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Srecan 83. rodjendan!

 

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Fascinating F1 Fact: 51
January 17, 2018 by Joe Saward


Franco Rocchi was a Ferrari man. He joined the company in 1949, having previously worked with Ferrari engineer Aurelio Lampredi at the Reggiane aircraft company. After Lampredi left Ferrari, Rocchi stayed on working with Vittorio Jano and then Carlo Chiti. He helped to nurture a youngster by the name of Mauro Forghieri, who joined the firm in 1960. He stayed on after the upheavals at the end of 1961, when Forghieri was propelled into the role of technical director. Rocchi played a key role in the Ferrari revival in the mid 1970s, as the designer of the Ferrari 158, the 1.5-litre V8 with which John Surtees won the World Championship in 1964, and then the 1512, a 1.5-litre V12 which was used in F1 in 1965. This was followed by a 3-litre V12, developed from a sports car engine and eventually the celebrated flat-12 which would help the team to win four World Championships in the 1970s. His engines were also successful in sports car racing. But Rocchi had heart troubles and so retired in 1979, at the age of 56. He remained a consultant but dedicated his time to painting, although he continued to potter about with engine design ideas. In the 1970s he had studied the idea of a W12 engine. In theory this was a good idea because a three-bank W12 is as compact as a V8 and should have the power of a V12. The downside of the engine is that it has a higher centre of gravity and because it weighs more. Rocchi believed that one could create a better overall unit, despite the disadvantages. In the late 1980s, a new opportunity arose as F1 was switching to 3.5-litre normally-aspirated engines, moving away from the expensive turbos. In this period Rocchi met a 38-year-old called Ernesto Vita, the son of a successful businessman, who had a factory in Maranello. Like many men his age, Vita was passionate about F1, and Ferrari in particular. In his youth he had dabbled in different businesses, including film production, construction and steel. He had raced as well, in Formula Ford and Formula 3 but in the end his father insisted he stop and go to work with the family business. It was through this that he met Rocchi, who told him about his W12 engine. Vita was enthused by the idea and rapidly bought the rights to the design, his aim being to sell the engine to F1 teams and become a modern version of Cosworth. He set up a workshop in Formigine, just up the road from Maranello, and the engine was built. He named the company Life Racing Engines, the name Vita meaning life when translated into English. He approached likely F1 teams (there were a lot more in those days) but no-one was interested in a supply deal.

Having failed to find a customer, Vita then decided that the best thing to do would be to demonstrate how good the engine was which, he believed, would bring him customers. The problem was that he needed to build a chassis in order to do that. At the same time, Formula 3000 racer Lamberto Leoni was trying to get his First Racing Formula 1 team off the ground. He had built a chassis, designed for a Judd V8 engine, but it had failed its crash tests and Leoni had given up. Vita agreed to buy the design and took on Gianni Marelli, who had worked in F1 as an engineer between 1966 and 1971 before moving to Alfa Romeo. He opened his own design office in 1981 and worked for various teams, notably Zakspeed in Formula 1 and Durango in Formula 3000. He was commissioned to convert the car to take the Life W12, and to get it through the crash tests. This became the Life L190. The whole project was done on the cheap, Vita believing that the engine would compensate for a poor chassis. The problem was that the car and engine were both overweight and the centre of gravity was too high. It did not help that the engine rarely ran without problems.

Gary Brabham was taken on to drive but he was kicked out after two races and Bruno Giacomelli was hired to replace him. There followed 10 more failures to pre-qualify. It was hopeless. In the summer, keen to get money to develop the engine, Vita sold his majority shareholding in the business to Verona industrialist Daniele Battaglino, who had done a deal with a Soviet Russian engineering company called Pilowki IC and the team became Life-PIC. It made no real difference. Soon afterwards the decision was taken to replace the Life W12 with a Judd V8 to try to qualify for a race, but this did not work either. The last European race was in Spain but it was a pointless exercise to spend more money to go to Japan and Australia at the end of the year.

Rocchi’s dream of success with a W12 was finished.

In the 1990s Alessandro Vita Kouzkin, Ernesto’s Russian-Italian son, tried his hand at racing.

Edited by Rad-oh-yeah?, 17 January 2018 - 13:49.

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Fascinating F1 Fact: 52
January 18, 2018 by Joe Saward

 

In the middle France, in the region they call the Auvergne, there is a dramatic chain of more than 80 volcanic hills. There are beautiful lava domes, maars and cinder cones, stretching 25 miles. The highest is the Puy de Dôme, rising to 4,800 ft. The local département is named after it, although for some reason the region has hyphens, while the mountain does not. The prefecture of the Puy-de-Dôme is Clermont-Ferrand, which sits on the Limagne plains, at the base of this odd range of hills. Clermont was an ancient town, with a rich history, and was later merged with Ferrand, a medieval new town. It is best known, however, as the home of Michelin. It is a long story, but in the 1830s Edouard Daubrée arrived in the area with his young Scottish wife Elizabeth, with the aim of setting up a refinery to turn sugar beet grown on the plains, into sugar. A flood wiped out the business and Elizabeth, the niece of Charles McIntosh, the inventor of the rubberised coat, suggested that it might be a better idea to create a rubber factory to manufacture bouncy balls, loved by children the world over. The raw material had to come from Brazil, but there was a market for these toys and gradually the business expanded and 50 years later passed into the hands of André and Edouard Michelin. Air-filled tyres were still in their infancy and in 1891 Edouard came up with the removable pneumatic tyre for bicycles. To publicise the invention, they became involved in bicycle racing and four years later they embarked on doing the same with automobiles, entering a Daimler in the Paris-Bordeaux race. The business boomed and Michelin even started producing guides for automobilists, explains the best places to stay and where to eat. Further innovation in the tyre business followed and in 1905 the bid to host the Gordon Bennett Cup automobile race, after Leon Théry won the Cup in Germany in 1904. They funded the Circuit d’Auvergne, an 85-mile road course, which ran through the Puy-de-Dome, and Théry won again. The Cup then ended and the Automobile Club de France organised a new event, called the Grand Prix, held for the first time at Le Mans in 1906. There was talk of other races in the area, but nothing happened and it was not until after World War II that Jean Auchatraire, the president of the Association Sportive de l’Automobile-Club d’Auvergne, revived the idea and working with F1 racer Louis Rosier, designed a five-mile circuit on the local roads that looped around the Puy de Charade (2965 ft) and the adjacent Puy de Gravenoire (2697 ft). This was to the south of the original Circuit d’Auvergne, with easy access from the city and the two hills providing natural grandstands.

Before the project could be completed Rosier was killed in an accident at Montlhéry in October 1956, but the circuit went ahead with construction beginning seven months later. The first event at the Circuit Louis Rosier took place in July 1958 with Maurice Trintignant winning an F2 race and Innes Ireland taking victory for Lotus in a sports car race. The motorcycle French Grand Prix was held there in 1959, won by John Surtees and the track would remain a major bike racing track until 1974. The Trophee d’Auvergne car races continued and in 1964 the Automobile Club de France voted for Clermont-Ferrand to host the French Grand Prix in 1965. Jim Clark dominated. There was much politics at the time, with the Fédération Française du Sport Automobile (FFSA) battling to take over control of motorsport from the venerable Automobile Club. That occurred at the end of 1967 and the Formula 1 World Championship then returned to Clermont-Ferrand in 1969 with Jackie Stewart winning in a Ken Tyrrell-run Matra-DFV. There were plans for the race to move to Albi in 1970, but these failed and so the French GP stayed at Clermont, with Jochen Rindt winning for Lotus. The new super-safe Paul Ricard circuit hosted the race in 1971 but the Grand Prix returned to the Puy-de-Dome in 1972. Safety work had been done, but the terrain made it impossible to create more run-off areas. That day, the last F1 race at Clermont, Helmut Marko was blinded in one eye when a stone was thrown up as he chased Emerson Fittipaldi.

The Trophee d’Auvergne races continued until 1988, where safety concerns led to the circuit being closed, although the south-western end of the track was used to create a new 2.4-mile Charade track, funded by the local government. In 2000, the public roads were finally closed to the public, and Charade finally became a permanent facility. The remaining parts of the old circuit are still there, and still open to the public…

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Fascinating F1 Fact: 53
January 19, 2018 by Joe Saward


The only thing that motor racing and religion have in common is that they compete for souls on Sundays. It is often said that the Seven Deadly Sins are the code of conduct in Formula 1, although to be fair, there are not many lazy folk in the sport. But pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony and envy are all to be found lurking the paddock.

It is therefore strange to relate that one of the team bosses in the early 1970s had a Masters degree in theology from Emmanuel College, Cambridge…

But then, by all accounts, Louis Stanley was a very strange fellow, who was always very vague about his childhood. His step-daughter Bobbie Neate spent years researching his background and concluded that he was the illegitimate son of Prime Minister HH Asquith and aristocrat Venetia Stanley, a friend of Asquith’s daughter. At the time he was 60, she was 25. Neate concluded that the unwanted baby had been given to one of the Stanley family’s tenants but benefited from trust funds. This explained how a boy from a modest background was educated at expensive private schools. Neate also concluded that Louis’s move into journalism came about as a result of his real mother having been the former lover of Lord Beaverbrook, the owner of the Daily Express.

Whatever the truth, Louis Stanley started out as a photographer and then wrote about high society. No one sees to know exactly what he did in the war, but it was in England – and something to do with intelligence. He was probably keeping an eye on society people. In 1942, when he was 30, he enrolled to study at Cambridge and married a shipping heiress. They had two children together but then she left him. He had somehow then become the manager of the Dorchester Hotel, while also becoming an author, turning out book after book, on a wide range of different subjects.

In the early 1950s he met Jean Baber, the divorced sister of Alfred and Ernest Owen, of the vast engineering company Rubery Owen. The firm had owned the BRM Formula 1 team since 1952, but it was four years after their marriage in 1955 that Louis and Jean first attended a Grand Prix. The race was at Monaco in 1959 and both caught the racing bug. At the time BRM was a mess and on the verge of falling apart, the Stanleys did what they could to stabilise the situation and, as luck would have it, Jo Bonnier won the next race, scoring BRM’s first victory.

Although they were passionate about racing, the Owen brothers did not attend races because they were religious and did go to events held on Sundays. Thus Louis Stanley began to exert influence by becoming the middle man between the team and its owners. He then engineered the promotion of Tony Rudd to run the technical side of the team. Graham Hill won the World Championship for BRM in 1962 as a result. At the end of 1964 Alfred (who had by then been knighted) collapsed during a visit to South Africa. Afterwards he delegated some of his duties to other family members. In February 1967 Ernest died suddenly and then in October 1969 Sir Alfred suffered a serious heart attack. Louis Stanley moved up to become joint managing director (with Jean) and chairman of BRM.

Stanley was pompous and arrogant, but at the same time he quickly became a strong supporter of the movement to improve F1 safety and medical care.after Jackie Stewart’s crash in the 1966 Belgian GP. He helped create the International Grand Prix Medical Service in 1967 and funded a mobile medical unit which was made available to every GP circuit in Europe. After the death of Jo Siffert in a BRM at Brands Hatch in 1971, he investigated fireproof clothing for the drivers.

A contradictory individual, he went straight from Siffert’s funeral in Fribourg to Lausanne to negotiate a sponsorship deal for the team with Marlboro. Yardley had backed the team in 1971, but then Marlboro arrived in 1972 and 1973. Motul took over in 1974 but at the end of the year Rubery Owen took the decision to stop funding the team, although it remained owned by the family and run by Stanley. It was rebranded as Stanley BRM in 1975 but there was no money and the team did not appear at all the races. At the end of that year Sir Alfred died.

Stanley found some backing from Rotary watches and a new car was designed, but it was not a success and by the end of 1977 the team was on its last legs. It was closed down and Louis Stanley departed from F1. He continued to write.

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Ser Sterling Mos se povlaci iz javnog zivota zbog bolesti:
 

Stirling Moss, winner of 16 Formula One grands prix and four-times runner up in the world championship, has announced his retirement from public life.

The 88-year-old’s decision was revealed by his son Elliot on his official website.

“To all of his many friends and fans around the world, who use this website for regular updates, my father would like to announce that he will be closing it down,” the Moss family announced.

“Following his severe infections at the end of 2016 and his subsequent slow and arduous recovery, the decision has been made that, at the age of 88, the indefatigable man will finally retire, so that he and my mother can have some much deserved rest and spend more time with each other and the rest of the family.”

“The entire and extended Moss clan thank everyone for all their love and support over the years and we wish you all a happy and prosperous 2018.”

Moss spent over a hundred days in hospital in Singapore from the end of 2016 until mid-2017 following a chest infection.

He raced in F1 between 1951 and 1961, during which time he became one of the sport’s most well-known figures. In addition to his grand prix successes he won several other major races including the 1955 Mille Miglia.

However a serious crash in the 1962 Glover Trophy race at Goodwood led him to retire from racing. He continued to participate in historic events and races until 2011.

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Fascinating F1 Fact: 54
January 20, 2018 by Joe Saward

The construction of Brooklands in 1907 and Indianapolis the following year prompted Europeans to consider building their own oval circuits, in order to both test and race automobiles. World War I interrupted progress and so it was not until the start of the 1920s that new oval circuits started to be built in Europe. The first was the Autodromo Nazionale at Monza, opened in October 1922. It was followed by Sitges-Terramar in Spain a year later. The French motor racing world felt it should follow suit, but finance was needed. A number of racing people were working for a newspaper called L’Aero-Sport and one evening they were having dinner at the Brasserie Wepler in the Place de Clichy in Paris when the owner of the newspaper, Alexandre Lamblin, then in his late thirties, said: “I’ll build an autodrome”.

Lamblin had plenty of money. During the war he had worked with the aviation company Breguet and had then designed and patented a revolutionary new radiator for aero-engines, which was twice as efficient as the standard models. In the years that followed he sold 10,000 of them. With money pouring in, he diversified into automobile radiators and air-conditioning systems and also launched a newspaper called L’Aéro, for fans of aviation. This was also a success, so he launched a second publication called L’Aero-Sport, which reported on all different kinds of sports. This was edited by a journalist-racer called Roger Labric and the staff included engineer Raymond Jamin, by Robert Letorey, and rising racing star Robert Benoist. After the dinner at the Wepler, Lamblin started looking for a suitable location and soon discovered a 1000-acre estate on the wooded plateau of Saint-Eutrope, located above the village of Linas, 16 miles south of the Porte d’Orleans in Paris, on the Route Nationale 20, the road to Orleans, Limoges and Toulouse. It was perfect. It was close to the main road, but as most people did not own cars, there was also a tram service that ran to Marcoussis, a mile from the track, built to carry farm produce into the city, which could be used to ferry spectators to the circuit. Work soon began and Lamblin’s ambitions expanded, with the goal of building a national sporting centre, in and around the autodrome.

The initial project was the oval, designed by Jamin, which cost 15 million Francs, around $110 million at today’s prices. Lamblin wanted to host the Grand Prix de l’Automobile Club de France, as quickly as possible but the ACF President Baron Rene de Knyff told him that this would only be possible if he had a road course as well and so Lamblin bought more land and work began on an L-shaped road course through the woods. It cost him another 12 million Francs ($80 million), and he had two share issues that raised 30 million Francs ($220 million) and everything was ready for the opening event on 18 July 1925. A week later the Grand Prix teams were in action in the Grand Prix de l’ACF. That day there was a huge crowd to see the opening event, which was dominated in the early part of the race by Antonio Ascari in his Alfa Romeo. Sadly, he crashed and was killed. Alfa Romeo withdrew the other cars and it was left to Delage to win the race, although it was apt that Benoist, one of the diners at the Wepler, was the winner.
The problem was that big crowds did not turn out for other races and although the GP de l’ACF took place at Montlhéry again in 1927, 1931, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936 and 1937 the track ran at a loss. It went bankrupt first in 1928 and Lamblin quickly disappeared. He would die penniless and forgotten in 1933.

The revived company was run by Letorey and used a great deal by manufacturers for record attempts but the running costs were huge and in 1938 it was sold to the government, to be used as a military camp. During the war this was used for the internment of gypsies and it was in a sorry state at the end of the war. It was leased to the Union Technique de l’Automobile et du Cycle (UTAC) to be used a testing centre on condition that it was restored and occasional races would be held. There were still big races in the 1950s but Grand Prix racing never returned.

Although it became increasingly run down in the 1970s, Montlhery continued to be used as a Formula 3 venue until 1989. In 1984 the Conseil General de l’Essonne commissioned a study to see whether the circuit could be revived for Formula 1 racing. This was carried out by a business strategist called Philippe Kessler, who concluded that a 2.8-mile circuit could be built using parts of the old circuit and creating a new section in the centre of the oval, converting the banking into grandstands. It was a terrific idea and there was room for a car museum and industrial units to help fund the facility and to boost the French motorsport industry. By then a major new Paris ring road, known as the Francilienne was being built and Linas was becoming a major intersection between the RN20 and the new road across the south of the Paris. The problem was that the reviving Montlhéry was going to cost around $250 million, including all the fees required to host a race. The French government was not interested and access remained a serious problem because there was only one significant road leading up to the oval – the Avenue Georges Boillot.

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Fascinating F1 Fact: 55
January 21, 2018 by Joe Saward


What is it with the British and tea? If you stop and think about it, it is a little strange that the whole world associates Britain with a herbal drink that comes from China. The British are reckoned to drink more than 60 billion cups of tea a year, from duchesses to dustbin men. A cup of char is part of the fabric of society. In a crisis, they turn to tea; if they feel uncomfortable in a social situation, they suggest a cuppa; there are tea breaks, tea rooms, tea ladies, tea cakes, tea sets and, well, just tea. Up north, tea is the name of the evening meal, while southern jessies drink tea in the afternoons, with delicate little sandwiches and sugary cakes, while builders stop whenever they can for mugs of the stuff. And if you want an argument, simply ask whether you add the milk before or after the is poured…

A cup of char is actually the correct description, as this is what the Chinese called their drink. But just as the Brits turned the word Jerez into sherry, so cha became tea. It all started in the 17th Century, so they say, when Dutch traders started selling the drink. It was supposed to be good for the health and it cost a fortune. People liked it because it gave them a boost, particularly in the afternoons – between lunch and dinner. It grew more popular when sugar became more readily available. They say that it was Portugal’s Princess Catherine of Braganza, who married King Charles II in 1662, who introduced tea to the British aristocracy. They were the only people who could afford the stuff. It was a high-class commodity and if you could afford it, you showed off the fact by having tea parties, with fancy china and crook’d little fingers. In 1770, however, the East India Company began trading with China, prices dropped and team became more democratic. The middle classes copied the upper classes and the workers followed and tea became a domestic ritual. It became the staple for every break during work hours. Fortunes were made, tea was taxed and smuggled. Fast ships were built to rush it around the world and in the 1840s, ambition folk began growing it is India and in East Africa. In Britain tea dealers began blending different teas to create new flavours and Arthur Brooke was one of them. He opened his first shop in Manchester in 1869. To make the company sound fancier he added the name Bond because Brooke Bond sounded better. He so had shops in Liverpool, Bradford and Leeds and by 1872 had moved to London. He then began selling his blends to groceries and made sufficient money to buy his own plantations. When he retired in 1904, he had an empire. There was no shortage of competition in the tea trade, so Brooke Bond started buying competitors and looked for interesting ways to promote its products, including illustrated cards in each packet of tea, so that children could collect them. There were a range of different series, ranging from wildlife to motor cars. Complete sets are worth a fortune. In 1926 London Zoo was looking for a way to attract more people and came up with the idea of having tea parties for chimpanzees, dressed in human clothing. These were wildly popular and would be the inspiration for Brooke Bond’s celebrated TV advertising campaigns for PG Tips, which began in 1956. The sales of “Monkey Tea” soared. In 1968, Brooke Bond merged with the Liebig company, famed for its Oxo cubes of beef concentrate. The new company was looking for new ideas and decided to stop the chimpanzee campaigns. Sales dived and 18 months later the chimpanzee advertising was revived. But was else could they do? Animal rights people were beginning to make trouble and Brooke Bond Oxo wanted to find a new silver bullet. As this was happening, Formula 1 was opening up to sponsorship and Brooke Bond Oxo decided to try to sell its products using racing cars. It joined forces with plummy Rob Walker in 1970 and became one of the first big non-trade sponsors in F1, along with perfume company Yardley. The deal was for three years (1971-1972-1973) and Walker hired British household name Graham Hill to drive. The sponsorship boom meant that life became tougher for F1’s private teams as budgets rose and Hill soon went off to Brabham. Walker decided to create an alliance with John Surtees and so the Brooke Bond Oxo Surtees team was created with popular Mike Hailwood and rising Australian star Tim Schenken, although he would later be replaced by Brazilian Carlos Pace. The experiment does not seem to have done much for sales of teabags or Oxo cubes, and at the end of 1973, with the economy in a mess, the company left F1. It was a time when the food industry was consolidating rapidly and Brooke Bond was soon gobbled up by Unilever.

Unilever, by the way, decided to enter F1 is 2012 with a deal to promote its deodorant brands Rexona and Sure and its Clear shampoo. The deal was originally with Lotus, but has since switched to Williams, a team that is as British as a cup of tea…

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Fascinating F1 Fact: 56
January 22, 2018 by Joe Saward
 

 

Motor racing engineering is much more rewarding than working in the car industry, emotionally-speaking at least. You have a problem, you solve it. You find out if it works. You do not have to wait years to see the results your work. So very few motorsport engineers end up working in automobile companies. They are too headstrong, too impatient and too aggressive.

Back in the dawn of the sport, the two jobs were the same. Engineers designed cars to sell and modified them for racing. They often drove them as well. But over time the racing men became specialists and the car designers did their own thing. And yet in the 1980s, one man broke the trends completely

François Castaing was born a few weeks after the end of the war. He was a liberation baby, conceived when the German armies were being driven from France.

Born in Aix-en-Provence in June 1945, he grew up in the sunny south and attended the Lycée Thiers in Marseille, before winning a place to study engineering at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers in Paris. He was one of the elite. While still a student he did some research work for Amedée Gordini, at his famous workshops on the Boulevard Victor. Then, in 1968 he arrived, asking for a job. Gordini took him on. There were a fleet of cars using Gordini engines at Le Mans that year and Castaing worked on them. But then, towards the end of 1968, he had to do his compulsory military service. By the time he returned, in the spring of 1970, the whole Gordini operation had been taken over by Renault, and was under the control of the Régie’s appointee Claude Hardt. The name had changed to Renault Gordini and the workshops had moved to Viry-Châtillon and Georges Sauvan had been named technical director. Castaing began looking at engine development, working with another youngster called Jean-Pierre Boudy to develop the V6 PRV engine, a joint venture between Renault, Peugeot and Volvo, for competition. Alpine had employed Bernard Dudot to develop engines and so the Renault Gordini engine men set out to beat his engines. Then, at the start of 1972, Elf commissioned Renault-Gordini to design a new 2-litre engine, to be used in sports cars. This was fitted into the Alpine A440 and began racing in 1973. It was called the CH after Hardt, who was drowned in an accident with his son in Arcachon in November 1972. Jean Terramorsi took over as CEO of Renault Gordini. The Castaing/Boudy engine won the European 2-litre Sports-Prototype Championship in 1974, triumphing in all seven races. That year Renault bought Alpine and so Dudot arrived and worked on turbocharging Castaing’s engine, while the normally-aspirated unit went on to be used as a Formula 2 engine. It duly won the 1976 and 1977 titles with Jabouille and Rene Arnoux.

Terramorsi retired in 1976 and his role was taken by Gérard Larrousse. Castaing replaced Sauvan as technical director of Renault Sport.

The company entered F1 in 1977 with a new 1.5-litre turbocharged V6, based on Castaing’s CH, developed by Dudot. It was a struggle. But in 1978 Renault won Le Mans with a turbocharged version of Castaing’s 2-litre engine, with drivers Didier Pironi and Jean-Pierre Jaussaud. A year later Jabouille gave Renault its first F1 victory at Dijon.

At the end of that year Renault president Bernard Vernier-Pailliez decided he needed Castaing elsewhere in the company and François was given the job of developing new models for the American Motor Corporation, which Renault took over fully in 1980. For seven years Renault tried to make AMC stronger, but it was battling Detroit’s Big 3: General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

It was during this period that Castaing led the team that designed the Jeep Grand Cherokee. He brought F1 ideas with him and speeded up AMC’s product development process using computer-aided design (CAD) software. This impressed Chrysler to such an extent that in 1987 it bought AMC and turned it into a new Jeep/Eagle division. Chrysler boss Lee Iacocca convinced Castaing to stay on and in 1988 he was appointed head of design for the whole of Chrysler, organizing design, engineering and manufacturing into “platform teams”, a system that would later become widespread in the automobile industry. In the same era Chrysler flirted with F1 through its subsidiary Lamborghini and came close to doing a deal with McLaren after Iacocca retired and Bob Eaton took over as Chrysler CEO. McLaren left Eaton standing at the altar, by doing a last-minute deal with Peugeot, which resulted in furious Chrysler executives shutting down the F1 programme.

Castaing was promoted in 1994 to become head of Chrysler powertrain operations and in 1996 became executive vice president for Chrysler international operations.

When Daimler took over The company in 1997, Castaing became technical adviser to DaimlerChrysler chairman Bob Eaton, but by 2000 Eaton retired and Castaing followed suit. He has since served on the boards of a number of automobile industry firms and has involved himself in educational programmes to find and encourage the next generation of engineers.

Castaing was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2010, one of only eight Frenchmen included: the others being Ettore Bugatti, André Citroën, André and Edouard Michelin, Armand Peugeot, Louis Renault and Albert Champion.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 57
January 23, 2018 by Joe Saward

Ian Burgess was an odd one. A talented young man who might have become a very successful driver, if there had been backing for him when he needed it. But there wasn’t… and after that things went a little off the rails.

Born David William Allan in London in 1930, he was adopted as a baby and went to live in Bletchingley, near Reigate, with a Scottish couple called Burgess. He was nine when World War II began. The Battle of Britain was fought in the skies above his home. He studied engineering and at 20 started racing 500cc cars at Brands Hatch. He showed promise and the following summer he borrowed a Cooper-Norton from the factory and went to the Nurburgring with the Cooper team and shocked everyone by winning the race in pouring rain, beating Ken Wharton, a man with vastly more experience. He followed up by finishing second in a heat in the 500cc race at Avus, setting the fastest lap. He had limited money and so could only race what he could talk his way into. He drove various different 500cc cars and raced an Osca sports car before taking a job as sales manager at Cooper. He also taught at the Cooper Driving School at Brands Hatch. This gave him the chance to race factory Formula 2 cars on occasion, finishing fourth in the Oulton Park Gold Cup in 1957 and racing in 1958 with Tommy Atkins’s High Efficiency Motors, winning races at Crystal Palace and Snetterton.

He also raced a factory Cooper at the British GP and took park in the German GP in an F2 car. He then crashed and broke his leg at Avus. Afterwards he left Cooper and set up his own business in Weybridge, called Laminates Ltd, making fibreglass bodies for cars. He did several Grands Prix with Scuderia Centro Sud Coopers, finishing sixth at the German GP and continued the same arrangement in 1960, with less success. He then moved to Camoradi International and started in three Grands Prix in 1961, before trying his hand with the Anglo American Equipe. He then ended his F1 career with a couple of Scirocco-Powell, for which he raced a couple of times in 1963.

That was the end of his F1 career and he faded away from the sport, only to re-emerge later when he was arrested with a large quantity of heroin in his possession when he was passing through customs. He explained that his had been given to him by MI5, as payment for intelligence work in the Middle East. MI5 declined to confirm this unlikely story, which is hardly surprising as MI5 is Britain’s secret security service, tasked with protecting the country, and its work is generally done in Britain, while MI6 is the Secret Intelligence Service, which gathers information around the world. Occasionally there have been MI5 offices in British dependencies, but payment in heroin is generally not known as a means of rewarding the nation’s defenders.

The judge did not believe the story and Burgess was sent to prison for 10 years. Legend has it that after a while he was transferred to Ford Open Prison in West Sussex and one day quietly departed, met a Czech girlfriend, who was waiting for him and disappeared off to Czechoslovakia, which was then behind the Iron Curtain. He later moved reappeared in Spain and would appear from time to time in Britain, making unannounced visits, but always keeping a low profile. He eventually returned to London fulltime and died there in Harrow in 2012, at the age of 81.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Strangest Cars I've Raced, the first in a new series on the Marshall Pruett Podcast, kicks off with legendary driver David Hobbs and the hilarious tales of the 1972 Lola T310 Can-Am car that did everything other than perform as expected.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 58
January 24, 2018 by Joe Saward

There are some companies involved in Formula 1 which are sitting ducks for criticism. No TV commentator ever shrieks: “… and what a tremendous victory for Champion spark plugs!” And journalists never write “What a great win for Pirelli tyres”. These are elements in F1 which only ever get mentioned when they don’t work. “Vettel’s power unit trouble was traced to a faulty spark plug…” and so on. Faced by a requirement to always be perfect, such firms are on a hiding to nothing, because no one (apart perhaps from this article) ever says that a particular component has been faultless at every race…

The Champion spark plug company is one of the most successful in Formula 1 history, having supplied spark plugs to around half of the cars to have won events since the start of the World Championship in 1950. The familiar bow-tie Champion logo has been seen in the sport since the earliest days of competition, but there are no records from the pre-war era as to which cars used which spark plugs.

One might assume that the name relates to success, but in reality the Champion firm is named after Albert Champion, a French bicycle racer… quite a character, by all accounts.

Born in Paris in 1878, the son of a coachman and a washerwoman, Champion left school at 12 and started working to support his family, his father having died. He made his living by stunt riding and racing in the then popular velodromes. He was spotted by Adolphe Clement, then a celebrated cycle manufacturer, but later the man behind Clement Bayard automobiles (and the father of one of France’s earliest Grand Prix drivers). Champion raced for Clement at weekends and worked for him during the week. Clement was soon developing motor-powered cycles, using de Dion Bouton engines. When Champion was 20 he won a famous victory on the Paris-Roubaix cycle race, despite falling seven times on slippery cobblestones. It was completely unexpected as velodrome racers were rarely able to compete with the road racing stars. As a result of this victory he was offered a contract to race in the United States and spent 1900 racing for Charles Metz’s Waltham Manufacturing Company up and down the Eastern seaboard, while also fitting motors to Waltham cycles. He spent three years racing bicycles in the US and in 1903 was the first man to ride a motorcycle for a mile in less than a minute, racing on a board track in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on what is now the MIT Campus. Later that year he crashed a Packard automobile during a race in New York and broke his femur. He went back to France to do more bicycle races, winning at the Buffalo vélodrome and at the Parc des Princes, but aggravating his injured leg and decided to retire. He then did a deal with fellow cycle racer Edouard Nieuport to sell his ignition systems in the US, returning to Boston in 1905 and setting up the Albert Champion Company selling Nieuport spark plugs, coils and magnetos, with American partners, Frank and Spencer Stranahan. By 1907 the company started manufacturing its own porcelain spark plugs under the Champion name.

At the end of 1908 Champion met William Durant, who persuaded him to move to Michigan where Durant was in the process of setting up General Motors. Champion incorporated the Champion Ignition Company, in Lansing, Michigan, his first office being in the Buick factory. The Stranahans moved their business to Toledo, Ohio, and soon began legal action over the Champion name. It was not settled until 1922 when Champion agreed to change the name of his company to AC, his initials. By then Champion was hugely wealthy, having benefited from the aviation and automobile booms during and after World War I. After the war he started a decorative tile company as well, in order to keep his kilns running full time, but the demand for spark plugs grew so much that he gave up the tile business.

Champion had married Elise, a Frenchwoman, in 1902 but they divorced in 1921 after he became involved with Edna Crawford, sister of one of the Ziegfeld Girls, who was 11 years his junior. Champion moved to New York and the couple married in 1922. Champion then began expanding the AC business in Europe and his wife grew bored. On a trip to Paris, for the annual Salon, in 1927 she met Charlie Brazelle, a former prizefighter. She and Albert quarrelled over Bazelle and later the two men came to blows at the Hotel Crillon (next door to the modern FIA offices). Champion was knocked down and returned to the Hotel Meurisse where has was staying. He died later that afternoon, at the age of 49. It is not clear whether the fight contributed to his death, or whether it was simply a question of stress. He left his widow $15 million. Champion was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Both Champion and AC remain in business today one being part of the Federal-Mogul Corporation, the other having become ACDelco.

[zoran59]

 

.................

He studied engineering and at 20 started racing 500cc cars at Brands Hatch. He showed promise and the following summer he borrowed a Cooper-Norton from the factory and went to the Nurburgring with the Cooper team and shocked everyone by winning the race in pouring rain ...
...................

 

(bold moj)

 

Zanimljiva prica. No, najverovatnije je vecini promakao ovaj naizgled nebitni detalj - to primecuju samo manijaci poput mene.

Zato sto se ovde ukrstaju moja dva interesa - automobili i motocikli.

 

Inace, 500cc jednosedi su bili preteca kasnije F3. Tada najjeftiniji nacin da covek (a vecina su bili privatnici) udje u "formulu". Mnogi kasniji sampioni su ovako poceli.

 

Cooper-Norton izgleda ovako (ej, na ovoj slici vozi legendarni Stirling Moss, glavom i bradom!):

 

 

 

A masina je ovo:

 

 

Tu sledi prica o ukrstanju 2 i 4 tocka.

Zato jer u svojem originalnom i prirodnom okruzenju masina izgleda ovako:

 

 

 

Norton je poceo proizvodnju modela Manx sredinom '40-ih. To je bio namenski trkaci motocikl. Bio je toliko dobar i uspesan da je ostao u proizvodnji (naravno sa redovnim apdejtovanjem) do '62. Skoro citavih '60-ih, dobar broj privatnika je u svetskom prvenstvu vozio Norton Manx sve do pocetka '70-ih!

Poslednja pobeda Nortona u top-klasi svetskog sampionata (danasnji MotoGP) je ostvarena na GP Jugoslavije u Opatiji 1969. - na motoru starom 7 godina!

 

Kao jedna od najboljih/najmocnijih masina, ova je postala popularna i trazena i za ugradnju u formulu 500, na 4 tocka.

Ali, ko ce ga znati zasto, Norton nije hteo da prodaje samo masinu nego iskljucivo kompletne motocikle. Tako su automobilisti kupili motocikle, izvadili masinu i prodali sve ostalo, Naslo ih se dosta (motocikla bez masine) na trzistu.

Istovremeno, pojavio se i cafe-racer trend medju motociklistima - konstrukcija sportskih motocikla "nabudzenih" u kucnoj radinosti. Norton Manx je, kao pravi trkac, odlicno lezao na drumu i imao pristojne kocnice, za razliku od popularnih putnih motocikla. Tako se pojavio Triton -  masina Triumph, u okviru i ostalome od Nortona. Najcesce dvocilindrasi od 500 ili 650 ccm.

Kao ovde:

 

 

Kako je u poslednjih dve-tri decenije poraslo interesovanje za klasicne aute i motocikle, i Manx je sve popularniji. Postoje firme koje prave delove itd.

Na zalost, tako su porasle i cene.

Ovde u USA, originalni Manx ide od $50 000 (kompletan ali jadan) do par sto 000 za odlican restaurirani primerak. Tritoni za obicnu upotrebu na javnom putu krecu od $15 000 za losije izvedene do 50-ak i vise 000 za odlicne.

Edited by zoran59, 25 January 2018 - 03:35.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 59
January 25, 2018 by Joe Saward
 

 

The end of the 1978 Formula 1 season things were going well for Scuderia Ferrari, although it was a sad time for the sport, following a multi-car accident at the start of the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, which led to the death of Team Lotus driver Ronnie Peterson, and resulted in Vittorio Brambilla suffering head injuries. Mario Andretti won the World Championship that day and Team Lotus was the Constructors’ Champion and so the last two races of the season in the United States and Canada would not change a great deal.

But Ferrari still wanted to win them because it had been a poor season, with only two wins in 14 races, while Lotus had won eight with its ground-effect Lotus 79.

Even the Parmalat Brabham-Alfa Romeo team had managed to win twice.

The days leading up to the United States Grand Prix in Watkins Glen, on October 1, were dominated by the news that Riccardo Patrese would be prevented from racing by the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association (GPDA), which believed he was responsible for the Monza crash. Patrese did not agree and tried to have the race stopped from happening without him. It was all a very unpleasant interlude.

Team Lotus took the decision to call in France’s Jean-Pierre Jarier (32) to replace Peterson. At the wheel of a Lotus 79 “Jumper” was able to show his pace and took the fastest lap at Watkins Glen, although the race was won by Carlos Reutemann in his Ferrari, after the Lotuses hit trouble. In the days that followed the F1 circus made its way up to Montreal for its first visit to the new circuit that had been laid out on the Ile de Notre Dame. There was much excitement because of Ferrari’s rising star Gilles Villeneuve, a Quebecois. Brabham entered a third car for a youngster called Nelson Piquet and Patrese was back, still irritated by what his colleagues had done in Watkins Glen. Jarier took on pole position and, in the race, left his rivals behind, building up a big lead and looking to be on his way his first Grand Prix victory, when he was forced out with an oil pressure problem.

Canada didn’t care. That opened the way for Villeneuve to complete the fairytale and win his home race.

What very few people knew at the time was that on the Wednesday evening before the Canadian race, Ferrari engine designer Giancarlo Bussi, had been kidnapped from a house where he was on holiday near the village of Villasimius, on the southern coast of Sardinia, not far from Cagliari.

Bussi (47) had worked alongside Mauro Forghieri and Franco Rocchi on the engine for the 312 series of F1 cars, which had transformed the team into winners once again in the mid-1970s. He was highly-regarded by Enzo Ferrari. He came from a wealthy and well-connected family, his wife Edda being related to General Pietro Piccio, a senior officer in the Italian Air Force, who owned the villa in Villasimius, where they were staying with their children. They were supposed to have gone home that day, but a ferry strike meant they could not get off the island.

At about 11.30 that night, a gang of masked men, armed with machine guns and Winchester shotguns burst into the house. They tied up Bussi’s wife and children and took him away in his Fiat 127. The car was found afterwards, 90 miles to the north in the remote Codula di Luna valley, which winds is way downhill through the rocky coastal range from the Urzulei plateau to a beach at Cala Luna.

Although it was not public at the time, the kidnappers contacted the family and asked for $2.5 million, a colossal sum of money at the time. The family, who believed that the kidnappers had probably been looking for the General, agreed to have its representatives meet with the kidnappers, to explain that it was impossible to raise that kind of money. At a second meeting, the kidnappers reduced the demand to $875,000. This was still too much. A third meeting was organised but it never happened because the car in which the kidnappers were travelling was shot at as it arrived for the meeting. They escaped but went quiet after that. In the end, in early December, the family appealed to the kidnappers in the media and another meeting then took place at which $100,000 was handed over. It was not enough. The kidnappers said they wanted another $375,000. Having got some money, the kidnappers then stopped all communication, but Bussi did not come home. Seven men were later arrested, six of them being local shepherds, and they were given a range of prison sentences ranging from life imprisonment to 17 years, although several of them still deny having been involved. No-one has ever been able to explain what had happened to Bussi…

Weirdly, last year, police in Nuoro, not far from the Codula di Luna valley, announced that they had uncovered a plot to steal Enzo Ferrari’s remains from the family tomb in the San Cataldo cemetery in Modena. The gang involved, which was being investigated for drug and arms trafficking, was apparently going to demand a ransom from the Ferrari family or the car company. No further details were given.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

RETRO: When Jaguar stunned Daytona
Thursday, 25 January 2018
Marshall Pruett / Images by MP Archive



 
IMSA's favorite teams and fastest drivers struggled to grasp the enormity of what had just taken place after 24 hours of frenzied racing.

Porsche's streak of 11 consecutive wins at Daytona International Speedway, including back-to-back victories in 1986 and 1987 by Al Holbert Racing with its proven 962 prototype, had been broken.

The culprit, Tom Walkinshaw Racing USA's upstart program, still in its infancy, stole the show in 1988. And to make matters worse for IMSA's old guard, TWR's high-tech Jaguar XJR-9 ended Porsche's reign on its first try.

Although it wasn't immediately known in Victory Lane, Porsche's time as IMSA's GTP powerhouse had come to an end. TWR's big cats, Nissan's GTP ZX-Turbos, and All American Racers' Toyotas would take ownership of the series' top class in the months and years ahead. Beyond the closure of the 962 era on January 31, 1988, the sheer intensity of the race also served as a turning point for IMSA.

A flat-out sprint had been waged on Daytona's high banks as GTP's version of cat-and-mouse tore around the 3.56-mile circuit near the limit. The turbocharged prototypes owned the banking and long straights, the naturally-aspirated GTPs like the Jags claimed the infield, and few survived without stops to repair the parts that could be replaced – provided outright failure didn't bring an end to the day. What we have today – effectively a qualifying race spread across the last weekend in January – was spawned by XJR-9 and 962 drivers in 1988.

The best Porsche could muster was second with Busby Racing's polesitting, BFGoodrich-shod 962, and behind the German machine, the podium was completed with another XJR-9.

First and third on its American debut, the British raiders stunned onlookers 30 years ago at Daytona. With the help of TWR USA team manager Tony Dowe and two of the three winning drivers – Martin Brundle and Raul Boesel, who were joined on the day by John Nielsen – take a trip back to one of the great editions of the 24 Hours of Daytona.
 
SOUNDS LIKE A CON JOB

"It was the hardest 16 weeks of my life," Dowe said from his home in Australia.

As part of the Newman Haas Racing team in 1987, Dowe was in his native England to look at the new 1988 Lola Indy car chassis coming for Mario Andretti, but after an invitation to meet Walkinshaw at Brands Hatch was made, the resulting change in employment would turn Dowe's life upside down.

"That was the 1st of October 1987, and I rushed back to the States, handed my notice in, I found a facility in Valparaiso in Indiana, which we bought – and there's even a load of stories in that," he said.

"I needed a $10,000 deposit to secure the building for the next day, otherwise it was going to someone else, so I found a lawyer in downtown Chicago that had a branch in London, and I went down and saw one of the head directors and convinced him to loan me $10,000 and that TWR would take $10,000 into their branch in London the next day. The guy's name was Bert Ritchie, and he did it. What a star. I had the biggest pair of balls you've ever seen at that time, and we got the building."
 


NOW GET BUSY

"We had to get the building set up for a race shop. We had to hire people," Dowe continued. "We had to build cars, and we tested at Daytona; Big Spring, Texas, which had zero facilities, so that that highlighted if there was anything missing in the team structure and so on."

TWR's XJR-8 was coming off winning the 1987 World Sportscar Championship, and with its production-based 7.0-liter V12 engine in the back, the Jags were mighty on smooth European tracks. Capturing eight wins from 10 races, only the misses at the 24 Hours of Le Mans and a short race at the Norisring prevented a clean sweep of the season.

But how would TWR fare in America, on the rough circuits that comprised IMSA's calendar, and with a de-stroked, IMSA-compliant 6.0-liter V12 in the new XJR-9?

BETTER THAN ANOTHER SEASON OF F1 WITH ZAKSPEED

Brundle's 1987 season, spent with the lowly Zakspeed F1 team, was largely forgettable. Despite one points-scoring result, the underfunded team and its explosion-prone turbo four-cylinder engine left the Briton with little hope of attracting a better ride in 1988. An old association with TWR dating back to 1979 would help Brundle determine where his career was headed after F1.

"I'd made a very difficult decision, talked into it by Tom Walkinshaw, to leave Formula 1, which was a really painful thing to do as I'd spent so much of my life trying to get there, but [chose to] voluntarily leave because there wasn't any really good drives around," Brundle said.

"He said, 'Look, I think your career will have an upturn if you go sports car racing,' and he was right because I was lucky enough to be part of the winning team at Daytona straight away – race one. I'd raced a Jaguar before in Group C in '85 and '87, but this was full-time, and then I became World Sportscar Champion later that year with lots of victories."
 
YOU SURE TALK FUNNY

Brundle's American baptism in the XJR-9 came at the most American of tracks, the big and perilously fast NASCAR oval in Talladega, Alabama. What better way to prepare for the challenges of lapping Daytona at obscene speeds for 24 hours than to sample Talladega's torture chamber?

"We popped over there, which was quite interesting, going around Talladega in a V12 Jag, and it literally all came together at the last minute with [Ian Reed] engineering it and the gang," he said. "Pete Hodge was over there. He's now with Mercedes-Benz in Formula 1, but so a really good gang. Really a can-do, will-do attitude, and it sort of all came together just in time for the race."

After trading Monaco for the charms of the Deep South, Brundle was taken aback by the sky-high angles at play on the 2.5-mile stock car oval.

"I think it's the banking that caught my attention," he said. "I remember going around with [TWR driver] Jan Lammers, and we stopped a rent-a-car on the banking and it was pretty... Is that 39 degrees, at Talladega?"

Behind the scenes, possibly unaware of the lessons Talladega provided, Brundle's team and the XJR-9's designer were scrambling to address foreboding issues.



"We did another test at Talladega before Daytona," Dowe said. "I have to tell you, it was like World War III. The [XJR-8] had just won the World Championship, and [then] Daytona sputtered out. The oil system in the engine; all the oil was going up the right-hand side of the engine in the banking, starving the left-hand side, and the front wheel bearings were, I want to say, [from] a production[-based] Renault. They were a nylon piece, and they kept melting. Tony Southgate was the designer, and he was very touchy about changing anything on his car.

"So we had to have a long session with Tom to explain we needed some proper roller bearings, some proper bearings in the front uprights, otherwise it wasn't worth going. It got done, but obviously it was a new spindles and bearings and so on..."

As Dowe recalls, the Talladega test would, in a surprisingly direct manner, play a vital role in TWR's win in June of 1988 at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

"The things that we pushed for to make the car reliable [for Daytona] were things that meant that it got home at Le Mans," he said.
 
LOADING IN

TWR USA took on its maiden Daytona visit with a trio of Indiana-built XJR-9s. Getting the cars out of the Valparaiso shop and into the transporters for the haul to Florida was the first leg of Dowe's logistical race, and once they loaded into the track, more revelations came.

"Well, I think Tom wanted to run three cars on the basis that we might get one home," he deadpanned. "I don't think he thought he could win it. We should have been first, second, and third, but one of the cars, I think, with [Davy Jones] and [Danny] Sullivan and [Lammers], dropped a valve after about 18 hours. Without that, I think we would've been first, second, and third instead of just first and third.

"That really did make Tom aware that we actually knew what we were doing, because obviously, everything was completely and utterly new. And then, what was good was the way all the guys came together and worked. Even loading the truck in Valparaiso, we were under two foot of snow, and to get trolleys and pit equipment and goodness-knows what else done, it was a mega effort.

"The hard bit – well, actually it wasn't hard because the drivers; I don't know what they expected. I mean, they certainly didn't expect Daytona to be harder than Le Mans, which it was. You went from freezing in the middle of the night to 20-odd degrees [Celsius; 68 Fahrenheit] in the heat of the day, so some of the peripherals like team clothing and food and so on lwere really hard to deal with. We were blackmailed into going with the Daytona Speedway's catering instead of our own, and that always turned up late and it wasn't good quality, but [as] new boys on the block, that's what we had to deal with."
 
GREEN FLAG

With Mauro Baldi's Busby 962 on pole, Brundle's No. 60 XJR-9 on the outside of the front row, and the sister Jags in fourth and sixth, the three-car TWR assault looked like a Castrol-sponsored train as they raced to the green flag.



Meandering humidity and ambient temperatures, in concert with Southgate's front-mounted radiators, meant the XJR-9 drivers fought wars on two fronts – inside the cockpit, and wheel to wheel at over 200mph – for hours on end. Lacking the brute power to live with the 962s, the Jags never relented, but also watched, somewhat helpless, as Porsche teams held a firm grip on the contest for most of the race.

Dyson Racing's 962 was the first to charge into the distance until mechanical issues slowed their effort. More 962s from Busby's team, Holbert's team, A.J. Foyt Racing, Bruce Leven's Bayside Racing, Hotchkis Racing, Walter Brun's team and Kalagian Racing gave chase or led, and for the sports writers in attendance, "Porsche Wins A Dozen In A Row At Daytona" looked like the obvious headline well before the halfway mark.

Other less competitive GTP entries were also involved, and even Group 44, whose Jaguar XJR-7s served as the factory team through 1987, turned up and faced the long odds of getting between the Porsche vs TWR duel.

As the back-and-forth intensity continued up front, the No. 60 Jag eventually blinked and headed toward pit lane as the first of a few reliability hiccups struck in the darkness.

"We actually had a couple of guys from TWR in England," Dowe said. "We got three or four guys given to us, and I think they were the renegades that they didn't want in England. But we had an electrical fuel pump problem in the middle of the night and we lost three laps fixing an electrical short on the fuel pumps, and they did an absolutely mega job, in the dark, fixing the pumps – which fortunately were in the left-hand side pod – and we got [them swapped], and they ran."

Facing a worrying deficit on the lap chart, Dowe let his stars drive with total abandon as the No. 60 sat third among TWR's entries.

"I've still got some film of Brundle and Lammers racing each other and they were like – if Tom had seen what was going on..." he said. "They raced like [they were in] Formula 1. Maybe not quite as much, but really, really hard against each other, which was a good thing. It dragged us up the field."
 
THE MAN WITH THE UNPRONOUNCEABLE NAME WAS IMPRESSED

Swedish racer Eje Elgh can testify to the heroics involved with the No. 60's comeback performance.

"Eje Elgh was in the race and he still comes up to me at Grands Prix," Brundle said. "He's involved with Marcus Ericsson who drives for Sauber, but at one point we had to make a bit of a comeback through the field because we had some electrical glitches, and I think I hit the inside of the pit wall – we'll talk about that in a minute – and we'd got a long way behind.



"We had to work the yellow [flags] hard, and I came up against some Porsches who were stuck behind a load of GT cars coming out of the final turn; what would be turn four and on the banked [part of the] circuit. I just went flat out down onto the apron, gathered it all up – I'm sure it kicked up a big plume of dust – and climbed back onto the banking, because I was such a new boy, too. It didn't occur to me that that might not be a very smart thing to do. I passed six cars all in one go, including Eje Elgh who still comes up to me to this day,to say, 'How did you do that? How did you get past this whole [group] – down on the apron?' That's the kind of downforce that Jaguar had."

BAKED WITHOUT THE SUN

The challenge of living close to the limit, in difficult conditions, with XJR-9s that made prodigious speed, was compounded by the lack of lighting in most corners around the expansive Daytona facility. The Jaguars might have been capable of enduring all 24 hours, but that wasn't the case for many within TWR USA's driver rotation.

"First of all, they were driving, let's say, 9/10ths the whole time," Dowe said. "And secondly, they had driven these cars at Le Mans and other places in the heat. But they hadn't had the extremes from the middle of the night, and you've got to remember those days, there was only the start/finish straight [that] was lit, so the rest of it was pitch dark, absolutely pitch dark. That was pretty stressful on the guys, when you're threading your way through some of the [slower] GTUs and things like that were out there.

"The cars... you didn't have power steering. You had pretty sticky tires. Dunlop were really good because we had different compounds for the heat of the day, getting cold and dark. And we didn't run just softer tires, we had a different compound on left front, right front, left rear, right rear. The tire guys were absolutely flat-out the whole time. It was usually about 40 minutes for a tank of fuel, maybe 45, and by the time you've recovered, got the next set of tires set up at the wall, and then you've got the next set that's going to go on ready and properly pressured... it's fairly intense."
 
SLIPPERY FAST

Florida's ever-changing weather ensured rain and fog entered the race in the pre-dawn hours on Sunday. Brazil's Boesel, adept at racing on slick surfaces, put the gummy Dunlops to work and clawed back more time in the No. 60.



"The rain was coming in my stint and a lot of cars stopped for wet tires, and they told me also to stop for them, but I said no," Boesel recalled. "I wanted to keep going because the rain was not that bad for me, and I knew we could be a lot faster – a lot faster – if I go with very soft dry tires, This was one more way time came back to us; this drive in the rain was one of my best."
 
VIKING TIME

John Nielsen, a Dane with the physique of a linebacker, would carry the No. 60 effort on his shoulders as Boesel and Brundle wilted after their exertions.

"The Jags were fearsome cars, and Daytona is the toughest motor race I've ever done because of the infield," Brundle said. "It's a little bit bumpy. You've got the banking. It's hard. You've got, I think, 13 hours of darkness, at least. You've got the humidity in the daytime. Shifting in the Jag, you've got a V12 engine strapped to your shoulder like a rucksack, and everything in those [cars] just goes up. The whole thing was a heatsink that just got hotter and hotter through the race.

"If I remember, Raul Boesel flaked a little bit [and] physically struggled, so it was kind of 'Super John' and me carrying it all the way nearly to the end. They were incredibly physical cars, and it was a physical race. I've won a lot of races together with John Nielsen, and he was built very solidly, shall we say, so when things got tough, you could put Super John in the car, the Viking, and he could drive forever."
 
SNEAKY DUTCHMAN

Even Nielsen had his limits.

After trailing for so long, mishaps and other dramas with most of the Porsche army had boiled the race down to a faceoff between the No. 60 Jag and Busby's leading 962 with veteran Brian Redman behind the wheel. It was a collision between Redman and TWR's Sullivan in the struggling No. 66 XJR-9 – the Cat with the unhappy engine – as the Porsche attempted to lap the Jag that set the finish in motion.

A blown tire, likely as a result of the contact with Sullivan, shredded the 962's nose and cost the Busby team time it couldn't afford in the pits as repairs were affected. Holding a modest one-lap lead over the Busby team as the final hours of the race drew near, keeping the Porsche at bay would require some lateral thinking by Walkinshaw.

If you're wondering how Holland's Lammers, who was entered in the No. 61 Jag, was mentioned by Dowe as one of the drivers who helped make up the lost laps in the No. 60, you aren't alone. Brundle had the same question 30 years ago on pit lane.

"Towards the end, we were leading and Raul was exhausted," he said. "John was even exhausted, and I got out of the car right near the very end, jumped out, helped the other driver get in, and as we did that and put seatbelts on, gave him a quick debrief, stepped back, shut the door and watched as the car drove out of the pit, and then I realized it was Jan Lammers I'd just put in the car! It wasn't John Nielsen. What's Jan Lammers doing in our car?



"I went to find Walkinshaw. I was pretty depleted of all necessary items to function well in terms of fluids and minerals, and just generally I was exhausted and I had a really... Tom was like a second father to me. He was my mentor. I wrote to him when I was 19 and asked him to give me a chance, and at that particular time, he did. I drove for Tom from 1979 through to the mid-90s, and we had a big shouting match and I demanded to know why I'd put Jan in the car.

"I said, 'We got it this far. We can get it to the end,' and he basically said, 'You're exhausted.' I said, 'I'm not exhausted.' He said, 'Look. Alright, sonny. It's my team. I'll do exactly what I want,' so I spun around and stormed off in anger, at which point I realized I was no longer going to be in the car. My race was over. The adrenaline dropped, and I just keeled over and was slumped up against a truck wheel out the back of the pits, absolutely exhausted.

"And the first guy to come along and trip over me was Tom Walkinshaw, of course, who had made his point that I was exhausted. As I was saying, the car, I think they ran 55°C (131°F) inside pretty much the whole race. It was a three-driver race, and so we were pretty exhausted. The banking, I think, caused that because you get that vertical G-force on the banking, not the lateral, with a Jag that's got a venturi underneath it that you could live in it's so big, [there's] so much downforce coming from underneath the thing. It just literally just pulled us apart inside the car."
 
CRASH-TESTING THE XJR-9

The fuel pumps weren't the only issue to stand in the way of victory for the No. 60. A failed electronic control unit needed to be replaced at one point – and then there was that incident between Brundle and an inanimate object.

"You will not believe what I'm about to tell you," Dowe declared. "In those days, you didn't have a pit lane speed limit, and the cars would come off the turn four banking and head down the pit lane and they'd be doing about 180 miles an hour in the fast lane.

"At three in the morning, you knew you were alive because the hairs stood up on the back of your neck. We always set up camp down where the Union 76 thing was so the drivers had something to aim for at 180 miles an hour. I would trade almost anything to go back to that now. That was racing, not coming down the pit lane at 45 miles an hour. We raced, and that's what was amazing.

"That's what I remember, and I think the drivers do. A great example is, Brundle came in and was staying in the car – we were double-stinting drivers to start with.

"There were no tire warmers in IMSA. We had a spool [in the gearbox]; we didn't have a [differential], and he spooled up the rear tires, and he got driven into the barrier where you turn left to go back onto the track, and he smashed the nose. I had to talk him around the lap. You've never heard such a s***-scared driver as what Marty was, so I talked him around, came in, put in new nose on and said, 'Be careful on your way out'."



ONE OF TWO

Brundle's crash was resolved with the installation of a replacement nosepiece. With the race still going, the tattered remains of the Jag's meeting with pit wall were not relegated to the trash bin.

"Well, with how marginal everything was... we had a great composite guy called 'Iggy' – Ian Goldston. Iggy collected all the bits up and spent the rest of the race piecing it all back together, gluing it back together and shaping it into another spare nose," Dower said.

"Tom Walkinshaw said to me, 'Hey laddie, you've got a really good guy there. You see, he's tried to repair that nose as a spare. That's really impressive.' And I said, 'Yes, Tom, but that is the spare.' Again, that's all the stuff that goes on behind the curtain, but that was quite an impressive – just things like that."
 
SNORING IN MY SOUP

Boesel, Brundle, and Nielsen survived the comeback attempt by Busby's 962 and took the 1988 win by a single lap. The haggard looks on the faces of the TWR USA team and drivers after the checkered flag spoke to the physical and emotional toll that was paid along the way. Climbing in bed for a year was all Dowe was hoping for at that point.

"After the race at Daytona, Jaguar took us for dinner," he said. "I'd been on my feet for 50 hours, easily, and I passed out in the food at the table. I mean, it was just like someone had pulled the pin and that was it. It was over. You didn't even realize how special it was. That was the first 24-hour race win for TWR."
 
THE TIPPING POINT

Daytona, including that initial test at Talladega, would ready TWR's European team for its season in ways that ultimately proved invaluable. Brundle, an occasional guest in IMSA after his win, would return home and focus on winning the World Sportscar Championship as 1988 delivered TWR's best year of racing.

"I went on to win the World Championship that year and Jaguar won Le Mans, and we started to win all over the world at that point," he said. "For me, it was sort of a turning point really, where the Jaguar started to become dominant. So in that respect I don't think it was such a surprise, and I think we all went there knowing we had a chance to win.

"First of all, the [IMSA] Porsches had great teams and great drivers and they had safety in numbers, so to beat them was pretty tough, to say the least, but it was – you know, and I started – I remember when I was part of the winning team at Le Mans with Price [Cobb] and John Nielsen [in 1990]. It was – you know, we were still fighting about how to beat the Porsches. It wasn't like Jaguar took over the mantle and then just disappeared up the road, that's for sure."
 
BRUNDLE STILL NEED ANSWERS

Brundle would eventually get a second crack at F1 in 1992. He'd extend his Grand Prix career through 1995 before adding in more sports cars and other racing adventures—including a return to race at Daytona in Grand-Am—prior to making F1 commentary his key form of expression.

With all his success and the 30-year celebration of TWR's finest day in America, Brundle is left with one lingering question that arose from the cockpit in 1988. And he's still searching for the answer.

"I remember the beginning, a lot of cars in the race," he said. "And still, 30 years later, I can remember – I believe it was a Corvette that had 'Thanks Wendy' written on the back of it. Back then there were a few more weekend warriors, so you were lapping some cars it seemed like every two or three laps because of the speed differential – and I don't think I'm exaggerating too much of that.

"I do remember this car that always seem to catch in the kink or somewhere really uncomfortable with a closing speed of 100 miles an hour, that had 'Thanks Wendy' written on the back. To this day, I wonder who Wendy was..."