Klasika

[Radoye]

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Aristocrats are a funny lot. Lavish wealth apparently does that to some people. Take a look around at some of the more eccentric ones and you will find those who had zebras trained to pull their carriages around London; those who had pianos installed in their Rolls-Royces; or who arrived at dinner parties, riding on the back of a bear. And of course there were those who built strange things, such as underwater ballrooms… Others were less eccentric and being so-called “sportsmen” became motorsport administrators.

 

The people who were involved with the Association Internationale des Automobile Clubs Reconnus (AIACR), the forerunner of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) were all European aristocrats: barons, counts, viscounts and even princes. They regularly had a “de” between their name and surname, indicating that they had large estates somewhere or other (or, at least, used to). In fact, it was not until 1965 that someone with a relatively normal name arrived to head the organisation: Wilfred Andrews, the first British FIA President. Most of those mentioned about never needed to worry about such things as work, and took on their roles because that was what people in their position did. This is why such roles were (and remain) unpaid. The people doing them didn’t need money.

 

They tended not to be celebrated competitors.

 

However, there are exceptions to every rule and Francis Richard Henry Penn Curzon was definitely that. He was President of the British Racing Drivers’ Club for many years and represented Great Britain in the Commission Sportive Internationale (CSI), a division of the FIA which was delegated the organisation of automobile racing as long ago as 1922. In the end he would become a Vice-President of the CSI.

 

So what, you might ask, did he do that was so good for motorsport? Well, where should we begin? Perhaps we should explain who he was. He was born into one of Britain’s most famous families, descended from Admiral Lord Howe, a distinguished naval officer, who became the First Lord of the Admiralty, whose only daughter married into the Curzon family, which was a clan that could trace its noble roots back to the 1600s.

 

Curzon’s father married one of the daughters of the 7th Duke of Marlborough and thus, in addition to his string of minor titles, he was also a cousin of Winston Churchill and, naturally, related to the Viceroy of India - the Marquess Curzon of Kedleston. 

 

Educated at Eton, he was interested in cars from the very beginning and in 1898, at the age of 14, went off to France for a summer holiday job, working as a mechanic in a French garage, learning about cars and how to speak French. After Eton he went to Christ Church College, Oxford, he served with distinction in World War I, joining the Royal Navy and seeing action in the Dardanelles campaign as a gunnery officer aboard HMS Queen Elizabeth before becoming the commanding officer of a battalion of the Royal Naval Reserve Division on the Western Front.

 

After the war – at the time he was known as Viscount Curzon - he stood for election as a Conservative candidate to become the Member of Parliament for Battersea South in London and held the seat for 11 years before moving to the House of Lords when he inherited the title Earl Howe when his father died.

Being a rich young man with not much to do, he got himself into trouble from time to time as an enthusiastic motorist and so in 1928 - at the age of 44 – he decided that he would start motor racing at the wheel of a Bugatti T43. His first major event was the Ulster Tourist Trophy of 1928, on the Ards circuit. He had a huge lead by the halfway stage when his fuel tank began to leak and he had to retire. Having shown his ability, and having money to buy the best machinery, including a Mercedes-Benz SSK which had previously been raced by Rudi Caracciola and a celebrated 1927 Delage, he began to enjoy good results. His biggest claim to fame came in 1931 when sharing an Alfa Romeo with Sir Henry Birkin he won the Le Mans 24 Hours.In his first year in competition he co-founded the British Racing Drivers’ Club, with Dudley Benjafield and he became its president in 1929.

 

He was soon racing in Grands Prix, winning a number of events in Europe and at home. He had some pretty exciting escapes, including flying into the trees at Monza. He moved on to ERAs in the late 1930s but then hurt himself quite badly in a crash at Brooklands in 1937 but returned to action to compete against the mighty AutoUnions and Mercedes GP cars in the Donington Grand Prix.  At the end of 1938 – when he was 54 – he decided to retire from the sport and lead a less dangerous life…

 

War then broke out and he was back in action with the Royal Naval Reserve, ending the war as a Commodore of Atlantic Convoys.

 

It was after the war that his role in motorsport became important. At the time, Britain had no racing circuits. Brooklands had been ruined during the war when some of the banking was demolished and Donington had been turned into an army camp. Racers had nowhere to race. As President of the new 500 Club, he played a vital role in convincing the government of the day that it would be a good idea to use airfields as motor racing venues. Along with the aforementioned Mr Andrews, Howe played a key role in securing the use of RAF Silverstone and helped to organise the first British Grand Prix in 1948. Under his leadership the BRDC developed from being a private dining club into a high-profile motorsport association and race promoter.

 

On top of all of this, he was one of the first drivers to race with a crash helmet, a decision that he believed saved his life on no fewer than three occasions. Others began to follow suit.

 

His children grew up surrounded by the sport and his daughter Lady Sarah Curzon married Piers Courage, the F1 driver. Another daughter Lady Georgina married Home Kidson, another racing driver, who the brother of Glen Kidson, a celebrated racer and aviator.

 

Earl Howe died in 1964, at the age of 80, leaving a hell of a legacy…

 

 

[Radoye]

 

[Radoye]

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The official posters for the French Grand Prix are more than a little confusing. If you take a look at the 1968 version from Rouen, it clearly says that the race was the “1er Grand Prix de France". If you check the 1969 poster, when the race was held at Clermont-Ferrand, it is billed as the “2eme Grand Prix de France”.

 

But how can that be when we all know – or at least have been told many times - that the French GP in the world’s oldest motor race, dating back to 1906?

 

Things get rather more confusing when you look at the poster of the 1975 race, held at the Circuit Paul Ricard. It clearly states that the race is the “61eme Grand Prix de France”. Sure enough, if you check 1976, the race is billed as the 62nd Grand Prix.

 

So did they hold 60 Grands Prix between 1968 and 1975?

 

There is another problem. If the first Grand Prix was held in 1906 and one adds 69 years, logically, one should have the 70th Grand Prix in 1975.

 

Now we know that there were two World Wars which ought to mean that there were no races between 1914 and 1918 and again between 1939 and 1945. But that’s not right either because that would mean 12 missing races (five plus seven) and so the 1975 race ought to have been the 58th… But that’s wrong too because there was a famous Grand Prix in 1914 when Georges Boillot fought Mercedes in his Peugeot at Lyon.

 

Ah, but in 1955, you might say, the Grand Prix was cancelled following the Le Mans disaster. So add one and take another away and the 1975 should still be the 58th, not the 61st.

 

But then, when you think about it, after World War I the Grand Prix was not revived until 1921 (when Jimmy Murphy won for Duesenberg), so one must deduct two more from the total. And after World War II, the first Grand Prix in France was not until 1947, so another two must be knocked off the total. So you get 58 minus four which means that the 1975 race ought to have been the 54th Grand Prix, not the 61st.

 

Oh, wait a minute, there was no race between 1909 and 1911, so that’s another three to knock off the total, which means the 1975 race ought to have been the 51st. So how on earth have the French managed to come up with 61 races?

 

Merde, ces Français sont compliqués…

 

There is, of course, an explanation for all of this. The French GP really was the world’s oldest motor race, but it is also true that the first French GP did not take place until 1968. How so? Because before 1968 the race was known as the Grand Prix de l’Automobile Club de France.

 

It was all the fault of President Charles de Gaulle. After the liberation of Paris in 1945, his provisional government issued Ordinance 45-1922 declaring that all sporting French organisations must be authorised to continue in their roles by the Minister of Education. De Gaulle wanted the country’s sporting administrators to be strong and independent of politics and business interests. In this respect the ACF was not in a very strong position because of its relationships with the country’s automobile manufacturers. To resolve the problem the ACF established the Fédération Française du Sport Automobile (FFSA) in 1952, to comply with new French laws. The first FFSA President was Augustin Pérouse, who also happened to be the President of the ACF. This comfy arrangement continued into the 1960s by which time FFSA members were increasingly frustrated by the situation. It was a time of change in France, with increased opposition to traditional institutions. This would lead to the civil unrest in May 1968.

 

In the motorsport world, the rebellion came a little earlier with the FFSA applying to be given the sporting power by the FIA, to replace the ACF. The FIA did not want to get involved in the domestic affairs of its members and ruled that autumn that it would not change existing arrangements, unless asked to do so by the ACF. However, the FFSA had the support of manufacturers, race organisers, entrants, drivers and, most importantly, politicians. The French government, represented by the Minister of Youth and Sports, Francois Missoffe, a former French Ambassador in Japan, invited the FIA to have discussions about the matter and a compromise was reached with the ACF giving up its sporting power in a seemingly generous fashion, when in fact it had been forced to do so...

Thus the 1968 Grand Prix was no longer the Grand Prix de l’ACF and so was the first French GP, as the posters state. However, after a while the difference ceased to matter and so the FFSA went back to using the numbering system that had previously existed.

 

However, this system can only be described as odd because in the 1920s, in order to emphasize France’s position as the cradle of motorsport, it was decided that the big annual races organised by the ACF between 1895 and 1905, latterly known as the Gordon Bennett Cup, should be deemed to have been Grands Prix de l'ACF. Thus, they declared that the 1st Grand Prix de l’ACF had actually been the ninth… The new first race having being the 1895 Paris-Bordeaux-Paris event.

This was a rather daft idea given that the ACF was not established until late in 1895, after the Paris-Bordeaux-Paris had taken place.

 

But, hey, Nicolas Chauvin was an apocryphal French figure from Napoleonic times, who legend suggests was a nationalist zealot to such an extent that his name passed into the language as "chauvinism"…

 

 

[Radoye]

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No-one really knows why Geoffrey Taylor decided to name his first racing special after the shortened version of the western Canadian province of Alberta, but the car was called an Alta. Perhaps it was a wistful thing because the cars were built in the safe and comfortable world of Surbiton, in the suburbs of London, half an hour by train from Waterloo, while Alberta was a more rugged and exciting world. Whatever the case, Alta was the name he chose - because he liked the sound of it.

 

Tayler's father was a consulting mechanical engineer who originated from Salford, a town to the east of Manchester that had been engulfed by the booming population during the industrial revolution. The young family left Salford in the late 1890s and by the time Geoffrey was born had settled in the pleasant seaside town of St Annes on Sea, to the south of Blackpool. Not long afterwards they moved south and settled in a large house on Coombe Lane in Norbiton, Surrey, not far from Kingston-on-Thames.

 

Geoffrey was too young to fight in World War I and in the mid-1920s he began providing special GT (Geoffrey Taylor) kits for the light sports cars manufacturered by ABC Motors Ltd, which was based in nearby Hersham. He machined these himself working on a small lathe in the disused stables behind the family house. ABC stopped making cars in 1927 and the 24-year-old Taylor decided on an ambitious project to built has own sports cars. He was keen on the Riley Nine, which had come out the previous year, but felt that he could improve upon it and using his own rudimentary equipment designed and built an all-alloy 1.1-litre twin-cam engine, hand-filing components and fitting the motor into an ABC chassis frame. His goal was to produce a small, light and low sports car. The car was finished and registered by the end of 1928 and made its competition debut on the London-Land's End Trial at Easter 1930, and he then took part in a variety of different events in the course of the next couple of years, impressing observers and creating interest in the vehicle.

 

He registered the Alta Car and Engineering Company Ltd at the start of 1931 and set about creating a factory on a piece of land that he had acquired in Tolworth, right next to the then new A3 Kingston by-pass. Unimpressed by what the builders were offering to do, Taylor bought the necessary supplies and equipment and built the factory with his own hands at far less cost and much more quickly. By April that year he was ready to start manufacturing copies of his original car, modified to make production easier. He commissioned Rubery Owen to build him steel chassis frames and fitted them with his own engines and transmissions, while also experimenting with supercharging to increase the horsepower available. The engines were developed with a new slimmer car in 1937, commissioned by Philip Jucker who sadly crashed it on its debut on the seafront at Douglas on the Isle of Man and was killed.

 

But with drivers such as Peter Whitehead, Taylor was able to show the potential of the design and by 1939 the cars were winning national races.

 

The war then intervened and Taylor had to switch his business to government work but in 1945 he began making plans to build a Grand Prix car, while also making light alloy cylinder heads for Austin 7s. In the years that followed Alta produced supercharged 1.5-litre versions of the engine to be raced in both Formula 1 and normally-aspirated units for Formula 2. There were a string of good results with John Heath, George Abecassis and Geoffrey Crossley driving. There were requests for road-going versions of the cars, but Taylor was never very interested and in 1950 he had three Alta F1 cars racing and was supplying his engines to Heath’s Hersham and Walton Motors (HWM). The HWM-Altas were most competitive with Stirling Moss finishing third place in Bari and Johnny Claes winning the Formula 2 Grand Prix des Frontieres at Chimay.

 

The Alta racing cars were gradually abandoned but the engine business boomed with Coopers, HWMs and Emerysons, including Moss winning the London Trophy at Crystal Palace in a Cooper-Alta. Competition became more intense but in 1955 Alta agreed a deal with Connaught Engineering to supply engines and Alta scored its best result with Tony Brooks winning the non-championship F1 Syracuse GP, while drivers such as Les Leston, Archie Scott-Brown and Jack Fairman and Stuart Lewis-Evans all achieved good results with the engines.

 

Gradually, however, the demand reduced as new options came on to the market and Taylor’s health became a problem. In the end he decided to close down the business and retired to the country, settling in Midhurst in Sussex. His engines continued to be raced until the end of 1960, while the 29 cars that he built are now all collectors' items.

 

Sadly, his health did not improve and he died at 63 in the autumn of 1966.

 

His son Michael tried to revive the Alta name in the 1970s but that was not a success. 

 

 

[zoran59]

Uporedni test...

 

 

[Radoye]

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Rice polishing is an odd industry. You take kernels of rice and polish them in machines so that the original brown rice becomes more attractive, more digestible and easier-to-cook white rice, which many think also has a more delicate flavour. However the polishing process removes many of the good things, which is why health-foody folk prefer brown rice.

 

In the early years of the 20th Century in Japan some of the rice-polishing machines that were used were driven by petrol engines and, as a toddler, Soichiro Honda’s favourite pastime was to visit local rice-polishing mill to watch such an engine operating. He was so small that his grandfather had to carry him most of the way, but he loved the machine and the noise and smells it produced.

 

Honda’s father Gihei was a blacksmith but as pople turned away from horses as their means of transport, he turned his efforts to repairing bicycles and so Soichiro grew up surrounded by machinery and happy to tinker with them. He was disinterested in schooling but was thrilled to see occasional cars when they passed through the village of Komyo, 10 miles to the north of Hamamatsu in the Shizuoka province, between Toyota and Nagoya. From a young age Honda was someone who knew what he wanted and at 10 he borrowed one of the bicycles in his father's workshops and cycled 20 miles to watch the demonstration of a flying machine, piloted by the visiting American Art Smith. Soichiro did not have the money to buy a ticket and so climbed a tree and watched the demonstration, returning home in awe of a machine that could fly.

 

He left school at 15 and saw an advertisement for an automobile servicing company called Tokyo Art Shokai, which was basically little more than a garage in the Yushima district, to the north of the city centre. While he was there the region was hit by the Great Kanto Earthquake in September 1923 which killed around 140,000 people, the damage being done not only by the quake but also by fires that raged through the city and a tsunami that swept away coastal villages. The earthquake nearly put Art Shokai out of business but its owner Yuzo Sakakibara and his brother Shin’ichi kept on a couple of apprentice mechanics, Honda being one of them. They started rebuilding the business and decided to build a racing car to advertise the firm. They found an old Daimler engine and fitted a chassis to it, but the result was not very good and so they tried again with a Curtiss OX-5 V8 aircraft engine. This was fitted into the chassis from an old Mitchell automobile.

 

At the end of 1924 Shin’ichi, with Honda as his riding mechanic, won the Fifth Japan Automobile Competition. A few months later Honda received a call up for military service, but was found to be colour blind and so did not have to go into the army and returned to finish his apprenticeship. After six years working with Art Shokai, he asked Yuzo Sakakibara if he could open his own branch of Art Shokai in Hamamatsu. He was then 25 but the business quickly gained an impressive reputation. Honda earned a great deal of money and began to build his own Hamamatsu racing car, powered by a supercharged Ford engine. This was quite successful, but at the opening race of the new Tamagawa Speedway, a three-quarter mile oval, built near Yokohama in 1936, disaster struck. There were a total of 24 cars entered and a big crowd turned up to watch. Honda was leading when close to the finish, he collided with a slow-moving car that pulled out of the pits in front of him. The Hamamatsu was launched into a series of rolls and Honda and his brother Benjiro were thrown out. Soichiro broke his wrist and dislocated his shoulder, in addition to suffering facial injuries, while Benjiro fractured his spine.

 

Although he took part in another race that autumn, Soichiro was convinced by his family that it was time to stop racing… or at least driving. His passion for the sport drove him to enter F1 when the company began building cars in the 1960s an to enter Formula 1 almost immediately…

 

 

 

[Radoye]

 

[Radoye]

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Some Formula 1 engineers never get the recognition they deserve. In part it is down to timing, in part because some don’t care and in part because F1 did not have the same profile as it does today.

 

One such man was Italy’s Giulio Alfieri. Unlike most Italians in Formula 1, Alfieri never worked for Ferrari.

 

Born in Parma in the summer of 1924, he excelled in school and won a place to study mechanical engineering at the Politecnico di Milano. He graduated in the summer of 1948, and soon began working at the Piaggio-owned Cantiere Navale Reuniti shipyard in Genoa, developing steam turbine engines. It was not really his thing and eight months later he moved to Innocenti in Milan, where he developed Pierluigi Torre’s Lambretta engine in an effort to break speed records. After four years he was head-hunted by Maserati and started working at Modena in August 1953.

 

By then Gioachino Colombo had finished the design of the 2.5-litre straight-six that Maserati had conceived for the new Formula 1 regulations, due to begin in 1954. The rest of the car stilled needed to be designed and manufactured. Colombo left Maserati in November that year, before the 250F prototype had run and Alfieri and Vittorio Bellentani took over the role. They had the prototype running at the Modena Autodrome in November but it was damaged during the first test when another car spun into it. It was thus a real struggle to finish two new cars (plus all the customer work with older machinery) in time to get everything shipped out to Argentina on Boxing Day. They worked through Christmas Day to get everything done.

 

The race was scheduled for January 17 at the Autodromo in Buenos Aires but the team had serious problems with overheating, as the cars had only run in cold European winter weather. There were a series of engine failures and eventually it was concluded that the best option was to run the 250Fs on castor oil, because it works better than petroleum-derived products at high temperatures – although only for relatively short periods. Maserati members scoured the city’s pharmacies buying 60 half-litre bottles of the medicinal oil. As dawn broke on race day, they started testing and continued for as long as possible before the race.

 

It all held together and Fangio won the race. He would win again at Spa in June but then left Maserati to drive for Mercedes. Later that summer factory driver Onofre Marimon was killed at the German GP, an accident which upset Alfieri so much that afterwards he never attended another F1 race, working on the cars in practice but then going home on race morning.

 

At the end of that season Bellentani departed to join Ferrari and so Alfieri took over as technical director for all Maserati projects, including F1, sports cars and road cars. Mercedes was dominant in F1 and so Alfieri decided to try some new ideas, including a streamlined version of the 250F, which he had actually tested in a wind-tunnel at the Politecnico di Milano. For 1956 there was a completed revised car, which was lighter and stiffer with plans for a new V12 to replace Colombo’s straight-six, which had been heavily-developed. Stirling Moss won for Maserati at Monaco and Monza and that attracted Fangio back to Modena for 1957, when he won four races and Maserati won the World Championship.

 

The bad news was that late in 1955, Argentine President Juan Perón was overthrown in a coup d’état. At the time Maserati’s owner Adolfo Orsi had a deal with Perón for a large order of machine tools, paid for in wheat. The new government stopped the deal and Orsi found himself in serious debt. The company was put into administration by the Credito Italiano bank, although Orsi stayed in charge and remained a shareholder. This meant that the racing had to stop. The V12 was raced by Jean Behra at Monza and then set aside. The 250Fs were sold to customers.

 

In the years that followed Alfieri built the Maserati 3500 GT and the celebrated Maserati Birdcage for sports car racing, while also developing engines for road cars such as the Maserati Merak, but the company did not have the money to compete in F1, although Alfieri experimented with engines for the 1.5-litre formula, which were raced by customers. The programme was cancelled in 1964 after the announcement of the new 3-litre F1 rules for 1966. Cooper asked Maserati to design an engine for the new formula and Alfieri revived the V12 and Maserati won in Mexico in 1966 thanks to John Surtees and then again in South African in 1967 with Pedro Rodriguez driving, but Repco was dominant and the car company was still struggling and had no money to develop the engines. In 1968 Orsi decided to sell. Argentine Alejandro de Tomaso wanted to buy the business but Alfieri opposed the deal and in 1969 the company ended up in the hands of France's Citroen. The Maserati engines were used in Ligier sports cars but by 1975 the firm was bankrupt again. This time it was bought by de Tomaso and Alfieri was promptly fired by the new owner. Alfieri became president of Honda Italia for a while and then joined designed motorcycle engines for Laverda before joining Lamborghini from 1979 until his retirement in 1987.

 

 

[Radoye]

 

[Radoye]

 

Bobi Rehol danas napunio 67. Jos najmanje opet toliko majstore! 🙂

 

[Radoye]

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There are some people who lead such extraordinary lives that one doubts the veracity of their tales. And yet when you delve into the stories, you find that they are true - or at least you cannot prove that they are not.

 

The story of André Guelfi is unbelievable - but most of it seems to be true. It is a tale which winds its way back to the port city of Mazagan (now El Jadida), 65 miles south-west of Casablanca, in Morocco, in 1919. Guelfi’s father was a Corsican who, after a long history in the French military, became the harbour master of Mazagan, Morocco at that time being a French protectorate. André’s mother was Spanish but with roots in Turkey. She was a professional pianist and so André grew up speaking French, Spanish and the local Arabic dialect.

 

He was by nature an entrepreneur and when he was 10 he was already making money by driving tourists along the Plage Haouzia, an eight-mile beach, in a car that had been modified so he could reach the pedals.

 

At 16 he left school and found a job as a messenger boy in a local bank. He discovered a dossier relating to unpaid debts and proposed to the bank manager that he collect the money, in exchange for 15 percent of the money. He made enough to invest in a sardine fishing business, run by his uncle. Although war broke out when he was 19, Morocco was not greatly involved until the end of 1942 when Allied forces arrived and drove out the Vichy French. Dédé joined the army and was despatched to Italy. The ship was sunk on the way and he returned to Morocco and was posted as a driver with General de Gaulle’s Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action (BCRA), involved in covert activities in Italy. This gave him a taste for speed and for adventure.

 

When the war in Europe was over, he volunteered to go to Indochina and join the so-called Commando Conus, a select Free French airborne unit, under the command of Captain Adrien Conus. Although based in Saigon, the unit saw action against the Viet-Minh at Tay-Ninh and then in special missions in Laos. In between these adventures Guelfi found time to open a garage in Saigon before returning to Morocco in 1946.

 

His love life was, by all accounts, as adventurous as career and he fled Morocco in 1947 to avoid an undesirable marriage. He settled in Paris, bought a bar and began to indulge in his two new passions: flying and motor racing.

 

He started out in competition with a Delahaye and then switched to a Jaguar. He then returned to Morocco and began to build up the sardine business, introducing refrigerated factory ships and earning himself a fortune – and the nickname "Dede La Sardine". In order to achieve his financial success, he developed a close relationship with the powerful politician Mohamed Oufkir. Money was suddenly not a problem and he rose to prominence in North African races, sharing victory with Jean Behra in a factory Gordini in the Casablanca 12 Hours. The then finished sixth at Le Mans, sharing a Gordini with Jacky Pollet. He was Moroccan champion in 1955 but then made little impact until 1958 when he finished second in the Prix de Paris at Montlhéry, at the wheel of a Cooper F2 car. It was no surprise that he was invited to take part in the inaugural Moroccan Grand Prix that autumn, at the wheel of an F2 Cooper. He finished last but had become a Grand Prix. His racing career would continue on and off until the late 1960s but his life changed dramatically in 1960 when his business was effectively wiped out by the Agadir earthquake. He decided that it would be better to start his new business further south, in the newly-independent Mauretania. He quickly made friends with President Moktar Ould Daddah until the latter discovered that Guelfi was paying “commissions” to the minister of finance. Guelfi left the country in a hurry…

 

Back in Morocco, all was well for a while but there was then a coup d’état against King Hassan II and Guelfi’s friend Oufkir was executed and his family imprisoned. Guelfi was hounded by the new regime, which demanded that he handed over a plane that Guelfi owned.

 

In the end he it blew up and departed Morocco.

 

He settled in France again, divorced his wife and soon married the niece of President Georges Pompidou. By doing so he became the co-owner of 45 percent of a company that owned 128 buildings in the centre of Paris. A year later he bought control of the business by acquiring a further six percent. He began building up a real estate business and soon money was rolling in again. He bought himself a huge mansion in Lausanne and purchased a private jet, which he flew himself. He then acquired the Le Coq Sportif sportswear company and was soon involved in business dealings with FIFA and the International Olympic Committee, becoming an advisor to Juan Antonio Samaranch, the President of the International Olympic Committee.

 

He played an important role as “a consultant”, doing deals to ensure that Russia won the 1980 Olympic Games, a deal which won him a lot of friends in high places in Eastern Europe. He became increasingly involved in doing government-level deals and earning commissions. Well-connected with Elf, its first boss Pierre Guillaumat having been involved with Guelfi in the BCRA, he began acting as an intermediary for the oil company and made his Swiss companies and bank accounts available to pay “retro-commissions to Elf executives. He was at the centre of the celebrated Elf Scandal in 1994 and spent 36 days on remand in the La Santé prison in Paris, where he met the colourful entrepreneur/singer/politician Bernard Tapie.

 

He agreed to finance the extraordinary Tapie to get back on his feet and in the years that followed he paid Tapie a total of €14 million as he fought a long legal battle with the French government. Tapie eventually won but the loans were never repaid which caused great bitterness.

 

He was released from jail and would later Switzerland and sell his property there after the Swiss agreed to work with the French in the Elf investigation. In 2003 he was finally sentenced to a suspended three year sentence and a large fine. He was also involved in a long battle with Elf over $30 million in commissions which came from deals between the French and German governments over the sale of the Leuna refinery.

 

He moved to the island of Saint-Barthélemy in the Caribbean.

 

Early in 2016 his name popped up again with numerous references in the Panama Papers…

 

He died later that year, just after his 97th birthday. 

 

 

[Radoye]

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Your average Formula 1 fan may not have heard of the Duchy of Saxe-Meiningen, a relatively minor region in what would eventually become Germany. It centred on the town of Meiningen, in what is today known as Thuringia but was previously in East Germany. The ruling family of the duchy made little impact until 1818 when Her Royal Higness Princess Adelheid von Sachsen-Meiningen was selected to become the wife of William, Duke of Clarence and St Andrews, the third son of King George III. There seemed little chance that he would become king until 1817 when his elder brother George’s daughter Princess Charlotte of Wales died. George had no other legitimate children but there was still Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, George III’s second son, although he also had no heirs. George duly became King George IV when his father died in 1820. Seven years later Frederick died at the age of 63. William then 62 became the heir to the throne. Adelheid (by then renamed Adelaide to sound less German) was 35.

 

Three years later George IV died and William became William IV and Adelaide became the Queen Consort of England. She was popular with the British as she was relatively young, modest, dignified and generous.

 

In the years that followed Edward Wakefield and others established the South Australian Association, aiming to set up a freely-settled and British-planned colony on the southern coast of Australia, with the citizens coming from the home country.

 

Wakefield wanted to call the colony’s capital city Wellington, after the celebrated general who had helped get the colony agreed, but King William felt it would be more agreeable (for him) if the new city was named after his wife. The city was established at the end of December in 1836.

 

Colonel William Lightdesigned the new city, using a grid layout, with wide boulevards and public squares, with a swathe of parkland ringing the whole place. It was a pleasant place and as it allowed complete religious freedom it developed into a city with a large number of churches and so became known as the City of Churches. It had a reputation of being a big country town rather than a buzzing metropolis and was regarded by other Australian cities as being rather sleepy and dull. It was a reputation that the city sought to change in the early 1980s. The locals were keen to make a big impact with the sesquicentenary celebrations in 1986 and set up a Jubilee 150 Board to consider ways to use the event as a way to gain international recognition for the city.

 

No-one had considered anything radical until a Christmas in 1982 when entrepreneur and motor racing amateur Bill O’Gorman was at a corporate party and the discussion turned to what the city should do for its jubilee in 1986. He joked that it would probably be celebrated with “sewing and knitting” but was then asked what he suggested. His reply was simple: a Formula 1 Grand Prix.

 

When he thought about it later he liked the idea and so wrote to the South Australian Premier John Bannon and suggested the idea. Bannon saw the opportunity and after South Australia’s Vern Schuppan won Le Mans in 1983 there was a celebratory dinner at which Bannon announced plans for a race. The key was to get the locals enthusiastic, without stirring up too much resistance to the idea. Once a plan was formulated O’Gorman and Mal Hemmerling, a former director of the South Australia cabinet office, who was taken on as executive director of the project, flew to London to meet with Bernie Ecclestone. It was May 1984 and Ecclestone showed little interest in the idea, although he noted the fact that a senior government official was involved. A few weeks later, at the British GP, O’Gorman met him again. The Dallas Grand Prix had been a disaster and Bernie was interested in Australia. They struck a deal a few weeks later with the first race scheduled for November 1985. There was not much time but the government made it happen, with laws being changed and the circuit being modified to reduce the disruption in the city by having the pits inside the Victoria Park racecourse. A new section of road had to be laid to cross the racecourse in two places. The pits were a temporary structure which could be disassembled each year.

 

The first event was deigned to be an end-of-season party for Formula 1 and it established the city as a place that F1 enjoyed going. The slogan beamed around the world was “Adelaide Alive” and suddenly it was.

 

The second race featured the incredible World Championship showdown between Nigel Mansell, Nelson Piquet and Alain Prostwhich fetaured Mansell's hopes exploding when a tyre blew and the championship outsider Prost scored an amazing victory to snatch the title. In the end Adelaide hosted the Grand Prix for 10 years but Ecclestone had already made a deal with Ron Walker in Melbourne to switch the race to Melbourne as soon as Bannon was no longer Premier and couldn’t extend the contract further. That happened in 1992 after the collapse of the state bank. Ecclestone and Walker did a deal with Victorian State Premier for a race in Melbourne in 1996.

 

The government of South Australia sold its equipment to Melbourne…

 

 

 

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Duke Karl Eugen von Württemberg had a couple of passions in life. He liked women and had a string of mistresses, producing 11 illegitimate children with no fewer than eight different ladies. Born in 1728, he succeeded his father as the ruler of Württemberg in 1737, when he was just nine years of age. He married at 20 and the new couple went to Paris for their honeymoon where he was impressed by the Chateau de Versailles and its contents. He ended up making four other visits to Paris during his lifetime, buying things for his castles. Building castles was really his biggest weakness. In fact, he built so many that the duchy struggled to pay for all of them. He had an extensive library and was passionate about opera, but it was building castles that really got him excited. That and his mistresses, of course. His wife left him after eight years and he ended up without a legitimate heir, the duchy going to his younger brother when he died in 1793.

 

Thirty years before his death he felt the need for a hunting lodge and summer residence and ordered a new castle to be constructed to the west of Stuttgart, close to the road to Leonberg, in a forest known as Glemswald. He had already built a castle, known as the Bärenschlössle (the Bear Castle) close by but wasn’t grand enough for the extravagant Duke and so a new palace, designed in late Rococo style, was built just up the road. This featured a wide tree-lined avenue that went in a straight line for a modest eight miles until it arrived at Schloss Ludwigsburg, which boasted only 452 rooms. 

 

The new castle was named Schloss Solitude, the Duke choosing the name because it was meant to be a refuge where he could relax and reflect on life, with only a huge staff of servants present, to keep him fed and watered. The problem was that with so many palaces to choose from (and mistresses to be entertained) Duke Karl Eugen rarely had time to visit all his castles and a year after it was completed he decided to set up an elite military academy inside the castle. The most famous student being Friedrich Schiller, the celebrated playright, poet and philosopher. After the Duke died, the school was closed down and gradually the castle fell into disrepair and was abandoned.

 

Early in the Twentieth Century, with the arrival of the automobile, Schloss Solitude became the finishing point for a hillclimb course, which climbed up from Stuttgart.  This continued until 1925 when it was decided to lay out a proper circuit 13.8-miles long to the south of the castle. The roads were narrow with no run-off at all and for much of its history Solitude was run only for motorcycles. Later this would shortened to become a very fast seven miles.

 

The track hosted the German Motorcycle Grand Prix on seven occasions between 1952 and 1964, sharing the race with Hockenheim every other year. It was upgraded in 1957 and in 1960 it hosted a Formula 2 race, which was won by Wolfgang Von Trips in a Ferrari. It was by then a huge event with crowds estimated to be in the region of 290,000. The circuit was also used by NSU, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche as a test track. It had the reputation of being a sort of mini-Nurburgring and was popular with the drivers.

 

The first Solitude F1 Grand Prix took place in 1961, with the race being won by Innes Ireland in a Lotus after a thrilling battle with Jo Bonnier's Porsche. A year later Dan Gurney led Bonnier in a Porsche 1-2, while Jack Brabham and Jim Clark rounded off the track's F1 history in 1963 and 1964. The circuit switched back to Formula 2 in 1965, with victory going to Chris Amon in a Lola but then the track fell victim to concerns about safety not only for the drivers but for spectators as well. One can still drive around the old track, as the roads still exist but there is little evidence of the old circuit, except the old scoring tower…

 

 

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MILLER: Can Roger Penske right some wrongs with the IMS Hall of Fame?

Image by Phipps/Sutton/LAT

 

By: Robin Miller

2 hours ago

 

 

I sent in my ballot for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame last week, but for the first time in 10 years, I didn’t write in Jim Hurtubise, Paul Newman, Carl Haas or Bill Finley because it was a obvious that no one in charge ever gave them serious consideration.

 

So I’m taking a different approach this year and asking Roger Penske to step in and examine their bodies of work, forget politics, and embrace what this honor supposedly represents.

 

Now, nobody from the Speedway has ever officially admitted that Herk, Paul and Carl are blackballed, but one former employee told me: “Those guys will never get in the Hall of Fame. Not after what they did.”

 

The Captain was just beginning his IndyCar story when Hurtubise was winding down a decade-long career, becoming one of Indy’s most fearless and popular characters of all time. He’d almost cracked the 150 mph barrier as a rookie in 1960; led the first 33 laps of the race in 1961; qualified a car he’d never driven in the closing minutes of qualifying in 1962; and put the mighty Novi on the front row in 1963 (photo above).

 

His popularity soared in 1965 when he returned from near-fatal burns in a 1964 crash at Milwaukee to put one of Andy Granatelli’s snake-bit Novis in the show. The ovation he received rolling down pit road that day is still one of the loudest on record. And then Herk cemented his legacy by qualifying the last roadster in 1968.

 

But because of what transpired during a 10-minute protest in 1978, all of those memorable moments in Jim’s glory days were wiped off the board. Yes, he disrupted qualifying on the fourth day after not being allowed an attempt, ran out on the track, and was finally led out of the pits by a couple of state troopers. It was as sad as it was embarrassing, but from that point on, the brave little man from North Tonawanda, N.Y., was basically treated like he never existed by the Speedway, and like all of his heroics never happened.

 

And that’s a lot more shameful than his actions back in ’78.

 

Newman came to IMS as a car owner in 1979 in a last-minute deal that had no chance before returning in 1983 with partner Haas and Mario Andretti. Newman/Haas Racing had Indy in the bag in 1987 with Mario and again in 1992 with Michael Andretti, but were KO’d late by mechanical gremlins. They became Team Penske’s primary rival and had the whole world watching Indianapolis in 1993 when they brought world champ Nigel Mansell to the 500.

 

Newman, Haas and Mansell at the ’93 Indy 500. Image by LAT

 

When Tony George formed the Indy Racing League, Newman/Haas became a staunch supporter of CART, and PLN publicly criticized TG for dividing open-wheel racing at the worst possible time. Yet the famed actor hosted a peace pow-wow at his home before TG put everything back together in 2008.

 

PLN made his final appearance at the Speedway with Graham Rahal in 2008 before his death that fall. “We may not win Indy while I’m still alive, but we’re damn sure going to keep trying until we do,” he said that May.

 

Haas, meanwhile, was the Lola importer, a chassis that comprised two-thirds of the 1996 Indy 500 field and won in 1990 with Arie Luyendyk. Haas also promoted Milwaukee when Indy cars packed the place. So while it appears everyone has moved on from the vitriol of The Split, maybe not.

 

Finley was one of those California jalopy guys who raced sprinters but quickly figured out he was better building race cars than driving them. He came to Indy in the late 1950s as a mechanic and then hooked up with Tassi Vatis, the pair starting their own team in 1965.

 

For the next 20 years, Finley fabricated Indy cars out of a little garage behind his home on Patricia Avenue less than a mile from the Speedway. He eye-balled one of Dan Gurney’s Eagles in 1973 and built what we called a ‘Fleagle’ from scratch along with son Tom and friend Howie Ferland. He didn’t have a wind tunnel, an aerodynamicist or much of a budget, but Johnny Parsons qualified the Fleagle for the 1974 Indy 500.

 

Fernley (kneeling next to the right-side mirror) with driver Johnny Parsons at the 500 in 1974. Image via Robin Miller collection

 

Finley did it all from welding to putting engines together to stealing IMS trash cans and making fueling rigs out of them. He helped Dale Coyne, Jerry Karl, John Barnes, Tim Richmond, Rick Muther, Wally Dallenbach, Gary Congdon, Sammy Sessions, Bentley Warren, Bill Vukovich, Lee Kunzman, Mike Hiss, Steve Krisiloff, John Mahler, Sam Posey and Johnny Parsons, and he also rebuilt crashes suffered by a third of the field.

 

Finley got to work at 7:00 a.m., took 30 minutes for lunch, worked until 6:00, ate dinner, and went back in the shop until 10 p.m. Every day.

 

Now, I know The Captain’s plate is full right now and he’s got bigger fish to fry than the Hall of Fame ballot. But he’s a racer and appreciates the history of the track he now owns, and I hope he looks at the evidence I’ve laid in front of him. And I get that these four are no longer with us and the HOF wants to honor living people who can buy tables at the banquet.

 

But Herk, PLN, Haas and Finley embody everything that made Indianapolis the greatest spectacle in racing. A brave, talented, crowd-pleasing driver who sold a lot of tickets at 16th and Georgetown; an odd couple of passionate racers who supported Indianapolis and IndyCar racing at the highest level for 25 years; and a savant of the toolbox who lived and breathed Indy 365 days a year.

 

If those four don’t qualify for the HOF, then neither does anyone else.

 

Editor’s note: Shortly after this piece was published, we were made aware that Carl Haas is already on this year’s ballot. One down, three to go!

 

 

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The city of Caen sits nine miles inland from the sea, on the Orne river, in lower Normandy. It has long been a river port where ships are better protected than at Ouistreham, the village where the Orne flows out into the English Channel. Overlooking the town of Caen are the remains of a once-mighty castle, one of the largest medieval fortresses in Europe. Nearby are the abbeys of Saint-Étienne and Sainte-Trinité. All were built (or at least started) by William the Bastard, the illegitimate son of Robert le Magnifique, Duke of Normandy.

 

It took William some years to secure control of the duchy and to build himself a castle, but he then turned to other matters and in 1066 set sail witH an army to claim the kingdom of England and thus was able to change his nickname to William the Conqueror, which was less of a burden for the poor fellow. Apart from William, Caen is celebrated for its stone, which is pleasant to the eye and easy to work with and thousands of tons of it were shipped to England to build the cathedrals at Canterbury and Norwich, the Abbey of Westminster and even parts of the Tower of London.

 

When William died in 1087 he was buried in the Abbey of Saint-Etienne where his tomb remains to this day, although the locals don’t mention that the grave was desecrated several times and all that is really there is a thigh bone. After William Caen returned to being a backwater until it was decided to build a canal alongside the Orne, to allow bigger ships to reach the town. This coincided with the arrival of the railways, while the earth dug for the canal was used to aid construction of a hippodrome on the flat lands to the west of the town, known as La Prarie, originally a marsh that had been drained in medieval times. Caen became a more important port with trains running from the quayside all the way to the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, where the citizens were happy to eat fresh fish rushed each morning from the port.

 

Caen was never much of a tourist destination, as the visitors went to the sandy beaches at nearby Cabourg and Deauville, but it remained a busy town with a coastal paddle steamer service that went across the Seine estuary to Le Havre, carrying both goods and passengers in the days before the automobile made it easier to get about. There was also a freight service across the Channel to Newhaven, at least for a time.

 

In an effort to attract visitors the hippodrome was joined by a velodrome and in the early years of the 20th Century it was decided to host automobile races. These were given the title Coupe de Normandie and took place on a triangular road circuit to the west of the town, running up the main road to Bayeux and then back by way of Tilly-sur-Seulles. The earliest races were amateur affairs for wealthy locals, but in 1909 and 1910 Peugeot voiturettes dominated, with victories going to the redoutable Georges Boillot and to Jules Goux.

 

It was not until 1944 that Caen was thrust on to the world stage when around 80 percent of the town was literally blown to bits by Allied bombers which dropped 2,000 tons of bombs on the city one night in July 1944, as a prelude to an armoured assault the following day to drive out the Germans. Nine thousand buildings were completely destroyed that night with another 650 badly damaged. Only 2,000 remained. The Allied push was successful but there was little left in Caen but rubble. It took almost two years just to clear this away. The city’s reconstruction would not be finished until the early 1960s.

 

Much of the local population lived in wooden huts while the work was done. One of the first tasks was to rebuild the roads and the local mayor Yves Guillou pushed for a new network of wider boulevards, rather than trying to rebuild the original streets. Once this was done and work began on the buildings, it struck the mayor that it might be a good idea to host motor races on his new roads, in order to show the world that Caen was still open for business. The local branch of the Automobile Club de l’Ouest thought this to be a splendid idea and in 1952 a temporary street circuit was laid out around the hippodrome on La Prairie and the first Grand Prix de Caen was held for Formula 2 cars. There was a decent entry with 16 cars, including a quartet of works Gordinis, a couple of private Ferraris, and even two HWMs sent out from England. The big names of French racing were there and Maurice Tintignant beat his team-mate Jean Behra to victory. It was a great success.

 

The ACO then suggested that the 1953 race should be for Le Mans sports cars and 16 cars arrived with a battle for victory going to the little-known Pierre de Chancel, a garage owner from Paris who drove his own Panhard, beating Rene Bonnet in his DB.

 

It was then decided that the 1954 race should be for Formula 1 cars and 10 Grand Prix cars arrived for the III Grand Prix de Caen. The entry might have been small but there was some quality in the field with Trintignant’s Scdueria Ferrari 625 beating Stirling Moss in a factory Maserati 250F. The fourth Grand Prix de Caen was not until 1956, because the 1955 race was cancelled in the wake of the Le Mans disaster but on a damp track Harry Schell drove his Maserati 250F to victory over André Simon’s Gordini.

 

In 1957 Guillou had a stroke and handed over the role of mayor to his deputy Henri-François Buot. The race was timed to be between the British GP and the race in Germany and while Maserati decined to attend, Jean Behra was permitted to find a ride elsewhere and convinced BRM to loan him a pair of BRM P25s which needed development. Behra won the race by more than a lap, ahead of Roy Salvadori in a Cooper-ClimaxT43.

 

A year later, it was decided to hold the race on Sunday, July 20, at the start of the French holiday season. The only problem with this was that the British Grand Prix was scheduled for the previous day, which made life pretty interesting for nine of the 12 drivers taking part, as they had to get themselves and their cars (in most cases) from Silverstone to Caen overnight. The race was scheduled for the late afternoon to give the late arrivals time to practice in the morning. The Grand Prix was a straight fight between Moss in a Cooper and Behra in a BRM with Jo Bonnier and Bruce Halford chasing in Maseratis. In the end Behra’s car broke down, leaving Moss to win the race.

 

Early in 1959 Guillou stood down as mayor and was replaced by Jean-Marie Louvel, not a man who saw the value of motor racing. The race died.

 

 

 

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Racing drivers come from many different and varied backgrounds but few of them are involved in “the arts”. There are not many writers, dancers or painters who have raced and while some drivers have been very good musicians, the average F1 driver seems to be more attuned to machines than to ethereal matters. Strangely, Leslie Marr’s family background came from the world of engineering. His grandfather was Sir James Marr, a celebrated shipbuilder who ran the Joseph Thompson and Sir James Laing shipyards, the Sunderland Forge & Engineering Company, which fitted out new ships, the Silver Line shipping firm and the Wolsingham Steel Foundry. He began running the Thompson shipyard in 1908 after the early death of Robert Thompson and was raised to a baronetcy in 1919 for services to the government during WW1.

 

His son John was also an engineer, working in the family businesses, while also being in the Territorial Army. He was called up in 1914 and served as the commander of the Durham Heavy Battery on the Western Front until 1917 when he was recalled to work at the Admiralty. After the war he married May Thompson, the daughter of Robert Thompson and Leslie was born two years later. Sadly, John would die of pneumonia at the age of 53, when Leslie was only nine. A year later Sir James died as well, leaving Leslie as the 2nd Baronet with a considerable fortune awaiting him when he was 21. His mother May was a character, sent to a finishing school in Belgium. She graced the ballrooms of St. Moritz and bobsleighed with a Russian Prince, while also visiting Egypt with her parents. She was one of the first women in the north of England to own her own automobiles and looked after them herself. These included a Darracq and later a Fiat. During the war she served in the Red Cross but was also a very good shot and opened a rifle range to train soldiers. After his father’s death, his mother struggled to cope and ended up spending some time in a psychiatric hospital in Kent. Her brother Stanley made a big impact with his wild nature and driving escapades.

 

Leslie was sent away to school in Shrewsbury in his teens and then went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he studied engineering. He graduated in 1942 and was then called up into the Royal Air Force Technical Branch (Radar), initially at the Yatesbury radar school and then at Dollarbeg Castle in Dollar, Scotland before being sent to Islay in the Hebrides. He was then posted back to a more lively station at Beachy Head where V1 and V2 rockets were being fired all the time and he had several near-misses. He was then despatched to Egypt where he was put in charge of a top secret Air Ministry Experimental Station (AMES) around the Middle East. It was during this time that he began to paint seriously before he was posted back to Egypt and then to the Isle of Wight by the end of the war.

 

He then decided that he wanted to pursue art, rather than going into shipbuilding. He returned to London and attended the Heatherley School of Fine Art in Pimlico and then moved on to the Borough Polytechnic, where he studied under David Bomberg and was one of the founders of the  Borough Group of artists, which held exhibitions in a large room above a bookshop. This included Cliff Holden, Edna Mann, Dorothy Mead, Peter Richmond, Dennis Creffield and Dinora Mendelson, Bomberg’s step-daughter, who Marr married in June 1948. They separated after only a couple of years and he moved to Shropshire to paint landscapes.

 

He then decided to buy himself a racing car and acquired a Connaught A-type with which he competed in British races that summer, finishing third in the United States Air Force Trophy at Snetterton the following summer, behind Tony Rolt and Bob Gerard. In 1954 he raced in the British GP and finished 13th, but he was a long way off the pace.

 

The following year he bought a new streamlined Connaught B-Type and won a race at Davidstow in Cornwall, although he was happy to admit that the competition was weak. A second appearance in the British GP later that summer saw him spin off after a brake failure. That autumn he shipped the car to New Zealand and went out to take part in the annual races there. He finished third in the Lady Wigram Trophy.

 

In the final round at Invercargill he was hit in the face by a stone and spun into a ditch, wrecking the car. He decided that enough was enough. He returned to Europe and focussed on his painting, but still returned to New Zealand later to paint.

 

He remarried in 1962 having met his second wife who was working as a mechanic in a garage. They had two daughters. They lived in a thatched cottage on Exmoor in North Devon from 1963 until 1969 and Marr then turned his attention to pottery, moving to Norfolk where he built a large kiln and opened a gallery. He began visiting Scotland on a regular basis and bought a house in Glencoe in 1973. He tried his hand at photography as well and in the late 1970s published a book about church architecture. The couple moved to the island of Arran in 1983, where they remained until 1991, before returning to Norfolk. His marriage broke down although he married for a third time in 2002.

 

He is styled Sir Leslie Marr, 2nd Baronet but he never uses the title – even at the advanaced age of 97…

 

 

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In 1979, the Monaco Grand Prix – the seventh round of the World Championship – took place on Sunday May 27. Going into the Monaco weekend Ferrari’s Jody Scheckter led the World Championship with 25 points, but he had won only one race. Ligier’s Jacques Laffite, who had won the first two races of the year, had 24, while Carlos Reutemann (Team Lotus) was third, despite not having won a race. He had 21 points. Ferrari’s Gilles Villeneuve was next with 20 points, having won twice. He was equal on points to Ligier’s Patrick Depailler who had won in Spain. The title was wide open…

 

Scheckter won that weekend and stayed ahead, increasing his total to 30 points, because the points system allowed only the best four results from the first seven races, despite being structured 9-6-4-3-2-1 for the top six. They were all still in the hunt but there was then a five-week break before the French GP at Dijon on July 1.

 

The weekend after Monaco was a long weekend in France, with the three-day Pentecote holiday. There was little for the F1 drivers to do. Formula 2 took place at Pau and there was the annual Nürburgring 1000km sports car race in Germany, but for the F1 drivers it was time off. Patrick Depailler decided to go home to his native Puy-de-Dome departément, the area around the city of Clermont-Ferrand, which features a string of picturesque volcanic craters, cones and domes. His plan was to go and jump off the side of a mountain, strapped to a hang-glider, and see how long he could keep the device in the air, looking for thermals and updrafts in the airflows around the mountains. It is a pastime that requires not only skill and courage but also experience. And it’s dangerous because flying with the wind can often bring surprises.

 

Depailler was not a man who worried much about risk. He smoked like a chimney, he had raced motorcycles in his wild youth, he still liked to ride them, and he loved to scuba-dive. And, of course, he was a Formula 1 driver… which meant that he had a contract which meant he wasn’t supposed to do these things.

But he found it hard to live without the thrill of such things. This had been illustrated a few years earlier when Ken Tyrrell agreed to run the young Elf protégé in a third car for the French GP at Depailler’s home circuit of Clermont-Ferrand, alongside Jackie Stewart and Francois Cevert. Tyrrell was impressed and so in 1973 offered Patrick the chance to race in the Canadian and United States GPs at the end of the season. Ten days before the Mosport race he crashed a trials bike and broke his leg. The opportunity was lost. But Tyrrell took him on for 1974, having lost Stewart to retirement and Cevert to a crash at Watkins Glen. Paired with Jody Scheckter, he showed his speed, taking pole position in Sweden that year and finishing second to his team-mate. That year he also won the European Formula 2 title, winning four of the nine races he took part in. He would score 14 podiums in the years that followed, racing the Tyrrell six-wheeler in 1976 and 1977, before he finally won his first F1 victory at Monaco in 1978. He finished fifth in the World Championship that year and then agreed to join Ligier, which was expanding  to two cars and switching from Matra engines to Cosworths. Designer Gérard Ducarouge designed the  beautiful JS11 and the team began to the season with three wins in the first five races: two for Laffite and one for Depailler. Both drivers were obviously in the running for the title…

 

This seems not have been a consideration when Depailler launched himself into the air on Sunday, June 3 and headed his hang-glider away from the mountain and began to look for thermals. He looped around and flew close to a cliff, where one can often find air moving upwards, but then an unexpected gust pushed the hang-glider into the cliff face and it tumbled to the rocky ground below. He survived but had hurt back of his legs and a wrist in his fall. His friends called for help and a medical helicopter was despatched by the Protection Civile service and he was put on to a stretcher and winched away, being flown to the main hospital in Clermont-Ferrand. He had multiple fractures of his right tibia and fibula and a broken right wrist – and his left ankle and foot had both been damaged badly. Surgeons completed a lengthy operation to try to put the bones back in place, but they warned that he would probably need more surgery. For some time there was still a risk that they might need to amputate. Guy Ligier recognised that Depailler was gone and so signed Jacky Ickx for the rest of the year and began talking to France’s next rising star Didier Pironi about a drive for 1980.

 

Depailler was not a good patient and as things were healing in August he managed to fall out of his hospital bed and re-break his leg. It was not until November that he knew for sure that he would be able to race again, thanks to a series of operations conducted by Professor Emile Letournel, the head of orthopedic surgery at the Centre Médico-Chirurgical de la Porte de Choisy in Paris.

 

He managed to convince Alfa Romeo to sign him for 1980 but in the early part of the year he was still in pain and not fully mobile. The car was fast – which was demonstrated when he qualified third at Long Beach, the fourth race of the year - but not at all reliable. He was soon back on the pace and often beating his team-mate Bruno Giacomelli in qualifying. But then the team went testing in Hockenheim in the week before the German GP. On August 1 the Alfa Romeo suffered a suspension failure in the high-speed Ostkurve at around 175 mph. There was no catchfencing in place and the car hit the barriers. Depailler did not survive. He is buried in the cemetery of his home village of Crevant-Laveine, in the land of the volcanoes of the Puy-de-Dome.

 

 

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In the early 1930s, AD (Anton) Hildebrand was in his mid-twenties and working as a writer of radio plays with the Algemene Vereniging Radio Omroep (AVRO), the public radio service of the Netherlands. In 1935 he published a book for children about a fictional brown bear called Bolke de Beer, who escaped from a zoo and went to live in a forest near Apeldoorn, with a group of animal friends. The book was a huge success and in the years that followed (despite the war) Hildebrand wrote a further nine books about Bolke. Later the stories would become a television series with puppets. Bolke was one of a number of different animal  characters that Hildebrand wrote series about during his lifetime.

 

His son Tonio, who was born before the first Bolke book was published, benefited from his father's wealth. He raced with some success in the 1950s and 1960s on the Dutch national scene and became something of a celebrity with a life of seemingly unlimited money, fast cars, beautiful women and wild adventures, with a group of friends that included circus performer turned TV persanality Bas van Toor, comedians Rijk de Gooyer and Appie Bueno de Mesquita and the singer Willy Alberti. Tonio carefully cultivated his image sporting a large moustache and always smoking a fat Havana cigar. 

 

In 1979 he agreed to sponsor Michael Bleekemolen in a Lotus B team, which would be run by BS Fabrications, using the old Lotus 79 chassis, which had won the title in 1978 with Mario Andretti. Team Lotus would move on to a new Lotus 81.

 

At the time, Bleekemolen was 29 but had shown promise in Formula Vee and in European Formula 3 that year in a factory Chevron, winning several heats and taking overall victory at Enna. He had finished fifth in the championship, which was won by fellow Dutchman Jan Lammers. He was a man in a hurry because there was not much money available in the Netherlands and he was in competition with Lammers, Arie Luyendyk and Huub Rothengatter. That summer he did a couple of Formula 2 races with a Fred Opert Chevron and tried to break into Formula 1 with an ATS. The previous year he had tried to qualify for the Dutch GP with a RAM March but had failed and with ATS it was a similar story, although he did make it into the race at Watkins Glen, where he retired with an oil leak.

 

That autumn the deal with Lotus was agreed and everything seemed to be place and over the Christmas period Bleekemolen went off for a skiing holiday. While he was away the FIA issued an entry list for the World Championship. Bleekemolen read about it in a German motorsport magazine and was upset to see that not only was he not there, but also there was no sign of the team either.

 

It emerged that the Dutch motorsport federation had failed to do the necessary paperwork.  A late application was made but it was turned down by the federation because there was no shortage of cars and it did not want there to be pre-qualifying.

 

As a result Bleekemolen had to give up the plans and raced instead in Formula 3, where he joined Roger Heavens Racing and finished a distant runner-up to Alain Prost. But the money for F1 was no longer there. Hildebrand ran into trouble with the Dutch tax authorities and skipped the country, escaping to Belgium. He would later spend six months in prison in Holland.

 

Bleekemolen was another chance in 1981 when he was named as a fulltime driver in the British Formula 3 Championship by Barron Racing, which had a Ralt-Toyota. His results were disappointing and after six races he was replaced by a young Brazilian called Roberto Moreno.

 

Bleekemolen drifted away from single-seaters and spent many years racing in Renault one-make championships after that.

 

 

[Radoye]

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To the north of Saint Albans in Hertfordhsire, the B651 passes through the quaint half-timbered village of Wheathampstead, dips down and crosses the River Lea and then climbs uphill to the Mid Herts Golf Course, one of the oldest in England, dating back to 1892. It then reaches the village of Gustard Wood, which boasts the inevitable pub, The Cross Keys, and of course the local church.

 

It was in this idyllic English setting that Ernie and Ethel Sparshott settled and where their son Robert was born in 1944. Ernie was a carpenter but as the work reduced he turned his hands to construction work. Robert soon became known as Bob and went to the local school in Harpenden and then spent time at Hatfield College before getting a job with a little-known company called Lotus Components in Cheshunt in 1962, when he was 17 years old. After a while he was switched to the Lotus service department which was then operating out of a hangar at Panshanger Aerodrome, between Hatfield and Welwyn. Lotus boss Colin Chapman was already into flying at that point and his Piper Comanche was based at Panshanger. Chapman and Jim Clark would often pass through on their way to foreign races.

 

Young Bob Sparshott wanted to be in the racing side business and in 1964 he switched across to Team Lotus, working under the celebrated Bob Dance. They were assigned to the Lotus Cortina Racing Team in the United States, where three cars were sent to take part in the 1964 United States Road Racing Championship (USRRC). As the pair were based in the States, Lotus called them up to help with Clark’s car at the Indy 500 that year, and were back again at Indy in 1965 - when Clark won the race.

 

For 1966 Sparshott returned home to England and began working with the Lotus Formula 2 team as mechanic to Graham Hill. He then moved into F1 in 1968, to work with Hill. Graham would win the title that year, but the team lost Jim Clark in a Formula 2 accident in Hockenheim. At the end of the year Sparshott decided it was time to lead a quieter life and set up his own fabrication business in Luton, not far from his home village. He formed a partnership with John Woodington, working for a number of F1 teams, and the business was named BS Fabrications. It was very successful as there were plenty of small F1 teams in that era.

 

In 1972, Sparshott agreed to run a March 722 Formula 2 with a Formula 1 engine for Mike Beuttler in selected events. This was called a March 721G and was sufficiently competitive that March built similar versions for the factory team. That year the team also ran American Brett Lunger in Formula 2 under the Space Racing banner.

 

The second BS Fabrications venture into Formula 1 came in 1976 when Henri Pescarolo's sponsor Norev bought a Surtees TS19 and asked Sparshott to run the car for him, alongside the factory entires of Alan Jones (Durex) and Lunger (Chesterfield). The programme began at Monaco where Pescarolo failed to qualify but the Frenchman went on to start seven races and managed to finish five of them, his best result being a ninth place at the Austrian GP. Vittorio Brambilla then arrived at Surtees with money from Beta for 1977 and so Lunger asked BS Fabrications to run him in Chesterfield-sponsored March 761. After a few races, it was decided to switch to a McLaren M23 and that arrangement continued into 1978 with an upgrade in the mid-season to a newer McLaren M26. This left the M23 available and Sparshott offered the drive to the young Nelson Piquet for the Austrian, Dutch and Italian Grands Prix. In the end Piquet did a one-off race with Ensign in Germany before joining BS Fabrications for the planned three races.

 

For 1979 there was a plan to run a Lotus B team, using the all-conquering Lotus 79, while the factory would move on to the new Lotus 80. The original idea was to run two cars for Rupert Keegan and Michael Bleekemolen but the project disappeared because Keegan didn’t have the money and Bleekemolen didn’t have the right paperwork. That winter Sparshott bcame involved in the creation of the Chaparral 2K Indycar, which John Barnard and Gordon Kimball were busily designing for Jim Hall in England and which Barnard insisted be built in the UK. The car was very successful although Hall was unimpressed by the cost involved. In the end two cars and a third set of parts were completed and shipped off to the United States where Al Unser Sr ended the season with a victory in Phoenix. In 1980 Johnny Rutherford took over and took the car to victory in the Indy 500 and went on to win the title.

 

After the Lotus B Team project failed, BS Fabrications began to work on a project to build a chassis for Argentine Ricardo Zunino. The team ran Zunino briefly in British Formula 1 but it all fell apart because of uncertainty surrounding the Argentine GP. As a result BS Fabrications closed down in January 1980. The factory was used to build the Toleman TG280 with which Brian Henton and Derek Warwick finished 1-2 in the European F2 Championship that year.

 

Sparshott would later start a new operations called BS Automotive and won the Formula 3000 title with Christian Danner in 1985. Bob retired from racing in 1988 but went on running a company called Sparshott Technologies Ltd, making components for racing teams. 

 

 

[Radoye]

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Of all the Formula 1 drivers in history – who now number 774 – Jean Lucas probably had the strangest debut in the sport. He made just one appearance, at the Italian Grand Prix in 1955, standing in for Robert Manzon.

 

Why? Because Lucas was the team manager of Equipe Gordini and Manzon, by all accounts, threw a wobbly and refused to drive what was a very difficult car on the new high banking at the Autodromo Nazionale. Gordini had spent plenty of money to get there and so Lucas stepped in to drive the car…

 

His F1 career lasted seven laps before the Gordini broke down. 

 

To be fair, Lucas was no slouch in a racing car.

 

He had been racing since 1949 and had scored a number of impressive results in sports car events, winning some major events.

 

Born in Le Mans, the city famed for endurance racing, in 1917, Lucas’s racing career did not begin until after World War II, but whicb time he was 28. He took part in some local rallying events and then was entered to race a Ferrari 166MM in the Le Mans 24 Hours, partnered by the pseudonymous “Ferret”, the shipping magnate Pierre Louis-Dreyfus who usually raced under the name of “Heldé” (which in French is a verbal version of his LD initials). In other words, it was in effect a factory Ferrari entry, alongside the lead car, driven by Luigi Chinetti and Lord Selsdon. The car was entered by Jean-Arthur Plisson, Chinetti’s partner in Ferrari’s Paris agency.

 

It was a difficult weekend as Lucas damaged the car avoiding a child who had wandered on to the circuit during the practice session. The repairs were finished just before the start but the race ended in retirement. Chinetti and Selsdon won the race.

 

Lucas obviously impressed Chinetti because three weeks later the two shared a 166MM to win the Spa 24. The following year at Le Mans Lucas was paired with Selsdon, but they failed to finish. Later that summer Chinetti and Lucas won the 12 Hours of Paris at Montlhéry.

 

After that Lucas was less involved as he went to live in Morocco and created a sardine fishing business, following in the footsteps of his friend Andre Guelfi. He won the Rallye du Maroc in 1951 in a Ferrari 212 and then in 1952 he and Chinetti went to Mexico and finished third on the Carrera Panamericana, as always with Ferrari.

 

It was then that he was offered the role of team manager of Ecurie Gordini and, although still close to Chinetti, he took the opportunity and later had a similar role with Monomill, a racing business established by another friend René Bonnet.

 

With a number of his racing friends, he established the Ecurie Los Amigos to race as and when they could.

 

In 1956, he finished second in the Paris 1000 with Harry Schell, and then tried single-seaters again to finish fifth in the Grand Prix de Caen. In 1957, he tried a Cooper Formula 2 car and finished second at Reims. That year he also scored his best result at Le Mans, driving a Equipe Los Amigos Jaguar D-Type, which he shared with “Mary”, the French industrialist Jean-Marie Brussin, a synthetic diamond manufacturer. They finished third.

 

This meant that he was invited to race in the 1957 Moroccan Grand Prix, a non-championship Formula 1 race. He crashed his Maserati 250F at high speed on the Ain-Diab circuit in Casablanca and suffered serious head injuries. He retired soon afterwards, aware that he could no longer race.He bought a bar in Paris, called the Bar de l’Action, located at the top end of the Avenue Iena, close to the Arc de Triomphe. This was managed by Harry Schell’s wife Monique and became a meeting point for the motorsport folk in Paris, notably Schlesser, Jean Behra, André Simon, Amédée Gordini. Henri Greder, Jose Rosinski and any foreign drivers who happened to be in town.

 

In the same period Lucas tried his hand at journalism, writing articles for an automobile magazine called Moteurs.

 

It was in the Bar de l’Action that Lucas and Gerard “Jabby”Crombac decided to establish a monthly magazine called Sport-Auto, at the start of 1962. Four years later they launched a second racing title called Champion.

 

In those exciting years Crombac and Lucas helped Jean Bernigaud to establish the Ecole de Pilotage at Magny Cours, which would become the famous Winfield School. They were also involved in establishing the Volant Shell and the Ford Jeunesse competitions, which helped to grow interest in racing in France and played an important role in developing France’s famous generation of racing drivers in the 1960s and 1970s. In the same era Jim Clark was living in Paris and was regularly to be found at the Sport-Auto offices where they had access to the latest English racing magazines. He also managed the careers of Schell and Jo Schlesser.

 

In 1976 Lucas decided to leave the magazine to Crombac and move to the west coast and set up his own monthly devoted to his other passion, horses. He would later become the director of the regional daily newspaper L'Élair de Nantes. He retired to live on the Île de Ré, an island off the coast, where he settled in the town of St-Martin-de-Ré until his death in 2003.