1234 replies to this topic

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 60
January 26, 2018 by Joe Saward

It is a little-known fact that Formula 1 drivers Didier Pironi and José Dolhem are buried in the same grave, at Grimaud in the south of France. This is because they were half-brothers – and cousins…

It takes an agile mind to figure that one out…. but obviously their father, public works engineer Louis Dolhem, was a lively fellow. He and his wife Ilva became the proud parents of a baby boy, early in 1944. He was baptised Louis-Jose. Eight years later Dolhem was the father of a second son – with his wife’s sister Eliane. She married an Italian by the name of Pironi and another baby boy appeared, christened Didier.

Years later Louis fathered a third child – with a different woman – a girl called Laurence, although neither of her half brothers knew about her until many years later.

The boys grew up as in the same neighbourhood in the southern suburbs of Paris. Jose studied engineering and in 1964 enrolled in and won a Ford France competition to find talented young racing drivers. His prize was to represent the Ile de France in the Coupes des Provinces, racing Lotus 7s against other rising stars: Pescarolo, Servoz-Gavin, Depailler and Dayan. All unknowns at the time. The 11-year-old Didier was hooked.

Racing was acceptable to the family, but only if the boys also competed their studies. José studied to be a Bâtiment et des Travaux Publics (BTP) engineer, a useful qualification. But then he enrolled in and won the Volant Shell competition, at the racing school at Magny Cours, beating Alain Cudini and Jean Rondeau, and winning a sponsored drive in Formula 3. He even did some F2 races.

In the meantime Didier had made friends with Claude Vigreux, a talented motorcycle racer, but early in 1967, Vitreux was killed in a freak bike accident at Mettet in Belgium. The 15-year-old Didier, who went driving illegally at night with José teaching him, set his sights on a career in motorsports. At school he was a sporting hero, notably as a swimmer.

Didier’s adventures in motorcycles worried the family, while José took up flying and soon had an adventure when he crash-landed a Cessna he was ferrying from Miami to Copenhagen (raising money for racing). He spent 22 very cold hours in Greenland before rescuers found him.

It was decided to let Didier enrol in the Winfield School at Paul Ricard, if he promised to give up bikes. He duly won the competition and so had a fully-funded season in Formula Renault in 1972, while José did only the occasional Formula 2 races with the Shell Arnold team.

By 1974 Pironi had won the French Formula Renault Championship and José was racing F2 with the Bang & Olufsen Team Surtees, alongside John Watson. He finished third at the Salzburgring in Austria and that summer raced for Matra at Le Mans. He tried to qualify a Surtees F1 car at the French GP but failed. The same happened in Italy but at the United States GP He managed 26th on the grid. Fate was not kind. His Surtees team-mate Helmuth Koinigg crashed in the race and was beheaded. Surtees withdrew Dolhem’s car. It would be his only F1 race.

That winter he went skiing and broke his neck in a crash and so was out of action for the whole of 1975. He returned to F2 in 1976, but a new generation was arriving. Didier won the Formula Renault Europe and in 1977 scored an important win in the Monaco F3 race. That season he was third in the Formula 2 championship driving for the Ecurie Renault Elf Martini team. Dolhem raced only occasionally. In 1978 Didier sailed into F1 with Tyrrell, while José struggled in F2 with an AGS. He finished fourth at Le Mans in Renault-Alpine A442A which he shared with Guy Fréquelin, Jean Ragnotti and Jean-Pierre Jabouille, but Didier won the race in an A442B with Jean-Pierre Jaussaud.

As José’s career quietly faded away, Pironi’s took off. He was signed by Ligier for 1980 and won a race in Belgium and Ferrari hired him to replace Jody Scheckter in 1981. Gilles Villeneuve won two races, but Pironi had a poor year and so the pressure was on in 1982. It would be an amazing summer for Pironi. He survived two huge testing accidents at Paul Ricard, he married his girlfriend Catherine Bleynie just before the San Marino GP. That event saw a fight between the two Ferrari drivers. The team showed a sign that said ‘Slow’ but Pironi overtook Villeneuve and won the race. Villeneuve was furious and went to Zolder determined to re-establish his status in the team. He was killed in qualifying.

Pironi split with his wife soon after the wedding (she ended up as Alain Delon’s partner) and Didier became involved in an affair with the 25-year-old movie star Veronique Jannot. Then at Hockenheim in August, in the pouring rain, Pironi made a mistake. He ran into Alain Prost’s Renault. The Ferrari flew over the Renault and cartwheeled. He suffered terrible leg injuries. He underwent numerous operations, hoping to return to F1. It was early in 1986 before he was able to test for the AGS-Motori Moderni team at Paul Ricard. He had two runs in a Ligier and understood that his F1 career was finished. He turned to powerboats and started racing them. Things went well early in 1987 and won a race at Arendal in Norway. He was suddenly a challenger for the world title. The next race was the Needles Trophy, held in the waters off the Isle of Wight. The boat flipped and Pironi and his two crew members were killed. His girlfriend Catherine Goux discovered she was pregnant and would give birth to twin boys in the spring of 1988. They were named Didier and Gilles.

Eight months after Didier’s death José was flying a Mitsubishi Marquise from Paris Le Bourget to Montpellier. The party had asked him to land at Roanne, near St Etienne, for lunch. In the early afternoon they took off, heading south. Seven minutes later, the plane crashed near the village of St Just, killing all of those onboard.

On their grave are bronze portraits of the brothers, and the inscription ‘Entre ciel et mer.’

Between the sky and the sea.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Newman remembered on 93rd birthday
Friday, 26 January 2018
By J.J. O'Malley / Images by IMS Photo, Lesley Ann Miller/LAT




Today would have been Paul Newman's 93rd birthday.

A household name for his acting exploits, Newman has a special place in the motorsports community as a fellow racer. Newman won the GTS class of the 1995 Rolex 24 at Daytona – at age 70 – driving a Jack Roush Ford Mustang as a birthday present from his studio to celebrate his recent film, Nobody's Fool.

Many of the drivers competing at Daytona this weekend have fond memories of Newman, a six-time competitor at the Rolex 24 who passed away in 2008.

"He was a tremendous man, a guy who was so influential in my life," said Graham Rahal, who debuted in IndyCar with Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing in 2007. "I thought about him a lot the past few weeks, with Dan Gurney's passing, reflecting a lot on the past. I wish he was still with us. He left us in 2008, but his legacy lives on. Tremendous guy. He was what you wish all celebrities would be like. I was very fortunate to get a lot of one-on-one time to get to understand what he felt about a lot of things. I just wish I could have spent more time with him."


[i]Paul Newman on the podium with race winner Sebastien Bourdais, third-place Graham Rahal, and co-owner Carl Haas in Edmonton, 2007.

Sebastien Bourdais drove for the Newman Haas open-wheel team for five seasons, capturing four consecutive Champ Car titles from 2004-07.
 
"It was a very privileged relationship with him," Bourdais said. "He was a great man. When I met him, his [acting] career wasn't the most important thing to him anymore. He really wanted to do things he enjoyed, and I was there for a bit of it. We had great times, and he was the team's biggest supporter. He was there to share the great – and not so great – moments."

Gunnar Jeannette began co-driving with Newman in 2000, when they co-drove in both the Rolex 24 and 24 Hours of Le Mans.

"I have a lot of extremely fond memories of being around Paul," Jeannette said. "From my perspective, he was never really an actor. When I got to know him, he was always the guy who always hung out at the race track. That's the thing that Paul liked the most about the racing environment. He was among his peers, and not people who were bothering him all the time for autographs. It was amazing.

"The last couple of races I did with him he was well into his seventies, and he was upset because he was two seconds off the pace. He wore himself down, because he wasn't where he wanted to be. That really describes how much of a racer he was."

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 61
January 27, 2018 by Joe Saward

Charlie Kimball is an IndyCar driver. This year he races for the new Carlin squad, after seven seasons with Ganassi, including a win at Mid-Ohio in 2013. He’s also part of a family that has farmed fruit in Ventura County, mainly avocados, for six generations. The family has been in the neighbourhood for so long that there is even a Kimball Road in Ventura.

But what’s odd is that Charlie was born in Chertsey, Surrey, in England in 1985.

It’s a story that really began 12 years before Charlie was born when his father Gordon, an engineering student at Stanford, spent his summer vacation working for Dan Gurney’s All American Racers, in Santa Ana, California. It worked for both of them; Gurney got cheap and talented labour; and Kimball got experience. Gordon was a quiet man, not needing to blow his own trumpet. Racing was fun and a challenge, but he did not need it to survive. He returned to Stanford, but was back with Gurney in 1974, working as a mechanic for the Eagle Formula 5000 team, which was running cars for Brett Lunger, Elliot Forbes-Robinson and F1 rising star James Hunt.

Gordon graduated from Stanford the following year and immediately went off to work for Vel’s Parnelli Jones Racing in Formula 5000. The team was running Viceroy-sponsored Lolas for Mario Andretti and Al Unser.

Around the same time, Parnelli hired John Barnard to design a new F1 car for 1976, but the team ran out of money and closed down its F1 operation and Barnard modified his design to accept Cosworth DFX engines, which Parnelli was then developing. Barnard soon had Kimball designing with him and Gordon then followed JB to Britain, where they worked in the sitting room of Barnard’s father’s house in Wembley, designing an Indycar called the Chaparral 2K, with which Johnny Rutherford won the 1980 Indy 500 and the Indycar title.

After the 2K design was finished Barnard joined Project 4 Racing and started work on a composite F1 car, Kimball disappeared back to the US and spent a year designing parts for offshore oil drilling rigs.

At the end of 1980 he joined Patrick Racing to help design the team’s Wildcat chassis, becoming the chief designer of the cars in 1983 and 1984, after his modifications in 1982 helped Gordon Johncock win the Indy 500. The team line-up in 1983 was Rutherford and an ambitious riding star called Chip Ganassi. It was in 1984 that Barnard called up and asked Kimball to join him at McLaren as assistant chief designer. Which is why Charlie Kimball was born in Chertsey…

It was a time of huge success for McLaren with World Championships in 1984, 1985 and 1986 with Niki Lauda and Alain Prost and Kimball was an integral part of that success. Then Barnard joined Ferrari and opened the Guildford Technical Office (GTO) and recruited Gordon to help out. That lasted a couple of years before Kimball went back to McLaren and became Ayrton Senna’s race engineer in 1990. His stock was increasing in value and in the middle of 1991, Benetton fell out with Barnard, and hired Kimball to replace him as technical director. It was Kimball’s big chance. A few months later, however, Benetton took on Tom Walkinshaw. He wanted Ross Brawn in charge of technical matters and Kimball was shovelled out of the way.

Fed up with the politics of F1, Gordon returned to California and set up his own design consultancy, doing interesting jobs and running Kimball Ranches, while enjoying family life as well. He would later design Gurney’s Eagle-Toyota 987 Champ Car, which showed some promise but was never developed. By then Charlie had started karting… His career would take him back to the UK where he raced Formula Ford, Formula 3 and in the Renault World Series between 2002 and 2005 before heading home to race in Indy Lights.

His sister Rachael, incidentally, built up good contacts in European racing in this era and ended up working in F1, spending seven years working in marketing for Mercedes AMG Petronas, before returning to California recently.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 62
January 28, 2018 by Joe Saward

In the old days of motor racing, careers were often longer than they are today. F1 today is a labour-intensive business, particularly if you are on the road going to all the races. People burn out and want to have other things in their lives. But for some, it is the only thing that they want to do.

Walter Hassan came from a family with its roots in Ireland. His father was born in England and ran a gentleman’s outfitting shop in Holloway, in north London. The family lived a little further north in East Finchley and young Walter, known as Wally, grew up wanting to be an engineer, thanks to an uncle who fired the interest, building model boats. Wally studied at the Northern Polytechnic Institute on the Holloway Road and then went looking for work, hoping to find a job with a company called Thrupp & Maberley, which made bodies for Sunbeam cars, at a workshop on on Cricklewood Lane. By chance he stumbled upon another automotive company he had never heard of. It was called Bentley Motors. He went in and asked for a job. He became the 14th employee, starting out doing odd jobs but soon became an assistant to a fitter, then a fitter, then a trainee mechanic, a mechanic and finally a riding mechanic. He was encouraged by the company’s test driver Frank Clement, who would win the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1924 with Canadian John Duff. That victory convinced Woolf Barnato to buy a Bentley and a year later he invested £100,000 to save the company from closing down.

In the course of the next six years Barnato would invest another £175,000 in the business, becoming its primary shareholder and chairman. As Hassan was by then the best of the riding mechanics, he was assigned to work with Barnato, the result being three consecutive Le Mans 24 Hours wins in 1928, 1929 and 1930. Bentley made a small profit in the first half of 1930, but was then badly affected by the fall-out of the Wall Street Crash. In July 1931 Barnato decided not to invest further and Bentey went into receivership. The firm was acquired by Rolls Royce for £125,000.

At the same time, Barnato bought shares in Rolls Royce and so by 1934 he was back on the board of Bentley. After the Rolls Royce takeover Wally went to work for Barnato in a garage in Belgrave Mews, looking after his fleet or cars and in 1933 built the Barnato-Hassan Special, one of the fastest cars ever at Brooklands, with Oliver Bertram lapping the oval at 142.6 mph. This was only ever beaten by John Cobb, who set a record of 143.44 mph in a Napier-Railton, although Bertram drove a revised version of the Barnato-Hassan Special and raised his best lap to 143.11 mph in 1938. At the same time, Hassan developed another Brooklands racer called the Pacey Hassan Special, working with Wally Saunders, his brother-in-law, who had also been a riding mechanic at Bentley.

In 1936, when Barnato decided to stop racing, Hassan joined the recently founded English Racing Automobiles, to help Peter Berthon develop a new engine for voiturette racing, moving on to work on ERA chassis development with Thomson & Taylor at Brooklands. In 1938 he was offered the job as chief experimental engineer of SS Cars Ltd in Coventry. When war broke out Hassan moved to work for the Bristol Aero Engine Company before returning to SS Cars to develop the Ultralight VA and VB cars and trailers for airborne forces.

Towards the end of the war Hassan, Williams Lyons, William Heynes and Claude Bailly spent their Sunday evenings fire-watching on the roof of the SS Cars factory in Foleshill. To help pass the time they discussed a new range of engines to be built to replace the pre-war engines which had been built by Standard. At the end of the war, SS Cars changed its name to Jaguar and the company built the aluminium XK straight six, which would be used in the XK120 sports car, the E-Type and to win Le Mans in 1951, 1953, 1955 and 1957. It would remain in production in different forms until 1992. At the start of 1950, however, Hassan left Jaguar, having been offered a job with the Coventry Climax engine company, about half a mile down the road from Jaguar. where he joined Harry Mundy to work on the design of a lightweight 1000cc straight four engine for use as fire pumps.

The company duly won contracts to manufacture 150,000 of them. The racing world took notice and in 1953 the engine was modified to become the 1100cc FWA. This engine and its derivatives enjoyed huge success with Cooper and Lotus, in particular, being used in the Lotus Elite, at Le Mans, in Formula 2 and ultimately in Formula 1 as well. Jim Clark won the World Championship using Climax engines in 1963 and 1965. By then Coventry Climax had been bought by Jaguar and Hassan was back with his former colleagues and together they develop a new Jaguar V12 engine, which went on to power the Le Mans-winning TWR Jaguars in the late 1980s.
Hassan retired in April 1972, at the age of 67 and was appointed an OBE for his services to motor sport. His wife Ethel died in 1981, but Wally lived to be 91, dying on the weekend of the British GP in the summer of 1996.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 63
January 29, 2018 by Joe Saward

Tommy Borgudd started playing drums with a band called the Lea Riders when he was still at school. They enjoyed some success at home in Sweden, playing blues rock. Legend has it that Borgudd got the nickname Slim when he stood in for the Willie Dixon Band’s drummer Memphis Slim. Great story… apart from the fact that Memphis Slim was Willie Dixon’s pianist. Whatever the details, Tommy became known as Slim. The Lea Riders lasted until 1968 when Borgudd and the band’s bass player joined Made in Sweden, a progressive jazz rock group, which toured extensively, including visiting Britain.

Borgudd had been a race fan since he was 12, when in the summer of 1959 he had spectated at Karlskoga. While in Britain he met Chris Barber, a celebrated dixieland band leader, who was also a keen car racer. Barber sold him a Lotus Formula Ford car which Slim took home to Sweden which he raced in local events whenever he could. Made in Sweden broke up after a couple of years and Borgudd moved on to another band called Solar Plexus, while also working on a regular basis as a session musician. It was in this role that he played with the Hootenanny Singers, which included a musician called Björn Ulvaeus, who became a mate.

Borgudd was still racing. He attended the Jim Russell Racing School at Snetterton after which he won two single-seater races but then switched to an old sports car, called the Focus, in which he scored a number of wins in Sweden. He went on to race a souped-up Hillman Imp in Group 2 races before winning the Scandinavian FF1600 title in 1973. Racing remained only a hobby until 1978, when he started his own Formula 3 team, after racing sporadically in the two previous years driving a Viking TH1 F3 car. Borgudd raced full-time in the Swedish and European series in 1978 with a Ralt-Toyota, and went on to win the Swedish title in 1979 and finished third in the European Championship, won in dominant fashion that year by Alain Prost. Slim wanted to move to F1 in 1980, but struggled to find the money required.

Conveniently, his old pal Ulvaeus had by then become a huge international megastar. Björn and another friend, Benny Andersson (there has to be at least one Andersson is every story of Swedish folk), and their two wives Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad had started singing together but did not become a formal band until 1972 when they combined their initials to create the name ABBA. Borgudd played a few studio sessions with the group, thanks to his friendship with Ulvaeus. In 1974 ABBA represented Sweden in the Eurovision Song Contest, held that year in Brighton and won with “Waterloo”, beating Olivia Newton-John’s “Long Live Love”, amongst others. ABBA went from success to success and are reckoned to have sold as many as 380 million records since then.

Borgudd asked Ulvaeus if ABBA might sponsor his F1 car and a deal was struck to let Borgudd use the name, to help attract other sponsorship. No money changed hands. The deal was offered to Gunther Schmid, the mercurial team boss, who owned the ATS Wheels company, and the ATS F1 team.

And so Borgudd arrived in F1 at the age of 34, at the wheel of an ATS. He had little experience and it took him time to get up to speed, but he scored a point at the British GP, a high attrition race, and so the ABBA band members turned up at the next race at Hockenheim, to cheer him on. The band was by then on its last legs, with the quartet doing their own things.

Borgudd’s results for the rest of the year were nothing special, but Ken Tyrrell decided to take him on in 1982, presumably on the basis that money would flood in, and so Slim found himself as team mate to Michele Alboreto – as long as they money kept arriving. The problem was that it didn’t… and after three races Borgudd was thrown out on his ear, replaced by Brian Henton.

After F1 Borgudd raced only occasionally in single-seaters and drifted into touring cars and ultimately trucks, where he enjoyed much success, returning to touring cars in the mid 1990s. He then went back to trucks and was runner-up to Steve Parrish in the European Chmpionship in 1994 before winning in 1995. He retired at the end of 1997.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Juce je bilo 80 godina od pogibije Bernda Rozemajera na autoputu blizu Darmstata u pokusaju da obori svetski brzinski rekord.

 

 

Njegovo rivalstvo sa Karacolom i Nuvolarijem i nacin na koji su sva trojica gurali jedan drugog da daju sve od sebe pa cesto i vise od toga u eri kada je auto-sport bio neverovatno opasan ce ostati zauvek neprevazidjeni. Kao najmladji medju njima, Rozemajer se na najvisem nivou takmicio samo tri sezone i za tako kratko vreme postao je neprikosnoveni vodja u timu Auto-Uniona dominantno osvojivsi titulu sampiona Evrope 1936.

 

Tog 28. januara 1938. i Auto-Union i Mercedes (sa Karacolom) spremili su "specijalke" za obaranje brzinskog rekorda na zatvorenoj deonici auto-puta izmedju Frankfurta i Darmstada. Celo prepodne rekord je isao iz ruke u ruku da bi popodne poceo jak vetar. U zelji da nadmasi rivala, Rozemajer se odlucuje za jos jedan pokusaj. Tokom voznje brzinom od preko 430 km/h u jednom momentu gubi kontrolu, sa dva tocka silazi sa asfalta sto izaziva naglo zanosenje i prevrtanje. Rozemajer je izbacen iz bolida (u ono vreme nisu se koristili pojasevi, mada u ovakvom udesu verovatno ne bi ni bili od velike koristi) i ostao na mestu mrtav.

Uprkos tome sto je za zivota bio protivnik nacisticke ideologije i odbijao uclanjenje u partiju, nakon smrti Rozemajera unapredjuju u SS-haupsturmfirera i zloupotrebljavaju ga za propagandne svrhe...

Edited by Rad-oh-yeah?, 29 January 2018 - 17:19.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Srecan 68. rodjendan svetskom sampionau za 1979. godinu:

 

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Jerry Sneva, 1949-2018
Monday, 29 January 2018
Robin Miller / Images by IMS archive


ABOVE: Jerry Sneva (right) and Larry Rice (middle) being honored at the 1978 Indianapolis 500 Last Row Party by a clean-shaven Robin Miller (left).


He was usually referred to as Tom Sneva's younger brother and got the hand-me-downs most of his racing life, but nobody drove any harder or was any braver than Jerry Sneva.

The 1977 Indianapolis 500 rookie-of-the-year, who died suddenly over the weekend at the age of 68, only made 28 IndyCar starts from 1977-82 and never had anything resembling a top-shelf ride, yet managed to qualify for five Indy 500s and impress the competitors with his racecraft.

A standout on the CAMRA modified circuit and part of the fast family that included Jan, Blaine, Babe and the 1983 Indy winner, Jerry first came to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1976 when Tom found him a car to take his rookie test. It was a homemade chassis that looked dangerous sitting still and he quickly abandoned that to take over a three-year-old Kingfish, but crashed trying to get up to speed.

The following May he showed his savvy by sticking a five-year-old McLaren into Row 4 and finished 10th to earn his rookie award.

But his best drives didn't show in his results.

In 1979, NASCAR regular Neil Bonnett dumped his AMC/Spirit ride in May to go drive for the Wood brothers, and Jerry stepped in to replace him. With very little practice he promptly put it in the show, but not without some drama.

His throttle stuck on his first lap so he headed for the grass and used up all the track going into Turn 1. He somehow made it without crashing so that's how he negotiated all four laps and made the show.

"I told the crew they wouldn't be able to take the nose off for tech inspection because the throttle pedal was jammed in it and they all laughed," recalled Sneva many years later. "I was chugging beers after that and then they came in all wide-eyed and said I was telling the truth."



His finest moment at Indy came in 1980 when he qualified fifth fastest in a two-year-old Lola (pictured above) that drew praise from its former owner Jim Hall, who said Al Unser had hated that car. In the race, Sneva ran among the leaders until pounding the wall in Turn 1.

Yet nothing sums up his racing luck like 1981. Driving a three-year-old Vollstedt-Offy for all it was worth in the new era of ground effects, he was the last qualifier on the fourth day and bumped Jerry Karl. But a member of his crew had jammed a bolt into the waste-gate to give the car more power and when he pulled it out after Jerry's run, a few eyewitnesses told USAC officials. There was a 90-minute protest hearing and Sneva was disqualified – with Karl reinstated.

He qualified for his final Indy 500 in 1982 and made what turned out to be his last IndyCar start at Michigan that fall.


Jerry Sneva poses before what turned out to be his last IndyCar start in 1982 at Michigan.

In 1983, Sneva returned to IMS with a car that would not handle. He crashed at 5:57 p.m. on a practice day, the car was fixed overnight and he hit the wall again shortly after 11 a.m. the next morning.

"It's a new track record for the two fastest crashes ever," joked the likeable veteran following his adventure. "My crew chief keeps telling me there's an invisible 200mph barrier that I've got to drive through and I keep telling him there's nothing invisible about that wall in Turn 1."

When the car was repaired again, Sneva got in and the throttle stuck as the engine was fired up. He hit the kill switch and nothing happened so they finally stuffed a few rags into the injectors to kill the power. "Giles," (his middle name) calmly climbed out of the car, took off his helmet and headed for lunch. He returned, got back in the car and made one more lap at 40mph before retiring on the spot.

"They've been trying to kill me all month and that's enough," he said.

His best-ever finish was a fourth at Pocono but Giles always got high marks from his fellow drivers.

"Jerry was very underrated as a racer and never got to drive the best equipment but he was damn good," said Bill Vukovich, one of his best friends. "A great guy and a good racer."

Sneva is survived by his wife of 35 years, Kathy, his daughter Shelby and son Trevor and there will be no public services.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 64
January 30, 2018 by Joe Saward

 

The Jordan-Ford 191 was a very beautiful racing car, some even argue that it was the best ever, with its elegant lines and wonderful green/blue livery. The 191 didn’t win any Grand Prix victories, but it was fit for purpose, it established Jordan Grand Prix as a credible force in the sport.

It is also remembered as the first F1 car driven by Michael Schumacher, although many modern fans would struggle to name others who raced the car. In reality, Schumacher did the least mileage of all those who competed in the car, as his racing involvement consisted only of the run down to the first corner at Spa. Few remember that the car was also the first F1 car that Alex Zanardi raced, before he went off to fame and fortune in the United States.

The best results of the 191 were two fourth places, achieved by Andrea de Cesaris in Canada and Mexico, while his regular team-mate Bertrand Gachot set the fastest lap at the Hungarian Grand Prix. That would be Gachot’s last Grand Prix with Jordan before he appeared in court in London and was sent to prison for 18 months by Mr Justice Butler, for spraying CS gas into the face of a London taxi driver who attacked him after a minor traffic accident in London. Gachot said he was defending himself and did not know that such sprays were illegal and deemed to be weapons under British law. A request for bail was rejected and Gachot was sent to Brixton Prison, before being transferred to Northeye prison in Bexhill on Sea.

After two months in jail he was released by the court of appeal, on the grounds that the sentence was much too harsh. Schumacher replaced him at Spa, but immediately switched to Benetton after some skulduggery, which saw Roberto Moreno kicked out of his drive by team bosses Flavio Briatore and Tom Walkinshaw. Moreno ended up in the Jordan for two races and then the drive was passed on to Zanardi.

Another thing people forget about the 191 is that it was designed by only three engineers, led ironically by Gary Anderson, one of Jordan’s bitterest rivals in European Formula 3 in 1983 and 1984. Anderson had gone on to engineer Moreno to the Formula 3000 title in 1988, in a Bromley Motorsport Reynard. As a result Adrian Reynard asked Gary to design the company’s 1989 Formula 3000 car. At Reynard he met two young designers with almost no experience in the sport: a young Mark Smith, who had joined the company a few months earlier after a year with Comtec, the composite subsidiary of March Engineering; and Andrew Green, one of the designers of the first Reynard Formula 3000 car in 1988, who had joined Reynard only in 1987.

Anderson took them both with him to Jordan in early 1990 and together they created the 191, which ran for the first time in November 1990 – in the hands of John Watson.

Anderson designed the chassis, Smith the engine installation and gearbox (using Hewland internals), and Green drew the suspension. A total of seven 191 chassis were built – although one was destroyed by de Cesaris at Silverstone.

The three stayed together at Jordan until 1998 when Anderson departed to Stewart Grand Prix and Green joined BAR as chief designer. Smith left two years later to be chief designer at Renault. Anderson stayed at Stewart until a year after it became Jaguar Racing, but was then replaced by Green, who stayed on after the team became Red Bull Racing, but returned to the former Jordan team in 2010, after it had become Force India – replacing Smith!

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Ron Walker 1939 – 2018
January 30, 2018 by Joe Saward

Ron Walker, the man who established the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne, and was the chairman of the Australian Grand Prix Corporation for many years has died at the age of 78. He had been suffering from cancer for several years. Walker was a mover and a shaker, a businessman and a politician but above all a man who was passionate about Melbourne and about Formula 1. He started out as Lord Mayor and was largely responsible for Melbourne becoming the sporting capital it now is. It was Walker, along with Victorian state premier Jeff Kennett, who swooped in and grabbed the Grand Prix from Adelaide. He would become a close ally of Bernie Ecclestone, the two doing business together in different spheres, and having some interesting negotiations along the way. Walker was also a long-standing member of the Formula 1 Commission.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 65
January 31, 2018 by Joe Saward

David Thieme was an enigma. He arrived in Formula 1 with what seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of money, stayed a couple of seasons and was then arrested on charges that never stuck, but nonetheless disappeared without trace, at least from F1 circles.

Tracing him is a problem because, oddly, there are a lot of people in this world called Thieme, and they are spread widely around the world. You can read fanciful tales that he was the son of the celebrated Dutch-American painter Anthony Thieme (born Antonius), but as romantic an idea as that is, it is simply not true. Anthony and his wife Lillian Beckett did not have any children.

Elsewhere, one can read that Thieme was born in Minneapolis in 1942 and that his father was an enginer who worked on the design of gliders which were used in large numbers on D-Day. This seems to be the most likely explanation because there was an F C Thieme, who was chief engineer of the Northwestern Aeronautical Corporation of Minneapolis at that time and Northwestern manufactured and developed versions of the Waco glider, although it had origianlly been designed by the Waco Aircraft Company in Troy , Ohio. Thieme then moved on to New York, where he joined CS Robinson’s new Robinson Aviation, which was running an air taxi service out of New York’s Teterboro airport. This fits in with David Thieme’s biography issued by the team, which says that he grew up in New York and later in Florida.

Young Thieme was interested in design of a rather different kind and won a place to study industrial design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and after graduating set up his won industrial design business, specialising in executive aircraft interiors, which one might plausibly suggest were assisted by his father’s connections in the industry.

The firm proved to be extremely successful and Thieme worked with car manufacturers and oil companies on their jets and then began designing other things for them as well. It was in this era that he became hooked on a racing as a fan of Parnelli Jones.

In the early 1970s, when Thieme was 30 and lready wealthy, he decided to invest in oil trading and set up a firm called Essex Overseas Petroleum Corporation, buying cheap oil at a time when OPEC had instigated an oil embargo, aimed at countries which supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The price of oil rose dramatically and would more than double again in 1979-1981. Independent oil traders leapt into the market, offering better terms to governments than were on offer from the multinationals, There were huge profits available for those with money enter the game and the overheads were low, with just a few staff needed to buy and sell the oil and arrange for transportation and refining. And thus it was that by the time he was 37, Thieme had so much money that F1 became a possibility. A deal with Credit Suisse to help finance more purchases led to a boom and he decided to get involved in motor racing, with the former F1 driver-turned-sponsorship agent François Mazet acting as his right-hand man. At the end of April 1979 the first Essex logos appeared on the Team Lotus 80s, driven by Mario Andretti and Carlos Reutemann. Thieme also put money into the Porsche factory entries for the Le Mans 24 Hours, with two 936s, driven by Jacky Ickx/Brian Redman and Bob Wollek/Hurley Haywood.

In December 1979 he launched Essex Team Lotus at the Paradis du Latin cabaret in Paris, with feather-clad dancers and a Lotus in Essex colours descending from the roof, with Mario Andretti, clad in a dinner jacket, descending with it. In 1980 Thieme took the title sponsorship of Team Lotus, with a flashy new red, blue and silver livery for Andretti, Elio de Angelis and later Nigel Mansell. Everything that Thieme did was extravagant, with the 1981 launch at the Royal Albert Hall, with 900 guests and his double-decker hospitality bus parked outside with Thieme’s helicopter (in Essex colours, of course) on top. Ray Charles and Barbara Dickson sang for the guests (including Margaret Thatcher) and an Essex-liveried Lotus Esprit was raffled and much Dom Perignon was drunk. The 1981 season proved to be difficult with the twin-chassised Lotus 88 causing controversy when it was introduced in Long Beach. The arguments raged at the next two races, where the team used 81Bs and then before the San Marino GP at Imola, Thieme was arrested by Swiss officials when he landed his private plane at Kloten airport in Zurich. He would spend the next 13 days in jail before he was allowed to leave, his bail apparently having been paid by Mansour Ojjeh’s father Akram. There followed seven months of investigation into his activities but no charges were ever confirmed. There followed a lengthy legal battle between Essex and Credit Suisse. The loss of the support led to Essex closing down and Thieme disappearing into the mists of time. It was reported that he lived in Paris, but it was clear that Thieme did not want to be found, his desire to be in the limelight, replaced by a strong desire to be utterly invisible.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 66
February 1, 2018 by Joe Saward


At the start of the 1969 movie The Italian Job, an orange Lamborghini Miura is seen racing along a mountain road. It disappears into a tunnel and there is a ball of flame as it runs into something solid in the tunnel. Oddly enough, this was the fate of F1 driver Piero Drogo four years later…

Drogo was then 46 and at the wheel of a Ferrari 250 California, which ran into a truck, stopped in an unlit tunnel near Bologna. In the film it was a mafia hit, but in Drogo’s case it seems to have been a genuine accident. Drogo came from a complicated family, with a 300-year history and roots in Hungary but branches in Sicily and England. He was born in the town of Vignale Monferrato, near Alessandria in Piedmont, in 1926, but did not want to be part of the Italian nobility and disappeared off to South American as soon as the war was over and raced all over the continent in sports cars and in the local road races. In 1957 he decided to return to Europe and raced a Ferrari at Le Mans, sharing the car with Alfonso Gomez-Mena. He then took up a job as an engineer working at Stanguellini in Modena. In the autumn of 1960 the British F1 teams decided to boycott the Italian Grand Prix. The World Championship was already settled in favour of Jack Brabham and the Italians had decided to run their race on a combined road/oval course at Monza, which the British teams felt was too dangerous. This meant the Ferrari had little opposition beyond a few private Coopers and some Formula 2 Porsches. Drogo rented a ride with Scuderia Colonia, which had some F2 Coopers and did a decent job, without being astonishing. Still, he had started a World Championship event… and that made him a Grand Prix driver.

Along the way he met Count Volpi di Misurata, son of the owner of Serenissima and the pair started a coach-building company called Carrozzeria Sports Cars, creating bodywork for Ferrari models, including the P-type sportscars, the Dino 206S, the Ferrari 250 California and the famous “Breadvan”. Sports Cars also built bodies to order for Bizzarrini and even made its own GT car, based on a Ferrari chassis, while also restyling the E-type Jaguar and the Birdcage. Later he worked closely with Renzo Rivolta, a refrigerator magnate who decided to build Iso-badged sports cars in the early 1970s.

Sadly, the story ended with the accident, although in recent years his nephew has tried to revive the Drogo brand.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 67
February 2, 2018 by Joe Saward

The police headquarters in Cologne, Germany, is located on the Walter-Pauli-Ring, a street named after a 22-year-old policeman killed in a gunfight with a terrorist on May the 9th in 1975. At the time Germany had a series of extremist groups engaged in bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, bank robberies, and shoot-outs with police. The best known of these was the Red Army Faction, usually referred to in the media as the Baader-Meinhof Gang. But it was only one of several, often overlapping, anti-capitalist groups. These grew out of the unrest in the late 1960s, which spread around the world and was highlighted in Berlin on June 2 1967 when a student protester called Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead by a policeman, during a demonstration against the Shah of Iran attending a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Deutsche Oper. A few months later Rudi Dutschke, the charismatic leader of the Socialist Students Union was shot in West Berlin. This led to increased protest and crackdowns that further exacerbated the problems between the older generation of Germans and the youngsters. One of these organisations was known as the Bewegung 2. Juni, known as the 2 June Movement, an anarchist group, founded in West Berlin following Ohensorg’s murder. It is best known for kidnapping Peter Lorenz, a Christian Democrat candidate for mayor of West Berlin in the elections in February 1975. He was set free 10 days later, after the German authorities agree to release a number of imprisoned group members, who were flown to South Yemen. After this happened the police became more active against Bewegung 2. Juni. In the early morning hours of May 9, locals reported that there were three men behaving suspiciously in an NSU Prince in a car park in the Flammersfelder Strasse in the Humboldt-Gremberg district of Cologne. A number of police cars responded to the call and, while the men were being questioned, one of them opened the door of the NSU and tried to escape. He pulled out a gun and shot Pauli in the chest. He injured another policeman while a ricochet hit the driver of the car, a doctor called Karl Heinz Roth. Police returned fire and the gunman was hit six times. He died on his way to hospital. The third man Roland Otto was arrested without a fight and it was revealed that the police had stumbled on members of Bewegung 2 Juni – and that the dead gunman was Klaus Dieter Tangermann.

Later when the two survivors went to trial, they contradicted the official version of the story, saying that the man known as Tangermann had tried to escape and had been shot in the back by the police – and only then had started shooting, killing Pauli. Tangermann’s real name was Philip Werner Sauber, a Swiss national from Zurich.

Siblings can often be very different and this was clearly the case with Peter and Philip Sauber. The two brothers were born four years apart, Peter in 1943 and Philip in 1947. They came from a wealthy background, the family firm Sauber + Gisin having been established in 1912 as an electrical business which developed over time into a firm employing 250 people, creating and selling traffic lights and signs, railway signalling and electrical planning. They grew up in a huge villa, overlooking the Zürichsee. It was by all accounts a strict upbringing. Peter wanted to go racing but first had to train as an electrical engineer. Once that was done, in 1967, he started racing. Philip left home that same year. He wanted to be a photographer and went to Berlin where he enrolled in the German Film and Television Academy. He was, by all accounts, a rather distinctive individual, who dressed in pinstriped suits, wore monogrammed shirts and handmade shoes and a long black coat. He seemed very conventional at the time. He soon met Ulrike Edschmid, a woman seven years his senior who had a small child. They moved into a commune and took part in political protests. Philip made his first film in 1968, called The Lonely Wanderer, but gradually he moved away from his artistic goals and became more involved in political protest. In a recent book called “The disappearance of Philip S” Edschmid chronicles his radicalisation over the course of their four years together, including his arrest and imprisonment on suspicion of being involved in underground activities. After that Sauber decided to go underground, with the goal of destroying the status quo. Edschmid decided not to follow him and heard nothing more until his death three years later.

As this was happening, Peter Sauber was living a rather more conventional life. He worked in a car dealership and began to compete in hillclimbs in a VW Beetle. He then built a prototype sports car, named the C1, after his wife Christine, in a garage beneath his parents villa. He would soon begin to requests from other drivers for his cars and so set up a workshop in Hinwil. In 1973 he built three C3s, followed by the C4 in 1975.

Philip seems to have gone to Paris in 1973 where he worked in a car factory, trying to organise unions to resist the demands of the management. After a year he went back to Germany, using the Tangermann alias, at the Klöckner-Humboldt-Deutz engineering firm in Cologne, once again quietly trying to stir up trouble amongst the workers, working the night shift while writing revolutionary tracts during the day. Little is known about his underground career until the gun battle in Cologne, although there are many suggestions that he was involved in gun-smuggling into Switzerland and even in the kidnapping of Lorenz. Those who know the truth, if there are any, have said nothing.

After his brother’s death Sauber continued building sports cars and sent cars to Le Mans for the first time in 1977. A year later Sauber sold Sauber + Gisin to one of its rivals and began the process of luring Mercedes back into international motorsport… The rest, as they say, is history.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Petersen launches major Porsche exhibit
Friday, 02 February 2018
Richard S. James (words & images)




For the next year, the Petersen Automotive Museum will host "The Porsche Effect," an exhibit that includes iconic road and racing cars.

Few automotive brands inspire desire and loyalty among race fans as Porsche. Opening this weekend, the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles is hosting "The Porsche Effect," which it claims is the most comprehensive display of Porsche cars outside of Stuttgart.

The collection on display includes a nice chronology of the rear-engined coupes that began with the 1938 Berlin-Rome Type 64 race car (pictured above), the first to bear the Porsche name. That beginning and the subsequent 70 years have inexorably tied the company to motorsports, and the collection houses some key components of Porsche racing history.


Porsche 906 Carrera 6



That includes one of Penske's Sunoco-liveried 917/30 Can-Am cars driven by Mark Donohue, a 910 and a 911 GT1, all in the lobby before one even arrives at the ticket counter. Inside the exhibit, there's a nice timeline of Porsche race cars that begins with a 550 Spyder and includes the 1970 24 Hours of Daytona-winning 917, a 959 (pictured above) driven in the Paris-Dakar rally by Jacky Ickx, a Penske RS Spyder and, of course, the recently retired 919. A display of Porsche racing machinery wouldn't be complete without a 24 Hours of Le Mans winner, and that comes in the form of the Whittington Brothers' 935K (below) that Don and Bill Whittington and Klaus Ludwig drove to an overall victory in in 1979.



Fans of Porsche's transaxle cars may be disappointed in the main exhibit, but they'll get to see some favorites among the front-engined cars in the special Porsche-dedicated vault tour. That will include a 924 Carrera GTS Club Sport and a 968 Turbo RS.

Accompanying them in the vault are a 962C in Jagermeister livery, a 1974 Vasek Polak 934, a 1988 March 88C Porsche IndyCar and the 1987 McLaren TAG Porsche F1 car driven by Alain Prost.

In all, 50 Porsche road cars and race cars will be available to museum visitors, along with a variety of historical documents, artifacts and non-car products that carry the Porsche name.

"Within my responsibility I have at Porsche, none is greater than the commitment of looking after our great brand," said Klaus Zellmer, President and CEO of Porsche Cars North America. "With that, of course, comes the compulsion to support and honor our rich heritage.When the Petersen Museum first suggested we work together on what has become 'The Porsche Effect,' I immediately saw the mutual benefits to both. We are looking forward to sharing the story of Porsche through rare and seldom seen artifacts and display elements, in addition to some of the most iconic cars or all time."

The exhibit runs through Jan. 27, 2019. The Petersen Automotive Museum is located at 6060 Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles.