weißkirchen in German) and then, aged 19, was transferred to the Imperial Artillery School at Traiskirchen, to the south of Vienna before being promoted to the rank of Sergeant and joining the Kaiser Franz Josef Regiment. At the time the Imperial Austrian Army was just beginning to look at replacing horses with motorised transportation and the 21-year-old Sergeant Neubauer was sent to the Austro-Daimler headquarters in Wiener Neustadt to discuss the possibilities with Austro-Daimler’s chief designer Ferdinand Porsche, another Sudeten German. Although there was a gap of 15 years in age, the two men hit it off.

 

War broke out not long afterwards and young Neubauer was put in command of two motorised mortar units and despatched to the Balkans, where he took part in campaigns in Serbia, Montenegro and Albania.

 

He was commissioned and appointed a Lieutenant and was ordered to join a commission that was looking into developing new vehicles for the Austrian artillery. This revived his friendship with Porsche and after Austria was defeated Porsche offered him a job as the director of road testing for the Austro-Daimler company.

 

After the end of the war, Neubauer was no longer an Austro-Hungarian and officially became Czech, the state of Czechoslovakia having been established in October 1918.

 

In 1922 Neubauer was despatched to Sicily to take part in the Targa Florioin an Austro-Daimler Sascha. He finished 19th, three places behind an Italian youngster called Enzo Ferrari, who had been racing an Alfa Romeo.

 

But change was ahead. In April 1923 Porsche was offered the role of technical director of Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft (DMG) in Stuttgart, Austro-Daimler’s parent company.Two months later Neubauer followed Porsche to DMG. Neubauer was sent off to Sicily again in 1924 to take part in the Targa Florio, teamed with veteran Mercedes Grand Prix drivers Christian Werner and Christian Lautenschlager. They finished first, 10th and 15th, with Neubauer bringing up the rear. Later that year Werner and Neubauer were joined for the Italian GP by aristocrats Count Giulio Masetti and Count Louis Zborowski. Sadly, Zborowski crashed into a tree in the middle of the race, and the Mercedes team withdrew.

 

It was a difficult time for the car industry and that year DMG formed “a community of interests” with rival Benz & Cie, which led to a full merger in June 1926 to form Daimler-Benz AG. Before the final merger Neubauer was named as racing manager for DMG, his organisational skills having been considered better than his abilities behind the wheel.

 

The Benz merger brought new management with Benz employees Wilhelm Kissel becoming CEO and chief engineer Hans Nibel sharing control of the technical development with Porsche. Neubauer managed the sporting activities, running Porsche’s Mercedes-Benz SSK in sports car events, with occasional outings in Grands Prix with stripped down cars for Rudi Caracciola. While this was going on, Neubauer became a German citizen in 1928.

 

At the end of the year there was another big change when Porsche decided to move to Steyr, leaving Nibel as technical director of Daimler-Benz AG. This time Neubauer did not follow, staying on to run competition activities, although these stopped completely at the end of the year when the Wall Street Crash caused an economic crisis that would become the Great Depression. Daimler-Benz withdrew from competition but Neubauer found a way to run low-key programmes with the SSKs at Le Mans in 1930 and 1931, with occasional Grand Prix appearances for Caracciola and others. He also kept an eye open for new talents and by the middle of 1931 Caracciola was able to give Daimler-Benz a major victory at Avus in a stripped down SSK sportscar. Nibel began to make plans for a new Grand Prix team and designed the Mercedes-Benz W25, which was funded by money from the new Nazi government in Germany.

 

And so it was that Alfred Neubauer found himself at the head of the mighty Mercedes Grand Prix programme of the 1930s, battling with rival German firm AutoUnion, in what has become known as the age of the titans.

 

World War II ended that era, with Neubauer managing Mercedes factories during the war years. He would begin campaigning for a return to competition in the early 1950s, when Mercedes ran three of the old pre-war cars in odd races. He then got the go-ahead to create a sports car programme with the Mercedes 300SL, with much success and in 1954 Mercedes returned to Grand Prix racing when the new 2.5-litre formula began. The W196 was a dominant car and in 1955, Juan-Manuel Fangio won the Formula 1 World Championship for the company.

 

But that summer disaster struck at Le Mans. Pierre Levegh, driving a works Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR ran into the back of a slower car that veered into his path, avoiding the Jaguar of Mike Hawthorn, which made a late decision to pit. Levegh’s car flew into the wall and disintegrated into the crowd. There were at least 80 people killed, including Levegh, with another 120 injured. It was, and remains, motor racing’s worst disaster and led to the banning of all racing in Switzerland and major changes in the way the sport could operate.

 

At the end of the year, Mercedes quietly withdrew from the sport. It would not return until the late 1980s. Neubauer was then 64 and was close to retirement age.

 

He lived to a ripe old age, long enough to see Mercedes begin to return the sport…

 

 

[Radoye]

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Paolo Pavanello was involved in racing in Italy in the early 1970s leading up to becoming the manager (and a shareholder) in the AFMP Euroracing team, partnered by March Engineering’s agent in Italy Sandro Angeleri, racing driver Martino Finotto and March Engineering itself.  That all went bad wrong when Angeleri was arrested in 1977 and jailed for drug smuggling. The team collapsed and Pavanello salvaged the operational end of the business and transformed it into Euroracing, running Piercarlo Ghinzani to victory in the Italian Formula 3 championship in a March-Alfa Romeo in 1979.

 

The team won the European Formula 3 title in 1980 with Michele Alboreto and then again in 1981 with Mauro Baldi. March then decided to withdraw from Formula 3 and so Pavanello took the two March 813 chassis he owned and rebuilt them as Euroracing 101s, which were then raced with much success in 1982 by Oscar Larrauri, who won the European title, and a young Emanuele Pirro.

 

At the time Alfa Romeo, which was then owned by the Italian government’s holding company Finmeccanica, was suffering serious financial losses and it was looking to reduce its involvement in Formula 1. The decision was taken to hand over the chassis design to Euroracing, leaving Carlo Chiti’s Autodelta to develop the engines.

 

Pavanello took control of things late in the day and so had little choice but to have Autodelta designer Gerard Ducarouge update the carbon composite 182 that he had designed the previous year, which had shown promise but was never properly developed. The result was the Alfa Romeo 183T which was raced by Andrea de Cesaris and Baldi.

 

It was clear that Pavanello wanted to get his own people involved and at the French Grand Prix, the opening European round of the World Championship, held in April at Paul Ricard, and in practice de Cesaris’s car was found to have an empty fire extinguisher bottle and was disqualified. Ducarouge was blamed and was dismissed by Pavanello. There were then races in quick succession in San Marino, Monaco and Belgium.

 

At the time John Player Team Lotus has slipped into the doldrums. The Lotus 93T, the first Lotus to be fitted with Renault F1 turbo engines, had been designed in the autumn of 1982 by a team led by Lotus founder Colin Chapman, who had done a deal for Renault turno engines that summer. In mid-December Chapman had suddenly died, at the age of just 54. The team finished off the design but what was not widely known at the time was that the Renault deal allowed for just one car to run with its engines for the first half of the season. Perhaps it was because the team was focussed on developing an active suspension system, but the car was designed with a standard-sized fuel tank, while rival teams worked out that with refuelling they could build smaller and lighter cars.

 

Team Lotus’s new boss Peter Warr had the difficult task of informing Nigel Mansell that h would be racing the older car, with the less-powerful Cosworth engines. It did not go down well.

 

The 93T was not very competitive and was highly unreliable in the early part of the year and Warr decided that new technical leadership was required. He made contact with Ducarouge, offering him the job of being technical director. The Duke, who also had an offer from Renault, decided to join the British team. The Gauloises-puffing Frenchman arrived like a whirlwind at Ketteringham Hall in May and concluded straight away that the 93T must be scrapped and a new car built. Working with Martin Ogilvie, Lotus’s chef designer, he set out to create a lighter more nimble car, based on a modified version of the Lotus 92 monocoque. His target was to have two of the new cars for the British GP at Silverstone on Saturday, July 16.

 

There was a gap of four and a half weeks after the Canadian GP on June 12, which helped the team get the work done and not only were there two new cars ready to go at Silverstone but they were quick as well. After the first qualifying session on Thursday, de Angelis was third on the provisional grid, behind Alain Prost’s Renault and Rene Arnoux’s Ferrari. Mansell, on the other hand, was suffering from a misfire which would not go away. On the Friday de Angelis dropped one place to fourth as Arnoux and his team-mate Patrick Tambay grabbed the front row. Mansell continued to struggle and ended up a disappointed 18th on the grid. In the race, however, de Angelis disappeared after just one lap with a turbo failure, but Mansell drove steadily through the field, making a late pit stop to emerge in fifth place and then hunted down Arnoux to grab fourth. He could not catch Tambay and had to settle for fourth place, amid great excitement for British fans…

 

Team Lotus was back on an upward path again. 

 

 

[Radoye]

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The Australian GPs of 1995 and 1996 followed on from one another. The event had switched from the end-of-season party in Adelaide, to the season-opener in Melbourne. The 1995 race, had the biggest crowd in modern F1 history, with a four-day attendance of 520,000 people and a race day crowd of 210,000. It is often remembered as the race at which Mika Hakkinen crashed at Brewery Bend on Friday afternoon, after suffering a rear left puncture and crashed so heavily that his helmet hit the steering wheel and then the side of the cockpit. He was fortunate that two of the doctors working at the corner intensive care specialist Jerome Cockings and neurologist Stephen Lewis were on the scene immediately, as Professor Sid Watkins was still on his way to the scene in the medical car. They realised that Hakkinen had suffered a fracture at the base of his skull and was not getting sufficient oxygen. They performed a trackside tracheotomy on the Finn, before he was transported to the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

 

The event went on as planned and by the end of qualifying on the Saturday, the two Rothmans Williams-Renaults of Damon Hill and David Coulthard qualifying 1-2 on the grid, the two split by 0.123s, with Hill ahead and Coulthard 0.211s ahead of the Benetton-Renault of Michael Schumacher.

 

At the start on Sunday Coulthard jumped into the lead and held off Hill until the first pit stops on lap 19. He has recently scored his first F1 victory, at the Portuguese GP, but the 24-year-old was still learning. He arrived at the pit lane entrance and slowed, changing down from third to second gear rather late. The engine gave him an unexpected push and DC braked to counter-act this, but the pit lane was dusty and Williams was travelling too quickly and the brakes locked up and Coulthard slid into the inside of the pit wall, which turned to the right quite dramatically at that point. The nose of the Williams was knocked off and broke the left front suspension of the car.

 

Coulthard was out…

 

Hill won the race, lapping the entire field twice after 81 laps.

 

And that was the end of the Grand Prix in Adelaide.

 

 

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The 1966 World Championship began on May 22 in Monaco. It was a late start because of the new 3-litre formula, which meant not just new car-engine combinations but also a number of new teams. Not everyone was ready.

 

The biggest change was that Jaguar, which had owned Coventry Climax since 1963, had agreed a deal to be merged into the British Motor Corporation (BMC). It was a time when the British manufacturing was in decline and mergers and takeovers were being promoted by the government in order to ensure that Britain retained a strong presence in the automobile industry. Jaguar owner Sir Williams Lyons was nearing retiring and his only son John had been killed in 1955 in a head-on collision with a US Army truck near Cherbourg, in France, when he was driving to Le Mans, leaving Sir William without a successor. As part of the restructuring it was decided to withdraw Coventry Climax from F1. The rights to the engines were sold to Bob King’s Racing Preparations in Wembley and although the engines continued to be used by some teams, they quickly became uncompetitive. Ferrari had a reliable V12 engine, concocted from a 3.3-litre sports car unit that was reduced to three-litres to meet the regulations. Jack Brabham had commissioned Repco to revamp an obsolete GM engine block to create a Repco V8, while BRM had decided to build a complicated H16 engine.

 

There big changes as well at Cooper. Charles Cooper had died at the age of 70 in October 1964. His son John was still recovering from a huge crash on the Kingston Bypass, which had left him with a fractured skull. Wheeler-dealer Roy Salvadori had just sold his car business to the Chipstead Motor Group, the UK’s Maserati importer, and he convinced Chipstead boss Mario Tozzi-Condivi to buy Cooper. Tozzi-Condivi then asked Maserati to revive its old V12 engine from 1957 to provide engines for the team.

 

Bruce McLaren had left Cooper and had started his own team, his plan being to use a Ford Indianapolis V8 engine, derived from the 406, while had commissioned Weslake Engineering to design a V12. Honda too was working on a new V12 but it was not ready.

 

It was a similar story with Team Lotus, as Ford had agreed to fund a new engine build by Cosworth Engineering, but the DFV was not ready. So Lotus did a deal to use the BRM H16s.

 

The usual pre-season non-championship races started only in April with Syracuse, which John Surtees won in a Ferrari, a good effort as John was still recovering from the serious injuries he had suffered in September 1965 when he crashed a Lola T70 sports car at Mosport Park. In mid-May the International Trophy at Silverstone saw Jack Brabham’s Brabham-Repco victorious.

 

A week later in Monaco there was much excitement as John Frankenheimer and his movie crew were busy filming.

 

Jim Clark was on pole in a Lotus, using an old Climax engine, with Surtees alongside in an interim Ferrari 246, which was basically an old 158 fitted with a 2.4-litre engine. Stewart was third in his BRM.

 

Surtees led the first 14 laps of the race, chased by Stewart, until the Ferrari suffered a differential failure. Stewart then took over. It was, not surprisingly, a race with a very high retirement rate, due to the all the new cars, and in the end Stewart won by 40 secs, with Graham Hill third a lap behind. The only other classified runner was Bob Bondurant, who was five laps down in a BRM. Two other cars were still circulating: Guy Ligier in a Cooper-Maserati, who was 25 laps behind, and Jo Bonnier, in a similar car, who was two laps behind him. The race held the record for the fewest number of classified finishers in the history of the World Championship until the Monaco GP in 1996 when only three cars got to the finish line.

 

 

[Radoye]

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George Fowell Ltd was a company based in the unglamorous Birmingham suburb of Smethwick. It manufactured small plant machinery: dumper trucks, mini steam rollers and cement mixers. These were branded GF. The founder’s oldest son Gordon began working for the family business in the late 1950s, designing dumper trucks. In his spare time he competed with a Lotus Eleven sports car. The arrival of the Mini in 1959 gave Gordon Fowell an idea: why not diversify the business and have GF build a lightweight GT coupé, based on the Mini sub frame and running gear.

 

It was in the same era in which Lamborghini was transforming itself from being a tractor manufacturer to becoming a supercar company so perhaps there was sound logic in the idea. The only difference was that Lamborghini had more money to play with. The GF coupé was given the rather exotic name of Gitane, the French word for gipsy. Creating the prototype proved to be sufficiently difficult to convince GF to give up on the idea, although the Gitane that was built was use quite successfully in hillclimb events in the late 1960s. By then Gordon had come up with another idea: to start a company with a racing journalist called Alan Philips to  create and sell audio tapes of racing engines. The business was called Goral. It is not really clear why David Yorke, the celebrated team manager, who had made his name with Vanwall and the JW Automotive Gulf GT40 team, who had gone on to be an advisor for motorsport to the Martini & Rossi drinks company, commissioned Goral to build an F1 car for Martini for the 1973 season.

 

The most likely explanation is that Fowell had decided to draw his own F1 design, probably just for fun, and that Yorke found himself in need of an F1 car in a hurry, heard about what Fowell was doing - and decided to give him a try. Whatever the case, choosing a designer without any previous F1 experience, with a background in dumper trucks, was a little eccentric.

 

At the time Martini was sponsoring a new F1 team called Tecno. It had a good record in the junior formulae but had embarked on a Formula 1 the hard way, building its own flat-12 engines, rather than buying Cosworths, as everyone else was doing. The first season – 1972 – was not a success and so Tecno’s owners Luciano and Gianfranco Pederzani commissioned New Zealander Alan McCall to design a new car for them. Yorke and Count Gregorio Rossi seem to have decided it would be wiser to build a car in the UK…

 

While this was all going on, McCall talked Chris Amon into joining Tecno. He was a top F1 driver who had been left without a drive when Matra quit F1. He did a deal to race with March Engineering, but fell out with the management before the 1973 season had even begun. McCall’s Italian-built car was ready in May, in time for the fifth race of the F1 season, at Zolder in Belgium. The car was heavy but reliable and Amon finished three laps behind, but that was enough to finish sixth and score a point, which looked like a pretty decent result, if only on paper.

 

The Goral car – known as the E731 – did not appear until the British GP in mid-July where Amon tried it for the first time in practice. It seems that the British end of the team indulged in some skulduggery, trying to show that the British car was better than its Italian cousin - and the result was that Luciano Pederzani stormed off, never to return.

 

Yorke then recommended that Martini & Rossi do a deal with Bernie Ecclestone’s Brabham for 1974. Before the money ran out, the Tecno E731 appeared again in Holland and Austria, but then the team closed its doors. That left Amon in need of a drive once again. He had seen Jack Brabham, Bruce McLaren and John Surtees all start their own F1 teams and decided that he would give it a go, reasoning that a half-decent chassis with a Cosworth engine and a Hewland gearbox ought to be able to qualify for races. He found funding from British racer John Dalton and asked Fowell to design him a new car which was then built by John Thompson’s TC Prototypes.

 

The E731 had been a very low car and the AF101 followed that concept. In an effort to create a narrower chassis (and thus reduce the frontal area) Fowell placed the fuel tank between the driver and the engine, rather than having the fuel in both of the sidepods, as was then the fashion.

 

Aerodynamics was still a rudimentary art in F1 but Fowell asked Professor Tom Boyce, a Canadian academic who worked at Imperial College in London, for help. Boyce was a clever man, with a Masters in plasma physics and a doctorate in combustion kinetics, although these were unusual qualifications for a racing car designer.

 

He had rallied an MG in Canada before moving to the UK in 1961 and after that had competed in (and completed) the London-Sydney Marathon, in an MGB, as co-driver of journalist Jean Denton. His first work in racing car design had been in 1970 and 1971 when he shaped the body of the Jerboa SP sports car, built around an old Ginetta G12. This enjoyed limited success in prototype events in Europe.

 

The Amon appeared (briefly) at the International Trophy race in April 1974 and a couple of weeks later was present for the Spanish GP. Amon qualified the car 23rd despite serious brake vibrations, which led to a failure in the race. The team missed the Belgian GP but then reappeared at Monaco, where Amon qualified 20th but did not start because the car was not ready in time for the race. Chris Amon Racing then missed the next four races and the team had concluded that the AF101 was not sufficiently rigid, which meant it flexed and consequently was not reliable nor easy to drive. Trying to strengthen the car made it too heavy and the car could not qualify when it reappeared in August in Germany.

 

The team ran out of money and closed down after the Italian GP.

 

Fowell disappeared from F1 but later designed the Sana Formula Atlantic car, with some success.

 

In the end he gave up racing - but later made a fortune by designing and developing the PowerJog running machine, with a new company called Sport Engineering Ltd, based in Stirchley.

 

 

[Radoye]

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Not all racing drivers are sane and balanced individuals. Some of them are rather difficult personalities and often that is a part of the reason that they are successful – or not. France’s Jean Behra was just such a man. He was a quick driver but never won a Grand Prix, although the driver from Nice won a series of victories in non-championship races. He rose to prominence with Equipe Gordini in the early 1950s, scoring his first podium in Switzerland in 1952. In 1955 he switched to the Maserati factory team and that year finished second in Argentina and collected four second places, ending the year fourth in the World Championship. He was second again in Argentina the following year but then moved on to a season with BRM in 1958, which resulted in just one third place, before he was recruited by Ferrari for 1959, to replace the retiring Mike Hawthorn. He found himself racing teamed up with British drivers Tony Brooks and Cliff Allison.

 

The problem for Behra was that Brooks was very fast and he fell into the age old trap of believing that the team was favouring Brooks. That made little sense, but sometimes drivers have to resort to such thinking when they come up against someone young and quicker. It’s the only way they can handle it. Behra was then 38 and Brooks 27 but although Ferrari never designated a number one driver, both Brooks and Behra seemed to believe they were team leader. In reality, Brooks was…

 

Things came to a head at the European Grand Prix at Reims in early July. Ferrari sent five cars to the race for Brooks, Behra, Phil Hill and Olivier Gendebien being joined by Dan Gurney. It was a blisteringly hot day and Behra dropped out of the race with an engine problem after showing well in the early laps, setting a number of fastest laps. Brooks streaked away to victory, averaging an impressive 127 mph.

 

Behra was frustrated. When he climbed out of the car he spoke to the French journalist Pierre About, the F1 correspondent of L’Equipe, France’s big daily sports newspaper. He claimed that not only had Ferrari given him a bad engine but the chassis was also not right and the car handled badly as a result. Legend has it that there was an altercation in the pits and Behra is supposed to have laid out Ferrari team manager Romolo Tavoni with a single punch.

But that is not what actually happened.

 

On the Monday after the race Enzo Ferrari heard what had been published in L’Equipe and was not happy with the criticism. He had not travelled to the race from Italy and so telephoned Tavoni, who had stayed on in Reims in order to collect the prize at a prize-giving lunch, which was a quite normal thing in those days. Ferrari told Tavoni to see Behra and tell him to retract what he had said.

 

Tavoni duly did as he was told instructed and met Behra at the restaurant where the prizegiving was taking place. Behra lost his temper, called Tavoni stupid and punched him in the face twice. Tavoni did not return the blows - but was not happy with his difficult driver.

 

There are two stories about how Ferrari found out: firstly that one of the engineers told him about the altercation; or secondly that it was Enzo’s wife Laura who was there with the team.

 

Whatever the case, Behra was summoned to Maranello for a meeting at 10 o’clock on the Tuesday morning. 

 

Enzo Ferrari decided that he would invite some Italian journalists and L’Equipe’s Italian correspondent for a press conference at midday. He explained to Behra that he wanted an apology for Tavoni and asked the pugnacious Frenchman to tell the media that he was happy with his car, telling Behra that he would never have sent a kinked chassis to a race, because it made no sense to do such a thing. Behra refused to do was Ferrari had asked. Enzo repeated the request. Behra refused again. Ferrari then called in the head of the finance department Ermano della Casa and told him to settle up Behra’s accounts, pay anything outstanding, and terminate the contract. Their relationship was over.

 

A couple of weeks later Behra went to Berlin to race a Porsche sports car and was killed in a gruesome accident on the high banking at Avus…