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[Radoye]

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Brothers Claude and Georges Gachnang were both passionate about racing, even if they lived in a country where such activities were banned. They lived in the town of Aigle in Switzerland, to the south of Montreux, nor far from where the river Rhone runs into Lake Geneva, and worked as mechanics, racing whenever they could. Georges competed at Le Mans in 1960, sharing an AC-Bristol with André Wicky, but it was not a great success. Claude and Georges then decided to set up their own business called Cegga, an acronym for Charles Et Georges Gachnang, Aigle, preparing and modifying cars to use in local hillclimb races and sports car events outside Switzerland.

 

These included the Cegga Ferrari 3000S, which was a modified 1958 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa. In 1961 the brothers decided that they would build their own Cegga Formula 1 car for the new 1.5-litre F1 regulations.  This was a tube-framed device, powered by a Maserati sports car engine. The car as not ready until April 1962 when it was taken to Pau to take part in the non-championship Pau Grand Prix Formula 1 race. The driver Maurice Caillet did not qualify. The car was then sent to Naples for the Gran Premio di Napoli on the Posillipo circuit but again Caillet failed to qualify and the project was stopped and the car sold. It was used in local hillclimbs after that. In 1966, however, the brothers decided to try again, this time with a V12 Ferrari engine. They built a car that looked similar to a Lotus 24 and Georges Gachnang tested the car at Monza but there was never the money to go racing and the Cegga-Ferrari was used only in hillclimbs by Georges Gachnang. It was later sold to a French driver called Philippe Panis for hillclimb races. He would only use it for a few months because his wife’s family forced him to stop racing, not long after he and his wife Monique had had a son, whom they named Olivier.

 

The Gachnangs did not have the money to make their dreams come true and Cegga was shut down in 1970 and Georges set up a garage and soon became a car dealer. Georges’s son Olivier and his daughter Veronique were also passionate about the sport, as was Véronique’s husband Antoine ‘Toni’ Buemi, who came from Sicilian stock. It was probably natural that Toni and Véronique’s first child Sébastien would become passionate about the sport as well, as was his cousin, Natacha, Olivier’s daughter, who born a year earlier.

 

When Sébastien was five his father gave him a kart for Christmas and he was soon racing around the car park outside the family’s Toyota garage. As soon as he could he began competing and was soon winning titles, often racing karts against his cousin.

 

Natacha, being older, was the first to jump into car racing, competing in Formula BMW in Germany in 2003, Sebastien followed in 2004. In his debut season he finished third in the championship, behind the dominant Sebastian Vettel, who was then in his second year. Buemi then did a second year, but was beaten to the title by a youngster called Nico Hulkenberg. But he landed support from Red Bull and this took him through Formula 3 and GP2 and ultimately put him into Scuderia Toro Rosso for the 2009 season. He scored points on his debut in Australia, and again in his third race in China. Despite some solid results Buemi fell victim to Red Bull’s ruthless approach, being dropped to make way for Daniel Ricciardo and Jean-Eric Vergne. His abilities as a test driver were recognised and appreciated and he was named asRed Bull Racing’s reserve driver for 2012, a job he continues to hold.

 

His career was far from over, however, as he was signed to race for Toyota in the WEC in 2013 and the following year he won the WEC title. He also began competing in Formula E and would win the electric series title in 2015-2016. In 2018 he won Le Mans sharing his Toyota with Fernando Alonso and Kazuki Nakajima and scored a second victory this year – and a second WEC title.

 

Gachnang climbed the ladder to race sports cars but in 2010 suffered a mechanical failure while practising with her GT car at the Yas Marina circuit in Abu Dhabi. The car smashed into the barriers at the end of the straight and was badly damaged. She suffered a serious leg injury and had to be cut from the car. She has not raced since.

 

 

[Radoye]

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Racing drivers are not always reasonable individuals. They are, perhaps by nature, not given to caution and that can get them into trouble – and worse.

 

Robert Kubica is a good example of this. He had struggled through the ranks to get to Formula 1, the first Polish driver to compete in the sport, and in 2008 won the Canadian Grand Prix at the wheel of his BMW Sauber after his longtime rival Lewis Hamilton crashed into the back of Kimi Raikkonen’s Ferrari at the exit of the pitlane. BMW quit at the end of 2009, leaving Robert without a drive and he quickly signed to race for Renault in 2010. It was not the best option as the team was in the process of being sold after the disastrous revelations about the Singapore GP in 2008 when the team fixed the race by having Nelson Piquet Jr crash, allowing Fernando Alonso to get into a position that allowed him to win. It was rumoured from the middle of 2010 onwards that Ferrari wanted to hire Kubica but Felipe Massa was retained that summer, leaving Robert to stay at Renault in 2011. Then in February that year, while competing in theRonde di Andora rally in a privately-entered car, he had a severe accident when he hit a barrier head-on and this came into the cockpit and caused him serious injuries. For the next eight years Robert tried to find a way back into F1, undergoing a number of operations, before finally convincing Williams to take him on in 2019. It is a sad story as Kubica was one of the most talented of his generation. It was doubly sad because a little while before his accident he had signed a dal to race for Ferrari in 2012…

 

He’s not only driver to have had such a story. The German driver Stefan Bellof exploded on to the international racing scene in 1982, winning his first two Formula 2 races as a rookie. This put him on the shopping list of the Formula 1 teams and landed him a factory Rothmans Porsche sports car drive in 1983 and 1984. In his first year he won at Silverstone, Fuji and Kyalami but lost out in the championship race to team-mate Jacky Ickx, although he also set the fastest ever lap at the old Nürburgring, which stood unbeaten until a couple of years ago.

 

At the end of 1983 Bellof had such a good reputation that he was invited to test for the McLaren F1 team, along with Ayrton Senna and Martin Brundle. The team had contracts with Alain Prost and Niki Lauda so there was little hope of a race drive, but the performances was such that he and Brundle were signed by Tyrrell for the 1984 season. That year he won the WEC title with six wins in 11 races and made his name in F1, with a best result being a spectacular third place at Monaco, a race he might have won had it not been stopped early because of pouring rain.

 

Bellof remained with Tyrrell in 1985 and Ken Tyrrell was keen to stop his drivers from racing in sports cars. But because he did not pay them enough, both Bellof and Brundle raced in WEC as well. Bellof drove a Brun Porsche. At Spa, during the Spa 1000km, he collided with his former Rothmans Porsche team-mate Jacky Ickx, going into Eau Rouge corner. The car ran into the barriers behind which was a concrete block that  served as the base for the grandstands. Bellof was killed in the crash. He had signed to join Ferrari in 1986 shortly before his death...

 

 

[Radoye]

 

[Radoye]

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Go west from Kuala Lumpur, across the Malacca Strait, and you will find the city of Medan. It might seem a pretty unlikely city to have been the birthplace of a Formula 1 team owner, but Jap Tek Lie was unusual in an awful lot of respects. When he born in 1907, Medan was part of what was known as the Dutch East Indies, and as the Paris of Sumatra. As the name suggests, Jap Tek Lie was from a hakka Chinese family. At the time around two percent of the population of the East Indies came from China (around 1.2 million of them) and they were treated as Dutch subjects, although there were classified as "foreign orientals",which meant that access to Dutch education was limited. In pursuit of a good education, therefore, Chinese parents would send their children to Holland. It was thus that in the 1920s, Jap Tek Lie went to school in Holland.  This meant that he learned a lot of languages, including six Chinese dialects, Dutch, English, French, German, Malay and even Thai. This all helped when he began a trading company after finishing his education. Initially he ran trading companies and travel agencies. By that point he had adopted the name of “Teddy Yip”. He was always a party animal, enjoying good martinis, exotic women and very fast cars. He had charm to spare and travelled endlessly, making money. When Europe fell into war, he departed, settling in Hong Kong, although much of the trading was done in this era through Macau which was neutral because it was a Portuguese territory. In the 1950s Macau’s position was further enhanced during the Korean War when United Nations imposed a trade embargo on China. Yip did well and by the 1950s was already a big player in the city. He started racing in the same era, competing in the Macau GP in a Jaguar XK120.

 

The Portuguese government then decided to grant the rights to all leisure activities in Macau, including casinos, hotels and even the ferries to a private company. Yip became part of the Sociedade de Turismo e Diversoes de Macau (STDM) consortium that won the bid, along with his brother-in-law Stanley Ho, Henry Fok, a well-connected Hong Kong real estate developer, and Yip Hon,  who ran casinos. STDM paid taxes to the government, but were also involved in many other activities, such as dredging waterways, funding construction projects, overseas tourism offices and trade shows and organising events in Macau. This organisation gradually turned Macau into a major tourist centre, focussed on gambling, but active in other respects as well, including hosting the Macau GP, in which he raced for many years, his best result being third in a Jaguar E-type. In the early 1970s he met the the team boss Sid Taylor and agreed to sponsor the team in Formula 5000, running Vern Schuppan. This led to Yip joining forces with Team Ensign in F1 in 1974 but also further Formula 5000 activity with Schuppan and Alan Jones. In 1976 he set up Theodore Racing, run by Taylor and fielded an Ensign for Patrick Tambay. He then commissioned Ron Tauranac to build him a Formula 1 car, which was driven by Eddie Cheever and then by Keke Rosberg, who shocked the F1 world by winning the non-championship 1977 International Trophy race at Silverstone. That was the high point but Yip continued to be active both in F1 and in the United States, where he sponsored Dan Gurney. In 1979 Yip he sponsored Ensign again without success and then ran a British F1 team for David Kennedy and Desiree Wilson, who become the first woman to win a Formula 1 race that year. Yip decided to create another F1 team in 1981 and hired Tony Southgate and team manager Jo Ramirez. The car was driven by Tambay and later by Marc Surer. He then merged Theodore with Ensign and ran the Nigel Bennett-designed Ensign N183 as a Theodore for Johnny Cecotto and Roberto Guerrero. The team was closed after that but Yip continued to run Theodore Racing in Macau, hiring some of the best known names to drive his cars. He continued to enjoy racing until his death in 2003, at the age of 96.

 

 

[Radoye]

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Before Charlie Whiting was made F1 Race Director in 1997 the role was filled  – albeit very briefly – by a British Rear Admiral, who had recently retired from the Royal Navy. The experiment was not very successful as military discipline and the fast-moving ducking and weaving of the F1 crowd did not combine very successfully. Roger Lane-Nott disappeared off to a life running worthy causes, initially in the offshore oil sector and later in farming. He was secretary of the British Racing Drivers’ Club as well. In recent times he has become involved in a poltical pressure group for veterans, campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union and earlier this year stood (and lost) as a Brexit Party candidate for the South West of England in the European Parliamentary elections.

 

Lane-Nott was a bit of an odd appointment. Max Mosley was FIA President was then leading a campaign to bring a more scientific approach to F1 safety, following the deaths of Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger at Imola in 1994 and it was felt that Lane-Nott’s experience in a high-technology, safety-critical environment would be helpful for the sport. He was a long-time racing fan, but his experience was rather limited as he had spent a lot of his life in submarines.

 

Educated at Pangbourne College, Mike Hailwood’s old school, he moved on to attend the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth. He was commissioned in the submarine service and then joined the nuclear-powered HMS Revenge in Scotland in 1969 and then moved on to HMS Conqueror (which would become famous for sinking the General Belgrano battleship during the Falklands War in 1982). He was then selected for what was known as a Perisher course, which was the first big step towards becoming a submarine commander. His first command came in 1975 with HMS Walrus and then after two years he was had a land posting, as a staff officer at Fleet Headquarters in Northwood, Hertfordshire, before becoming commander of the nuclear submarine HMS Swiftsure and then HMS Splendid in 1979.

 

The submarine was one of the first to arrive in the South Atlantic during the Falklands War in 1982, its job being to shadow the Argentine aircraft carrier 25 de Mayo. The ship disappeared into Argentine territorial waters, defined as 12 miles off the coast, and Splendid came close to attacking the ship, as its torpedoes could have been fired from international waters. In the end this was deemed to be unwise and then Splendid was sent to the estuary of the Gallegos River, off Puerto Deseado, where it sat beneath the waves, monitoring all activity at the Río Gallegosair base, which meant that the task force in the Falklands knew what to expect. As a result of this, he was mentioned in despatches and then posted to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, where he studied management techniques before returning to Britain to take command of the Third Submarine Squadron in Faslane, Scotland.

 

He later moved on to become assistant director of defence concepts at the Ministry of Defence and after a staff course at the Royal College of Defence Studies in 1989 he spent a year at sea as commander of the frigate HMS Coventry. He was then made senior naval officer in the Middle East, during the latter stages of the Gulf War before becoming Chief of Staff, Submarines. A year later he was appointed to be the Royal Navy’s first Commander Operations, exercising operational command of all Royal Navy maritime operations, reporting to the Fleet Commander, in addition to being Flag Officer Submarines. That led to a role with NATO but by then it became clear that he was not going to get to the very top as younger men were in more senior positions and so after 33 years in the Royal Navy he retired, at the age of 52.

 

Mosley later credited him with setting up new systems and procedures and for having brought new thinking into the sport, but it was quickly clear that it was not a perfect fit.

 

 

[alberto.ascari]

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Odesláno z mého BBF100-1 pomocí Tapatalk

[Radoye]

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The name Boulogne can be rather confusing for the average non-French motor racing fan. It was a racing circuit from the very early years of the sport, between 1909 and 1928. Then the name popped up again in the late 1940s, with another circuit in the so-called Bois de Boulogne (which translates as Boulogne Wood). The only thing was that the two circuits were 150 miles apart. And then, of course, you have Boulogne-Billancourt, where Louis Renault built his first automobile in a garden shed at his parents’ weekend house. Today, Renault’s world headquarters is located in the town, although some may know it as being a place where the comedy actor Peter Ustinov had an apartment, simply because he wanted a suitably silly address - “11 rue de Silly”.

 

So, how does one make sense of all of this? Well, it all began with an unmanned boat floating in the estuary of the River Liane off Boulogne-sur-Mer in around 633. The thing was that, so they say, the boat was carrying a luminous statue of the Virgin Mary. This impressed the locals (as it would) and they secured the boat and took the statue to the local church and soon miracles started to happen. Notre-Dame de la Mer became a popular pilgrimage destination, which made Boulogne-sur-Mer a prosperous place. In 1308 France’s King Philip IV made a pilgrimage to see the statue and decided, because it was a long way to travel, that he would build a chapel with a copy of the statue in the hamlet of Menuls-lès-Saint-Cloud, in the forest not far from Paris. This was known as Notre-Dame de Boulogne la Petite and over time the area became known as Boulogne-la-Petite and later Boulogne-sur-Seine. In 1924, in an effort to make things less complicated, this was renamed Boulogne-Billancourt. By then the forest had become known as the Bois de Boulogne (Boulogne Wood) and had been transformed into a public park, featuring wide carriageways, man-made lakes and even waterfalls. It was all designed to be a place for Parisians to relax, just outside the walls of the city.

 

At the same time Boulogne-sue-Mer had become something of a seaside resort, as a place for Parisians to go bathing and a port to which the English came on steamboats from Folkestone, often going on Paris. The artist Joseph Turner painted many seascapes and sunsets in Boulogne. Competition between rival seaside towns resulted in all manner of promotional ideas and Boulogne-sur-Mer hit on the idea of having a motor race in 1909 and a 32-mile road circuit was laid out in the countryside inland from the town, using the Saint-Omer road as far as Longueville and then south Brunembert, Selles and Desvres, before returning to Boulogne on the Arras road. It was fast and dangerous and while the Coupe de l’Auto provided great victories for Lion-Peugeot and rival Hispano-Suiza, it also caused the death of Giosue Giuppone, one of the Lion-Peugeot stars. Later it would see one of the early victories for Delage and in 1913 hosted the Grand Prix de l'ACF, with Peugeot battling the British Sunbeams. In the 1920s the circuit was revived for the Boulogne Speed Week, a variety of races, rallies and hillclimbs with the main event being a combined voiturette/cyclecar race called the Grand Prix of Boulogne, with the winners including Henry Segrave, the splendidly-named Bunny Marshall, George Eyston and Malcolm Campbell. By 1928, however, the event run out of steam and faded quietly away.

 

However, down in Paris, the Bois de Boulogne began to feature in motor racing as many of the early races started from the Porte Maillot and featured sections in the park. Later there would be sprint competitions on the fast roads and even in 1927 the suggestion that the Grand Prix de l’ACF should be held in the Bois de Boulogne. In the end it was decided to run the race at the Montlhéry speedway. “Certainly the race in the centre of Paris would have done much to popularize the sport of motor racing,” Motorsport magazine reported, “and its publicity would have been so great, that it is not improbable that some of the biggest firms in the French industry, who have long regarded racing with indifference, would have returned to the arena”. It didn’t happen, but immediately after the war, in the summer of 1945, the Bois would become the venue for the Grand Prix de la Liberation, attended by hundreds of thousands of people, who were delighted to watch Jean-Pierre Wimille win the race for Bugatti. Perhaps one day the French will wake up to the fact that Formula 1 cars are now incredibly efficient and host another race in the Bois, instead of at remote circuits such as Paul Ricard and Magny-Cours. Paris is, after wall, just what F1 wants – a global destination city.

 

Who knows, the name Boulogne might once again be at the forefront of motorsport. And who knows perhaps Renault might even start winning again…

 

 

[Radoye]

 

[Radoye]

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The coast of the Languedoc is flat, apart from a very large rock, called Mont St-Clair, which rises from the sea, a few miles to the south-west of Montpelier. Around it is the town of Sète and a sandy isthmus which divides the Mediterranean from a salt water lagoon, which marks the end of the Canal du Midi, the waterway that links the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. Sète boasts a network of canals which has given it the nickname of the“Venice of the Languedoc”. It is popular seaside resort. It was there in 1963 that Georges Raphanel, a former BP executive in Algeria, opened an ice cream shop on the Canal Royal.

 

Algerian independence has resulted in around 800,000 so-called Pieds-Noirs returning home to France. Georges’s parents had done the same, setting up a bar called Le Dauphin at the nearby Grau d'Agde.

 

Georges's son Pierre-Henri, who was born in Algiers, was only two at the time the family left Algeria but he grew up as a Frenchman, attending the local school in Grau before being sent off to boarding school during the week, firstly in Beziers and then later at Pezenas. He started karting when he was young, using an engine which his father had taken from a moped, competing on a track in the vineyards, inland from the coast. It was clear that he was talented and his family decided to sell the business and concentrate on developing his career, spending their weekends on the road at kart races all over Europe. After pondering a career as a vet and then as a policeman, Pierre-Henri realised that he was best-suited to being a racing driver. But without money it was tough. Things began to move in the right direction when he won the Marlboro-backed Cherche Son Pilote scholarship scheme, which led to a fully-sponsored season in Formula Renault before he moved into French Formula 3. He was helped on his way by the town of Agde, which raised money from the local population to sponsor him.

 

In his second Formula 3 season he joined the mighty ORECA and won the French title and the Monaco F3 Grand Prix. It seemed like he was finally on his way but Formula 3000 was tough and he didn't have much money. There was little success but at the end of 1988 he finally got a break in Formula 1, being offered the chance to race in Australia by Gerard Larrousse to replace Yannick Dalmas, his long-time rival, who was suffering from Legionnaire’s Disease. It was not a great move and Raphanel failed to qualify. The following year he took a risk with Coloni because he had no money and then switched to Rial, but both cars were uncompetitive and his chances of an F1 career began to slip away. Rather than trying to battle on without money, he took the wise decision to accept the offer of a factory drive with Toyota, racing mainly in Japan, where he earned good money and enjoyed some success. He also raced sports cars in Europe and finished second at Le Mans on two occasions and was on the podium a third time.

 

He continued racing until 2000 and then returned to his home town and set up an estate agency but in 2006 he was recruited by Bugatti as a test driver and demonstrator, teaching wealthy buyers how to handle the 1,000hp cars. In 2010 he set a world record for production cars when lapping the Volkswagen Ehra-Lessien testing facility in a Bugatti Veyron at 267 mph.

 

 

[Radoye]

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Ellis Hall was an oil man, and a very successful one as well. He had plenty of money and lived in a grand house in Boulder, Colorado, with his wife Theresa and their four children: Richard, Betty, James and Charles.

 

Alas, tragedy struck and he lost his wife to illness at the age of just 46. The children were 18, 16, 12 and nine. It was a traumatic time. A couple of years later he remarried. Virginia Hockenhull was 10 years his junior and her daughter Joann joined the clan. The new family spent the next three years in New Mexico.

In the summer of 1953 Ellis took his wife and two daughters and some friends on a holiday trip to Juneau in Alaska with their the twin-engined De Havilland Dove. On the return trip the plane disappeared somewhere over southern Alaska. It was a month before any wreckage was found. For the Hall brothers it was a second traumatic blow – and it changed their lives. The  always plan had been to follow their father into the oil business but once Ellis was gone, they could do what they wanted to do. James (known as Jim) gave up studying geology at Cal Tech and switched to mechanical engineering. He was already mad about cars and at 14 had turned a beaten-up 1929 Model T Ford into a hot rod.

 

Richard (known as Dick) ran the oil business for a while and then they all agreed to sell the shares. Between them, they inherited a vast fortune, amounting to nearly $24 million, equivalent to around $250 million today. Dick moved to Texas and helped Carroll Shelby set up a sports car dealership in Dallas.Jim came home from college in the summer of 1954 and did his first races in his brother’s Austin Healey at Fort Sumner in New Mexico. That was it. He was hooked on racing.

 

With some of his inheritance money he built his own speedway on a plot of land outside Midland, Texas, not far from the Texas-New Mexico border. Rattlesnake Raceway was soon attracting a group of young racers, including another younger oilman called Hap Sharp. As this was being developed another oilman Gary Laughlin asked the Hall brothers and Shelby to build him a Chevrolet Corvette with Italian-styled bodywork, designed by Sergio Scaglietti. Jim thenbought a Lotus Formula 2 car and put a 2.5-litre Climax engine into it and entered it for the United States GP at Riverside. In the next three years he raced in 11 Grands Prix in a variety of different Lotuses for various different teams.

 

Hall and Sharp had the ambition to build their own racing cars and in the US at the time sports cars were the thing. They approached well known racing car builders Dick Troutman and Tom Barnes to build them a car to be called a Chaparral. It was a conventional machine and but they wanted more and so bought the rights to the name and built their own sports car, named the Chaparral 2, a mid-engined car with a monocoque chassis and a fibreglass body. At the same time in Britain, Colin Chapman was creating the first monocoque F1 car, but the difference was that Chaparral were using aerospace materials, notably fibreglass composites to build the bodywork.

 

At the time, the American car manufacturers had all agreed to withdraw from racing  but General Motors was not playing by the rules and began to use Chaparral as a skunk works to develop new ideas. They started out with the first rear wings, and even adjustable versions of the same thing, they then invented side-mounted radiators, built lightweight aluminium engines, designed a semi-automatic transmission, did the first data-collection, built the first composite chassis and ultimately, in 1970, created the extraordinary Chaparral 2J, the first ground effect racing car, which used an small engine to drive fans that sucked air from beneath the car and used a polycarbonate plastic material called Lexan that was light, flexible and unbreakable to create “skirts” that sealed off the air flows, moving up and down as required using cables and pulleys.

 

If all of this sounds vaguely familiar it is because most of these ideas eventually went into F1, where others took credit for them. Perhaps they were better developed that Hall’s machinery had been, but he had got there first.

 

Pushing the boundaries of technology meant that Hall had many of his ideas outlawed at international level, but Chaparral enjoyed huge success at home with Hall winning the US Road Racing Championships in 1964 and 1965 and his cars winning in every series in which they competed including CanAm, Formula 5000 and IndyCar. Although there was never a Chaparral Formula 1 car, Hall’s impact on Grand Prix racing was considerable. 

 

In the end, Hall tired of fighting regulators and began to produce more conventional cars, such as the Chaparral 2K, which applied the ground effect seen in F1 to Indycars. It was designed by a certain John Barnard. In 1980 the Chaparral 2K won the Indy 500 and the CART championship in the hands of Johnny Rutherford. Barnard then went off to F1 to create the first composite chassis and the first semi-automatic gearboxes, while Colin Chapman ad previously down much work on ground-effect, and Gordon Murray had designed a car that was sucked to the tarmac using fans…

 

Hall turned to using March, Lola and Reynard chassis in Indycar racing and was still winning races with Gil de Ferran in the mid-1990s. He then decided he had done enough and closed the team down. He was then 62 and wanted a quieter life.

 

 

[Radoye]

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The 2021 Formula 1 season will be the first to feature a budget cap, in an effort to stop teams from spending silly money in their quest to win F1. Racers are racers and as long as they have access to money, they spend it. It’s illogical, of course, in a world where automobile companies are obsessed by cost-efficiency, but the rewards for winning are great and so the big guns each burn through more than a million dollars a day - and consider this to be money well-spent.

 

But it is nonetheless like a nuclear arms race, with rivals spending vast amounts on futile machines that are developed only to keep them ahead of their rivals, without having much value in the real world. F1 engines today are amazing and useful for the world, but the chassis and aerodynamics are completely useless outside the sport. The money is being spent so that teams can “keep up with the Joneses”.

 

It is now 15 years since a budget cap was first suggested in Formula 1 and the irony is that the idea came from a man called Parry-Jones. Richard Parry-Jones was Welsh, as the name suggests. He hails from the city of Bangor, close to the Menai Strait, which separates the island of Anglesey from the Welsh mainland. His family had been involved in slate quarrying in the region but from childhood his passion was for cars, inspired by watching the RAC Rally passing through the forests close to his house. Parry-Jones joined the Ford Motor Company as a trainee, working in product development while also studying for a degree in mechanical engineering at Salford University. He rose through the company to become Chief Technical Officer.

 

In 1999 the Lebanese-Australian Jacques Nasser became the boss of Ford. “Jac the Knife” had big plans and rapidly bought Cosworth and Stewart Grand Prix and in 2000 launched Jaguar Racing. This was not a success and while there were internecine fights for control of the F1 operation, Nasser fell out withFord chairman William Clay Ford Jr and was removed from office in 2001. A year laterParry-Jones was asked to review Ford’s F1 programme and decide what to do to make it work. He took charge.

 

It was in Australia in 2004 that he left his biggest mark on the sport, when he proposed a budget cap.

 

"The cost trends in the sport are unsustainable," he said. "Other sports have successfully created ways in which costs can be capped and there is no reason that we cannot do the same in F1."

 

Parry-Jones said that to get everyone in F1 to agree to cap the budgets there would need to be a high cap to begin with and strong penalties to make sure that anyone found to be overspending would face serious trouble.

 

The idea was laughed out of the paddock at the time because F1 team bosses argued that it was naïve to believe that spending could not be controlled and that there would inevitably be off-the-balance-sheet operations if teams had their budgets restricted. They cited the case in the 1960s when the American Automobile Manufacturer Association announced that to keep down costs, none of the companies would compete in racing. But then Chevrolet secretly used the Chaparral company as a so-called "skunk works" to develop all kind of extraordinary racing technology, while pretending not to be involved.

 

In 2006 the then FIA President Max Mosley took up the fight, saying that F1 should scrap income-sharing deals with manufacturer teams saying that it would "entirely reasonable to offer the manufacturers that join the Formula 1 World Championship no income" and suggesting that the least successful teams should get the most money. No-one took that very seriously either, as Mosley was clearly stirring up trouble in the negotiating process to get the automobile manufacturers to sign up to a new Concorde Agreement.

 

Alas, there was not much patience in Detroit and at the end of 2004 Jaguar Racing was sold to Red Bull. The rest is history, culminating in World Championship success in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013.

 

Parry-Jones remained at Ford. In 2005 he was made a CBE in the New Year honour list, for services to the automobile industry and then retired in 2007  to life as a technology and policy advisor and academic.

 

 

[Radoye]

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The Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften was an independent scientific institution, established in Germany in 1911, with its goal being to promote research into the natural sciences in Imperial Germany. One of this organisations biggest successes came in the 1920s when research scientists Dr Hans Tropsch and Dr Franz Fischer discovered a process that allowed the production of liquid hydrocarbon fuels using coal as a starting point. It was, by all accounts, a complex business, which involved a thermochemical process that turned carbonaceous materials (such as coal and lignite) into gas which was subsequently transformed in a high pressure environment, using metal catalysts, into a liquid.

 

The reason that this was important was because Germany had very little oil of its own - but there was an abundance of coal reserves. Today the country has closed the last of its hard coal mines, but still around 38 percent of its electrical power comes from power stations which are fired by lignite, the so-called brown coal. The fuel produced with the Fischer-Tropsch process was first commercialised in the late 1930s by a company that was formed for the purpose called Braunkohlen Benzin AG, shortened to Brabag. This was created by the Nazi government which ordered the giant chemical company IG Farben to join forces with a consortium of lignite mine owners to create petroleum products.

 

When the war came a few years later the Fischer-Tropsch process took on an even more important role and was used to produce around nine percent of Germany’s fuel during World War II.

The easy access to oil around the world in the post-war years was such that the technology found few users but South Africa had an unusual set of circumstances. It had little in the way of oil reserves and it had a political system that would end being unacceptable around the world, leading to embargoes. As early as 1950 the South African government realized that it needed to do something to cut down on the cost of oil imports and acquired the rights to use the Fischer-Tropsch process in South Africa and set up a company called SouthAfrican Coal, Oil and Gas Corporation (Sasol), with funding from South Africa's Industrial Development Corporation.

 

The first production facility was opened in 1955 and by the mid-1980s Sasol was supplying around a quarter of South Africa’s fuel needs. Its big breakthrough came in 1973 when OPEC hiked oil prices around the world, causing an oil crisis and as a result Sasol expanded to two extra manufacturing facilities. The government decided to float the business in 1979 and by the 1980s Sasol was considering foreign expansion and after the laws of apartheid were abolished in 1991 Sasol set out to increase the company's international exposure by sponsoring a team in Formula 1. The problem was that all the top teams already had big oil deals: McLaren with Shell, Ferrari with Agip, Williams with Elf and Benetton with Mobil.

 

The best-placed team without a deal was Jordan Grand Prix, which had finished fifth in the World Championship in its debut season earlier that year. It had done a great job, but was in desperate need of money.

 

World Champion Ayrton Senna got involved in the process, as he was looking for ways to get his friend Mauricio Gugelmin a drive for 1992, and so he rang Eddie Jordan just before Christmas and introduced him to the South Africans. Jordan jumped (one might say leapt) at the opportunity and Sasol was happy to become the Jordan team’s title sponsor for 1992. The problem was that EJ had also decided (on financial grounds) to do a deal with Yamaha to use the OX99 V12 engine. These were terrible and that season the team managed to score only one point in 1992.The sponsorship would last two further seasons, with the Yamaha V12 being replaced by a Hart V10 for the second and third years, which led to Jordan climbing back to fifth in the Constructors’ again. During that time, Sasol developed its own fuels for F1 (although one needs to be careful because in that era there was a lot of mistruths peddled about who was supplying what fuels to whom)

 

For 1995 Jordan was offered a Peugeot engine deal (with a lot of money) and the French firm wanted to work with Total and so the Sasol deal was bounced on to the struggling Arrows, along with the Hart engines. The 18 percent slide in the value of the rand against other international currencies that year meant that the firm could not really compete outside South Africa.

As F1 looks more to synthetic fuels in the future, perhaps Sasol can play a role… We shall see.

 

 

[Radoye]

 

[Radoye]

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Being practical is a skill that is sometimes forgotten in modern Formula 1, with its complicated computer programmes and slightly odd boffins. One of the key elements to success is to make sure that your drivers feel confident and happy and thus in a position to perform at their very best. Today, honesty and transparency are important, but in the old days that was not always in the best interest of a team…

 

Alberto Ascari was a hugely talented driver. He won the World Championship for Ferrari in 1952 and 1953. His other great victory outside F1 was winning the Mille Miglia in 1954, when he was driving for Ferrari.

 

The only real problem was that Ascari was extremely superstitious, something which probably related to the fact that when he was seven years old his father Antonio, a celebrated Grand Prix driver of his era, was killed racing in the Grand Prix de l’ACF at Montlhéry. Alberto wouldn’t permit anyone to even touch the case in which he carried his racing equipment: his blue helmet, his goggles, his gloves and his favourite shirt.

 

For 1954, Ascari decided he would leave Ferrari in order to join a new team being put together by Gianni Lancia, with the celebrated Vittorio Jano building a car that would become known as the Lancia D50. It was late in arriving and so Ascari had to sit out most of the season. He did some sports car racing with Ferrari but it was a relatively quiet year for him. In November the Lancia factory sent three of its D24 sports cars to Mexico, to take part in the Carrera Panamericana, the final round of the World Sports Car Championship. This was a 1,900-mile race on public roads from Tuxtia in the southern state of Chiapas to Ciudad Juarez, in the state of Chihuahua, in the very north of the country.

 

The cars were driven Juan Manuel Fangio, Piero Taruffi and Felice Bonetto. The drivers did reconnaissance work before the event and would often paint warning signals on the road to remind themselves of particular hazards ahead. At the town of Silao, in the central province of Guanajuato, Bonetto missed one of the warning signs and arrived in a 60 mph corner travelling at about 125 mph. He tried to negotiate the corner but the car slid into the side of a house and the impact was such that Bonetto hit his head on the side of the building. He died instantly. The car was stopped by a lamp post and when it was taken back to the factory it was found that the damage was not very serious.

 

Jano and his team decided that the D24 could be rebuilt for the 1954 season. The problem was that they were well aware of Ascari’s superstitions and were worried that he would be spooked if he was racing a car which had previously killed its driver and so they carefully changed the chassis number from 0002 to 0006, so that Alberto would think it was a different car.The team entered the Mille Miglia in May 1954 with four new cars: for Ascari, Taruffi, Castellotti and Gino Valenzaro. Ascari was on fine form and completed the 992-mile race from Brescia to Rome and back again in 11 hours and 26 minutes, a full 33 minutes ahead of the second placed.

 

The following year Lancia’s D50  was ready for the Formula 1 World Championship, although the company was already running into financial difficulties. In Monaco Ascari had a celebrated crash into the harbour. A few days later he went to Monza and for some reason decided to test a Ferrari. He did not have his usual racing gear with him and so climbed aboard the car in a shirt and tie and with a helmet he borrowed from Castellotti. He crashed and was killed. Gianni Lancia decided to cancel his F1 programme and sold the cars to Enzo Ferrari…

 

 

 

[Radoye]

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The story of Scuderia Ferrari's primary sponsor begins in Germany in the 1830s. It was not a happy place, with poor working conditions, unemployment, failed harvests and increasing food prices. This led to uprisings that were suppressed violently. This unhappiness would lead to the revolutions in 1848 but before then tens of thousands of Germans headed abroad, to countries where they thought life could be better. Many went to the United States, but a considerable number also ended up in Britain, particularly in London.

 

We know from records in the UK that a German who took the name Bernard Morris was born in Germany in 1793 and we can deduce from the 1841 census that he moved to Britain between 1833, when his daughter Johanna was born in Germany, and 1835 when his son Philip was born in London. The family lived in Whitechapel and were not poor, as they could afford a servant. Bernard’s profession was listed as being a tobacco manufacturer. At the time tobacco was imbibed in pipes and cigars, although chewing tobacco was also widespread.

 

Legend has it that Philip opened a shop on Bond Street  in 1847, but he was only 12 at the time, so it was probably his father who opened the store at 22 Bond Street and began to sell cigars from Havana. Several Germans had opened cigar factories in Havana, which would explain the supply. 

 

This was followed seven years later (in 1854) by cigarettes. Legend has it that Philip Morris saw an army officer on leave from the Crimean War, smoking tobacco rolled in paper and decided that the firm should make hand-rolled, smoke-cured cigarettes, using Turkish tobacco. But the best cigarette-rollers could make only three or four a minute. Morris hired a staff of cigarette rollers from Russia, Turkey, and Egypt and they manufactured an impressive 3,000 cigarettes a day, which were snapped up by customers keen on what was then called “a short smoke”.

 

Somewhere along the way, the name of the business became Philip Morris & Co. Ltd.

 

In the 1860s Don Luis Susini, a Cuban cigarette manufacturer, developed a cigarette-rolling machine that could roll up to 60 cigarettes a minute, and then as technology improved, American inventor James Bonsack built a more efficient machine able to produce 200 cigarettes a minute.

 

Morris’s primary brands by 1870 were called Philip Morris Cambridge and Philip Morris Oxford Blues and the popularity of the cigarettes grew, with demand spreading through the British Empire. The business began to more and more money and in 1872 Gustav Eckmeyer became the company’s exclusive importer in New York.

 

Ironically, Morris was then struck down with lung cancer as he died in 1873, at the age of just 37, leaving his company to his widow Margaret and his brother Leopold.

 

That same year, Richard Benson and William Hedges opened a rival shop a few buildings further down Bond Street.

 

Seven years later Leopold agreed a deal to buy Margaret's shares and continued in the business for another 14 years, taking on another partner in Joseph Grunebaum for a while. In 1881 the company initiated a public offering raising £60,000. This was oversubscribed six-fold. The money raised enabled the construction of new factories in Soho: one on Poland Street, the other on Marlborough Street. The business grew accordingly and the firm began marketing a brand called Marlborough, mild cigarettes produced in the Marlborough Street factory, which were aimed at the female customers. Later the company would also introduce a brand called Bond Street.

 

But Leopold Morris, by then in his mid-fifties, fell deeply in love with an opera singer and spent far too much money on her whims with the result that the business ran into trouble and ended up in receivership, with William Curtis Thomson, an accountant, getting control of the business. This all meant that when Imperial Tobacco was put together in 1901, Philip Morris was deemed to small to be a member. The firm was then appointed tobacconist to King Edward VII and became a chic and luxury product. At the same time Eckmayer put together investors in New York to create a US manufacturing business. Ownership was split 50-50 between the British parent and American partners. The rest is history the Americans bought out the British in 1919 and soon afterwards the firm shortened the Marlborough brand name to Marlboro and began selling cigarettes under that name.

 

Marlboro was one of the first tobacco sponsors in Formula 1, arriving with BRM in 1972. It began a hugely successful relationship with McLaren in 1974, which continued into the 1990s. Marlboro’s links with Ferrari began in 1978 with Gilles Villeneuve and gradually the company became the primary sponsor of the celebrated Italian team. That remains the case today, despite anti-tobacco legislation that means that the Marlboro name and logo are no longer allowed.

 

 

[Radoye]

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Richard Cregan pops up from time to time in the Formula 1 paddock. He doesn’t say much but he’s clearly up to something… Cregan’s story is one that is a great source of inspiration for those who want to work in the business – but don’t know how to achieve their goal.

 

Born in County Kildare 59 year ago, Richard was passionate about the sport from the age of five or six because his older brother Andy competed in motorcycle trials. The family didn’t have much money, their father was a blacksmith-turned-bricklayer and so the Cregan brothers had to do what they could.

 

At 16 Richard applied to become an apprentice with Aer Lingus, studying to become a technician at Bolton Street College (now part of the Dublin Institute of Technology) for two years before moving to the airport to complete his apprenticeship. His passion was motorsport and he did his best to compete, taking part in local rallycross, but followed the World Rally Championship passionately. At the time Toyota was doing a lot of rallies in Africa and the enterprising Cregan managed to find the telephone number for Toyota Team Europe in Cologne, Germany, and rang up and offered to work for free on the Safari Rally, telling the team that he could get to Nairobi simply enough on an Aer Lingus flight and wanted only accommodation. Not long afterwards the TTE team manager Henry Liddon rang him.

 

The result was that Cregan quit Aer Lingus and went to Cologne to work as a mechanic with TTE. At the time the team, owned by Ove Andersson, had a staff of just 25. Cregan was then 24 and in the years that followed, as Toyota became a force in the World Rally Championship, winning the World Championship for the first time in 1990 with Carlos Sainz, Cregan was quietly moving up in the organisation. In 1993 Toyota bought TTE and it was renamed Toyota Motorsport GmbH (TMG). Cregan soon became operations manager for the team and overseeing the WRC successes that followed. He was then involved with the organisation of the team's Le Mans 24 Hours team, which raced at Le Mans in 1998 and 1999before attention turned to a Formula 1 programme. By then the team had expanded to 450 people.

 

Cregan was by then general manager and when Andersson retired (against his will) in 2003 Richard was made team manager of Panasonic Toyota Racing. Alas, the top management at Toyota Motorsport had little idea of how to be successful in motorsport and the team spent a huge sum of money but achieved little. A frustrated Cregan decided to leave at the end of 2008 in order to take up an interesting new role, overseeing the development of the Yas Marina racing circuit with Abu Dhabi Motorsport.

 

The first race took place in 2009 and Cregan moved up to become CEO of the Yas Marina circuit until the end of 2013 when he was asked by Bernie Ecclestone to work getting the Russian GP at Sochi together in time for the inaugural event in the autumn of 2014.

 

Having delivered the F1 race, he took time to run his own Formula 4 team, called Rasgaira Motorsports, in the UAE, with his son Robert as the driver. In 2017 with the Sochi contract coming to an end, he began working as an independent F1 consultant.

 

Since then, so they say, he has been working on the concept of a Formula 1 race in Las Vegas – not that he is going to say much on the subject.

 

 

[Radoye]

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Racer and safety pioneer Bill Simpson dies at 79

Images courtesy of Steve Shunck

 

By: Robin Miller

 

 

He made safety part of the racing vernacular, but lived his life on the edge. He started in drag racing and spread his knowledge to IndyCar, NASCAR and Formula 1. He pissed people off hourly, yet shared a drink with them before the sun went down.

 

He set himself on fire to prove a point, and saved countless lives with his innovations. He took a sucker punch from NASCAR, and retaliated with a haymaker in court. He drove in the Indianapolis 500, yet was much more successful out of the car. He was an orphan that embraced fatherhood, although he wasn’t that great of a husband.

 

E.J. “Bill” Simpson was a pioneer in motorsports safety, a self-made millionaire and a stubborn character that answered to no-one.

 

Simpson, who died Monday after suffering a massive stroke last Friday, did a little bit of everything during his 79 years. He drove dragsters and Indy cars, started a safety business in his garage that grew into an empire, and helped reduce the death rate in all forms of racing.

 

“Not a lot of people know this but Bill was an orphan that had nothing, and turned his life into something special,” said Don “The Snake” Prudhomme, the drag racing legend who was one of Simpson’s best and oldest friends. “He did so much, and saved so many lives with his innovations.

 

“He was the original rags-to-riches story, but he had a big heart and cared about people. Of course he wasn’t real tactful, and we had our differences over the years, but I loved the guy.”

Born in Hermosa Beach, Ca., Simpson started drag racing in the late 1950s and broke both arms when he was 18 years old. That led to his initial safety idea of mounting a parachute behind the car to slow it down, and soon enough it was adopted by the NHRA. But his big breakthrough came in the 1960s, when astronaut Pete Conrad introduced him to a fire-retardant material called Nomex. Those were the days when IndyCar, NASCAR and F1 drivers lost their lives to fire at an alarming rate because they either drove in a T-shirt or a uniform that was dipped in a chemical to give minimal protection. Simpson began cranking out Nomex suits, and by 1967, 30 of the 33 starters at Indy were wearing them.

 

“We never, ever thought about safety, and I didn’t chase Bill Simpson, but thankfully he chased us and made us think,” said Bobby Unser, whose career began in the lethal ‘60s. “Nobody paid any attention to him at first, but then we had to take a serious look at him because he was so smart.

 

“The things he was doing changed racing, and he was the best in the world. He did more for racing safety than anyone. He was the man.”

 

Adds Prudhomme: “We were wearing Levis and leather jackets, and he saved my ass a time or two with his Nomex suit.

 

He showed up at Indianapolis in 1970 with long hair, a fu manchu moustache and an old car, but finally made the show in 1974. He was public enemy No.1 with USAC because of his combative attitude, and drew its ire when he set himself on fire in Turn 1 once to prove the effectiveness of his latest suit. He also kept the USAC charter plane waiting for over an hour in Argentina because he was trying to sweet talk a young lady into flying home with him. They eventually got married.

 

Still, as much as he enjoyed driving, the safety side of racing was his passion. From suits, Simpson branched out into gloves, shoes, seat belts and helmets. Simpson Safety Products were used worldwide, and his reputation grew alongside his bank account. His equipment was on display all over the world, and he was constantly upgrading it. But in 2001, his pal Dale Earnhardt was killed in a crash at Daytona that changed the course of Simpson’s life.

 

Despite the fact Earnhardt used a seat that was anything but safe and was notorious for loosening his seat belts during a race, NASCAR blamed Simpson seat belts for the death of NASCAR’s biggest star. His life was threatened by fans, and he resigned from his company. “The Earnhardt thing broke his heart, took him down to his knees,” recalled Prudhomme.

But it didn’t deter his will to prove NASCAR was merely looking for a scapegoat, so he sued the sanctioning body for defamation of character in 2003. “Those people declared war on me but they didn’t know what kind of a fight they were in for,” he said in a 2004 interview. “Everyone who has ever dealt with NASCAR has acquiesced to them because they think they’re bulletproof and nobody will stand up to them. They brought me my knees like nobody else has ever done. But I’m a pretty mean son of a bitch, and they f%^&$% with the wrong guy.”

The $9 million suit was settled out of court, and while terms were never divulged, Simpson always smiled when asked how he did.

 

Another thing that always made him smile was the mere mention of Rick Mears. Simpson took him out of desert racing and into an Indy car in 1976, and then watched the kid from Bakersfield, Ca. blossom into one of Indy’s greatest champions. He kindly sold Rick’s contract to Roger Penske.

 

“I didn’t know anything about Indy back then and I didn’t realize what a leader Bill was in the safety industry,” said the four-time Indy winner. “I didn’t know his history, but as time went on I could see what he did to forward its progress. Obviously, I’ll always be thankful for what he did for my career, but I grew to appreciate what he’d done for the sport as time went on. He was the leader in safety, and the guy everyone looked up to in safety. He was big on safety, but didn’t mind taking risks on how to improve things.”

 

Simpson was married three times and loved picking fights in bars, but fathered two sons, Jeff and David, and enjoyed sailing on his boat in Mexico almost as much as whiskey.

Unser recalls almost getting into a fight in Gasoline Alley with Simpson while The Snake spent many nights with the “wild man” trying to keep him out of bar fights.

 

“Bill was a hippie when I met him and a cranky old guy most of his life, but he went from a nobody to the top of the heap,” said the three-time Indy winner. “He worked hard and had a good mind – it didn’t go where the normal mind went. Now, he was a hard-head and I’d get mad at him, but then he would do something really good, which was often, and we’d like him again. He’d piss people off one day and save a bunch of lives the next. That was Bill Simpson.”

 

 

[Radoye]

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The South African Grand Prix of 1982, which was the last F1 race to take place in January, is best remembered for a drivers' strike caused by the mercurial Jean-Marie Balestre, President of the intenational federation, who inserted new clauses in the superlicence documents which meant that the drivers had to stay with the same team for three seasons, forced them to declare their salaries and made them commit to not criticising the governing body. It was all rather daft.

 

The race was scheduled for Saturday, January 23, and to make the most of the trip the teams decided to test at Kyalami on the Monday and Tuesday before the race. It was during these tests that Marc Surer crashed and broke his ankles at Leeukop Corner, while testing his Arrows. The crash came two years after he had suffered similar injuries crashing an ATS at Crowthorne Corner.

 

A few days later Didier Pironi, the head of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association, announced that the drivers would not compete in Thursday practice and organised a coach to take them away from the circuit, to the Sunnyside Park Hotel. The race organisers tried to stop them leaving by parking a minibus across the circuit exit but Jacques Laffite hopped off the coach and found the keys in the ignition and so moved the offending machine and the drivers then disappeared off to Johannesburg. Pironi remained at the circuit to negotiate. A compromise was eventually found and practice and qualifying happened as normal on Friday with Rene Arnoux on pole for Renault with Nelson Piquet second in a Brabham-BMW and Gilles Villeneuve third for Ferrari. Then came Riccardo Patrese (Brabham-BMW), Alain Prost (Renault) and Didier Pironi (Ferrari), making it six turbocharged cars in the first six places, which was no surprise given that Kyalami is at 5,000 ft above sea level. The normally-aspirated cars were behind, led by the two Williams-Cosworths of Keke Rosberg and Carlos Reutemann.

 

There was little doubt that a turbo would win the race, if they could get to the finish. Arnoux led early on but on lap 14 Prost overtook him to take the lead. Things remained much the same until lap 41 when Prost suffered a puncture at high speed. He was lucky not to crash and drove around to the pits, taking a long time to get there. He was given new tyres but he was a lap behind when he rejoined. On his new tyres, he quickly unlapped himself and began to hunt down the cars ahead and within 20 laps was back in second place and hunting down Arnoux for the lead. Rene was in trouble with his tyres and could push no harder and 10 laps from the end Prost took the lead and went on to win the race. It was a great victory, made extraordinary by the fact that Alan had fought back from being a lap behind. The key point, however, was that Prost had completed the race in a faster time than his his team-mate - despite a long delay.

 

This got some of the designers thinking. At the time Brabham was struggling with unreliable BMW engines, which was causing friction between team boss Bernie Ecclestone and BMW. Ecclestone wanted to race Cosworth-powered BT49s, while BMW wanted the team run BMW-engined BT50s, which were not very reliable and often not as fast as the lighter Cosworth cars. Towards the end of the season a new fuel mix made things a lot better but at the British GP Brabham designer Gordon Murray decided to try something a little different and started the BT50s with a light fuel load, allowing them to race away from the field using faster soft tyres. They were then called in to refuel and given new soft tyres which meant that they could run a faster race than would have been the case without having a pit stop. It was the start of F1’s pit stop revolution…

 

And was Alain Porst responsible for that?

 

 

[Radoye]

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The Chris-Craft Corporation is a manufacturer of powerboats, based in Sarasota, Florida. It dates back to the 1870s when Christopher Columbus Smith began building motorboats, but the celebrated name probably never reached the ears of Reginald Craft, a Barclays Bank manager from Romford in Essex, a devout Methodist, who went on to become a missionary in Africa. He was not into boats and so when his second son was born he saw no reason not to name the newcomer Christopher Craft, Christopher was, after all, a good biblical name.

 

Reginald had married one of his bank colleagues, Lois Logan, but their three sons: Ian, Christopher and Robert (known as Andy) were not much given to banking nor to religion. Ian became a doctor and in the 1970s, as professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the Royal Free Hospital in London, was one of the pioneers of artificial insemination techniques in Britain. Andy was still a teenager when he became involved with a bodyshop in nearby Woodford; while Chris was briefly a buyer of ladies underwear before getting involved with the Ford Motor Company in Dagenham, where he quickly found his way into the competition department. He was keen to race but did not get the chance until he was 22, when he drove a Ford Anglia, which had come from his brother Andy’s shop. There was never much money but Chris raced whenever he could and in whatever machinery was on offer. After a promising start in various touring cars he tried single-seaters with a Merlyn Formula 3 car and then a more competitive Tecno.

 

In 1968 he was recruited by the mighty Broadspeed team to campaign factory Ford Escorts in the British Saloon Car Championship, while he was also able to race sports cars with a Lola T70, with which he won the Martini International Trophy at Silverstone. This led him to start a long partnership with Alain de Cadenet, in his Porsche 908 and later his McLaren M8E CanAm car.

 

This led to the decision to acquire an ex-factory Brabham BT33 F1 car and enter it for Craft under de Cadenet’s Ecurie Evergreen banner. Chris failed to qualify for the first race, in Canada, but he made it for the second race at Watkins Glen although his race ended with a suspension failure. There was no money to do more but Craft Craft continued to compete in a wide range of machinery, including Formula 2, Formula 5000, sports and touring cars. He finished fourth on his debut at Le Mans in 1971 in a David Piper Ferrari 512M, which he shared with David Weir. 

 

In 1973 he won the 1973 European 2-litre sportscar title in Martin Birrane's Lola and in 1976 finished third at Le Mans with De Cadenet, following up with fifth the following year. He returned to the BTCC with a Ford Capri in 1978 and 1979 when he was also working for Ford’s competition department and running a second-hand car business. He continued to race into the 1980s but then turned to engineering, starting the Light Car Company, based in St Neots in Cambridgeshire, with Formula 1 designer Gordon Murray, who he had known since his F1 days, with the goal being to build a car called the Rocket, which was shaped as a racing car and powered by a 1,000cc Yamaha motorcycle engine, but was licensed for the road.

 

The cars were produced until 1998 when the Light Car Company turned to classic car resoration.

 

 

[Radoye]

Not everyone who drives a Formula 1 qualifies to be called a Grand Prix driver. There have been around 80 drivers who tried to qualify for a race since the World Championship began, but failed to do so, not least a certain Bernie Ecclestone, who tried to qualify a Connaught at Monaco in 1958. These nearly men (and women) come from wildly varied backgrounds. However, quite a few of them came from southern Africa.

 

Why? Well, back in the 1960s there was a fairly active South African National Drivers Championship which used all manner of machinery, ranging from cars that had been recently raced in the Formula 1 World Championship, to F1 machines that had been modified and then there were a few home-built specials, based on the technology that the locals has seen in action. They would race one another and when Formula 1 visited South Africa each year at the end of the year (summer time in the Southern Hemisphere) there were always a few non-championship races, such as the Cape, Rand and Natal Grands Prix, which appealed to the F1 folk, who could make decent start money from race promoters and could also sell their old machinery at the end of the F1 season. As engines were hard to find, the locals relied on tuned-up versions of the 1.5-litre straight-4s which were used in the Alfa Romeo Giulietta.

 

Doug (Louis Douglas) Serrurier built LDS cars, based on old Coopers. They were not bad cars and consequently Ray Reed decided to build his own car, based on the LDS. 

 

Reed had been born and grew up in what was then Southern Rhodesia, a self-governing British colony, run by a minority white government. He had recently turned 30 but had a taste for adventure. When he was 19 he had signed up for pilot training with the Southern Rhodesian Air Force at Belvedere Airport in Salisbury. For reasons that are now obscure, he did not graduate and become a jet pilot but rather ended up back at home in the town of Gwelo, halfway between Salisbury (now Harare) and Bulawayo. He focused instead on engineering, making himself enough money to consider building his own racing car. The folk of Southern Rhodesia had to be practical because they were a long way from anywhere and they were willing to give anything a try. Reed’s car was called the RE-Alfa Romeo, named after his business, Ray's Engineering. The car was first raced in local events in 1963 before being taken to South Africa early in 1964. It didn’t achieve a great deal but was in action in Lourenco Marques in Mozambique (now Maputo) later that year. For the end of season races in 1964 it went back to South Africa and competed in the Rand GP at Kyalami on December 12 but suffered an engine failure. It was entered for the South African GP, held on New Year’s Day on the East London circuit, but Reed never showed up. Perhaps the blown engine could not be replaced, or there was no budget left. The car passed into the hands of Peter Huson, who crashed it at Kumalo in late 1966 and although Reed had plans to rebuild it into a sports car for the Springbok Series, which was then becoming the major motorsport series in southern Africa. Whatever the case this was never done. Early in 1970 Reed and his three children were killed while flying in bad weather in South Africa. 

[Radoye]

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When he was a teenager Paul Morgan drove a 1904 De Dion Bouton around the cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral with rather undue haste. It seemed like a good idea at the time. He had rebuilt the vintage car and the cathedral was hosting an exhibition to highlight the hobbies of the boys at Gloucester School – and renovating old cars was Morgan’s hobby… It was something he had picked up from his father Brian, the managing director of the Benton & Stone engineering company, who had rebuilt a string of old automobiles and was well known for having written, with Dick Wheatley, a book called The Restoration of Vintage and Thoroughbred Cars, which is still considered a classic today. Not long after the adventure in the cathedral cloisters, Morgan and his pal Robert Simpson drove the car in the London to Brighton Run. Thankfully no-on thought to ask about driving licences…

 

After leaving school he won a place to study engineering at Aston University but in his spare time he enjoyed dangerous sports, including racing a 1934 Lagonda Rapier, learning to fly, going pot-holing and being one of the pioneers of hang-gliding in the UK. He graduated in 1970 and went to work for Cosworth Engineering in Northampton, where he became increasingly involved in the DFX programme, the engine soon replacing the Offenhauser as the standard engine in Indycar racing. It was at Cosworth that he began working with Swiss engineer Mario Illien, developing the engine for CART. Both men were frustrated that Cosworth was rather conservative because it had a virtually monopoly by then and did not need to push that hard. They believed that they could build much better engines and eventually decided to go it alone and do exactly that. Thy asked Roger Penske for help and he found them funding from General Motors and the four parties each took a quarter share in a new company called Ilmor Engineering – with Morgan looking after manufacturing and commercial matters and Illien running the design and development. In 1986 they entered CART with Ilmor-Chevrolet engines and in 1987 Mario Andretti gave them their first victory at Long Beach. A year later Rick Mears gave them their first victory in the Indy 500. Between 1987 and 1991 the Ilmor-Chevrolet won 64 of 78 CART races.

 

In 1991 they built a V10 Formula 1 engine for the Leyton House F1 team and then added Tyrrell as a customer. This drew them to the attention of Sauber and Mercedes which were looking at doing F1. A deal was done for Ilmor to build the engines and things went well  in 1993 and a year later Mercedes acquired GM’s share in Ilmor and officially entered F1 with Sauber. In the US, Ilmor’s new engine in 1995 was called a Mercedes. More success followed. That year Mercedes and Ilmor began a new relationship with McLaren. It took time but in 1998 and 1999 Mika Hakkinen won the World Championship using the engines.

 

The success allowed Morgan to indulge his hobbies and he acquired not only a collection of vintage cars and motorcycles but also several vintage aircraft including a Harvard, a Mustang, a Corsair and a Hawker Sea Fury.

 

In the spring of 2001 he decided to take the Sea Fury up for a short lunchtime flight from the grass strip at Sywell Aerodrome, not far from the Ilmor factory in Brixworth. After half an hour flying he came in to land. The plane landed with a series of light bounces without the tail dropping as would normally be the case. It then ran into softer ground, which caused the plane to nose over, coming to rest upside-down, crushing the cockpit.Morgan was killed in the impact. He was just 52.

 

 

Edited December 20, 2019 by Radoye

[Radoye]

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Lucio Zanon ran his family’s wool business in Biella. He had inherited the business from his father Giuseppe, although the family originated in Venice.

Biella is in the foothills of the Alps and the soft water coming from the mountains was particularly effective for washing wool and so the town became a centre for wool processing and textile manufacturing. With the mechanization of the industry and Biella’s reputation for quality materials, the family became very rich. Lucio began to invest in other businesses, notably finance and insurance in nearby Turin.

 

Lucio was a man of culture and education and was keen on charitable causes. He established the Cavalry Museum in Pinerolo, and funded the reconstruction of the church tower of San Paolo in Biella, while also acquiring villas on the Italian Riviera and across the border in Saint-Jean Cap Ferrat. In World War II he fought with the Italian army in France and later in Albania. He became a decorated hero and was granted the title of Count of Valguirata by King Victor Emmanuel III. He later became the Marquis di Fenera. A celebrated monarchist, he later became the Liberian consul in Turin.

 

His son Giuseppe, named after Lucio’s father, was born in Biella in 1927 and grew up in a very comfortable world, where money was never a problem. He was known as “Gughi” and developed a passion for fast cars, which he shared with his cousin Vittorio, although the latter was more interested in historic racing cars, while Gughi enjoyed finding and helping to develop young talents.

 

He first became involved in Formula 1 in the 1950s and played a role in helping Italian youngsters Umberto Maglioli, Gino Munaron and Giancarlo Baghetti to get to F1. He would later become involved with Emerson Fittipaldi and Carlos Reuteman. He did a lot to help establish Frank Williams, who had spent a lot of time in Italy in his formative years, although the two later fell out later when Zanon wanted Michele Alboreto in a Williams for 1989 and an agreement was basically in place (but not signed) and Williams decided that he wanted to keep Riccardo Patrese, leaving Alboreto out in the cold.

 

Count Zanon provided funding for Ronnie Peterson and then Lella Lombardi, paying for her drive with March in 1975, when she became the first woman to qualify for a race in F1 since the 1950s. Lombardi’s sponsorship came from Lavazza, the company controlled by Zanon’s wife Pucci. Lella finished sixth in her second race, the Spanish GP, which was stopped early as a result of crashes, resulting in the award of half points. Nonetheless her half-point marked the first (and to date last) time that a woman has scored in Formula 1. The relationship was due to continue in 1976 but Peterson became available and March preferred him and Zanon so Lombardi switched to RAM, although it was not a success. Peterson on the other hand did well and won the Italian GP that year. Zanon later provided money for Ronnie to rejoin Team Lotus in 1978, providing the money to pay Mario Andretti’s salary.

 

After Peterson’s death at Monza, Count Zanon began to support Michele Alboreto, and in 1981 organised for Michele to join Tyrrell, paying for the team’s supply of Cosworth engines, and was delighted when Alboreto won the Las Vegas GP in Caesars Palace Grand Prix in 1982.

 

That year the Banco Ambrosiano, Italy’s second largest private bank, which had close ties with the Vatican, collapsed and in the course of the years that followed the Italian authorities investigated what had happened. In 1992 Zanon was one of 33 people convicted of fraud, although the sentence was overturned by the court of appeal in 1998.

 

Zanon died in 2005, at the age of 78. 

 

During his career the family’s banking business had grown significantly and in 1984 they acquired Morval Vonwiller, a boutique bank based in Milan, from Credito Romagnolo. This was relocated to Switzerland in 1989 and merged with an asset management company the family controlled. It opened offices in Geneva and Lugano and branches in Monaco and Georgetown in the Cayman Islands and a mutual fund headquartered in Luxembourg. 

 

Few are aware that Count Zanon was also involved in getting Paolo Barilla into the Joest Porsche which won Le Mans in 1985 and later, in 1997, he helped Alboreto to get into the Joest-run TWR Porsche that won that race that year.

 

On top of that of all of this he was at the centre of negotiating a settlement between Ayrton Senna and Toleman in 1984, when Ayrton wanted to leave to join Team Lotus. This resulted in Zanon buying Senna’s Toleman contract, so that the Brazilian could move teams...

 

 

[Radoye]

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[Radoye]

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In 1961 the Formula 1 World Championship kicked off in the middle of May, with the Monaco Grand Prix, with the first race with the new 1.5 litre engine regulations. A week later there was the Dutch GP at Zandvoort but then there was a break of almost a month before the Belgian Grand Prix, which meant that the big F1 stars were looking for things to do. Many of them went to the Nürburgring, to race in the 1000km and then headed back to Brands Hatch for the Silver City Trophy, which was scheduled to take place on Saturday, June 3. It was raining when practice began on the Thursday and not long before there was a big accident at Paddock Hill Bend, the treacherous first corner at the Kentish circuit. The youngster Shane Summers had crashed his Terry Bartram-run Cooper-Climax T53. The car hit the barriers at the exact point where there was a concrete wall protecting the tunnel that paases under the track from the paddock to the pits and the little-known 24-year-old was killed in the impact.

 

He was born in 1936 in the village of Rossett in what was then Denbighshire. It was just a mile from the English border just outside Chester. His family owned the John Summers Steelworks at Shotton, a few miles away on the River Dee. When he was only four years old his father Spencer was elected as a Conservative MP for Northampton in a by-election, and so the family moved to south. Spencer Summers was a man who was obviously rated by the Prime Minister Winston Churchill, as he was soon put in charge of the regional organisation at the Minister of Supply, under Lord Beaverbrook, ensuring that the army had all that was required. It was an important job. Later, when the war came to an end, he was named Secretary for Overseas Trade, although he woud hold that role for only a few weeks before the general election which shook things up as the Labour Party won the vote and Clement Attlee became the Prime Minister. Summers lost his Northampton seat to Labour. He would return to the House of Commons four years later after being nominated as the Conservative candidate for Aylesbury, after the previous incumbent retired. It was a safe seat and he would hold it until his own retirement in 1970. He was content to remain a backbencher as he was again busy running the family firm. He was knighted in 1956.

 

One of his Spencer’s roles in the post-war period was as chairman of the Outward Bound Trust, which opened an international network of schools in the post-war years, aiming to develop character, leadership and a sense of service through challenging outdoor activities. Shane travelled the world to instruct at Outward Bound schools in Malaysia and in Africa.

 

When he returned to Britain he decided that he wanted to go racing and acquired a swoopy Lotus 15 sports car from an old school friend. This was prepared by Terry Bartram and Summers enjoyed much success that year and the pair then decided to acquire a new Cooper F1 car to race in 1961.He showed promise in the UK and aboard with a front row starting position in the Großer Preis von Wien at Aspern in Austria, but he from the race with a suspension failure. He went up against the big stars of the day in the Aintree 200 in April and finished 12^thin a field of 28. He then finished fourth in the London Trophy at Crystal Palace. His sixth race that summer was at Brands Hatch and there the story ended before it had really begun.

 

That year, there was a second British F1 driver called Summers, also driving a Cooper, but Chris Summers was no relation to Shane, although this did cause some confusion…