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[MrIncredible]

 

Prelepo izgleda

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Prelepo izgleda

 

Vuca na sva cetiri tocka, steta sto nikada nisu uspeli da ga naprave da radi kako treba...

Fascinating F1 Fact: 68
February 3, 2018 by Joe Saward


Money, so they say, is the root of all evil today – at least according to Pink Floyd. If one reads the newspapers in Bayonne, in France, these days, one would probably agree. Last November, when the F1 circus was in Abu Dhabi, Soledad Cabeza de Vaca, the Marchioness of Moratalla, died in the Basque city, at the age of 87, leaving two children – one biological, the other adopted – fighting over her fortune.

The money – no-one seems to know exactly how much is involved – is not inconsiderable and came to the Marchioness’s mother, Olga Leighton, after the death of her first husband Frank Jay Mackey back in 1927. A gold medalist for polo in the Paris Olympics, Mackey went on to found the Household Finance Corporation (today a part of HSBC), but at 74, diagnosed with cancer, he shot himself at his home in the Hotel Leamington in Minneapolis. Olga was then 38. Newspapers will tell you that she was an Irish nurse, but in truth she came from Fulham, the daughter of Captain Forester Leighton, a British Army officer, who was the son of a Shropshire clergyman. So much for Ireland… In any case, she sailed to Miami on the SS Mauritania in January 1920, at the age of 30. She married Mackey 11 months later.

After his death she became one of the wealthiest women in the world, and was thus very attractive to impoverished noblemen. She would marry Antonio Cabeza de Vaca, the Marquis de Portago, a glamorous Spanish aristocrat around a year later. He was charming, made movies, played polo and was a friend of Spain’s King Alfonso XIII. Descended from a swashbuckling family of adventurers, including a celebrated conquistador, he seemed a good match. The couple’s first child, a son called Alfonso, was born in London at the end of 1928; their second, Solidad, in 1930. The children spent their childhoods in the stylish seaside resort of Biarritz. Their father was away often, fighting with General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He survived the war and then the family had to move when the Germans took over France in 1940, Olga being British and thus an enemy of the invaders. They chose to go to New York and set up home in the Plaza, where 5th Avenue meets Central Park, where Alfonso befriended a young elevator operator called Ed Nelson, who would become his closest friend and mentor. In 1941 his father died suddenly, while playing polo, at the age of only 48.

Olga decided to send the 13-year-old Alfonso to a boarding school near Princeton, but he hated it and soon returned to his mother at the Plaza and tutors were engaged. Olga would marry again in 1943 becoming the wife of 36-year-old Don Isidro Martín y Montis, the second son of the Marquis de Linares.

Alfonso grew up a sportsman, a fencer, a swimmer and a man passionate about horses. At 17 he learned to fly and won a $500 bet with a chef in Miami who said he would not fly beneath a causeway bridge. Only 20 foot above the water. He won the money, but was arrested as a result.

The following year, the war being over, the family went back to France and Alfonso embarked on a career in horse racing, on the flat and over hurdles. He played tennis for Spain in the Davis Cup, was a regular on the Cresta Run bobsleigh course, and crash-landed a plane in a French field after an engine failure, taking out an unfortunate cow.

In 1949, when he was 20, he met Carroll McDaniel, a beautiful 27-year-old American, at the El Morocco nightclub in New York. Within days he had asked her to marry him. They would have two children in the years that followed. Marriage did not slow him down and in 1950 he rode in Britain’s celebrated Grand National, falling from Garde Toi in 1950 (on which he had finished third in the Cheltenham Gold Cup) and then from Icy Calm in 1952.

He soon developed new passions, discovering automobile racing when he attended the 1953 New York Motor Show and met Luigi Chinetti, the Ferrari importer (and former Le Mans winner). Chinetti offered him the chance to be his co-driver for the Carrera Panamericana in Mexico. De Portago was hooked.

His life became more complicated when he started an affair with Revlon model Dorian Leigh, reputed to be the inspiration for the character Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The two married (bigamously) in Mexico and had a child together in 1955. By then Alfonso was a racing driver, having made his racing debut in the Buenos Aires 1000 in 1954, sharing a Ferrari with Harry Schell. Later that year he won the Governor’s Trophy in Nassau, in the Bahamas, a victory he repeated in 1955. Enzo Ferrari then sold him an F1 car, although he destroyed it during the International Trophy at Silverstone, breaking his leg in the process. He was back in action by the end of 1955, racing sports cars, but that winter he went to the Winter Olympic Games in Cortina d’Ampezzo, in Italy, where he placed fourth in the two-man bobsleigh, representing Spain.

In 1956 he became the fifth Ferrari F1 driver, alongside Juan Manuel Fangio, Luigi Musso, Eugenio Castellotti and Peter Collins. He won the Tour de France for Ferrari, with Ed Nelson as his co-driver. He also won the Oporto GP sports car race and, after handing his car over to Collins at Silverstone, finished second in the British GP. The racing world noted that he was not just another wealthy playboy…

He was quick, but also down-to-earth, dressing like a mechanic, with perpetually unkempt hair and a cigarette forever dangling from his lip. He was a star. A Spanish James Dean.

His love life remained complicated as he took up with movie actress Linda Christian, the ex-wife of Hollywood star Tyrone Power. Their romance was much in the newspapers and at the Mille Miglia early in 1957, with de Portago running third, she stole a brief kiss during a stop in Rome. It was caught by photographers.

It is a little known fact that de Portago’s divorce from McDaniel was due to be finalised the next day… except that Alfonso de Portago had run out of days.

Late that afternoon his Ferrari suffered a tyre failure at 150mph in the village of Guidizzolo, near Brescia. The accident was horribly violent killing both Portago and Nelson but also 10 spectators, including several children. The public outcry was enormous and Enzo Ferrari spent the next four years fighting manslaughter charges. The crash killed the Mille Miglia.

At the time of Alfonso’s death, his mother was worth $550 million… which explains the bitter fight in Bayonne in recent months…

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 69
February 4, 2018 by Joe Saward

History can be a magical thing. People and places have their day in the sun and then fade away, leaving few traces of what once they were. One can find magnificent follies in tiny villages and wonder how and why such a thing could exist. History ebbs and flows. Empires rise and fall, some lost forever in the mists of time. Where was Eldorado? Did Atlantis really exist? Were these places real or did the storytellers, sitting around fires on cold dark nights, weave magical words together to create magnificent places that lived only in the imaginations of the listeners? Who was King Arthur and where was Camelot? Stories were passed down through the generations to become folklore and fairytales.

In the late Seventeenth Century, a French aristocrat called Charles Perrault dedicated himself to collecting and writing down these stories and put Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Puss in Boots and Sleeping Beauty into books 100 years before the Brothers Grimm told their tales and long before Hans Christian Andersen wrote his celebrated stories.

Perrault lived in the Château de Viry, in the countryside to the south of Paris. It was built on a hillside overlooking the lowlands where the mighty Seine was met by the lively Orge. Through these meadows ran the main road south from Paris’s Porte d’Italie en route to faraway Italy. A century later the Emperor Napoleon would classify the road as Route Nationale 7, and in time it became the road that Tout Paris drove, on their way to the Côte d’Azur.

The chateau sat in the village of Viry-sur-Orge, which was next to a settlement called Châtillon-sur-Seine, the incongruous names resulting from the confluence of the two rivers. After the French Revolution, during a surge of frenzied efficiency, the two villages were tied together with red tape to create the Viry-Châtillon commune.

The chateau is gone now and today there is a busy boulevard called the Avenue Marmont, which runs across the site, rising up to a drab industrial roundabout, ringed by fast food restaurants and a sizeable shopping centre. This is the Rond-Point Amédée Gordini, named in honour of the Italian engine wizard who kept French motorsport alive in the 1950s, in the era before Elf came along and sparked a new golden age.

Today, the name Viry-Châtillon is known the world over for the Renault facility, where the magicians who followed Gordini designed and developed the company’s Formula 1 engines.

The factory that Gordini built in 1968 to replace his cramped but famous workshops on the Boulevard Victor on the old Paris ring road, overlooks the roundabout, while the A6 motorway (which never sleeps) is alongside. The Renault facility is on a piece of land that Gordini found thanks to his friendship with the local mayor Henri Longuet, who had won the European speedboat title in 1956. Longuet wanted Viry-Châtillon to be a sporting centre and funded the construction of football fields, tennis courts, an ice rink, a swimming pool and a nautical centre, not to mention a ski chalet in Megeve, in the Alps, where the children of Viry-Châtillon could go to learn to ski. Having the celebrated Gordini racing company in his commune was just what Longuet wanted.

What is not well known in the racing world is that before Gordini, Viry-Châtillon was famous for things other than Perrault. Go a few blocks to the north of the factory, on the flat land that lay below the old chateau, and you will find clues: the Boulevard Guynemer, and streets named after Nungesser et Coli, Roland Garros, Vedrine and Eugène Lefebvre. You don’t need to be much of an expert to recognise that these were all early aviators. The reason for this is that Viry-Châtillon was the site of the world’s very first properly-organised aerodrome, opened amid much excitement in May 1909 when Leon Delagrange flew five times around the circular landing field at about 20 feet, watched by tens of thousands of fascinated people. The aérodrome was named Port-Aviation and had hangars and workshops for the aviators. A couple months after it opened an unknown flyer called Louis Blériot flew 24 laps circuits around the field, preparing to fly across the English Channel, a feat that made him a household name. Shortly afterwards Lefebvre wrote his name into the history books by becoming the first person to die while piloting a powered aeroplane. A matter of days after that, the Count de Lambert, the first person in France to be taught to fly by Wilbur Wright, took off from Port-Aviation and overflew Paris, astonishing tens of thousands as he flew past the Eiffel Tower. And so it went on: three years later Port-Aviation was where the dashing Adolphe Pégoud became the first man to fly an aircraft upside-down and followed up by being the first to loop the loop.

During the First World War, Port-Aviation became a military base, housing a flying school which trained nearly 600 French pilots before being handed over to the Belgian Air Force to provide a flying school for their exiled pilots.

The problem was that as the horsepower of the aero-engines increased, so the hills around Port-Aviation became more and more of a drawback. And so the development of engines ultimately destroyed the fame of Viry-Châtillon… the aerodrome was abandoned after the war, the hangars and workshops were demolished.

Half a century later, history worked its magic and engine development put Viry-Châtillon back on the world map, a fairytale that Perrault would have appreciated…

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 70
February 5, 2018 by Joe Saward

So, how many of you recall the Grand Prix in Ontario? No, I don’t mean the circuit we are now supposed to call Canadian Tire Motorsport Park, which used to be called Mosport Park, in a more poetic age. Nor am I talking about the old airfield they called Edenvale or Stayner Speedway at one point. I’m not thinking about Harewood Acres, nor Green Acres, neither Shannonville nor Cayuga. Not even Exhibition Place in Toronto…

Give up? Well, it’s probably best because it’s a bit of a trick question. I’m talking about Ontario Motor Speedway, which is not in Canada at all, but used to be found alongside Interstate 10, about 40 miles due east of Los Angeles, on the road to Palm Springs in California.

Keep going east on I-10 and you will (eventually) reach Jacksonville, Florida. Go west and you will hit the Pacific Ocean at Santa Monica.

The land in this Ontario is fertile, lying to the south of the San Gabriel Mountains. They planted grapes there in 1839 and the Cucamonga Winery became famous for its sweet Angelica wine and for its port. A century later, times were hard and land became cheap. Eventually some enterprising folk figured that they would build a 2.5-mile Indianapolis-style speedway on the old vineyards, within easy reach of LA next to the new I-10. Around 800 acres were purchased at $7,500 per acre and by the end of 1970 the Ontario Motor Speedway was in operation.

They had big ambitions and wanted to host a Grand Prix and found $400,000 in sponsorship from a New York Stock Exchange-listed diversified conglomerate called Questor, which had grown out of the automotive parts business AP Parts, but also owned the Dunhill cigarettes, Spalding golf clubs, billiard tables, skis, furniture and Tinker Toys, and some construction products. The goal of the sponsorship was to get the company’s name known in financial circles.

The Questor Grand Prix, scheduled for March 1971, was billed as the richest ever car race, but the FIA refused to sanction a World Championship event and so Ontario invited the money-hungry F1 teams to join a Formula 5000 race that was already planned and so turned the event into a non-championship F1 race, with half the field being F1 cars, the other half being Formula 5000s, less sophisticated but with bigger engines, but smaller fuel tanks. To balance the performance it was agreed that there would be two heats of 32 laps apiece but the F1 cars still dominated, with Mario Andretti winning the first heat for Ferrari, ahead of Jackie Stewart’s Tyrrell with Jo Siffert third in a BRM. The best F5000 was driven by Mark Donohue in ninth. The second heat saw the same top two but Chris Amon was third in a Matra. Ron Grable was the best F5000 runner in seventh. On aggregate, victory went to Andretti from Stewart with Denny Hulme third for McLaren, with Grable the best F5000 runner in seventh overall. The races were watched by 68,000 people. But that was not enough to meet the needs of Ontario.

There was talk of a Grand Prix in 1972, but there was no money to do it. Ontario survived for 10 years, holding races and rock concerts, but then the Chevron Land Company twigged that the land had increased in value to around $150,000 an acre and so it bought the circuit, demolished it and made a killing by turning the property into Piemonte, a mixed-use development with condominiums, business offices, and retail stores. It was not until 2008 that this was completed, with the opening of the Citizens Business Bank Arena, an 11,000-seat sports and entertainment venue.

While this was all happening, two miles up the road the old Kaiser Steel Mill was demolished and the land acquired – to build a speedway. The California Speedway opened in 1997, but since 2008 it has been known as the Auto Club Speedway.

As for Questor, the company vanished in the 1980s during a period of frenzied corporate buyouts, its various divisions being spun off.

 

 

Ontario Spidvej je bio popriste mnogih cuvenih Indikar trka na 500 milja i deo originalna "triple krune" (Indi, Pokono, Ontario). Staza je identicna kopija Indi ovala ali je vozila drugacije zbog razlicitih klimatskih uslova i novije podloge, Ontario je bio nesto brzi.

Kvestor Granpri je naravno vozen na neovalnoj konfiguraciji staze s krugom duzine 5140 m, koja je takodje koriscena za trke americkog F5000 sampionata. Ideja da se voze trke sa kombinovanim F1 / F5000 gridom nisu nista novo, cesto su F1 trke van sampionata sveta posezale za tim kada je trebalo popuniti broj prijavljenih bolida. F1 bolidi su imali prednost i najcesce su lagano pobedjivali, osim u jednom slucaju o kome sam vec pisao ranije - 1973 Trka sampiona na Brends Hecu koju je osvojio Piter Getin u F5000 Sevronu.

 

Inace vozene su i trke u kombinaciji Indikar / F5000 (Finiks)  i F1 / Indikar (Monca), i u oba slucaja Indikar bolidi su komotno pobedjivali, doduse vozilo se na ovalima sto je ipak njihova teritorija - da se vozilo na redovnim stazama prica bi verovatno bila drugacija...

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

He holds the record for the most cars passed on the first lap of the Indianapolis 500 and soldiered home 10th once in the Novi but Bill Cheesbourg will best be remembered as a skilled journeyman driver who would give anything with four wheels a try.

'Cheese' competed six times at Indy from 1957-65 with his best finish of 10th in 1958 in Andy Granatelli's Novi, despite being involved in the multi-car, first-lap accident that wound up breaking his sway bar. He began his Indy career the year before at age 30 and overcame the emotional trauma of losing his 2-year-old son to a reaction from penicillin and came back to qualify for his first race.

He started 30th in 1959 but wasn't there for long as he swept past 17 cars on the opening lap and got all the way into the top 5 before losing a magneto.

Bill's best ride came in 1961 when he drove the Dean Van Lines Special for Clint Brawner and qualified ninth but was eliminated in a crash. His final start came in 1965 and after missing the show with a couple of clunkers in 1966, he went back to his home in Tuscon and began racing stock cars – winning a feature when he was 63 years old. He died in 1995 at age 68.

Edited by Rad-oh-yeah?, 05 February 2018 - 20:49.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 71
February 6, 2018 by Joe Saward

You probably haven’t heard of “Pal Joe”. He was a pretty successful pseudonymous Italian racing driver in the 1960s. The problem was his mother, who refused to sign his racing licence, fearing that her son would hurt himself. He could not compete until he reached the age of 21.

Having been born in 1934, this meant that racing cars were off-limits until 1955. The good news for the youngster was that the motor cycle world was less fussy about licences and so “Pal Joe” appeared, saving his mother the pain of knowing her son was risking life and limb, in little-reported endurance trials, such as the Milan-Taranto, the Giro d’Italia and even a few circuit races.

Soon Pal Joe was working in a motorcycle factory for Isomoto in Brescia, run by the wealthy refrigerator manufacturer Renzo Rivolta, who would go on to create the Iso-Rivalta F1 team (with Frank Williams) in the early 1970s. He worked as a test rider, looking for defects in the products that were coming out of the factory. He would later switch to the rival Rumi company, run by another man who would end up in Formula 1. When he reached 21 he finally got his racing licence but he then didn’t have money to go racing and concluded that the best thing to do would be to become a car dealer and opened a dealership in the wonderfully-named Busto Arsizio, selling small cars: Abarths, Autobianchis and Simcas. He raced when he could and got to know Carlo Abarth. At the time he was looking for a young Italian driver and Pal Joe suggested that he try a youngster from Como called Arturo Merzario. He even wrote a cheque to cover any damage if Merzario shunted the car in the tests.

Pal Joe still didn’t have the money to race and so diversified and started a travel agency in Milan. He would start racing cars again in 1967, still using his pseudonym, driving an Abarth 850, although he quickly moved up to cars with more horsepower, including touring cars (Italian and European), GTs and sports prototypes, including a number of 1000km races. He competed in more than 100 races.

He grew close to Enzo Osella, who had bought the racing assets of Abarth to create Osella Squadra Corse, running sports cars before turning to single seaters. In 1977 Pal Joe helped Osella finish runner-up in the sports car class of the World Championship of Makes. By then Merzario had begun to run out of options to continue his F1 career and so he decided to start his own team. He raced a March 761B in 1977 and then asked Pal Joe to help him out and finally Gianfranco Palazzoli emerged from behind his mask. The team set to work and built the Merzario A1, based largely on the March, but with revised aerodynamics. Art qualified eight times in 16 races. A new car was built for 1979 but it was not a success and Merzario bought the Kauhsen F1 project – which wasn’t much better… The cars were then converted to F2 spec and Palazzoli joined Osella, to work with its Formula 2 team, sponsored by Beta and driven to victory three times by Eddie Cheever, who finished fourth in the European Championship. Palazzoli also ran Osella’s BMW M1 in the Procar series for Cheever, Bruno Giacomelli and Elio de Angelis. The team moved to F1 in 1980 with Cheever, with funding from Denim and MS, the Italian national cigarette company. He would remain team manager until 1983 when he joined Benetton to oversee its F1 sponsorship of Tyrrell. That role continued with Alfa Romeo in 1984 and with Toleman in 1985, although the fashion house then bought the team and Benetton Formula was born. Palazzoli was no longer required as the team already had a management structure in place and so in 1987 he joined the factory Alfa Romeo FIA World Touring Car Championship team for a couple of years before returning to Osella, which had been taken over by Gabriele Rumi (of the motorcycle family) and was transformed into Fondmetal. Things seemed to be on a good course until Rumi ran out of money and had to shut the team down in 1992. He would later try a different approach by buying the Casumaro wind tunnel and doing consultancy work before putting together a consortium to buy Minardi in 1997. By then Palazzoli had built himself a new career, as a broadcaster, working as a commentator with Italy’s RAI, alongside Mario Poltronieri and Ezio Zermiani.

He has stopped racing in 1980, at the age of 45, but he remained keen on competition and turned his attention to table tennis, a sport in which he has since won no fewer than 28 single and double Italian Champion titles!

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 72
February 7, 2018 by Joe Saward

Wilhelm Höttl was a Nazi, a member of the party in Austria and a Sturmbannführer in the SS security service, known as the Sicherheitsdienst, during the war years. In this role he was responsible for counter espionage operations in Eastern Europe, based in Budapest. In 1945, when he was 30 and the Third Reich was falling apart, Höttl made a clever decision. He contacted America’s intelligence agency, the OSS, and agreed to turn himself in to them. As a consequence of this he figured prominently in the Nuremberg Trials – as a prosecution witness. This also meant that he was released from custody in 1947 when he became involved in intelligence work, running two US-controlled spy networks in the Russian occupied zones in eastern Austria, in the early Cold War years.

At the same time, he opened his own private secondary school in Bad Aussee, expanding to accept boarders in 1955, when the occupation of Austria ended and his spy networks were no longer required.

The aim of the school was to take troublesome Austrian teenagers and get them through the matura, the examination before graduation, at the age of 18.

In his spare time he wrote books under the name Walter Hagen about some of his wartime activities.

Höttl‘s school quickly grew to around 400 pupils, including 320 boarders. Austrian society did not seem to mind about the past and wealthy Austrians felt that discipline was the right thing for their troublesome children. Discipline and lots of sports.

The Höttl school produced no fewer than four Grand Prix drivers in the era, including two World Champions…

Jochen Rindt and Helmut Marko were contemporaries and, a few years afterwards, Niki Lauda and Harald Ertl passed through the same corridors. It is often forgotten that when Lauda crashed at the Nurburgring in 1976, his old classmate came to his rescue. Arturo Merzario is often credited with having saved Lauda, but he himself said that it was Ertl’s bravery, dashing into the fire, that gave him the courage to do what he went on to do. Brett Lunger, a Vietnam War veteran, and Guy Edwards also played roles in saving Lauda from the flames.

Ertl is not remembered for the rescue of Lauda, but rather for his exuberant Chase Carey-ish handlebar moustache, although he had a full beard as well. It was all rather Germanic…

In fact, Ertl was an Austrian and renowned as a charming individual. His results in F1 did not reflect his talent, rather his budget…

Born in Zell am See, the picturesque lakeside town , to the south of Salzburg and the Berchtesgaden Alps, in the summer of 1948 (Lauda was born in February 1949), Ertl was the son of a civil engineer whose career had led him to the city of Mannheim in 1964, when Harald was 16. After boarding school Ertl studied business in Karlsruhe and then borrowed the money he needed to buy a Kaimann Formula Vee car. He was quick but tended to have accidents. He worked as an automotive journalist and also earned money driving touring cars in the Deutsche Rennsport Meisterschaft, notably with Schnitzer and Alpina. In F3 he drove a Lotus, a GRD and even a little-known Rheinland F3 car, while Team Obermoser Jorg (later to build TOJ chassis) ran him in Formula 2. His biggest win came with Derek Bell in the 1973 Tourist Trophy in an Alpina BMW.

In 1975 he found sponsorship from the Warsteiner brewery to get a chance in Formula 1 in 1975. He bought an ex-Alan Jones Hesketh 308 from the factory and it was painted up in the gold livery of the beer company. Ertl finished eighth first time out at the Nurburgring and ran well at Monza as well, despite being a lap down because of an scheduled pit stop. This was promising and so plans were laid for a full season with the Hesketh team in 1976. It would be a disappointing year, although he came close to scoring a point at the British GP. Two weeks later came Lauda’s crash an he would finis eighth again in the wet in Japan. He stayed with Hesketh in 1977, with backing from the tool company Heyco, but left when the money ran out. He would reappear in 1978 in a Sachs-sponsored Ensign. At Hockenheim in 1978 he was running in sixth place with three laps to go, after a long battle with the new boy Gilles Villeneuve in a McLaren, when his engine failed and the car stopped in the stadium area. There would be one of two appearances with ATS after that but he did most of his racing in touring cars.

In April 1982 he planned to spend the Easter weekend with his family on an island just off the coast of northern Germany, near the Danish border. His brother in law Dr Jörg Becker-Hohensee owned a six-seater single-engined Beechcraft Bonanza plane and the plan was to fly from Mannheim for the holiday. Harald and his wife Vera, their son Sebastian, his sister Gabi Becker-Hohensee and his niece Alexandra. They had just passed over Frankfurt when there was an engine problem. Becker-Hohensee crash-landed in a field near Giessen. Alas, all three of the Becker-Hohensees and Ertl were killed in the crash. Vera and Sebastian were injured but survived.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 73
February 8, 2018 by Joe Saward

It is perfectly ironic that the current United States President wants to restrict immigration while also keen on making the country great again. At the same time the people who are in favour of Brexit in the UK think that Britain will rise again if immigration is restricted. It is a lovely idea, but the reality is that immigrants tend to work harder and become more successful than those who have lived in a place for generations. It is only natural. They have been uprooted and want to build something solid for themselves and their families and so they work hard, they take risks, they find solutions. This kind of mentality was a key element in the whole idea of “The American Dream”. If you want evidence of this, one can look to a think tank called New American Economy, which showed in a 2011 survey that 76 percent of all patents issued in the US had at least one non-US born person involved. Immigrants search for opportunities, they are more alert to changes, they have an entrepreneurial attitude and are willing to move things quickly. If you want a good example of this one needs only to look at a man called Walter Wolf.

He was the son of a German bricklayer and his Slovenian wife. Born in Graz in Austria, just a few days after World War II began, Wolf did not have an easy early life. His father was called up into the German Army and was captured by the Russians. The Wolf family did the obvious thing and moved to Slovenia, where his mother had family. But times were hard and he had to give up school early to work to help the family survive. Even so he lost his sister to malnutrition. He did jobs that others would not do, including the alarming task of dismantling hand grenades, which resulted in many deaths. Wolf survived. His father was not released from Russia until 1955, when Walter was 16. The family moved to Germany and he went back to school. He was fascinated by aviation and, once he had graduated, found a job at an aircraft factory – and learned to fly in his spare time. Once he had a licence he headed to the United States, aiming to live The American Dream. At the age of 20 he began working as a crop-duster, but there wasn’t much money in it and after a year he went to Canada, with only seven dollars in his pocket. His English was still poor but he began working on construction sites and learned the language by watching TV. Things began to improve. He was soon working as an elevator engineer, getting paid better money, flying occasionally and learning how to be a diver. In 1967 he became a Canadian citizen.

The diving work was for the construction industry and for pipelines and the company he worked for was called KD Marine. It was heavily in debt and eventually went out of business. Wolf went to the bank, asked for a $25,000 loan and bought the company and was soon developing KD Marine in the oil services industry. The firm did everything that oil companies did not want to do and Wolf even began trading crude oil from the Middle East, selling it to whoever wanted it. Very rapidly, he acquired all the toys that money can buy: a Lear Jet, a Bell Ranger helicopter, a Lamborghini Countach and a Rolls Royce. He married a Canadian nurse and started a family and began to travel. He moved the family to Europe in 1972 and had residences in London, Lugano and in Cannes. He could afford it. He was keen to go motor racing and early in 1975 Giampaolo Dallara mentioned him to Frank Williams, who was looking for money (as always) for his F1 team. Williams invited Wolf to the International Trophy at Silverstone in early April and Wolf began to help out. At the end of the year he was offered the assets of the Hesketh F1 team and asked Williams to join him. Williams decided it was the best thing to do and became an employee. The car (a Hesketh) was renamed the Wolf-Williams, but Walter Wolf was in charge. Things did not go well and at the end of the 1976 year Williams was “promoted” to a commercial role and Peter Warr was hired from Lotus to run the team. Harvey Postlethwaite went to work on a new car and Jody Scheckter was lured from Tyrrell. When the Wolf team went off to Argentina in 1977, Williams was left behind. To make matters worse, Wolf then won its very first race…

Williams decided it was time to depart and took Patrick Head with him to start a new team. Wolf won in Monaco and again in Canada. Money was not a problem and he also ran a CanAm team for Chris Amon, with Dallara providing a Wolf Dallara sports car. There would be Wolf Dallara Formula 3 cars in 1978 for Bobby Rahal, amongst others, and Rahal would make his F1 debut with Wolf at the end of that year. But the F1 cars were not competitive and Scheckter went off to Ferrari in 1979, to be replaced by a demotivated James Hunt, who quit that summer, opening the way for Keke Rosberg. By the end of 1979 Wolf had had enough, he sold the F1 team to Emerson Fittipaldi and dropped out of F1.

A little over a year later he sold KD Marine. His marriage broke up around the same time but he now began to wheel and deal in political influence in Canada, introducing important people to one another, while investing in businesses that others were running. He had the money to buy a 7,000-acre ranch in British Columbia and married and divorced a former Miss Austria and Barbara Stewart, a relative of the movie star James Stewart.

He was close to Canadian politician Brian Mulroney and introduced him to a German-Canadian businessman called Karl Heinz Schreiber but that went wrong in 1995 when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police accused Mulroney of having accepted payments from Schreiber in exchange for Air Canada buying a large number of passener jets from Airbus when he was Prime Minister.

Then in 2008 Wolf was caught up in a corruption scandal involving the Finnish firm Patria, which accused him of bribing Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa, in relation to arms deals. They both denied the accusations but the Finnish police issued an arrest warrant for Wolf, who protested his innocence. In 2014 Jansa was convicted, but Wolf argues that the $3 million he was paid was a legitimate consulting fee. The scandal lost Wolf a great deal of business and he threatened to sue the Slovenian government for $100 million after charges against him were laid. The problems are ongoing…

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 74
February 9, 2018 by Joe Saward

These days motorsport is divided into different disciplines and it is rare that a driver switches between them, particularly when rallying in concerned. Yes, we have seen Kimi Raikkonen and Robert Kubica both taking part in major rallying events but they haven’t won them. If you look back through history you will find quite a few F1 drivers who did a few rallies, or one-offs in their home countries. The list includes Leo Kinnunen (Finland’s first F1 driver), Mark Blundell, Martin Brundle, Derek Warwick and Patrick Tambay. Pedro Chaves did five WRC events, Carlos Reutemann did a couple, while lesser known names such as Torsten Palm, Eliseo Salazar and Ricardo Zunino all had a try. When it comes to off-road action racers have been better: both Jacky Ickx and Jean Louis Schlesser both won the Dakar Rally, while many others competed in the desert.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s things were a little blurred sometimes between sports car road races – such as Argentina’s famous turismo carretera, the Targa Florio and the Mille Miglia, and so one can say that Juan Manuel Fangio and others won races that were not unlike modern rallies, as did the likes of Stirling Moss, Peter Collins, Luigi Musso, Jo Bonnier, Wolfgang Von Trips, Jo Bonnier and Jo Siffert.

Former F1 team boss Gerard Larrousse, raced in F1 and sports cars but also won the French Rally Championship with an Alpine A110, not to mention scoring a victory on the Tour de Corse in 1969 and three second places on the Monte Carlo Rally in 1969, 1970 and 1972, so probably he comes to closest to being a Formula 1 driver who won a major international rally, even though he did only one F1 race…

But then, of course, one must also remember the strange French rally called the Ronde Cévenole, one of the best known events in France in the 1960s and 1970s. It started in 1959 as a fairly traditional rally, using the town of Alès as its base and then later moved to Nîmes, but then in 1967 the organisers decided on a new idea: a course that went around a 42 km road circuit 10 times, between the towns of Le Vigan and l’Esperou. If that sounds like a road race, one can argue it, but it remained a rally, at least officially. What made it unique as a rally was that from 1969 until 1980 it took place with the cars having no co-drivers. This meant that some of the teams build special cars just for the one event.

In early June 1969 the French rallying fraternity gathered for the event with Jean Vinatier and Jean-Pierre Nicolas in their Alpine A110s, Bernard Fiorentino in a Simca and Jean-François Piot in a Ford Escort. They found themselves up against a 27-year-old Italian called Ignazio Giunti, at the wheel of a Alfa Romeo T33/2 prototype, entered by the Alfa Romeo factory. And, much to the surprise of everyone Giunti won. The event would become a round of the French rally championship and then from 1980 to 1992 it was called the Rallye des Garrigues, and was a round of the European Rally Championship, but with co-drivers again.

In that era the winners included Michèle Moutonin an Audi Quattro (1981), Guy Fréquelin (Opel Manta) 1983 and 1985, François Chatriot in a Renault 5 Maxi Turbo in 1986 and then in a BMW M3 in 1988 and 1990. The biggest winner of all, however, was Jean Claude Andruet, who won no fewer than five occasions (1970, 1972, 1976, 1979 and 1984).

A few months after his victory, Giunti was recruited by Ferrari and raced to fourth place in the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps on his Formula 1 debut. He also raced sports cars to good effect but early in 1971, driving the brand new Ferrari 312P, he was leading the 1971 Buenos Aires 1000kms race when he collided with the Matra which Jean-Pierre Beltoise was attempting to push back to the pits, after running out of fuel on the circuit. Giunti never had a chance…

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Fact: 75
February 10, 2018 by Joe Saward

John Octave Claes (not Octave John Claes as a lot of sources say) was the son of a Belgian civil engineer Jean Octave Claes. His mother, Ellen Knoth, the daughter of a stained glass window designer. The couple were married in Fulham in 1908, but young John did not come along until 1916. He had a colourful childhood, by all accounts, living in different countries but then settled at Lord Williams’s Grammar School in Thame, Oxfordshire, where he was an accomplished sportsman, and where he learned to play the trumpet.

He left school in 1934 and moved to London, to study economics at the Regent Street Polytechnic – and to play jazz…

Very quickly, he found himself as a part of the busy London scene, playing in a band with Max Jones then with Billy Mason at the Tufnell Park Palais before moving on to play with the resident band at the Nest, a basement club in Kingly Street in the West End. At 20 he signed a contract to be a session musician with Decca Records. Then in 1937 he set off to tour Europe with Johnny Pillitz’s Orchestra, playing with Valaida Snow, before returning to London and recording with Gerry Moore. He was back in Europe later in the year, to play with Coleman Hawkins in Holland and then joined Eddie Meenk’s Bank in the Hague before drifting on to play with Johnny Fresco in Holland in the winter of 1938-1939. But music was not an easy business and so he also found work as a crane operator, working with his father.

After a period playing with Jack Kluger’s Band in Belgium he went back to Britain, just weeks before the German invasion of Belgium and France in 1940. He joined the house band at the Boogie Woogie Club and then went on a UK tour with Teddy Joyce. The following year he started his own band. Johnny Claes and the Clae Pigeons was a popular dance band during the war years, resident in a number of London clubs, depending where the bombs had fallen, it’s membership changing as the musicians were called up, or sent off to play with the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA). Among those involved were a young Ronnie Scott and a drummer called Alfred Fingleston, better known in motor racing circles as Les Leston. Claes was signed to EMI and to promote the band also appeared in several movies, including George Formby’s immediate post-war flop George in Civvy Street.

Johnny returned to Belgium in 1946 and opened his own club at Blankenberge, a seaside resort near Zeebrugge. He gave up playing, hoping to make money from jazz as an entrepreneur, he started writing articles for jazz magazines and set up an import- export business. He was 30 when he discovered motor racing in 1947, after agreeing to travel with a small group of British drivers going to the French GP in Lyons – to act as their translator.

He was enthralled and in May 1948 made his debut in a Talbot-Lago sports car, owned by Louis Rosier, in the Grand Prix des Frontières in Chimay. He finished third behind Guy Mairesse in a Delahaye and Henri Louveau in a Delage. He then met the veteran Belgian racing driver Emile Cornet, and the two men agreed to race Cornet’s Veritas Meteor sports car in the Paris 12 Hours. This led to the establishment of Ecurie Belge, which soon acquired a Talbot-Lago T26C Grand Prix car and a Veritas F2, plus a second Meteor sports car. To look after the cars Claes hired a racing mechanic from Milan. Roberto Bianchi moved to Belgium with his family. Claes was a regular in F1 by 1950 with his Talbot, but never scored a point, although he did well in non-championship races and in sports car racing. His first win came in the 1950 Grand Prix des Frontières at Chimay, at the wheel of an HWM. He won again the following year in a Gordini but that year he suffered a nasty accident at San Remo, in which a marshal was killed. He did occasional races for factory teams and won the 1953 Liège-Rome-Liège Rally and his class at Le Mans in 1954.

He was third at the dreadful Le Mans 24 Hours in 1955 in an Ecurie Belge Jaguar, but by then he was ill, having somehow contracted tuberculosis. He was also struggling for money and this led to the decision to sell Écurie Belge to rival Jacques Swaters, who merged the team with his Écurie Francorchamps to form Écurie Nationale Belge (ENB).

The following year, at 39, Claes died but that was not the end of the story. Roberto Bianchi’s two sons Luciano (known as Lucien) and Mauro both raced for ENB in F1 events and Lucien went on to win Sebring in 1962 in a Ford GT40, which he shared with Jo Bonnier. He eventually landed a regular F1 ride with Cooper-BRM in 1968. He finished third at Monaco and that same year shared a GT40 with Pedro Rodriguez to win Le Mans. That same weekend Mauro crashed an Alpine at the event and suffered serious burns, which ended his racing career and left him badly scarred. Less than a year later Lucien died at Le Mans, testing an Alfa Romeo T33.

Mauro would settle in Provence and in time became a naturalised Frenchman. His son Philippe was barred from motor racing as a result of the family’s misfortunes with racing cars. Instead he opened a kart track. But as soon as his feet could touch the pedals of a kart, his son Jules began racing…

[zoran59]

 

.....
... Lucien went on to win Sebring in 1962 in a Ford GT40, which he shared with Jo Bonnier.

.....

 

 

!?

Autor ove serije clanaka ima dobre i zanimljive informacije, no nesme mu se previse verovati.

 

1962. Ford GT40 jos nije postojao. Prema Bonnierovoj biografiji, on i Bianchi jesu te godine pobedili u Sebringu, ali u Ferrariju 250.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Da, ovo je izgleda doslo s Vikipedije:
 

Bianchi also raced touring cars, sports cars and rally cars, being successful in all disciplines, his biggest victories coming in the 1968 24 Hours of Le Mans, behind the wheel of a Ford GT40 with Pedro Rodríguez and at Sebring in 1962 with Jo Bonnier.

 

Inace, ispravio je u medjuvremenu u clanku:

 

 

Lucien went on to win Sebring in 1962 in a Ferrari, which he shared with Jo Bonnier.

Edited by Rad-oh-yeah?, 10 February 2018 - 23:29.