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Dzems Hant, F3, 1969:

 

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Fascinating F1 Fact: 43
January 9, 2018 by Joe Saward

In 1493 Leonardo da Vinci invented a helicopter. The problem was that humans don’t have the power-to-weight ratio required, and no-one had created an engine…

Another great thinker, Jules Verne, wrote a book in 1865 which imagined with remarkable accuracy how Man might travel to the Moon, even down to launching from Florida and landing in the Pacific Ocean.

Motor racing has always been filled with people who have great ideas, but that is not the only thing that matters. You have to have your idea at the right time…

Piero Dusio was a clever man. He made a fortune by selling waterproofed clothing to the Italian army. This led to him establishing the Compagnia Industriale Ron Sportiva Italiana in 1942. He had been a racer in the 1930s and decided during the war to build a racing car to be used when peace returned. He commissioned Fiat’s Dante Giacosa to design a 1100cc racing car that would become known as the Cisitalia D46. The car made its debut in the Parco del Valentino in Turin in September 1946 in the Coppa Brezzi voiturette race and finished 1-2-3, with Dusio beating Franco Cortese and Louis Chiron. As sales flourished, Dusio came up with another interesting idea. He wanted to organise a global racing circus that went from city to city, just as Formula 1 does today…

He called it the Circus Racing Organisation and found investors in Switzerland to back the idea. He then went out looking for venues and drivers to take part in his “Cisitalia Cruise”. Given that the cars had to travel by boat he concluded that a good place to go would be Egypt, to where ships travelled to use the Suez Canal.

Egypt’s King Farouk was then 27 and had reigned for 11 years, having succeeded his father King Fuad I in 1936, at the tender age of 16. The King was used to getting what he wanted and lived a lavish, almost outrageous, lifestyle. He was passionate about automobiles and had an impressive collection of them, and so was keen on the idea put forward by Dusio and the Automobile & Touring Club of Egypt. They planned a series of three one-make voiturette races beginning on March 9 1947 with a circuit laid out on Gezira Island, west of downtown Cairo in the middle of the River Nile. The plan was to then go on to further races in Heliopolis (a northern suburb of Cairo) and in the port city of Alexandria. Dusio then organised for 16 D46s to be shipped to Egypt and invited the best drivers he could find to take part. It was an impressive list with pre-war names such as Antonio Brivio, Louis Chiron, Piero Taruffi, Franco Cortese and Mario Tadini and motorcycle stars such as Omobono Tenni, Alberto Ascari, Nello Pagani, Dorino Serafini and Pietro Ghersi, plus Count Johnny Lurani and the little-known Swiss Ciro Basadonna, Italians Sergio Banti and Marinotti and France’s Raymond de Saugé Destrez.

The track chosen on Gezira Island was around the 150-acre Gezira Sporting Club, which had been created in what had previously been botanical gardens, and so provided a scenic setting. It was only 0.9 miles in length but was fairly fast, with some challenging corners.

Dusio and the drivers flew out on two planes, arriving in Cairo on February 22 and enjoyed the Cairo social scene and seeing the sights.

The event consisted of two 25-lap heats and a 50-lap final. Cortese won the first heat, while Taruffi, the Cisitalia test driver, won the second. The final was started by the King and Taruffi took the lead and stayed ahead until he started suffering carburettor problems which let Cortese through, chased by the impressive Ascari. The winner was presented with the solid gold Sehab Almaz Bey Trophy by King Farouk himself.

The only problem was that only 6000 spectators turned up to watch, and the race was a financial disaster. Dusio’s Swiss investors disappeared, leaving him to pay for everything, which even required him to sell some of the D46s to wealthy Egyptians. The other races were cancelled and Everyone headed home. The exercise was not repeated. Dusio ran out of money and went off to Argentina where President Juan Peron financed a new car company called Autocar.

King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 and went to live in Monte Carlo.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 44
January 10, 2018 by Joe Saward

Some Grand Prix drivers are a little bit mad. They accelerate blindly into spray, not considering that there might be cars there. They take big risks. And it is not really about bravery. It’s more to do with the lack of a sense of self-preservation… and when a driver begins to spend too much time worrying about getting hurt or killed, it is usually best for them to walk away. This tends to happen at the end of a career, when drivers have other interests in life, such as families and possessions.

No-one would ever have called France’s François Hesnault a man without courage. He was lucky to be born into a family which, as he was growing up, developed a huge transportation empire, carving out new markets in the Pacific, Asia and particularly in Africa. His father Pierre, a former paratrooper, enjoyed close relationships with leaders in a number of African countries and also within French government circles. The group moved everything, from missiles to furniture. François’s brother Philippe was a keen racer but his career was short because he was sent off to Asia by his father, to develop the business. Nonetheless he raced at Le Mans in 1975 and again in 1980.

When François was 16 years old he suffered a very serious injury to one of his hands in a shooting accident. It took eight operations – and a great deal of pain – to repair the damage. By the time he was 19 Hesnault had become a junior officer in one of France’s most celebrated parachute regiments and was sent out to Africa, where he saw action when France intervened in local conflicts. Having acquired a taste for adventure, he set up his own trading company – to do business in dangerous countries – where people did not always play by the rules.

When he was not off doing deals in Africa, he decided to do some racing, starting out in some hillclimbs around Paris. He discovered that he was very competitive and so enrolled at the famous Winfield School at Magny-Cours, although he was sick with hepatitis at the end of 1979 and so missed the Volant Elf finals, which could have won him a free ride in French Formula Renault in 1980. Instead he raised the money to do it himself. It was a super-competitive era with more than 60 drivers taking part that season, but Hesnault did well enough to warrant a second year and he duly won his first race in 1981, on his way to third in the championship. He moved to French Formula 3 in 1982 with his own UFO Racing, with sponsorship from the Elf brand Antar and from the French distributor of UFO Contemporary, the New York-based fashion brand. The season began with a Martini-Alfa Romeo but as the year developed the Ralt RT3 became the car to beat. In the summer be bought the Ivens Lumar Racing Ralt RT3 which Roberto Moreno had used to win several races in Britain and soon afterwards François won at Albi, ending the year third in the championship behind Dave Price Racing’s Pierre Petit and the ORECA factory Martini of Michel Ferté.

For 1983, with support from Saudia Airlines and Elf, he joined Price’s team and won a string of victories, but finished runner-up by just two points to the consistent Ferté.

That year in F1 was a disaster for Ligier, the team scoring no points at all. For 1984 Guy Ligier secured Renault engines and took on Andrea de Cesaris, who brought substantial funding. Ligier wanted a French driver and when Hesnault appeared with funding from Antar and UFO Ligier Guy hired him. It was a late decision and Hesnault had done little testing and so he was learning as he went along. He had high hopes of a good result at Dijon, a circuit he knew. Unfortunately, de Cesaris was excluded from the first qualifying session after his fire extinguisher bottle was found to be empty. It then rained on Saturday, which meant that the Italian did not qualify. Hesnault had qualified 14th, his best result thus far but Ligier, mindful of money, withdrew Hesnault’s car, in order to allow de Cesaris to start from the back of the grid. That damaged their relationship, but as the year went on Hesnault got closer to the Italian and ended up with five top 10 finishes.

For 1985 he produced another surprise by signing to join Nelson Piquet at Brabham, replacing Teo Fabi. Michelin had pulled out of F1 and Brabham took a risk and went with Pirelli, while most of the other teams switched to Goodyear. The Brabham-BMW BT54 was difficult car to drive and things began badly. Then Hesnault failed to qualify at Monaco. A few days later, testing at Paul Ricard, he crashed in the high-speed Verreries corners after the pits. The Brabham ended up wrapped up in catchfencing and it was several minutes before Hesnault was extricated from the wreck by marshals. He explained to the team that something had broken. Team boss Bernie Ecclestone responded that things did not break on Brabhams. François decided to quit. A year later Elio de Angelis had a similar accident at the same corner and died, asphyxiated in the cockpit because the marshals could not get him out and did not have enough fire extinguishers to put out the fire. His only injury was a fractured collar bone. Hesnault reappeared later in 1986 at the German GP, driving a factory Renault, which was being used as a camera car. It was the first onboard camera to race in F1 and the last time in F1 history that a team ran three cars. But he had lost his desire to race. Life was too short for that. He was an eligible young man and didn’t need the money that racing could bring. After leaving F1 his name was linked in gossip magazines with Princess Stephanie of Monaco, who had previously been the girlfriend of fellow driver Paul Belmondo. In fact Hesnault had other intentions and married Stephanie’s business partner in a swimsuit company, fashion designer Alix Prieur de la Comble. They had three daughters: Morrigan, Victoria and Marie-Maubruny.

In 1990 his father retired from the business and bought the ruined Chateau St-Martin de Toques, a dramatic Cathar castle on the top of the hills near Narbonne, along with its 227-acre estate. In the course of the next 20 years he spent more than $25 million to restore the castle before his death in 2010, at the age of 82. François ran his own companies, living between Switzerland and Paris, but retained his share of the family business, but leaving his brother to run it. The firm would be floated in 2000 and a few years afterwards Hesnault returned to Paris fulltime to run the business, after his brother moved to the United States.

A fitness freak, his passion was rollerblading, which he did in the early hours each morning, on the deserted streets of Paris.

Although he continues to keep a low profile, he was one of the pall-bearers at Guy Ligier’s funeral in 2015.

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VN Kanade 1976, Mosport:

 

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Fascinating F1 Fact: 45
January 11, 2018 by Joe Saward

Ask most people if they have heard of George Martin and a few will be able to tell you that he was the man who made The Beatles what they were. Ask them about Georges Martin – with an s at the end of George – and most will simply look blankly at you.

Born in the town of La Ferté-Allais, due south of Paris, not far from Étampes, in 1930, Martin’s education was disrupted by the war, delaying his attendance at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV, a high school on the Left Bank in Paris, which prepares students from 11 upwards for entrance to France’s elite grandes écoles. The Lycée has an astonishing list of alumni including President Emanuel Macron, Prime Minister Leon Blum, philosophers Jean Paul Sartre and Simone Weil, writers André Gide, Guy de Maupassant and Prosper Merimee, not to mention Georges-Eugene Haussmann, the man who rebuilt Paris and (oddly) the British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

He went on to study engineering at the École Spéciale des Travaux Publics, graduating in 1957 – at the age of 27 – and then being required to do his military service. This all meant that he was 29 before to went to work in quality control at Simca in 1959. He moved to the engine development division two years later and was named as the designer of the Simca 1100 engine, which would become known as the Simca Poissy. This was a small inline four cylinder to be used in economy cars. It first appeared in the Simca 1000 in 1961. Two years later he became head of the design department after the firm was taken over by Chrysler. He moved to Matra at the end of 1966, lured there by former Simca colleague Philippe Guédon, who had left two years earlier soon after Jean-Luc Lagardère launched Matra into the car business.

Lagardère’s plan was to use sport to promote the business and during the Monte Carlo Rally festivities in Monaco in January 1967 Lagardère and Jean Prada, the boss of the new Elf oil company, announced that Matra would develop an all-new French Formula 1 car, powered by its own 3-litre V12 engine. The pair then negotiated a loan of six million Francs from the French government to pay for it.

Lagardere wanted a three-litre engine which could be used in both Formula 1 and sports car racing. Martin had the engine on a dyno at Velizy by December, with the 60-degree V12 producing 400 horsepower. Martin chose the angle so that the engine could sit lower in a chassis than the 90-degree Cosworth DFV and Repco engines. The engine debuted in F1 and sports cars on the same day, May 26 1968. The F1 car at Monaco in the hands of Jean-Pierre Beltoise and the sportscar at the Spa 1000km, driven by Henri Pescarolo and Jimmy Mieusset. A month later, at the Dutch Grand Prix, Beltoise finished second. The engine needed more development and so in 1969 Matra agreed to supply Ken Tyrrell with its F1 chassis, into which he fitted Cosworth engines. Jackie Stewart won the World Championship. The engine was developed in sports cars with Beltoise and Piers Courage finishing fourth at Le Mans and Beltoise and Pescarolo winning the Paris 1000 at Montlhery.

In December 1969 Matra and Simca agreed to work together, in order to give Matra access to the Simca dealer network. The racing cars were rebranded as Matra-Simcas and Matra told Tyrrell that he had to use the V12s. Ken’s deal with Ford made this impossible and so he switched to March chassis and Matra ran Beltoise and Pescarolo, but managed only three third places. The pair won the Buenos Aires 1000 sports car race and the team scored a 1-2 on the Tour de France, with Beltoise, Patrick Depailler and Jean Todt (yes, that Jean Todt) ahead of Pescarolo, Jean-Pierre Jabouille and Johnny Rives. For the 1971 season Beltoise was joined in F1 by Chris Amon but the only victory was a non-championship race in Argentina., while Gérard Larrousse won thre Tour de France, with Rives. The F1 team remained poor in 1972 but at Le Mans there was a Matra 1-2 with Pescarolo and Graham Hill finishing ahead François Cevert and Howden Ganley.

At the end of the year Matra left F1 and in 1973 and 1974 the Matra sports cars were dominant, winning the Constructors’ Championship twice and Larrrousse and Pescarolo won two consecutive Le Mans victories.

Then at the end of 1974, with the economy in a bad way, Matra withdrew from all competition. Guy Ligier bought the F1 assets and many of the staff transferred to the Ligier team, which entered F1 in 1976. Martin stayed at Matra , which continued with other automotive projects, and his V12 reappeared briefly in the back of a Shadow F1 car that year before a deal was struck for Ligier to use the engines in 1976. The revised engine allowed Jacques Laffite finally give Matra it’s first F1 victory in Sweden in 1977. There were no wins in 1978 and in August Peugeot bought control of Chrysler Europe.

Matra had no money for F1 and so the partnership with Ligier broke up. A few months later, with Ligier winning races with DFV power, Peugeot announced that its Chrysler assets would be rebranded as Talbot and the revived brand joined Peugeot and Citroen to form PSA. The company wanted to promote the Talbot brand and so took on BMW’s Jochen Neerpasch to run its motorsport. He bought control of Ligier and revived the Matra relationship and in 1981 Laffite added two more Grand Prix victories, in Austria and Canada. It was clear that Talbot would need a turbo engine and Neerpasch tried to get BMW to agree to sell its secret F1 programme to Talbot. This achieved the opposite of what he intended. The BMW board decided to go ahead with its own engine and did a deal to supply the Brabham team. Neerpasch put Martin to work on an in-house 1.5-litre 120-degree V6 turbo engine, but then another blow fell. Peugeot changed strategy and dropped the whole Talbot brand, merging all the assets into the main company. Neerpasch departed and Ligier was sold back to Guy Ligier and Peugeot stopped its partnership with Matra because of a project it had with rival Renault – to develop something called the Espace. The F1 turbo programme was axed. The firm tried to keep it going and came close to a deal with Williams, but then Honda turned up and Williams had no choice but to take the deal. The Matra V6 never ran and the department was closed down. Martin stayed with Matra until 1992 when he retired.

His Simca Poissy engine was used in economy cars for 30 years, from 1961 until 1991. There were variants with displacements ranging from 777 to 1592cc used by Simca, Chrysler Europe, Talbot and Peugeot. Among the cars powered by the engine were the Dodge Omni, the Plymouth Horizon, versions of the Peugeot 205 and 309, the Simca Rallye, the Talbot Horizon and Solara, the Chrysler Alpine and the Citroen C15, not to mention the Matra Bagheera, Murena and Rancho…

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Fascinating F1 Fact: 46
January 12, 2018 by Joe Saward

Des Plaines, Illinois, is not the sort of place one associates with Formula 1. It was in Des Plaines in 1955 that Ray Kroc opened his first McDonald’s franchise restaurant (although he had eight others he ran himself), but that did not cut much mustard in the world of Grand Prix racing. However, the Chicago suburb, just up the road from O’Hare International Airport, was also the home of the STP Corporation.

STP had started out at the chemical compounds division of the Studebaker automobile company. This acquired a supercharger company called Paxton Products, which was run by Andy Granatelli, a former racer who had run a speed shop on Chicago’s North Side in the late 1940s, with his brothers Vince and Joe. They also promoted hot rod races and ran cars in the Indy 500. Andy was a consummate showman and would become one of the great characters at the Indy 500. He and his brothers bought Paxton hoping it would help them to develop the Novi engine. After the purchase, Studebaker decided to put Granatelli in charge of its chemical compounds division. This proved to be an inspired decision. He changed the name of the business to Studebaker Test Products (STP) and went racing to promote the brand, with cars and boats. STP was soon everywhere, famously in 1964 when Granatelli dressed his team in overalls covered in STP logos (looking like pyjamas), but wore a business suit in the same style. His experiments with turbine cars led to two near-misses for victory in the Indy 500 but in 1969 Mario Andretti gave STP Racing its first Indy 500 win.

Granatelli had even bigger ambitions and in 1970 he agreed to go Grand Prix racing, as the sponsor of the new March F1 team, with drivers Jo Siffert and Chris Amon. Granatelli decided to enter a third car at a number of races for Mario Andretti.

In fact there were five Marches on the grid for the first Grand Prix of 1970, at Kyalami in South Africa: the two STP works cars and the STP Oil Treatment Special, driven by Andretti. There were also two blue Marches with Elf sponsorship for the Tyrrell team’s Jackie Stewart and Johnny Servoz-Gavin. Later in the year a sixth car would become involved, with Ronnie Peterson at the wheel of a Antique Automobiles Racing 701, run by Colin Crabbe.

What very few people know is that the STP Oil Treatment Special was not run from the March factory in Bicester, but rather from a race shop located at STP headquarters at 125 Oakton Street, in Des Plaines, Illinois. The project was, by its very nature, complicated because Andretti’s 1970 schedule was fairly insane. The season kicked off that year at the South African GP in Kyalami in early March. Prior to that the car was built up in Des Plaines by former Team Lotus mechanics: Bob Dance and Bob Sparshott (who would be joined soon afterward by a third ex-Lotus man Sid Carr. The team was run by Andy Granatelli’s son – Vince Jr – and the only other team member (of sorts) was a 17-year old school kid called Cary Capparelli, who was the president of the Mario Andretti Fan Club. He had known Granatelli for some years and had asked for a gopher job one summer and ended up working for the team whenever he could.

The three Britons stayed at the Holiday Inn in Des Plaines and regularly ate at a place called Lum’s, giving themselves the nickname of “The Lum’s Bums” as a result. After South Africa, Andretti (and the car) went home to the US and Mario won the Sebring 12 Hours for Ferrari and then did his first USAC races at Phoenix and Sears Point. He then flew to Spain, where he scored his first podium finish with third place. Then it was back to the US for a USAC race at Trenton, before going into the preparations for the Indianapolis 500, leading up to the race itself on May 30. That was followed by USAC races at Milwaukee, Langhorne, Continental Divide (which he won in a McNamara) and Michigan. His only free weekend was June 21 because the team decided not to enter the Dutch GP. There was then a CanAm race for Ferrari at Watkins Glen before the British GP at Brands Hatch on July 18. Then it was back to the US for a USAC race at Indianapolis Raceway Park and then back to Europe for the German and Austrian GPs in August before returning to the US again for USAC races at Milwaukee and then four consecutive races in September.
For the early F1 races the team prepared the car in Des Plaines and then took it to nearby O’Hare and flew it to London aboard a a Seaboard World Airlines 747 freighter. It was met at the other end by a truck from March Engineering and would then join the other STP cars en route to the races. Getting a truck each time to drive the short distance to the airport proved to be a pain and Vince decided it would be much easier to drive the F1 car to the freight area. He organized a police escort and drove the car himself on the first occasion this happened. Carr drove it the second time, just before the British Grand Prix.
Granatelli was keen to make the car as competitive as possible and kept a close eye on the modifications being made by Tyrrell and found a man in Chicago, who hailed from Czechoslovakia, who had built a fiberglass submarine and he was commissioned to make new parts. After the British GP, the team stayed in Europe because the German and Austrian races followed quickly. The team thus set up shop in the McNamara shop at Lenggries in Bavaria, south of Munich and close to the Austrian border. It was not possible for Mario to race at Monza, but as the last three races were all in North America (Canada, Watkins Glen and Mexico) they might have been included in the programme except that things went wrong and the project was abandoned. Lum’s Bums went back to Des Plaines and prepared the March 703 for the Tasman series, replacing the 3-litre Cosworth DFV with a 2.5-litre DFW, and the car was then dispatched to New Zealand for the first race at Levin International on January 3, 197 for Chris Amon to drive. The series had a mix of rules that year with the 2.5-litre cars up against more powerful Formula 5000s, although there handled better, but the formula was out of balance and the best Amon could do was third. The team duly replaced the March with a Lotus Formula 5000 car. The March was sent back to the US, returned to F1 spec and was sold to Skip Barber. Dance went on to work for Braham, before returning to Lotus and overseeing Mario Andretti’s World Championship in 1978. Sparshott set up his own F1 team, called BS Fabrications which ran customer F1 and F2 cars for a variety of drivers between 1972 and 1978, including Brett Lunger, Henri Pescarolo and even the young Nelson Piquet. The company helped build the Toleman F2 cars and then, under the BS Automotive banner, won the Formula 3000 championship in 1985 with Christian Danner.
Carr worked for McLaren in Detroit and later the Vel’s Parnelli F1 team before setting up his own business, while Capparelli set up a sports marketing firm called Omni, working with many drivers, teams and sponsors in IndyCar, while also developing a career in politics.

Granatelli won the Indy 500 again in 1973 with an STP Eagle, driven by Gordon Johncock, but in September that year he was replaced as chairman and CEO and STP’s exciting times in motorsport quickly waned…

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 47
January 13, 2018 by Joe Saward

 

In the Eighteenth Century, Bordeaux was the second busiest port in the world, after London. Ships arrived from the West Indies and America and the port supplied most of Europe with coffee, cocoa, sugar and cotton. Ships leaving Bordeaux carried the local wines. The city was responsible for a quarter of all French trade. It was a rich town. Sixty miles inland from the sea, on the River Garonne, it sits just a few miles to the south of where the River Dordogne and the Garonne meet to form the Gironde Estuary, making the city a crossroads for trade and the commercial and cultural centre of southwest France. In 1820 the city planners laid out the Esplanade des Quinconces, a 31-acre square, surrounded by trees, planted in patterns of five (hence the name). It was built on the site of a vast fortress which was demolished after the Revolution and was used to host fairs and exhibitions, while also featuring two 70-ft high stone columns, one representing commerce, the other navigation. Later a fountain monument to the victims of the French Revolution, 165-ft tall, was built, surrounded by bronze statues. The quayside curves away in both directions, lined with imposing 18th century architecture.

In the early days of the automobile, where there was money, there were horseless carriages and Bordeaux had plenty of them. It also had the Route Nationale 10, which left the city and headed up to Paris, by way of Angouleme, Poitiers, Tours, Chartres and Versailles. For the automobile world, this was the Mother Road, along which history was written large. It was the RN that was used for the first major motor race, the 1895 Paris-Bordeaux-Paris. Later it was the route of the disastrous 1903 Paris-Madrid race, cancelled when the cars reached Bordeaux, having left a trail of destruction along the way.

What does this have to do with F1? Well, long after the great road races ended, the first Grands Prix of Bordeaux were held in the Parc Bordelais in the late 1920s and then at Saint-Médard-en-Jalles in 1932, all of them organised by the Automobile Club du Sud Ouest (ACSO). After the war, the club was headed by Louis Baillot d’Estivaux, a chemical engineer who invented various processes for wine and also designed an instant camera.

He proposed in 1950 that the city host a non-championship Formula 1 race around the Esplanade des Quinconces and along the quayside. It was a great idea. The race would require much the same infrastructure of the foire aux plaisirs, held twice a year in the autumn and in the spring, and it would spread the word about Bordeaux and attract business. Baillot d’Estivaux argued that if it was held in April or May it would slot into the international calendar after Pau, which was always held at Pentecost, and so the entry ought to be good if the cars remained a few extra days in the region. He took the idea to the mayor of Bordeaux, an ambitious 45-year-old called Jacques Delmas, who had been a Resistance hero, using a nom de guerre Chaban, and so had become Jacques Chaban-Delmas after the war. He was a dashing sportsman, who had won the French tennis championship just before the war and played rugby while working in the Resistance. After the Liberation he became the youngest general in the French Army, at the age of just 29 before Charles de Gaulle sent him to Bordeaux, where he was elected mayor in 1946. He played rugby for Begles and indeed for France.

Chabon-Delmas loved the idea and gave it his full support. Baillot d’Estivaux set to work, getting the pre-war racing star Albert Divo to design a 1.4-mile track, which ran from the bottom of the Esplanade along the Quai des Chartrons to a hairpin and then back to the Esplanade, sweeping right up the Allée des Chartres, one one side of the Esplanade, to a left-hander that led to a specially-built piece of road that swerved around the Monument aux Girondins until it reached the other side of the Esplanade and then went left along the Allée d’Orleans to rejoin the quad, through a fast right-hander. The circuit then ran down past the Place de la Bourse to a hairpin and then returned to the start-finish line running along the waterfront. Chaban-Delmas agreed to tarmac the two allées and to build the section of road looping around the monument. On Sunday, April 29 1951 60,000 spectators turned out to watch, sitting in temporary grandstands opposite the pits, or on rooftop terraces above the quayside warehouses, or at trackside around the Esplanade.

There were 15 cars entered, 10 of them having travelled the 550 miles from San Remo, where they had all contested the Gran Premio di San Remo on the Ospedaletti circuit the previous weekend. This contingent included Henri Louveau and Louis Rosier in Ecurie Rosier Lago-Talbot T26Cs, Enrico Platé’s Maseratis, entered for Prince Bira, Harry Schell and Emmanuel de Graffenried, Rudolf Fischer in his Ecurie Espadon Ferrari and Peter Whitehead in his private Ferrari, plus Yves Giraud-Cabantous in his own Lago-Talbot and the HWM Altas of Lance Macklin and Louis Chiron. They were joined by the Simca-Gordini squad (Maurice Trintignant, Andre Simon and Robert Manzon) from Paris and by an additional Maserati, entered by Scuderia Milano for World Champion Giuseppe Farina and a second Ecurie Espadon car for Pierre Staechelin.

Seven of the cars retired during the three-hour race leaving Rosier to win. A year later, using the same circuit, the race was run for sports cars because the F1 rule changes meant that no-one was really ready at that time of year. In 1953, with the circuit running in the opposite direction. The race was held over the May Day holiday weekend, with 16 cars, including the Ferraris of Alberto Ascari, Gigi Villoresi, Farina and Rosier. There were three Gordinis, two Maseratis, three HWM-Altas, two OSCAs and a Connaught, a very decent field, which included all three World Champions up to that point: Farina, Juan Manuel Fangio and Ascari. The Ferraris finished 1-2, a lap ahead of the rest. In 1954 Ferrari went one better and finished 1-2-3 with Froilan Gonzalez beating Manzon and Trintignant, with Stirling Moss fourth in a Maserati. Soon afterwards Chaban-Delmas was named Minister of Public Works, Transport and Tourism, departments for which the race had prepared him for…

In 1955 there was another strong entry with factory teams from Ferrari, Maserati and Gordoni, with privateers including Moss in his Maserati, Bira, Simon and Rosier in similar cars and Alfonso de Portago in a Ferrari 625. The race saw a Maserati factory 1-2-3 with Behra beating Luigi Musso and Roberto Mieres. It was the end of April 1955. In June the Le Mans disaster changed all the rules, just as the Paris-Madrid race had done 52 years earlier. Safety became an issue and France stopped almost all of its street races. And so ended the Bordeaux Grand Prix.

Chaban-Delmas would remain mayor of Bordeaux until 1995, winning 12 consecutive municipal elections. He was portrayed in the 1966 movie “Is Paris Burning?” by heart throb Alain Delon, and in 1969 he became Prime Minister for three years under Georges Pompidou. He was even a Presidential candidate after Pompidou’s death, but was defeated by Valerie Giscard d’Estaing. He would be President of the Assemblée Nationale (effectively the French Parliament) on three separate occasions.

Edited by Rad-oh-yeah?, 13 January 2018 - 23:18.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 48
January 14, 2018 by Joe Saward

Titles can be very confusing, but there is some logic to them, if you look closely. Emperors ruled over empires, kings governed kingdoms, dukes ran duchies and princes principalities. Counts controlled counties and Viscounts were, quite literally, vice-counts. Simple really.

Well, apart from the fact that the British don’t use the term Count, but prefer Earl, although the wife of an earl is not an earless, but rather a Countess. Oh, and in Europe a Duke is more important than a Prince, although the opposite is true in Britain. Then there is the confusing rank of Marquess, which slots in between duke and earl in the pecking order. This was derived from those who ruled over a march, the border area between two realms. It gets a little complicated because aristocrats can have different names at different stages of their life. The British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, started out as Lord Robert Cecil. He then became Viscount Cranborne and then the Marquess of Salisbury.

Having a title did not guarantee that one was wealthy, but as in the game Monopoly, the richest folk are the ones who build houses on their properties and gather rents… and those with the most property wins. When the automobile was first invented, these exotic machines were not cheap and so the early history of the sport is filled with aristocrats. The Marquis de Dion was a key player, while Baron de Zuylen was the first President of the Automobile Club de France. The presidents of the FIA included Counts de Vogue, de Rohan, de Liedekerke-Beaufort and Princes Filippo Caracciolo di Castagneto, Amaury de Merode and Paul Metternich. Among the racers, there was Viscount Curzon, who became Earl Howe, a Le Mans winner, Grand Prix driver and President of the BRDC. There were barons Camille Jenatzy, Pierre de Caters, René de Knyff and Pierre de Crawhez. Later there were Prince Bira, Baron Philippe de Rothschild, Counts “Johnny” Lurani and Carel Godin de Beaufort, Barons Huschke von Hanstein and Emmanuel de Graffenried and the Marquis de Portago, not to mention Wolfgang Reichsgraf Berghe von Trips. Racing cars provided a source of new adventures for men with plenty to spend and little to do.

The Marquis de Montaignac de Chauvance, – known to his pals as Renaud – had the great misfortune to become the first fatality in the history of motorsport, although in truth he probably wasn’t actually the first because a riding mechanic in another vehicle was killed instantly in the same incident. The Marquis lived a few hours, but history relates that the serving classes do not get the glory… The Marquis, who had just celebrated his 47th birthday, was so keen on the automobile that he had invested in a car company called MLB (Montaignac, Landry et Beyroux), his partners Justin Landry et Gabriel Beyroux being engineers.

De Montaignac was motoring down a straight piece of road just before the village of Marsac sur l’Isle, to the west of Perigueux, in May 1898 when he caught up with a Monsieur De Montariol, driving a lighter and less powerful Parisienne. The latter politely moved over to allow de Montaignac to pass and the Marquis gave a cheery wave, letting go of the tiller, which steered his vehicle. This resulted in the two cars colliding. Montariol was thrown clear of the Parisienne while his mechanic was hurled against a tree and expired on the spot. A horrified Montaignac lost control of his own car and it turned over. His mechanic was injured and Montaignac suffered injuries that proved to be fatal, although he had time to tell everyone that it had all been his fault. A noble noble.

Being a peer sounds like a grand life, but not everyone likes it. The money is useful, of course, if they have access to it, but some want to be seen to be making their own way in life, relying only talent rather than inheritance.

This was certainly the case with John Crichton-Stuart, who came from a family which could trace its roots back to Robert the Bruce, King of Scots. The youngster inherited an impressive range of titles, including being Earl of Windsor and Earl of Dumfries. he was also Viscount Ayr, Viscount Mounty, Viscount Kingarth, and Lord Crichton of Sanquhar and Cumnock, Lord Montstuart Cumbrae and Inchmarnock and Baron Cardiff. He left school at 16 and worked as a builder for three years until his cousin Charlie, a Formula 3 racer in the 1960s, got him a job as a van driver with a new F1 team called Williams Grand Prix Engineering, running a March for Patrick Neve. A year later he moved on to work as a mechanic with BS Fabrications, a team running a McLaren M23 for Brett Lunger and later a young Nelson Piquet. John had been inspired in his childhood by the exploits of his cousin Charlie and soon began to race karts. He broke both his ankles in a crash and so in 1981, at the age of 23, he switched to Formula Ford 1600. He did well enough to land a factory drive in 1982 with Ray and finished third in the P&O Championship in Britain that year. He had a sponsor who was keen to move to Formula 3 and so he went to Dave Price Racing (DPR) and bought the Ralt that Martin Brundle had raced in 1982, prepared by Dave Morgan, a former F1 driver. Johnny Dumfries, as he was known, made his first significant impression when he battled with Ayrton Senna in a round of the European F3 series at Silverstone that summer and he was signed for 1984 by BP, which ran a young driver programme with DPR.

Dumfries won 10 times in Britain and challenged for the European title as well, finishing second to a young Ivan Capelli. In July Johnny was offered an F1 drive with Tyrrell, after Brundle broke his legs in a crash in Dallas. Dumfries decided not to take up the offer. A month later he tested a Lotus-Renault at Donington and soon after that ran in a Williams before trying a McLaren at Silverstone, as part of his prize for winning the British F3 title. The year ended with a test for Brabham-BMW at Kyalami. Johnny was a man in demand.

He also raced with the Rothmans Porsche sports car team, as there was a plan for him to move up to Formula 3000 in 1985 with Rothmans sponsoring a team run by Price. But then the phone rang and he was asked if he would like to become the Ferrari test driver, so he gave up on all the others and headed off to Italy. He signed a deal for Formula 3000 with Onyx, but he did not have the money and it ended after four races.

The sport is fickle and by then he was no longer the golden boy he had been at the end of 1984. He was fortunate that Senna blocked Derek Warwick from being his team-mate at JPS Lotus. The team was thus forced to look elsewhere and so picked Dumfries. Competing with Senna, with less experience, was a tough role, but Dumfries would twice score points before he was dumped as Lotus had secured Honda engines and the Japanese wanted the team to take Satoru Nakajima.

He tried to work a deal with Tyrrell but then started racing sports cars, with an Ecurie Ecosse, then a Sauber-Mercedes in practice at Le Mans. There was then an outing in July at Brands Hatch with a Britten Lloyd Racing Porsche 962 and his second place finish attracted the attention of fellow Scotsman Tom Walkinshaw. who signed him to drive for the Jaguar team in 1987. He would also become a Benetton F1 test driver, a role he held for the next four years. Dumfries won in the Jaguar at Spa in 1987 and then took victory with Jan Lammers and Andy Wallace at the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1988. He was later fired by Walkinshaw for crashing too much, but was taken on by the Toyota factory sports car team in 1989 and 1990. At the end of 1990 he had nowhere to go. He raced briefly with a Cougar-Porsche in 1991 but then disappeared from the racing scene and went to help his ailing father run the family estates. These were not insignificant and included Mount Stuart, a vast neo-Gothic stately home on the island of Bute, with a 27,000 acre estate, including farms, property, forestry, a sawmill and various other businesses. There was also Dumfries House, a collosal Palladian mansion built in the 1750s, which sat on a 2,000 acre property, which had been in the family since 1635.

His father died in 1993 and Johnny Dumfries became the 7th Marquess of Bute and took control of the family empire. Using the name John Bute, he took the decision to open Mount Stuart to the public, which achieved great things for the troubled economy of the island of Bute. This became a tourist destination and a venue for high-end weddings, beginning with that of fashion designer Stella McCartney in 2003. He also launched a motoring event called the Mount Stuart Motorsport Classic. This was so successful that it overloaded the local infrastructure and had to be cancelled.Soon afterwards he took the decision to sell Dumfries House, which went for £45 million to a consortium headed by Prince Charles, who has since renovated the estate to become self-sufficient, helping to regenerate the local economy. Dumfries worked a similar plan at Mount Stuart, creating a three-day food festival called eatBute and publicising Mount Stuart’s astonishing library, while adding to the artworks by becoming a patron of the arts. A couple of years ago he made a film about the people of Bute, and continues to work to attract tourists.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Upravo objavljena vest, napustio nas je jos jedan istinski velikan:
 

Dan Gurney, 1931-2018
Sunday, 14 January 2018
By Mark Glendenning / Images by IMS Photo, LAT, Marshall Pruett, All American Racers, Steve Shunck



 
Iconic race driver, team owner and constructor Dan Gurney has died at the age of 86 Dan passed away due to complications from pneumonia.

"With one last smile on his handsome face, Dan drove off into the unknown just before noon today, January 14, 2018," Gurney's wife Evi and family said in a statement. "In deepest sorrow, with gratitude in our hearts for the love and joy you have given us during your time on this earth, we say ‘Godspeed.’"

Born in New York but raised in Southern California, which remained his home for the rest of his life, Gurney was renowned as one of the fastest and most versatile drivers in the sport's history.

The two driving feats for which he is best remembered – the 24 Hours of Le Mans victory that he shared with A.J. Foyt in 1967, followed by a win at the Belgian Grand Prix in an Eagle Formula 1 car of his own construction – were made all the more notable by the fact that they occurred just a week apart. But more remarkable still is that they only begin to scratch the surface of his achievements.

He was the first driver ever to win races in Formula 1, NASCAR and IndyCar: a feat that has only been matched since by Mario Andretti and Juan Pablo Montoya. He was a race winner in Can-Am and Trans-Am. He invented the podium champagne spray. He pioneered the use of full-face helmets in F1. He gave three F1 teams their first victories. And he oversaw the creation of one of the most beautiful Formula 1 cars ever built in the Eagle Mk.1.


A.J. Foyt and Dan Gurney with the first-ever champagne spray after winning Le Mans in 1967.

A product of the postwar West Coast's vibrant car culture, Gurney's first big break came when he dragged the fast but terrifying Arciero Special – a Mistral powered by a reworked 4.2-liter Maserati engine – to second place in the inaugural Riverside Grand Prix in 1957.

That performance turned the head of famed North American Ferrari importer Luigi Chinetti, and the following June Gurney found himself sharing a factory 250 Testa Rossa with Bruce Kessler. The latter crashed, but Gurney's performance behind the wheel helped pave the way for him to make his F1 debut with the Scuderia at Reims in 1959. His three subsequent F1 appearances with Ferrari yielded two podiums and a fourth, but his dislike of the team culture steered him toward a drive with BRM the following year.

A largely frustrating year punctuated by a tragedy at Zaandvort, where a young spectator was killed after Gurney suffered a brake failure, opened the door for a move to Porsche in 1961, and in 1962 he claimed his first F1 victory at Rouen (below).



A three-year stint at Brabham yielded another two wins, but by this point, plans that Gurney had been hatching with Carroll Shelby to create an American car that could compete with Europe's best were creeping closer to fruition.


On the heels of his 1967 Le Mans win, Dan Gurney and his Eagle won at Spa. Also on the podium were Jackie Stewart and Chris Amon.

The product of that dream – the AAR (All-American Racers, or Anglo-American Racers in its F1 guise as a nod to the British Weslake Engine) Eagle Mk.1 made its debut at the beginning of the 1966 F1 season. Reliability was an issue, but when it finished, it tended to finish strong: The win at Spa in '67 was accompanied by a podium in Canada that same year, a fourth place at Watkins Glen in 1968, and a heartbreaking near-miss in 1967 when the car suffered a failure while leading by 42 seconds two laps from the checker at the Nurburgring.

A driver who fully embraced his era's opportunities for diversity, Gurney routinely dovetailed his F1 program with other events. He made eight appearances at the Indy 500 between 1962 and 1970, finishing second twice in Eagle-Fords, and won seven Champ Car races from 28 career starts.


Gurney at Indianapolis, 1969.

Indy cars also gave rise to perhaps his most famous engineering breakthrough, the Gurney flap: a small tab projecting from the trailing edge of a wing that generated substantial additional downforce. First introduced on Bobby Unser's car at a test at Phoenix in 1971, after Gurney had retired from driving, the device remains in common usage across motorsport and aviation to this day.

In NASCAR, his name was synonymous with Riverside: He earned five Grand National wins there during the 1960s, four of which were with Wood Brothers Racing, and also made three career appearances at the Daytona 500 with a best finish of fifth with Holman-Moody in 1963.

Following his retirement from F1 after a year with McLaren in 1970, Gurney turned his attention to full-time team ownership, and sat at the helm of AAR until 2011, when the team was taken over by his son Justin. His car were formidable on the track, claiming 78 victories across all categories, including the Indianapolis 500, the 12 Hours of Sebring, and the 24 Hours of Daytona. And Gurney himself remained a formidable figure outside the cockpit, penning the famous 'White Paper' in 1978 that argued for a dramatic overhaul of the structure of American open-wheel racing, and representing a first step towards the formation of CART a year later.

AAR withdrew from CART for the first time in the mid-1980s, but enjoyed huge success in IMSA GTO competition, and later GTP with the ferocious Toyota-powered Eagle MkIII, which claimed 17 consecutive race wins and back-to-back drivers' and manufacturers' championships across 1992 and 1993.


The 1987 IMSA GTO championship team - Chris Cord, Willy T. Ribbs, Dan Gurney and Dennis Aase.

Gurney's tremendous achievements have been reflected through inductions into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame, the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America, the Sebring International Raceway Hall of Fame, and the West Coast Stock Car Hall of Fame.

He is survived by his wife Evi, and sons Justin, Alex, Jimmy and Dan Jr. According to his wishes, the funeral will be private.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

MILLER: Gurney, All-American treasure
Sunday, 14 January 2018
By Robin Miller / Images by LAT, IMS Photo, Marshall Pruett, All American Racers, Steve Shunck


Above: Dan Gurney's milestone win in his Eagle at Spa, 1967.


He wasn't an American Treasure as much as he was America's treasure.

From the time he went from a sports car at Riverside to sitting in a Ferrari at the French Grand Prix in only 23 races to helping change the face of the Indianapolis 500 with rear-engine cars to teaming with A.J. Foyt to win Le Mans to capturing Spa in his own design to dominating Indianapolis with his Eagles to racing a street car across the United States at 150mph in a race that paid nothing, Daniel Sexton Gurney embodied everything that was cool and daring and spirited about motorsports.

He was a fearless competitor in the deadliest era of Formula 1 who had Jim Clark's undivided attention, a versatile road racer that won in F1, Can-Am, IndyCar and NASCAR but who also adapted quickly to ovals – especially Indianapolis.


Gurney, 1964, Lotus (Ford)

In 312 starts, he scored 51 victories and 47 podiums while driving an astonishing 51 makes and more than 100 models from Europe to California to Canada.

But as great as he was in the cockpit and as willing as he was to drive anything with four wheels, the reason we loved The Big Eagle was because he charted his own course. The All-American Racer did it his way, from building his own chassis and engines to pushing boundaries and never hesitating to run with an idea.

"He was a great race driver but what we had in common and what I liked most about Dan was that he built his own cars and engines and we did it our way," said Foyt, who was devastated to hear of Gurney's passing.

"I always respected him because he was an American in Formula 1 racing his own car and then we won Le Mans together, a couple of Americans in a Ford, and that was pretty cool. He wasn't afraid to try something different and I had so much respect for him."

It was because of that mindset that Gurney never became an F1 or IndyCar champion, because instead of going with a conventional car or engine that were reliable, he wanted something different, faster, zoomier. And something that was his.

"If Dan would have driven for Lotus or Ferrari he'd have been a multi world champion," said Mario Andretti, who also took the news of one of his heroes quite hard. "But he did it his way, be it F1 or Indy cars, and he paid dearly but you have to admire him for that. In my book he was a world champion. He just didn't have the trophy."


Gurney's first F1 win came in the 1962 French Grand Prix at Rouen-Les-Essarts.

His F1 career started with Ferrari then went to Porsche, where he earned his first victory in 1962, then BRM and then chalked up two wins for Brabham before starting All American Racers. In 86 starts, he was on the front row 22 times but fourth in the championship was his best-ever showing. But he never second-guessed what he did.

"When I look back we were pretty confident as well as curious because we did some radical things but I loved being creative, something not allowed anymore," he said back in 2009.

"I liked having my own stuff, and if we hadn't run out of money with the Westlake engine I think we could have given everyone a run for their money."

Of course his competitors knew what they were up against. Stirling Moss told veteran motorsports writer Gordon Kirby that Gurney was one "of the finest drivers in the world," while Clark's father told Dan at the funeral that The Big Eagle was the only driver his son feared.

In today's specialized world of race drivers, it's hard to fathom Gurney's greatest year in 1967 when he won a Trans-Am race, then co-drove to victory with Foyt at Le Mans and a week later captured Spa in his Eagle before capping off the season with an IndyCar win at Riverside. He owned the NASCAR race at Riverside with five wins, and helped keep McLaren on track by winning the Mosport Can-Am race for them shortly after Bruce McLaren's death.


In 1967, Gurney and A.J. Foyt won Le Mans in a Ford GT40 Mk.IV.

Gurn (as Troy Ruttman's daughter Toddy calls him) also won endurance races at Sebring, Daytona, the Tourist Trophy at Goodwood and Nurburgring. He brought Ford and Lotus to Indianapolis in 1963 but had his best success at IMS in his Eagles – finishing second twice and third once before retiring after 1970.

"Those were great times because A.J., Mario, Parnelli and myself were always driving something different and it was a great feeling to jump into a new car and get right up to speed," said Gurney in 2012.

"I feel bad for these kids today because most of them are stuck in one category their whole career and it deprives the fans of seeing how versatile they could be. I'd never trade the era I raced, I think it was the best and most rewarding time for a driver."

After stepping away from the wheel (other than his 35-hour win in the inaugural Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash in a Ferrari Daytona in 1971 and his mastery of the Toyota Celebrity race at Long Beach), Gurney concentrated on AAR and Indianapolis.
 

 
Dan's pride and joy was the 1972 Eagle, in which Bobby Unser obliterated the IMS track record by 17mph in the AAR Eagle in 1972 and was long gone in the race before an ignition failure.

"Dan was so smart about cars it was scary," said Unser, who broke eight track records in ’72. "He’d invent an idea and I’d run with it and it was a great combination. That was the best car I ever drove and it was so far ahead of anything else at that time.

"I’d have lapped the field that day in ’72 and I was just coasting."

That Eagle became the most popular car in Gasoline Alley as 19 of the 33 starters were in Eagles the following May, which always gave Dan pride but pain. "We sold them for $40,000 apiece so we only lost $20,000 per car," he'd chuckle.

Unser gave the Eagle its initial win in 1968 and then Uncle Bobby finally got the Big Eagle into Victory Lane at Indy in 1975 after Johncock drove an Eagle to first in 1973. Mike Mosley gave Dan one of his finest moments – going from last-to-first at Milwaukee in the beautiful Pepsi Challenger before that design was neutered by the CART board.

So he moved on to sports cars, where his Toyota-powered GTP Eagle MKIII ran roughshod over the IMSA competition from mid-season in 1991 to 1993 (it scored 19 wins in 24 starts in '92 and '93) and ran Nissan and Jaguar out of IMSA.


Juan-Manuel Fangio II, Andy Wallace and Kenny Acheson piloted the GTP Eagle MKIII in the 1992 24 Hours of Daytona.

The final IndyCar looked great but was handicapped by Toyota's unprepared engine and Goodyear tires, so AAR never got a sniff from 1996-2000.

But in the final analysis, AAR cranked out 50 IndyCar wins, 21 in GTP, six in GTO, four in GTU and two in Formula 1 during its remarkable 34-year run.



For the past decade Gurney had been concentrating on his Alligator motorcycle while sons Justin and Alex (above) take AAR into a new direction with government work. At 86, he still had his right-hand girl Kathy Weida pick him up every day and go to the shop so he could brainstorm with Chuck Palmgren about their new motorcycle engine or talk with the boys or to go Mexican lunch on Thursdays. It kept him going and his mind was just as sharp as ever just a week ago.

"Dan was a super nice person who lived for racing and he was still sharp as a tack the last time we spoke,” said Unser. "He was also a helluva a good driver and I’ll always be happy we got to win Indianapolis together."

Parnelli Jones was shocked to hear of his pal's passing because they'd just eaten lunch together a couple weeks ago. "He was in great sprits and we had a lot fun that day," said Rufus. Asked to reflect on Gurney's career, the 1963 Indy winner replied: "Dan was always tough in whatever he ran when I was around, one of those guys you always had to beat. He could drive anything and drive it well.

"But truly he was the All-American guy. Who else had a bumper sticker that said 'Dan Gurney for President'? I think everybody liked cheering for him."

Edited by Rad-oh-yeah?, 15 January 2018 - 04:19.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Dan Gurney 1931-2018
January 15, 2018 by Joe Saward


Dan Gurney, who had died at the age of 86, was a colossus in motor racing history.

A racer, a team owner, a car manufacturer and a sage. Gurney was so popular in the United States in the mid-1960s that Car & Driver suggested that he run for President.

Gurney was tall (6ft3), graceful and handsome, dashing and charming. He was the archetypal schoolboy hero. He had it all. He won races in Formula 1, Indycars, NASCAR, CanAm and TransAm, not to mention sports cars. His biggest victory came at Le Mans in 1967, when he and AJ Foyt shared a Ford GT40, afterwards spraying champagne from the podium, starting a tradition that is now integral to all celebrations in motorsport today. That same summer he won the Belgian Grand Prix in one of his Eagles, to become only the second American to drive an American car to a Grand Prix victory, following Jimmy Murphy’s win in France in 1921, in a Duesenberg.

Gurney also invented the gurney flap, a small metal attachment that was bolted to the trailing edge of a rear wing to create more downforce without too much additional drag.

He was the first F1 racer to use a full-faced helmet.

In F1 circles, there was only one Dan.

Born on the affluent north shore of Long Island (Gatsby country), in New York in April 1931, Gurney was the son of John Gurney, a celebrated bass-baritone who sang with the Metropolitan Opera. After he retired in 1947 John Gurney moved his family to sunny California, settling in Corona del Mar, where he became a portrait artist and furniture designer. He still sang on occasion, notably the national anthem at the inaugural Long Beach Grand Prix.

Dan was a part of the 1950s sports car boom in California and was quickly spotted by Ferrari’s US agent Luigi Chinetti. He was invited to join the Ferrari factory team at Le Mans in the summer of 1958. His smooth and elegant driving style and his speed won him a place racing a works Ferrari F1 car in selected races in 1959, beginning at the French GP. He moved to BRM in 1960, but in Holland suffered a brake failure which caused him to crash, breaking an arm and killing a young spectator. He changed his driving style after the accident and developed a marked distrust of engineers.

The change in F1 regulations led him to a switch to the Porsche factory team in 1961 and he won his first World Championship victory the following year at Rouen, before moving to Brabham from 1963 to 1965, when he showed his pace but was often let down by mechanical trouble. With the arrival of the new 3-litre Formula 1 in 1966 he started his own Anglo American Racers and began competing with the Eagle-Weslake, winning his first victory in Belgium in 1967. His Eagles were successful in the US but struggled with the Weslake V12s and Gurney shut down the F1 operation in 1968 and he raced for McLaren on and off that year and in 1970. His Eagles – in Indycars and later in IMSA sports cars won 78 races (including the Indianapolis 500, the Sebring 12 Hours and the Daytona 24 Hours. His factory cars won eight different championships, while customers using his cars won three Indianapolis 500s and three championships. He was one of the founders of CART.

In later years he developed a low-rider motorcycle called the Alligator, hoping to license the design to a major manufacturer.

Gurney married German Evi Butz – Norbert Haug’s sister – in 1969 and they had four sons, Justin, Alex, Dan Jr. and Jimmy.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 49
January 15, 2018 by Joe Saward
 

 

Helmet designs are very personal things, but some of them have fascinating stories behind them. Jo Siffert, the Swiss racer from Fribourg, was one. His famous red helmet with two white stripes and the white cross of Switzerland at the front was actually a design that had been used previously by Benoît Musy, the man who inspired Siffert to race.

Benoît’s father Jean-Marie Musy had been a lawyer before he was elected to the Swiss National Assembly in 1914. He then became one of the seven Federal Counsellors, in charge of the Department of Finance, effectively the Finance Minister, and in 1925 was elected the President of the Swiss Confederation. He was in power for five years and then retired to advise financial institutions and foreign governments. Benoit was born in 1917 and in the late 1930s joined the Swiss Air Force and became a pilot. Towards the end of the war he and his father became involved in an extraordinary mission to negotiate the release of Jewish prisoners in German concentration camps, on behalf of an organisation called the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada.

Jean-Marie wrote to Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, requesting a meeting and then father and son drove to Berlin for a meeting. Himmler agreed to liberate 600,000 Jews, in exchange for a large number of vehicles, which the Germans needed. It was then early in 1945 and the war was not going well. The Musys went back to Switzerland and tried to secure the vehicles needed but it was impossible to do, so they drove back to Berlin to find that Himmler was not there, but was in the Black Forest. They drove there and Himmler agreed to accept five million Swiss Francs. The plan was for one train a week to take prisoners to Switzerland. The first train arrived at Konstanz in February 1945, carrying 1,200 Jews from the Theresienstadt camp, near Terezin, in northern Czechoslovakia.

Hitler then discovered what was happening and ordered no further release of prisoners, but the Musys went back to Berlin, despite being bombed and strafed by planes, on the road near Bayreuth and managed to negotiate further releases of specific individuals before returning to Switzerland. They had to travel at night, without lights, after their car was shot at on the way back. A few weeks later Benoit travelled alone to Weimer to meet Hermann Goering in order to negotiate a deal for prisoners in Buchenwald. There was fighting in the area and Goering could not get through and so Musy drove to Berlin, arriving with his car riddled with bullet holes. He met Goering and they travelled to Theresienstadt in order to release more prisoners, but they had disappeared and so Musy went back to Berlin, despite the fact that Hitler was threatening to execute anyone liberating Jews. Musy worked with General Walter Schellenberg, Himmler and Count Bernadotte to negotiate the release of 13,500 women prisoners from Ravensbruck and he accompanied them to freedom in Sweden in the final weeks of the war.

He then went back to farming for a couple of years before he began racing motorcycles professionally, winning six Swiss titles between 1947 and 1953, and inspiring the young Siffert, who would eventually follow in his footsteps. Musy then switched to car racing, driving Maserati sports cars, until October 1956 when he suffered a steering column failure at Montlhéry, hit the wall violently and was thrown from his car and killed.

Fifteen years later in October 1971 Siffert was killed in a fiery accident at Brands Hatch.

The two men are buried close to one another in the Cimetière Saint-Léonard in Fribourg.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 50
January 16, 2018 by Joe Saward
 

 

In the 1960s and 1970s, the city of Dallas was known for just one reason. It was the place where President John F Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald (and others) in 1963: Dealey Plaza, the grassy knoll, the Texas School Book Depository and so on… The folk in Dallas wanted to change that image and for the city to be seen as cool, international and cosmopolitan. Things were not helped when CBS created a prime time TV soap opera called Dallas, the story of a fictional wealthy feuding Texan family. In 1980 this led to one of the family shooting the evil JR Ewing character, but it was a mystery who had done it. The intrigue resulted in the highest ever TV ratings for any show up to that point, with 90 million Americans tuning in to find out “Who shot JR?” What the show did, however, was add to Dallas’s image problem.

In 1984 a group of businessmen came up with the idea of hosting a Formula 1 race in the city, the authorities were excited, although this did not mean that they dived into public funds to support the idea. The individuals concerned were all car fanatics, but they embarked on the idea because they thought they would either gain status in Dallas society, or make a pile of money, or both.

Donald Walker was a quiet Oklahoma-born accountant who had turned to investing and at 40 seemed to be doing pretty well. He had around 5,500 investors in various DRW companies. He seemed to know how to make money. Although not an outgoing individual, he lived an extravagant life, owning a $6 million French-styled mansion in North Dallas, employing a butler and flitting around other residences, including an 800-acre woodland ranch in Terrell, Texas; a ski lodge in Crested Butte, Colorado; a house near the sea in Carmel, California; and another on the Atlantic coast, near Jacksonville, Florida. There was also a yacht in Florida and a house in the Cayman Islands. When he and his wife travelled, they did so aboard chartered Lear Jets. His wife Carol liked to be seen as a society maven.

Walker’s partner in Dallas Grand Prix of Texas Inc. was Larry Waldrop, a 38-year-old property developer and construction contractor, who had made a considerable fortune building and selling apartments, before diversifying into finishing construction projects, fitting out apartments, offices and retail outlets.

A third partner in the business was Jarrett “Buddy” Boren, a 40-year-old entrepreneur had been active in entertainment industry during the 1960s and 1970s, as a record producer, a concert promoter and a film producer. His best known film was Wheels of Fire, a 1973 film about professional drag racing. As things were beginning to come together Boren was diagnosed with throat cancer and stepped down and was bought out, although he believed that he was pushed out so that Carol Walker could have a bigger role and believed that the race was really being held “as an excuse to hold a party”.

Dallas’s mayor Starke Taylor, who was new to the job, thought it was a great idea and hoped that it would bring 200,000 people to Dallas and boost its claim to be “The International City”. The promoters hired Long Beach’s Chris Pook as a consultant and Carroll Shelby as an ambassador and they set to work organising the event, and grinding through the required red tape. The venue chosen was the 277-acre Fair Park, just to south-east of the downtown area, which had been operation since the 1880s, hosting exhibitions, sports events and the annual State Fair, held for three weeks every autumn. At the centre of the park was the Cotton Bowl Stadium, once the home of the Dallas Cowboys, which was then best known for the Cotton Bowl Classic, a major college football annual event and for the Red River Showdown, an annual game between the Oklahoma Sooners and the Texas Longhorns. It was also a major concert venue and in the 1970s was home to the Texxas World Music Festival, hosting names such as Van Halen, Ted Nugent, Aerosmith, the Steve Miller Band, Fleetwood Mac, Boston, Blue Öyster Cult, the Eagles, Foreigner REO Speedwagon, Bryan Adams, Santana and many others.
Many of the buildings in the park dated back to 1936 when the city hosted the World Fair and the Texas Centennial Exposition and so there were restrictions about what could be done. Around $6 million was spent preparing a 2.8-mile, 16-turn circuit, repaving roads and creating the necessary concrete barriers and debris fences, in addition to promoting the race, hoping to attract a large number of Dallas’s one million people. A five-year contract from 1984 to 1988 was signed with Bernie Ecclestone.

In 1984 the July 4 Independence Day holiday fell on Wednesday, giving people the chance to take a couple of days off and get a very long weekend on July 6-8. The weather was hot and in practice Martin Brundle had a very nasty accident when his Tyrrell hit a concrete barrier and then bounced into another. He suffered serious fractures to both feet in the second impact. The grid was unusual with Nigel Mansell on pole poistion in his Lotus-Renault, ahead of his team-mate Elio de Angelis. Derek Warwick was Renault for Renault with Rene Arnoux in his Ferrari, Niki Lauda in his McLaren-TAG, Ayrton Senna in his Toleman-Hart, Alain Prost (in the second McLaren) and Keke Rosberg in the Williams-Honda.

The weather was very hot on race day but former US President Jimmy Carter turned up, while Larry Hagman (the actor who played JR Ewing) waved the green flag at the start of the parade lap.

Arnoux’s Ferrari failed to fire up on the pre-grid and so he had to start from the back. Mansell went into the lead, chased by de Angelis and Warwick while Senna passed Lauda to take fourth. Senna hit a wall hard on the second lap and so had to pit for new tyres, while Warwick moved ahead of de Angelis to create a British 1-2. He was challenging Mansell for the lead when he crashed on lap 10. By then Rosberg had climbed up to second, ahead of de Angelis, but the heat began to take a toll with cars expiring and drivers making mistakes. Patrick Tambay crashed out of sixth place in his Renault on lap 25. Prost then moved up to second before an error dropped him behind Rosberg again. Three laps later Rosberg overtook Mansell to take the lead. Prost would later make another mistake and crash so Rosberg ended the day ahead of Arnoux, who had driven through the field, with de Angelis third. Mansell ran out of fuel while running fifth but pushed his Lotus to the finish line and then collapsed dramatically.

It was clear, however, that the date needed to change to avoid such hot weather and that created a problem. Walker and FOCA could not agree on a date for 1985. It did not help that he failed to come up with the required race fee. This meant it lost its place on the F1 calendar and in March 1985 Dallas Grand Prix of Texas Inc. went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The DRW empire soon became the target of investigations by the FBI and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and it emerged that the company owned 80 apartment blocks and office buildings but had debts of $255 million, with around 300 secured creditors, scrapping over the assets. It was a mess. Walker disappeared from Dallas society.

Buddy Boren, who had got over his cancer, made a comeback and ran seven non-F1 Grand Prix events on various tracks in the Dallas area between 1988 and 1996.

Dallas, in the interim, embraced its history – Kennedy and all – and in 1993 Dealey Plaza was named a National Historic Landmark. The city around it may have changed sigificantly, but the plaza is forever stuck in 1963 and today Dallas attracts around 2.7 million international tourists a year, who all depart wondering “Who shot JFK?”