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Fascinating F1 Fact: 33
December 30, 2017 by Joe Saward

Bernie Ecclestone once said that the best thing to do if you are an F1 team with an unlucky driver is to fire him – and find a lucky one. In truth, most of the people in F1 are very lucky individuals, and more than a few brilliant souls have been unlucky and have never had the careers that their talents deserve. Lots of people in Formula 1 say that you make your own luck, by being positive, dynamic, hard-working and always ready to seize opportunities when they present themselves. Perhaps it is a way for them to feel good about themselves, but the reality is that luck plays a part. There are some things over which we have no control. Some people are struck by lightning…

… and some just do things at the wrong time.

When Jack Brabham retired from Formula 1 at the end of 1970, he sold his half of the Motor Racing Developments company to his partner Ron Tauranac and went back to Australia. Two of Jack’s mechanics decided that it would be a good moment to set up their own Formula 2 team for the 1971 season. Tauranac agreed to sell them two new Brabham BT36s on hire purchase and Rondel Racing was born. RON was for Ron Dennis, DEL for Neil Trundle.

They needed funding, of course, and the enterprising Dennis went out looking for sponsorship. At the time his girlfriend was the daughter of the owner of the vast four-storey antique furniture emporium in St Margarets Road, Twickenham. This had some wealthy clients and Dennis managed to get himself introduced to Tony Vlassopulos, the son of Greek shipowner, who was working as a barrister in London. Through Vlassopulos, he met Kenneth Grob, a Lloyds insurance broker. Grob’s son Ian wanted to be a racing driver and so it was agreed that he would part of the business if Vlassopulos and Grob became backers of Rondel. With a deal in place Dennis was able to sign Graham Hill and Australian rising star Tim Schenken and the team won two European Formula 2 races in 1971, Hill and Schenken being joined late in the year by Frenchman Bob Wollek, who arrived with a budget from Motul. Rondel took him on for 1972, alongside new signing Carlos Reutemann, running a pair of Brabham BT38s.

Halfway through the season, the decision was taken for the team to build its own Formula 2 chassis for 1973. Tauranac had sold Brabham and the new owner Bernie Ecclestone was not very interested in manufacturing customer cars. One of Tauranac’s designers Ray Jessop, who had previously worked at the British Aircraft Corporation, was available and so Dennis and Trundle commissioned him to design a car to be called the Motul M1.

In 1973 Rondel ran a variety of drivers, including Schenken, Wollek, Henri Pescarolo and Tom Pryce. The Motul M1 was fairly successful, with the best result being a 1-2-3-5 finish at the Norisring.

It was then decided that it was time for Rondel to go into Formula 1 with Jessop commissioned to build a Cosworth kit-car for the 1974 season. He began work to design the car, but then on October 6 1973, it all went horribly wrong – although perhaps Dennis and the team did not realize what would happen until later. That day – Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in Judaism – a coalition of Arab nations launched military attacks on Israel, hoping that the holiday would give them an advantage. It did not work out like that. The Israelis fought back and America provided support. On October 16, as the fighting continued, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) raised the price of oil in an attempt to derail the US economy. Oil companies suddenly had to pay much more for their supplies of crude oil. Petrol prices rose dramatically. There were shortages and oil companies were forced to cut their budgets. Motul cancelled its Rondel sponsorship. Dennis recognized that the Rondel F1 project was no longer possible, but Vlassopoulo and Grob wanted to continue and so Rondel Racing was closed and the F1 project sold to a new firm called Token (TOny and KEN) in February 1974. Trundle was hired to build Jessop’s car. This would appear at several races that season in the hands of Pryce, David Purley and Ian Ashley, but it was not competitive and was sold to Peter Thorp, Jessop’s next door neighbour, who wanted to help out his friend. He started a business called Safir Engineering, his goal being to use the original design as the basis for a new F1 car in 1975 but Safir did not have the money for that. The original car was revised and took part in non-championship F1 races, using Tony Trimmer as the driver while Jessop designed a Safir Formula 3 car. The resulting design was promising and so Thorp drew up plans for a new and improved Formula 3 car for 1976.

Early that year, fate struck again. Jessop suffered a fatal stroke, at the age of only 45. The project stopped. Later Safir went on to make its name building GT40 replicas…

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Fascinating F1 Fact: 34
December 31, 2017 by Joe Saward

Everyone is quite excited about the prospect of Fernando Alonso racing at Le Mans in 2018, but in truth, when you stop and have a look around, there are lots of Le Mans winners in the Formula 1 paddock these days. You just have to remember all the connections. You might argue that Ferrari is the big banana in F1 when it comes to Le Mans victories. It won nine times between 1949 and 1965, but there is no-one around today who was involved in all of that. Yes, Ferrari has won class victories since then, but honestly who cares about class winners at Le Mans? As I figure it, Tom Kristensen trumps that with his nine wins. He pops up all the time in F1, both as an FIA Steward and as the President of the FIA Drivers’ Commission. Alfa Romeo has been in F1 this year as a Ferrari sponsor (the hype-merchants forgot this when they all announced Alfa Romeo’s comeback to F1 with Sauber) but the Italian firm hasn’t won Le Mans since 1934. Aston Martin, Red Bull’s new title sponsor, is also a Le Mans winner, back in 1959, while dear old Mercedes will not let us forget that it won the 24 Hours in 1952 and played a fairly serious supporting role in 1989 when the race was won by Sauber, in the days when the team was Swiss. Renault too won the race (1978) and before you start writing in, yes, McLaren won it as well, in 1995. But how many folks have forgotten when Williams won Le Mans? Yes, it was in 1999 when Williams built four BMW V12 LMRs, which were then handed over to Schnitzer Motorsport to run and Jo Winkelhock, Pierluigi Martini and Yannick Dalmas drove one of them to win at Le Mans.

When it comes to drivers one is forever seeing (and enjoying the company of) Emanuele Pirro, a five-time Le Mans winner, who is one of the regular driver stewards at F1 races these days. Another is Derek Warwick, who won the race in 1992, driving for the Peugeot factory team, which was run at the time by a chap called Jean Todt, who also oversaw the Peugeot 1-2-3 in 1993. One of the primary design engineers on the 905 engine, by the way, was Gilles Simon, now the FIA’s Head of Technical, after a troublesome time in recent years with the Honda F1 programme.

Another person who might lay claim to being a Le Mans winner is Ross Brawn. He designed the Jaguar XJR-14 for Tom Walkinshaw Racing for the 1991 World Sportscar Championship. The car didn’t win Le Mans but Walkinshaw, ever the entrepreneur, sold the design to Mazda, which called the car the MXR-01 and stuck a Judd V10 in the back. The cars were fast but not reliable and Mazda killed the project. Walkinshaw then sold the design to Porsche and with the roof taken off the car won Le Mans in 1996 and 1997. Actually the very same chassis won the race twice, which has only been done four times in the history of the race… (I’ll let you find out what those were…)

So who else? Well, there’s the fairly obvious Dr Helmut Marko, Red Bull’s racing guru, who won Le Mans back in 1971, driving a Martini-sponsored Porsche 917. Walk through the paddock and you are bound to bump into a few others. Sky TV has a couple on its commentary team: Martin Brundle, who won in 1990 at the wheel of a Silk Cut Jaguar, and Johnny Herbert, who won the race with Mazda in 1991. Oddly, each one has a Le Mans-winning team-mate who is to seen often in F1: Brundle shared his Jaguar with John Nielsen, who is a regular TV commentator on F1 for Danish television, while one of Herbert’s team-mates at Le Mans was Bertrand Gachot, who is now an F1 sponsor, his energy drink Hype being seen on the Force Indias in recent years. There’s also Allan McNish, who won Le Mans three times with Porsche in 1998 and then Audi in 2008 and 2013. He is a commentator with BBC Radio 5 Live. Nor, should we forget Alexander Wurz, who is always kicking around the paddock, consulting, ducking and weaving and being the chairman of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association. He won Le Mans in 1996, at the age of 22, and then did it again in 2009. And there is also Ferrari test driver Marc Gené, who also commentates for Spanish TV, who won Le Mans with Wurz in a Peugeot in 2009.

Apart from that I can only think of a couple of others: Nico Hulkenberg and Brendon Hartley…

There are probably more…

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Fascinating F1 Fact: 35
January 1, 2018 by Joe Saward

It is magic how histories intertwine to make things happen in the future. At New Year we look ahead with hope for a better future and a little historical magic may help today. It is the story of a wealthy young Canadian called Peter Ryan, who entered the very first Canadian Grand Prix, held at Mosport Park in September 1961. It was a sports car race and some big names were there: Pedro Rodríguez in a NART Ferrari and Stirling Moss in a Lotus 19. No-one paid much attention to the 21-year-old Ryan, also driving a Lotus 19 sports car, until he won a remarkable victory. Eight days later at Watkins Glen Ryan made his Formula 1 debut at the wheel of an ex-factory Lotus, entered by J Wheeler Automotive, Ryan became the first ever Canadian F1 driver. He finished a solid ninth and Lotus boss Colin Chapman signed him up with a three-year contract. He went to Europe with high hopes, but Chapman felt he should race in Formula Junior, as he already had Jim Clark and Trevor Taylor under contract in F1. In June at Reims, fighting for the lead of a race, Ryan went off, his car flipped and he was crushed. He died the following day. He remains one of those poignant “what could have been” stories in F1 history.

Ryan’s path to F1 began with his great-grandfather Thomas Fortune Ryan who became rich from street-car networks in New York City, although he made separate fortunes in tobacco (he was one of the founders of British American Tobacco) and in insurance, owning the Equitable Life Assurance Society. When he died in 1928 he left $155 million (about $2.1 billion today). One of his heirs was Joseph Bondurant Ryan, something of a playboy. He had visited the ski resorts of Europe, and the first US facility at Sun Valley, Idaho, and in 1938 he turned up at the Gray Rocks Inn at Lac-Ouimet, in the Laurentian mountains of Canada, because there wasn’t much snow to the south, in New England. He heard another hotel guest discussing a plan to climb Mont-Tremblant and asked if he might join him. When they reached the summit Ryan was overwhelmed by what he saw and immediately decided that he would build a ski resort there. He didn’t bother with mundane things such as planning permission and started work straight away, hiring locals to clear ski runs and create a village at the base of the mountain. He funded the construction of a 4,900ft ski lift, while also buying as much land as possible to protect the area from any future developers.

The resort opened the following year and Ryan then started to negotiate to make it legal. It was already a big success and soon Hollywood stars such as Norma Shearer, Bing Crosby, Lionel Barrymore and Henry Fonda began to arrive. The Kennedy Family and tobacco heiress Doris Duke were among the early visitors and Robert Kennedy meeting his wife Ethel at Mont-Tremblant in the winter of 1945.

Ryan continued to develop the resort, with new ski runs and other facilities. One of the early visitors was Leo Samson, a musician who went to the resort to play his banjo, but took some photos of visiting movie stars and somehow emerged from his visit as the official photographer of the resort. He then set up his own night spot. Samson soon understood that the work was seasonal and proposed the construction racing circuit to attract visitors in the summer months. He started buying land on which to build his track.

While this was quietly happening Ryan fell on hard times. The snow was thin in 1949 and the ski lift broke and towards the end of 1950 Ryan went to New York, looking for more investors. He checked into the Warwick Hotel in midtown Manhattan and early one morning fell 22 stories to his death. Some believe he jumped.

His wife Mary was made of stern stuff and rather than selling up, took over the resort, developing new runs and accommodation on the north side of the mountain. More money flowed in and when young Peter Ryan, Mary and Joe’s son, began racing, Leo Samson was overjoyed. Ryan was dead before Samson met a radio reporter called Jacques Duval who told him that the MG car club of Montreal was looking for a circuit. Duval put Samson in touch with the club and he convinced 50 of them to each invest $1000 and work soon began to build the circuit. The first race in 1964 attracted 16,800 spectators but then the next attracted 35,000 and corporate sponsorship. Things went so well that the track was extended to 2.65-miles. The company was heavily in debt but there were CanAm and Indycar races and then in 1968 Formula 1 as well. There would be a second Grand Prix in 1970 but demands for better safety meant that the track was deemed to be too dangerous for F1.

The arrival of Gilles Villeneuve saw a new circuit laid out on the Ile de Notre Dame, in Montreal and Mont-Tremblant faded from view for more than 20 years until a new owner came long. He commissioned a complete rebuild to bring the track up to modern FIA standards. The new track was finally opened in 2002 and it hosted a few international races, notably a round of the Champ Car Series in 2007 but it became most popular with fans of historic racing, who poured in each summer, just as Samson hoped that it would. Mont-Tremblant remained a chic ski resort and Samson lived to see it all, celebrating his 100th birthday in 2014.

The owner of Mont-Tremblant is so wealthy that over time he was able to help his own son on his path to Formula 1 – which is how Lance Stroll is linked to Peter Ryan, by way of a ski resort in the Laurentian Mountains…

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 36
January 2, 2018 by Joe Saward


Families can be pretty complicated things, as we are often reminded at this time of year. In Formula 1 we have seen quite a few family members racing one another over the years, but no-one has come close to matching the Fabi brothers when it comes to making things complicated…

Mining is not an easy business, but if things work out one can become very rich. Motorsport history is dotted with the offspring of mining families, made wildly rich by diamonds, gold, silver… or hydrated magnesium silicate, otherwise known as talc.

In the mountains to the north of Bergamo, in the valleys around the town of Sondrio, there are a number of talcum powder mines. It was here after World War II that Carlo Fabi secured a talc mining concession and built facilities to crush and grind the rock into dust. Very valuable dust. Talc is used as a cosmetic, but also in plastics and polymers, paints and varnishes, paper and ceramics.

Carlo made a lot of money and was soon able to indulge his passion for fast cars and in the early 1950s he competed each year in the Mille Miglia road race, initially with Fiat 500s, but later with more potent machinery. He didn’t win a race until 1960 when he drove a Fiat-Abarth 750 Record Monza to victory in the Preis von Tirol, a sports car race on the Innsbruck airport circuit in Austria.

Carlo also liked to ski and his eldest son Teodorico, known as Teo, took to the slopes in his youth and was a ski racer from the age of 15 onwards, taking part in the 1970 World Championships in Val Gardena. Like his father he loved speed and raced motorcycles as well, while also being sensible enough to study mechanical engineering in Milan.

His brother Corrado was six years younger but was not a ski freak. One day, bored by watching Teo in a ski race, he wandered off and stumbled upon a kart track. It looked interesting and so he gave it a try – and loved it. He liked it so much in fact that he talked his father into buying him a kart of his own. By the time he was 14 – in 1975 -Corrado had signed to race for the Birel factory kart team.

This got Teo interested in the sport and in 1976 he decided he would give up skiing and go into motor racing instead. Being older than Corrado, he was able to get into a Formula Ford car straight away and had soon won the Italian Championship. He moved into the European Formula 3 Champion in 1978 and won three races, finishing fourth in the championship at his first attempt, driving a privately-entered March. This caught the attention of team owners, always on the lookout for new talent.

In early 1979 Corrado celebrated his 18th birthday and jumped straight into Italian Formula 3, using his brother’s old March 783. That year, while Teo raced in Formula 2 with the March factory team, Corrado made a big impression in F3. The opposition was strong, the title going to Piercarlo Ghinzani ahead of Michele Alboreto and Mauro Baldi, but Corrado impressed and was offered a drive alongside Alboreto in the Euroracing European F3 team for 1980. He won twice and finished third in the championship.

That year Teo stayed in Formula 2 and finished third in the European Championship but he then began to look for a way to get into Formula 1. In the end it was not possible and he had to go to America in 1981, to race for movie star Paul Newman in CanAm. Corrado took Teo’s place in the March Formula 2 team and at the end of a promising season was given a first test run in a Brabham-BMW at Paul Ricard. He would stay on in F2 for 1982 and won the European title but Teo would beat him into F1, making his debut with the Toleman team at the San Marino GP at Imola that year. It was not an easy season and Teo was then offered the chance to drive for Skoal Bandit Forsythe Racing in the CART championship in 1983. His car was a March 83C, designed by the little-known Adrian Newey. Fabi won four races and narrowly missed winning the title, which went to Al Unser Sr, but he was named Rookie of the Year. He was suddenly a man in demand.

While that was happening Corrado had joined the Osella team in F1 but was having a miserable year in very poor machinery.

At the start of 1984, Brabham boss Bernie Ecclestone offered Teo a seat in F1, to race alongside Nelson Piquet, the World Champion, replacing Riccardo Patrese, who had been offered a lucrative ride with Alfa Romeo. It was an offer Teo could not refuse, but he had already agreed a contract with Forsythe. Some nifty negotiation resulted in Teo racing for Brabham when he was available and Corrado filling in when his brother was not available. You never knew which Fabi was in the car from one race to the next… Teo soon realised that this was not really a good idea and so organised for his brother to race the CART car in his place…

That autumn Carlo died suddenly and Teo immediately stopped racing and took over the family business. It was not what he wanted to do – and in the winter months it was agreed that Corrado would quit racing and Teo would go on with his career. He joined Benetton, for which he raced in F1 for the next three seasons, taking three pole positions, but scoring only one third place.

In 1988 he went back to the United States as the Porsche factory Indycar driver, thanks to his connections with March. He would win at Mid-Ohio in 1989 but the programme was not a great success and was stopped at the end of 1990. Teo was offered a Jaguar sports car drive for 1991 and won the FIA World Sports Car title at his first attempt. He would go on racing in sports cars and Indycars until 1995 – when he turned 40.

While Teo was being a racing driver, Corrado began a series of strategic acquisitions to build up the IMI Fabi company and then began to expand internationally in the 1990s. Today the firm has mining and manufacturing sites in Europe, Australia, North America, China and Pakistan. It mines around 350,000 tons of talcum powder per year and today has an annual turnover in excess of $100 million.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Ferrari's landmark F1 cars: Why the 641 should have won the title




The Ferrari 641 was not only arguably one of the most beautiful Ferrari Formula 1 cars, but it also came so close to taking Alain Prost to the world championship.

During McLaren-Honda's dominant seasons from 1988-1991, no car pushed it harder than the Ferrari 641.

Having watched with mounting fury as his cars were trounced on track by John Barnard-designed McLarens, Enzo Ferrari came to a logical conclusion - and poached Barnard at the end of 1986.

Barnard had fallen out with McLaren boss Ron Dennis and was keen to leave, but was aware of his market value to the extent that he secured a great financial deal and persuaded Enzo to bankroll a new design office, not in Maranello, but in Shalford - a sleepy village between Guildford and Godalming.

Working from the grandly named Guildford Technical Office, Barnard and his team faxed their completed designs page by page through to Maranello, where they were painstakingly reassembled and rendered into carbon fibre reality. What could possibly go wrong?

Somehow, amid Ferrari's notorious internal political wranglings, a situation exacerbated by the power vacuum following Enzo's death in August 1988, Barnard created some beautiful racing machines while working remotely.

The 1987 and '88 cars followed an upward trajectory of competitiveness, thanks in part to Ferrari's new windtunnel, before Barnard delivered his game-changer in '89.

Despite reliability niggles - Nigel Mansell's win first time out at the 1989 season-opening Brazilian GP was the first time the car had completed a race distance - the 640, with its screaming V12 and semi-automatic gearbox, was beautiful and astonishingly quick.

Sadly, it wasn't fast or reliable enough to beat McLaren to either world title, and so Barnard, worn down by the infighting, moved to Benetton for 1990.

Design work on the 641 was completed by Enrique Scalabroni and Steve Nichols, who joined from McLaren along with world champion Alain Prost.


Alain Prost, Ferrari 641
Photo by: Sutton Images
 
Mechanically similar to its predecessor, the new car had a larger fuel tank and a more conventional engine air intake, but retained its svelte good looks.

Scalabroni and Nichols had focused on improving its reliability, but the 641 still let Mansell down enough for him to announce his retirement from F1 mid-season.

Prost, though, won five grands prix and was denied the title only when his bitter rival, Ayrton Senna, drove him off the track at Suzuka.

The 641 is still one of the most beautiful F1 cars of all time. The proof? There's one in New York's Museum of Modern Art.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Ferrari's landmark F1 cars: Kicking off Schumacher's reign




Michael Schumacher had spent four seasons with Ferrari when he finally won his first Formula 1 drivers’ title for the team in the F1-2000.

This was the car that started five years of supremacy for Ferrari, which won the drivers’ and constructors’ championships from 2000-2004.

In the years following Enzo Ferrari's death, his team grew so dysfunctional that only a complete change of management could turn around its on-track fortunes.

Jean Todt was headhunted to take charge in 1993 and empowered from above to transform the working culture at Maranello.

Even so, it still took six years - and the import of Michael Schumacher and tech gurus Ross Brawn and Rory Byrne from Benetton - to flush out the toxic mindset of divisiveness and infighting.

By 1999 Ferrari had a car capable of winning the world championship, and might actually have done so had Schumacher not broken his leg in a crash at Silverstone.

Eddie Irvine stepped into the breach, but wasn't quite up to the task. Yet within the team, there was a sense that they were now on the cusp of something big.

While main rivals McLaren decided that Mika Hakkinen's title defence would be better served by a completely new car, Byrne focused on evolving the existing Ferrari, tweaking and fettling it from nose to tail but retaining the same philosophy.

The chief difference was the all-new engine, but even that represented just a few cautious steps down a wide-angle road that many rivals (especially Renault) had charged down at full pelt.

Opening out the 'vee' of the engine lowered the centre of gravity and offered tantalising aerodynamic possibilities, but at the cost of a weaker structure prone to failing under the torsional stress.

As such, Ferrari moved from a 75° vee to 90° but would go no further.

Mercedes had the most powerful engine in F1, but the FO110J was on the limit in terms of reliability. Failures for Hakkinen in the first two rounds of 2000 as Schumacher won the first three set up a deficit from which the Finn struggled to recover.

Schumacher bounced back from four mid-season DNFs to rack up a nine wins and earn Ferrari their first drivers' title in two decades - and begin an era of unprecedented dominance.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 37
January 3, 2018 by Joe Saward

Motor racing can catch out even the smartest entrepreneurs, because their passion and ambition overpower their business logic. They go ahead with plans when perhaps they should not… and that can lead to disaster.

Willibert Kauhsen is a good example of this unfortunate phenomenon. Born in Eschweiler, a town close to Aachen, near the German border with Belgium and Holland, in the summer of 1939, “Willi” grew up in the difficult late 1940s and 1950s in Germany. He began working in the freight transportation business and in his early twenties began competing in hillclimbs in the Ardennes and Eifel regions, both close to his hometown. He raced with a Porsche and then switched to circuit races with a Fiat Abarth 1000 TC and won the 1967 European Touring Car title in one of the small Italian cars. He then drove a Porsche sports car with Baron Karl Von Wendt and that led to him being recruited to Porsche by Ferdinand Piech, as a factory racing and development driver.

In 1972 he decided to start his own racing team and enjoyed much success, notably in the Interserie. The oil crisis resulted in Kauhsen doing a deal to run the Alfa Romeo factory sports car team on behalf of Autodelta in 1975. At the time Alfa budgets had been slashed and Kauhsen brought sponsors and expertise. The Alfa Romeo Tipo 33 TT12 won the World Championship of Makes that year and for 1976 Kauhsen bought a couple of Formula 2 Marches and ran them for Klaus Ludwig and Ingo Hoffman, with funding from Toshiba and then In 1977 he switched to the Elf 2J chassis which had dominated the championship in 1976, with support from Elf and Renault for Michel Leclere and Ludwig, although he would depart midseason, which allowed a young Alain Prost to try F2, albeit briefly.

In 1978 Kauhsen began preparations for an F1 team, taking on Mike Earle to get the operation going. Money was tight but Kauhsen convinced Klaus Kapitza, a 39-year-old Austrian engineer, who worked for Ford in Cologne, to draw the car. Kapitza had started out as a motorcycle designer with Steyr-Daimler-Puch in Graz before joining Ford but then did design studies for Formula 1 in league with fellow Ford designer and racer Claude Lobo for McLaren in 1976 and for the Copersucar F1 team in 1977. The 1978 season was a difficult time for F1 designers as the sport was being revolutionised by the ground-effect Lotus 79, although few truly understood how the aerodynamics worked. The Kauhsen took ideas from the Lotus but the car did not work. Original test driver Patrick Neve, who had raced for Williams in 1977, was replaced by Italian rising star Gianfranco Brancatelli but the car was never competitive despite being substantially reworked for 1979. The car failed to qualify in Spain, Belgium and Monaco and Kauhsen ran out of money. The team closed down and a bankrupt Kauhsen left Germany for Canada where he spent five years selling real estate in Ottawa. He returned home in 1985 and became a Porsche salesman, before returning to the freight business.

The Kauhsen was sold to Arturo Merzario, one of Willi’s Alfa Romeo drivers in 1975, and he turned it into the Merzario M4, although this never qualified for a race, despite some engineering assistance from Giampaolo Dallara before the team shut down.

Kapitza stayed with Ford, working in the Escort and the Sierra before being hired by BMW in 1984 to design the 8 Series E31, which appeared in 1989. He was then part of the Z13 personal car project, unveiled in 1993 but never put into production. He remained a road car designer and consultant, while also writing books about Alfa Romeo.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 38
January 4, 2018 by Joe Saward

A World Championship Grand Prix is usually held over a distance of 190 miles, or the least number of laps required to exceed 305 kilometres. A race lasts anywhere between an hour and 15 minutes and two hours, at which point it will be stopped the first time the leader crossed the line after the two hour limit is passed. The only exception is Monaco which runs to only 161 miles, because of the twisty (and therefore slow) nature of the circuit.

However, there have been races that have not gone to the full distance, because of bad weather. If conditions are deemed to be too dangerous the race is stopped and if it is later deemed that conditions are too bad for a restart, the race is called off and half points are awarded if less than 75 percent of the planned race distance has been completed. This means that the possibilty exists for very short races if the weather gods intervene at the wrong moment.

The shortest ever F1 race was held at Adelaide in Australia in 1991 when the race was (rightly) stopped after 16 laps of dangerous mayhem. The result was based on the positions at the end of the 14th lap. This meant that the actual race lasted only 32.88 miles…

The race, billed that year as “F1: the ultimate” was the last race of the World Championship and took place on the first weekend of November, two weeks after the Japanese Grand Prix, where Ayrton Senna had wrapped up the title and then launched a tirade of very public abuse against FIA President Jean Marie Balestre, who had just been defeated as FISA President by Max Mosley. FISA was at that time the sporting subsidiary of the FIA, although Balestre remained FIA President. Senna felt that he was sufficiently protected and spoke out about the history of conflict between them, believing that Balestre has favoured his fellow countryman Alain Prost in previous controversies. It was not a very classy way to celebrate the title, bit Senna did not care. He said what he wanted to say.

Prost, at Ferrari, did pretty much the same about his car, the Ferrari 643, which he compared to a truck. This did not impress team boss Claudio Lombardi, who took the opportunity to fire the uppity Frenchman. Alain received the news when he was holidaying in Port Douglas between the races, and Ferrari promoted its test driver Gianni Morbidelli to race alongside Jean Alesi.

Australia at that time of year is usually gorgeous. Spring is turning to summer in the Southern Hemisphere and Adelaide was always the driest of the Australian state capitals. However there is always the possibility of bad weather as had been seen two years earlier seen when the race was stopped at the two-hour mark, with the leaders having managed only 70 of the planned 81 laps thanks to a period when the race was red-flagged because there was too much standing water on the circuit. In Adelaide that was always a problem because the drainage was poor…

It began to rain on Sunday morning and conditions were so bad that the race start was delayed. This was bad news for the TV stations, which had their satellite time booked for the usual slots. Delays meant that the race would not be covered everywhere. F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone was keen to go ahead and when the rain eased a little the officials decided that the race could start. The Constructors’ Championship needed to be settled between Williams and McLaren, separated by 11 points, with McLaren ahead. The two McLarens of Ayrton Senna and Gerhard Berger had qualified on the front row and they immediately went off into the lead, chased by the Williams of Nigel Mansell with Michael Schumacher fourth in his Benetton. On the third lap Mansell somehow managed to pass Berger for second, but then things started to get out of control. Schumacher had a spin and then Satoru Nakajima crashed his Tyrrell into the rear of Thierry Boutsen’s Ligier. Soon afterwards, Nelson Piquet, unaware that his team mate Schumacher was trying to repass him, moved over on the German, who swerved into the path of Alesi. Both cars hit the wall, leaving wreckage all over the road and showering the track with wreckage and the Lamborghini of Nicola Larini then hit the wall opposite the abandoned cars, while Pierliugi Martini added to the wreckage on the road when he hit the wall in his Minardi. Race Control did nothing. The race went on, despite safety vehicles and tow trucks being on the road.

The next drama came when Mauricio Gugelmin’s Leyton House aquaplaned into a wall in the pit lane, with flying wreckage injuring two marshals. Then Mansell crashed heavily, banging his ankle on the inside of his monocoque. Berger spun but continued, while Senna passed the start-finish line waving his fist angrily. Finally, after 24 minutes, the red flag was finally shown. Piquet finished second place on the road with Morbidelli third, while Williams’s Riccardo Patrese crossed the line with parts of another car under his front wing.

There was a hope that the rain would abate and the race restart, but eventually the Grand Prix was abandoned. The result was called after 14 laps, which meant that Mansell was given second and Berger third. Mansell was not on the podium as he had already headed off to the airport, to catch the evening flight back to Europe. Piquet, Patrese and Morbidelli were classified fourth, fifth and sixth – and McLaren won the Constructors’s title, despite only half points being awarded.

The rain eventually eased and the soggy Australian fans were treated to a concert by Paul Simon, who sang his famous Bridge Over Troubled Waters, which summed up the day in an appropriate fashion…

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Komplikovano za preneti u celu, ima puno slika i kojecega ali definitivno vredi procitati:

 

https://www.f1fanati...-f1-197mph-mpv/
 

The F1-engined Mercedes AMG Project One is an extraordinarily bold car. But it’s not the first time a road car has been equipped with a Formula One engine. The Renault Espace F1 was arguably an even more radical creation.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 39
January 5, 2018 by Joe Saward

People think that women team bosses are a new phenomenon, but one can look back to the 1930s, for example, to when Lucy O’Reilly Schell, an American born in France, ran her own Grand Prix team.

A wealthy heiress, she invested heavily in the Delahaye car company and pushed the firm to develop a Grand Prix car, which she then ran under the Ecurie Bleue banner, winning at Pau in 1938 with Rene Dreyfus driving. Her son Harry later became a Grand Prix driver and was killed at the wheel of a Yeoman Credit Racing Cooper-Climax in practice for the 1960 International Trophy at Silverstone.

Many people have also forgotten Louise Bryden-Brown, who ran a Formula 1 team in 1961 and 1962.

Born Laura Parke in California in 1916, she was one of the heirs to the Parke Davis drug company, once the world’s largest pharmaceutical company. She grew up in a grand mansion on Ocean View Boulevard in Pacific Grove, between Carmel and Monterey, overlooking the rocky coastline. The family compound covered two and a half city blocks and consisted of four buildings and 59 rooms. In her twenties she married William Cano and they had a daughter together, but the marriage did not last and by the mid 1950s Louise had turned to motor racing, entering cars for others, or racing herself. She was by then 40 but raced various different cars including a Lancia Spyder, a Denzel Spyder and ultimately a Porsche 550. Early in 1958 in Reno, Nevada, she married Australian Anthony Bryden-Brown, who was a sales executive with the perfume company Goya. She moved to London, where he was based and they settled in a large mansion in Montpelier Square in Knightsbridge. She bought a Lotus 18 at the start of 1961 and it was driven by South African Tony Maggs and, on occasion in non-championship races, by Dan Gurney, including the Inter-Continental Formula race at Goodwood in April, which saw Gurney leading the race until being overhauled by Stirling Moss and Bruce McLaren. Gurney challenged for second at the end and went off. He would crash the car again later at Silverstone.

The team entered two World Championship races in Britain and Germany, with the car painted sky blue and Maggs finished 13th and 11th respectively. It was enough for him to earn the second seat with the Cooper factory team in 1962, alongside Bruce McLaren and replacing no less a figure than Jack Brabham, who started his own team that year.

Bryden-Brown reorganised her team, taking on Ian Burgess, who worked as the sales manager at Cooper, but raced for various teams when the opportunity arose. The team was renamed Anglo-American Equipe and Bryden-Brown acquired a Cooper T59 Formula Junior car into which Aiden Jones fitted a Coventry Climax FPF engine. The car was reworked with radiators mounted in pods on either side of the engine, in an effort to reduce the size of the nose. The idea, later to become standard in F1, did not work as the car suffered overheating problems. The modifications were abandoned.

The team competed in three World Championship events in 1962 and a series of non-championship races and Burgess scored a string of very decent results, including a fourth place at Solitude and fifth at Posillipo, Karlskoga and Roskilde. Burgess was 12th at the British GP and 11th at the German GP, but failed to qualify in Italy.

By then Bryden-Brown was beginning to lose interest in spending so much money and was suffering too from good living, with drink and drugs becoming a problem. She faded from the Formula 1 scene but continued to live in England until her early death at 55 in Penzance, in Cornwall, in 1972.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 40
January 6, 2018 by Joe Saward

If you are going to start a Formula 1 team, don’t call it Shannon. There have been two teams with that name and both failed very quickly. It might be a case of third time lucky, but people say that disasters always come in threes…

The first Shannon was back in 1966 when a 43-year-old engineer called Aiden Jones went into business with designer Paul Emery. Jones was Irish – hence the name Shannon – but had cut his teeth in the sport in the 1950s, working as a mechanic with Prince Bira. He moved on to work for the Weir Lodge Garage in Chertsey before being recruited by Scuderia Camoradi.

He had ambitions to design his own cars and got the chance in 1962 when he modified a Cooper Formula Junior for F1, calling the car the Aiden-Cooper. It scored some promising results in non-championship races, but the team closed down and Jones went on to work with the Scirocco F1 team, created when wealthy American Hugh Powell, who took over Paul Emery’s Emeryson Cars. That did not last long and Emery and Jones decided to create a car of their own for the new 3-litre F1 regulations in 1966. They began working on a Coventry Climax V8 engine, called the Godiva, which had been designed in 1954 for the then new 2.5-litre F1 regulations. It was to have been used by Cyril Kieft’s planned new F1 team, but Coventry Climax got cold feet and axed the programme. The entire project would be sold a decade later to enthusiast Andrew Getley, who agreed to let Emery make modifications to one of the blocks. This was bored out to 3-litres and looked promising in dyno testing. The monocoque chassis was built from steel and the car was dubbed the Shannon SH1. It was not ready until the British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch in July 1966 but was driven in practice by Syd Fox. The fuel consumption of the engine was such that the car needed to be fitted with additional tanks. Shannon then offered the drive on the race weekend to veteran Trevor Taylor and he qualified the car 18th, seven seconds off pole position. In the race one of the new fuel tanks developed a leak on the first lap and Taylor retired the car.

It was not seen again in F1.

Jones’s son Eddie followed his father into the sport, working for Ralt before heading to the United States where he competed in SuperVee before establishing the Shannon Car Corporation, building a Sports 2000 car. He later moved into Indy Lights and joined Team Green before graduating to Indycar as engineer to Michael Andretti, winning the Indy 500 and the Indycar title with Dan Wheldon in 2005.

The second F1 Shannon team appeared briefly in 1996 when Aaron Colombo – the boss of the Italian composite company Belco-Avia – announced that he had organised a deal by which the Forti F1 team would hand over 51 percent of its equity to a Dublin-registered company called Shannon, owned by an Italian firm called FinFirst. On paper this was owned by an Italian-based German called Hermann “Ben” Gartz, a well-connected but fairly dubious individual wanted by the police in Austria and under investigation in several other countries. He was close to Italian TV magnate (and later Prime Minister) Silvio Berlusconi, who coincidentally, ran a big firm called FinInvest.

Colombo engineered the deal in order to be paid money he was owed by Guido Forti. The latter claimed that the deal agreed was not respected and money promised did not appear and soon began legal action to regain control of his team. The cars appeared in a new green and white Shannon livery for a few races, but it was not long before the engines ran out of life. Cosworth refused to supply new units until money was paid. The cars appeared in Germany, but did not run because there were no engines available and finally Forti withdrew the team from the championship, to avoid potential fines from the FIA.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 41
January 7, 2018 by Joe Saward

Racing drivers are by nature adventurous human beings and in time of war they tend to get involved in all kinds of dangerous activity – often from choice.

Harry Schell was a good example of this. The son of two French-based Americans, Schell was born in Paris in 1921. Laury, his father, was a wealthy gentleman racer and Lucy O’Reilly Schell, a feisty Irish-American heiress, who won the Coupe des Dames on the Monte Carlo Rally in 1929. She inherited her father’s fortune in 1936 and the couple established Ecurie Bleue and began encouraging Delahaye to build more sporting cars. This resulted in René Le Bègue and Julio Quinlin winning the Monte Carlo Rally in an Écurie Bleue Delahaye in 1937 and that autumn René Dreyfus won the Prix du Million, a prize of one million Francs offered by the French government to try to induce the nation’s automobile manufacturers to develop cars capable of competing with the dominant German Grand Prix teams. That was followed in April 1938 by Dreyfus scoring an unexpected Grand Prix victory at Pau against Mercedes. A few weeks later the company scored a 1-2 at Le Mans.

But then things then began to go wrong. The Automobile Club de France, which administered the Prix du Million, did not pay up as it was supposed to do, giving more than half the money to rival Talbot, as the crafty Antony Lago showed someone some plans he had for a Grand Prix car. Delahaye boycotted the French GP in protest and the Schells moved Ecurie Bleue from Paris to Monaco.

Worse was to come. In the autumn of 1938, while testing at Brooklands, Laury crashed and suffered serious head injuries, which required brain surgery. He had recovered in the course of 1939 but then war broke out, although fighting did not begin in France until May 1940. A few weeks after the was began, travelling to Paris in a chauffeur-driven car, the couple were involved in a collision with another car, near the city of Sens. Laury was killed and Lucy seriously injured.

A few weeks after the accident, the Soviet Union attacked Finland, after claiming that the border should be moved further from Leningrad. The Finns rejected the idea and so the Russians invaded – or least attempted to do so. The Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations, but despite having far more men and equipment the Red Army failed to make much progress. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had purged so many officers between 1936 and 1938 that the army was short of competent commanders. The European nations, more worried about Nazi Germany, did not want to be dragged into a fight with the loathsome Stalin. As a result a movement called “Friends of Finland” was started in the United States, led by former President Herbert Hoover. It sought to help the Finns.

With his father dead and his mother in hospital, 18-year-old Harry Schell decided to volunteer to help the Finns and was one of seven US adventurers who signed up to join the Finnish Air Force. They arrived in Helsinki at the end of January 1940, and discovered that the Finnish Air Force was not extensive. It was wildly outnumbered by the Russians and had to play hide-and-seek, avoiding the superior fighters but attacking the bombers with much success. The odd was that the Finns flew with their planes carrying blue swastikas… the insignia adopted when the airforce was set up in 1918. Thus the Americans flew planes with swastikas! Schell was enthusiastic but there was no time for pilot training and so he flew as a gunner in one of Finland’s 17 Bristol Blenheims. Six weeks after he arrived Finland concluded that it was best to give in – despite the Finnish Air Force shooting down 218 Soviet aircraft for the loss of only 47 planes – and the Moscow Peace Treaty in mid-March 1940.

Schell went back to France where his mother was working on a plan to send René Le Bègue and René Dreyfus to Indianapolis to drive a pair of Maseratis that the team had acquired after it fell out with the French over the Million. The cars were sent to the US in April with the two drivers released from military service to take part.

The invasion of France began in the second week of May and the Schells sailed a few days later for New York. The race was run on Thursday, May 30, as the Allied and German forces battled at Dunkirk and Calais. In the bitter fighting during the Battle of France, 85,000 French military personnel were killed and 12,000 went missing. It was clear that France would be defeated and so the Schells decided to stay in the US. After Pearl Harbor Harry joined the US military, hoping to become a tank commander, but he failed the selection courses and spent the war working in various army camps in the US, his languages being useful with German prisoners.

He returned to France in 1946 and began racing in 1948. He made his Formula 1 debut in 1950 and competed in 56 Grands Prix, his best result being second at the Dutch GP in 1958. On May 13 1960 he was killed while qualifying for the non-championship F1 International Trophy race at Silverstone.

[alberto.ascari]

Pogledajte obavezno.

 

Film je pre svega o Peteru Collinsu i Mike Hawthornu. Imao sam više puta tokom gledanja filma knedlu u grlu....kakve su to bile ljudine...

 

 

 

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6622186/

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 42
January 8, 2018 by Joe Saward

BMW is a company with one of the strongest brands in the world. The brand stands for sporting success, luxury and technology.

It wasn’t always like that. At the because BMW built aero-engines. Many people think that the iconic blue and white logo is based on a spinning propeller, but the truth is that it isn’t that complicated. It’s a reworking of the blue and white flag of Bavaria. That’s all.

It wasn’t until 1928 that BMW decided to diversify into automobiles and bought the Automobilwerk Eisenach company, which manufactured the Dixi, a copy of the Austin 7, licensed for the German market. The Dixi was renamed the BMW3/15. It was virtually identical to the Austin 7 but in 1930 the company produced its own BMW 3/20 and terminated the licensing deal. The engine of the 3/20 was based on the Austin 7, but in 1933 BMW built its own engine: the 2-litre straight-six M78, designed by Rudolf Schleicher. It was used in the BMW 303 and was then developed into the M328 for the BMW 328 sports car, launched in 1936. The car made BMW a force in motorsport in the years that followed, with a strong performance at Le Mans in 1939 and victory on the Mille Miglia in 1940.

When the war broke out in 1939 fewer than 500 328s had been built. BMW turned to military work, mainly aero-engines. The company’s factories were heavily bombed during the war years. The Munich plant was completely destroyed and the Allach facility was taken over by the Americans, to service military vehicles. In the immediate post-war period BMW was banned from producing vehicles and survived by manufacturing pots and pans until 1947 when the occupation authorities agreed to let the firm build motorcycles once again. The Eisenach factory was in the Soviet sector, behind the Iron Curtain, but this began producing pre-war BMW models under the Eisenacher Motorenwerk (EMW) banner, using the Same basic logo as BMW but in red.

BMW would probably not have become a sporting powerhouse had it not been for the newly-named FIA, which announced plans in 1947 for a new Formula B to replace the old voiturette class. This featured 2-litre power units and it quickly became known as Formula 2, with the first races in 1948. Suitable engines were rare but in 1949 a lot of racers had realised that the BMW 328 could be stripped down and turned into a single-seater racing car. Among the first to do this was the Veritas firm, started by former BMW engineers Ernst Loof and Lorenz Dietrich. Loof soon started to develop his own engine design, also a 2-litre six-cylinder but manufactured by Heinkel. Another contender was another ex-BMW man, Alex Von Falkenhausen, who set up AFM, which began with converted 328s before building AFM prototypes in 1949. BMW responded by building new cars designed by Herman Holbein.

In France Jean Caillas created a car called a Jicey in his workshop at Viroflay in 1947 but achieved little until he switched the car to BMW engines and enjoyed some success with Eugène Martin at the wheel, while Marcel Balsa also built a BMW special. In Britain, Bristol manufactured engines based on the BMW 328 after taking over Fraser Nash, which had a license to produce BMW designs in the UK.

BMW Specials, known in Germany as Eigenbaus, were everywhere, but it was in East Germany where they enjoyed most success, in the hands of privateers such as Paul Griefzu, but also with cars run by the Eisenach Rennkollectiv, racing cars built by EMW engineers, which proved to be successful in the hands of Edgar Barth and others.

All of this would not have meant much were it not for another FIA decision at the start of 1952. The Formula 1 rules had not attracted sufficient support and after Alfa Romeo and BRM withdrew from F1, the decision was taken to run the World Championship to Formula 2 regulations. Ferrari was dominant, but the BMW 328 engines meant that there was a wide variety of cars racing. It would last only two years before the rules changed again, with F1 switching to 2.5-litre engines and F2 being marginalised.