1234 replies to this topic

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

27 February 2018
Fascinating F1 Fact: 93
Joe Saward
 

There are a number of convoluted tales about the man who was known as Rudy Cleye. He said he was the grandson of the founder of the Adler automobile company, Heinrich Kleyer, and that he went to America in the 1940s after an adventurous time escaping from the Nazis. There are no immigration records of anyone called Cleye or Kleyer arriving in the US in the 1940s… Another story suggests that he was living under an assumed name when he went to the US, having stolen the dog tags from an American GI at the end of the war. Whatever the case, he appeared in the United States under the name Rudy Cleye.

Rudy said that when he arrived in America he had only $20 in his pocket and believing that both of his parents had died (which later turned out not to be the case) and he started out working for the Cabot Lodge family before moving on to be the maitre d' at Billy Rose's famed Diamond Horseshoe, a nightclub in the basement of the Paramount Hotel, near Times Square in New York, a place famed for its vaudeville revues. He then moved on Bill Miller's Riviera, a top post-war nightclub, overlooking the Hudson River in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After that he joined Lerner, one of the oldest women's apparel chains in the United States, and that took him out to California, where 10 years after arriving in the US he bought the Blarney Castle, a celebrated Hollywood restaurant and landmark, in league with the wealthy landowner Richard J. O'Neill. This project was a great success and they soon had a three storey annex and another restaurant nearby called the Black Forest. With money coming in, Rudy turned to racing, although he was already in his mid-forties and the Blarney Castle quickly became a meeting place for the sports car racing fraternity in southern California. Rudy raced an Arnold Bristol and later upgraded to a Mercedes 300. He was nicknamed “the Flying Dutchman" and was sometimes reckoned to have been Swiss. No-one really knew.

He launched a concours d'elegance in parking lots adjacent to his restaurant, then began looking for a place to build a racing circuit in southern California. He was friends with a builder called Jim Peterson and together they began looking for lannd in the desert, using friends with private planes to take photographs of possible properties. In 1956 they found an isolated 600-acre turkey ranch, seven miles east of Riverside, not far from March Air Foce base, in an area known as the Moreno Valley.

The town of Riverside had been ranchland before it was acquired in 1870 by John North, a high-minded abolitionist. His followers soon planted oranges and the region rapidly became very prosperous, if remote. Wealthy folk liked it, however, and soon in addition to big houses, the area boasted California's first golf course and its first polo field. It became a chic place to visit and its Mission Inn became a stopping off place for movie stars, presidents and even royalty.

The circuit land was anything but glamorous, but it was cheap and it was easier to get the necessary building permits. Cleye had some backers and so Peterson went off to Europe to study the design of racing circuits and then returned and started to trace out a design on the land, using a Jeep. His goal was to create a track that could be used for all kinds of motorsport, with a road course, an oval and a drag strip. He also wanted to build a lake with picnic facilities and a campsite. The permits were time-limited and when they were coming close to expiry, Cleyes still did not have the money he needed and so he turned to John Edgar, who ran the Los Angeles based John Edgar Racing team with driver Carroll Shelby. Edgar agreed to put up $100,000 to build the basic part of the planned track, which featured a 1.1-mile long straight and a challenging series of corner with some interesting elevation changes.  The full road course was 3.2 miles in length.

The opening event was held in September 1957 and drew a promising crowd of 30,000 for a sports car race won by Richie Ginther, with Dan Gurney winning the supporting event. A year later, with sponsorship (and publicity) from the Los Angeles Times, the sports car event drew 75,000 people, who saw the local heroes battling with international drivers such as Jo Bonnier and Jean Behra. There was an even bigger crowd a year later when Phil Hill won a race that featured Stirling Moss and Dan Gurney. Things looked to be going well, but the track was still losing money and the original backers needed to sell. Oil baron Ed Pauley became involved. He was one of the owners of the LA Rams football team and sent Les Richter, one of his players who worked for him in the offseason, to take a look at the track. It was not used for most of the year and was in a poor state, but Richter saw opportunities and set out to find some more partners to buy the track with Pauley.

In an effort to attract interest the track decided to run two big races in 1960: the LA Times Grand Prix sports car race, and the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix. The first drew a big crowd as usual but the F1 race attracted only 25,000. It was won by Moss, but it was a financial disaster. It took time, but by 1963 Richter had put together a new consortium, which included the entertainer Bob Hop,  LA Rams shareholders Pauley and Fred Levy and Robert Petersen, a publisher who would go on to set up the Petersen Automobile Museum. Richter then decided to embrace NASCAR and the Motor Trend 500 events at the track, won four times by Dan Gurney, were a success. Gurney was also successful when Indycars first visited the facility in 1967.

Richter then invented the International Race of Champions so that fans could see the champions in different categories competing against one another. But by the beginning of the 1980s the owners were keen to sell and in 1984 decided to take up an offer from Texas-based developer Fritz Duda, a racing commentator who was felt to be a person who would keep the track alive. But as Los Angeles spread so the area went up in value and in 1988 Duda sold out and the former race track was ploughed up to create the Towngate development, including a big shopping mall and homes, apartments and parks.

Richter departed to work for NASCAR, where he spent nearly 10 years before being hired by Roger Penske to oversee the construction of the California Speedway on the site of the old Kaiser Steel mill in Fontana...

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

28 February 2018
Racing Grand Prix cars in the snow...
Joe Saward




I’m not in Barcelona but my spies down there report it is snowing at the Circuit de Catalunya this morning, which means that one way or the other it is going to be hard to get any meaningful work done today. Even without snow, the temperatures are so low that getting the Pirellis switched on is a major achievement and keeping temperature in them is equally tough. This is bad for all the engineering types but could be a bonus for race fans as it will make the early part of the season less predictable if teams have less data and don’t know how to optimise their cars in all conditions. Testing in February and March is, of course, not ideal when one is in Europe, but going somewhere hotter costs a great deal more money and while the big teams would be happy to do that, it’s not really fair for those struggling with budget restraints.

The launches have revealed a relative paucity if sonsorship across the board in F1 and the problems look like getting worse when one hears that Williams is going g to lose Martini at the end of the year. It was never a big deal in financial terms, compared to other sponsorships, but it looked good. The problem seems to be that F1’s switch to more payTV has reduced the number of eyeballs and so the sport is less attractive to sponsors. It probably didn’t help that F1 has a reputation for burning money, which sponsors don’t like, and it’s failure to engage with social media has certainly not helped matters. Liberty Media is in the process of revamping the sport and while some teams are going to object, no one is bigger than the sport and if some of the big teams have to do, then do be it. Sport needs to be fair. I gave up watching cycling and athletics because you just didn’t know whether some of the players were drugged up to their eyeballs. F1 needs to be fair and patently it is not. Any new Ferrari-led series would obviously be the same because why quit a very successful sport if you’re going to be going to one where you get less? And that’s Ferrari’s problem. In order to do something else they would need to invest a ton of money (and shareholders are not going to be keen that). It could not be a World Championship and the FIA cannot afford to break its 100-year commercial deal because the damages would put it out of business. A new championship would not be up and running until years after Sergio Marchionne retires and who is going to support all the teams in the interim? It’s all poppycock and anyone with the vaguest clue knows it is not possible. We went through this whole process in F1 38 years ago and things have become much more difficult since those days. Bernie Ecclestone says Ferrari is serious but he knows it cannot work. So why is he saying anything? Just to be troublesome? Or just to be in the newspapers and not to feel like a man who is no longer powerful in the sport he built. He’s got his money (unless HMRC can prise it from him) and it would be so much wiser to go and enjoy retirement and not have to through the Sunset Boulevard scenario. If people would stop wasting their energy on all this crap and would instead focus on what the sport needs to do, everyone would be better off in the longer term, because F1 might become sexier again and bring back the sponsors.

In the meantime, I'd like to point out a little history from the 1930s which today's F1 heroes (haloes and all) might like to remember. It was Pau in 1933, which was held in mid-February. It was snowing but the drivers got together, had a meeting and decided that if the track could be cleared they should go racing, with a little bit of salt sprinkled around to prevent any ice. The snow quickly turned to slush and with the salt the drivers found themselves being sprayed with the stuff, which was fairly unpleasant, but they battled on through the snow storm although the snow stopped after about 25 laps. The strange thing was that the race saw two Algerian-born drivers Marcel Lehoux and Guy Moll, both in Bugattis, finish 1-2. The result remains the best ever international Grand Prix result for an African country. ironic when one considers that most of Algeria is covered with hot desert.

 
A bilo je takodje i ovo:
 
​

A Superswede caught out by the snow!




Ever wondered if there was once a race impacted by snow in the history of Formula 1?

There's no record of a flurry wreaking havoc on a world championship Grand Prix, but the weather at the International Trophy at Silverstone in 1973 certainly through a spanner into several drivers' works.

That year, the traditional early season non-championship event was held in very cold temperatures. Ronnie Peterson had put himself in command in the opening stages of the race and looked set for a victorious home run until an icy wind turned into flurries of snow and blew the Lotus driver off at Becketts!

Peterson eventually recovered to hold second place while Jackie Stewart's Tyrrell ran unchallenged to the checkered flag.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

28 February 2018
Fascinating F1 Fact: 94
Joe Saward

You don't often hear people saying: "You remember when Subaru was in Formula 1?" One associates the Japanese car manufacturer with zippy blue and yellow rally cars, run by Prodive and driven with much success by Colin McRae, Richard Burns and Petter Solberg. Scoobies go rallying. If you look back to the early days the first motorsport activity was actually in California at the start of the 1970s, where Jack Coyle, who owned the Subaru dealership in San Bernardino, built a rallying version of the Subaru FF-1, which was driven in the celebrated off-road race, the Baja 500 by Pete Petrowsky, one of his salesmen. The folk in Japan were intrigued by this and the following year Subaru's Noriyuki Koseki entered a Subaru GL Coupe, developed in Japan, in the same event.

In Japan Koseki and Ryuichiro Kuze, the chief of Subaru's product planning division, soon formed the Subaru Rally Team Japan and Kuze himself competed in several Southern Cross Rally events in Australia, before the team began to enter Subaru Leone RX Turbos in the Safari Rally with various well known drivers, notably Ari Vatanen, Shekhar Mehta, Per Eklund and Possum Bourne.

At the time the company's motorsport activities were still of little importance but in 1988 Kuze and Koseki established Subaru Tecnica International (STI), with the support of company president Toshihiro Takima, a banker who had been put in charge of the business and wanted the firm to have a more dynamic image. STI began work to create a relationship in rallying with Prodrive, which would eventually result in much success with the Subaru World Rally Team, but Takima was an ambitious fellow and having seen the success that Honda had enjoyed in 1986 and 1987 with Williams, thought that Subaru could do the same. Kuze's plan was to go to Italy and talk to Carlo Chiti, a famous engine designer with a history at Ferrari and Alfa Romeo. After Alfa Romeo quit F1, Chiti set up his own engine business, called Motori Moderni, and built turbocharged V6 engines for the Minardi team. The results were not great and at the end of 1987 Chiti has withdrawn for F1. Kuze arrived and asked Chiti to design him a boxer engine for the new normally-aspirated 3.5-litre formula. The flat-12 had been a successful engine with Ferrari in the 1970s but when ground-effect arrived, the low and wide layout meant that it was in the way of the air flows required for ground-effect. Chiti argued that the low centre of gravity was still a huge advantage and with ground-effect being curbed by regulations and the new rules, a flat-12 might still be competitive. A deal was struck and with research and development being paid by Wacaol, a Japanese underwear manufacturer which had long been a supporter of the Dome team, the Subaru 1235 engine was designed. It was first shown in September 1988, which suggested that Chiti had already had something on the drawing board. Soon afterwards Minardi signed a deal with STI to do the development work and in the summer of 1989 a Minardi-Subaru was seen testing in Italy.

But then Enzo Coloni arrived on the scene. Coloni was a racer in the mould of Eddie Jordan and Tom Walkinshaw. He enjoyed his nickname "Il Lupo", the wolf, and his team moved up through the junior formulae and entered F1 in 1987 with a car designed by former Dallara man Roberto Ori. Coloni's efforts in 1987 and 1988 were underwhelming and so Enzo swooped on the troubled AGS team and lured away half the staff, including the chief designer Christian Vanderpleyn. The result was the Coloni C3 which showed some potential in the hands of Pierre-Henri Raphanel and Roberto Moreno in the latter part of 1989.

Enzo then decided that the best thing to do was to sell the team to someone because he did not have the money to go on. Subaru was an obvious target and the Japanese were convinced that having their own team was the best way to make a big impact. Coloni stayed on as Vice-President under Subaru appointee Yoshio Takaoka, one of the company's rally drivers from the Safari years. The team hired Bertrand Gachot to drive and engineer Paul Burgess was taken on to refine Vanderpleyn's car. The whole thing was a disaster. The engine was overweight and underpowered and in May Coloni quit, after Subaru bought his remaining 49 percent, hoping to get full control of the team. Burgess convinced Vanderpleyn to rejoin the team but in July the embarrassed Subaru withdrew, sold the whole team back to Coloni and walked away. The engine was replaced with a Cosworth but the result was nothing special. The team stumbled on a while before Coloni sold it in the autumn of 1991 to a shoe salesmen called Andrea Sassetti, which is another whole story…

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Hm, mislio sam da sam postovao juce, sad vidim da nema - juce je Mariu Andretiju (i naravno njegovom bratu blizancu Aldu) bio 78. rodjendan!

 

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

1 March 2018
Fascinating F1 Fact: 95
Joe Saward


Parklands Avenue in Lillington, a suburb of Leamington Spa, is a quiet and unassuming tree-lined road, with semi-detached brick houses, built post-war with gardens front and back. As was the style at the time, each has its own garage. Back in the spring of 1970, however, one of these garages housed a secret: a mock-up of a new Formula 1 car.  The car would win the World Championship the following year. The curtain-twitchers of Parkland Avenue might have guessed something was afoot if they had been alert early one evening when Derek Gardner, the house owner, arrived with Jackie Stewart in his car. The two men hurried inside, spent an hour doing a seat-fitting in the garage, and then Stewart was driven back to Coventry Airport, five miles away and flown back to Goodwood by helicopter, where he was due to continue with a Dunlop tyre test in his Matra F2 car the following day.


A wooden mock-up to avoid arousing suspicion

No-one asked where Stewart had been and no-one spotted him in Leamington Spa, although Stewart says that he overheard someone at the airport saying: "Isn't that Jackie Stewart?" and another person replying: "Yeah right, in Coventry!" Gardner went back to work on a drawing board in the spare bedroom and continued to build the mock-up downstairs in the garage. He didn't want to ring alarm bells by having a monocoque built from aluminium and so the original was made from wood (right). The drawings were marked with the name "Esspe", which stood for SP, or Special Project. Gardner procured prototype parts from a local machine shop and bodywork from a fiberglass company in nearby Coventry. He even used some strands of carbonfibre to brace the nose, learning how to use the new material from a lecturer at Coventry Technical College…

It was a story that went back to a year to 1968 when Matra designer Bernard Boyer asked Harry Ferguson Research in Coventry to design and manufacture a four-wheeled-drive system for a car which was designated Matra MS84. Gardner did the design work and as a result met Ken Tyrrell, who was running a team with Matra-Cosworths for Stewart. Tyrrell was impressed by Gardner and later that year rang him and asked him if he would like to design the first Tyrrell F1 car. Gardner and Tyrrell met at Henley on Thames, agreed terms and Gardner left Ferguson and started work in secret for Tyrrell. Ken had insisted that the car be ready for the International Gold Cup at Oulton Park on August 22, so Gardner had little time.

At the time the Tyrrell F1 team consisted of just 18 people, six of whom travelled to the races as well as working in the Tyrrell workshop, a large wooden shed, built from two army huts which Tyrrell had bought and transported from Aldershot to his wood yard in Ockham in the early 1960s. Gardner has never been there until the secret Tyrrell F1 design was signed off and it was necessary to send out the work to sub-contractors such as Maurice Gomm's metalworking business in Old Woking, which built the monocoques, Jack Knight Engineering which did the machining, Aeroplane & Motor Aluminium Castings which provide the a wheels, Laystall Engineering which did the axles and so on. Despite this, the car was still a secret when it appeared at Oulton Park. The first event was not a great success but Stewart set the fastest lap, which was promising. A month later after the car had been tested the team appeared at Mont-Tremblant in Canada where Stewart took by a tenth, ahead of Jacky Icky's Ferrari. He retired from the lead after 32 laps. He was second on the grid and led but retired in Watkins Glen and was on the front row in Mexico as well but retired after hitting a stray dog. Stewart was on pole and finished second to Mario Andretti's Ferrari in South Africa in March 1971 but by then Gardner had reworked the car in a number of areas and it was rebadged as the Tyrrell 003. Stewart and his team-mate François Cevert won seven of the remaining 10 races. Stewart won the Drivers' title and Tyrrell won the Constructors'. Lotus would fight back in 1972 but Gardner's 006 would allow Stewart and Tyrrell to win the titles again in 1973.

Two World Championships in your first three attempts as a Formula 1 car designer is a pretty spectacular record… in any era.

Gardner was an engineer who specialized in the complex world of transmissions. Born in 1931 in Leamington Spa, he grew up in nearby Warwick. Passionate about machinery, particularly aeroplanes, he was studying aerodynamics at Coventry Technical College when he started working for Constant Speed Airscrews Ltd in Warwick. He was too young to fight in World War II, but was soon called up for National Service, which he served two years with the Royal Air Force, during which time he built his own car, based on an Austin Seven. After he was demobbed, he joined Hobbs Transmission in Warwick (run by David Hobbs's father) and worked on its Mechamatic gearbox, a fully automatic transmission, which was originally fitted to a BSA Lanchester Sprite. He then concentrated on the transmission system for a new kind of landing craft.  The firm went out of business in 1960 and Gardner moved on to join Harry Ferguson, who was leading the way with four-wheel-drive with his Massey-Ferguson tractors. He helped with the transmission used in the Ferguson F1 car and then a system used by Novi in its gas turbine car in Indycar racing. It was this project that led to the approach from Matra.

In 1975 Gardner saw that the F1 regulations did not have a rule that restricted the cars to four wheels and concluded that to reduce the frontal area while offering a similar amount of mechanical grip. Another top secret project was created, the result being the Tyrrell P34 six-wheeler. The race won the 1976 Swedish Grand Prix in the hands of Jody Scheckter. By then, however, he was fed up with F1 and when he was offered the role of director of research and development by the Borg-Warner clutch company he decided to leave the team. He would go on to a career which involved designing a wide range of machines, including boats, microlight aircraft and electric bikes before he retired in the 1990s. He died at the age of 79 in 2011, a man who never truly got the recognition for what he had achieved...

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

2 March 2018
Fascinating F1 Fact: 96
Joe Saward


Think of the most famous British-built racing motorcycle… the Norton Manx probably. Think of the first British F1 team to win the Constructors' World Championship… Vanwall in 1958. Think also of the much-loved Hillman Imp, the Rootes Group's answer to the British Motor Corporation's Mini, which sold half a million units between its launch in 1963 and 1976 when production ended.

What did they all have in common?

To answer that question one must look to Eastern Europe. It's a confusing place for many people because over the years borders change and countries come and go. Ferdinand Porsche was born in Bohemia, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but is today in the Czech Republic. Mario Andretti was born in a village that was then part of Italy but is now in Croatia. And so it goes on.

In 1910 in what was then deemed to be Russia, a Polish military medical officer Stanislaw Kuzmicki and his wife, a music teacher, had a son whom they called Leo. At the time Poland was under the rule of the Russian Empire and its men were regularly conscripted into the Imperial Russian Army, but when Leo was nine Poland became a sovereign state and he became a Polish citizen. He did his national service with the air force and then attended Lwow University from 1933 until 1938, studying mechanical engineering and then staying on to gain a Master's degree, while researching diesel engine development and lecturing undergraduates. He would probably have stayed on and gained a doctorate if Poland had not been invaded in 1939 by Nazi Germany, from the west, and Soviet Russia, from the east. He was called up into the air force but the battles lasted only a month. Kuzmicki was captured by the Russians and taken away to Moscow. In many ways he was lucky. The Soviets executed tens of thousands of Polish soldiers because they considered Poland to be a subversive state that belonged to Russia. Kuzmicki was handed over to the NKVD, the Russian secret police, and after lengthy interrogation was sent off to a forced labour camp - a gulag - in the Arctic Circle in Siberia. It is reckoned that somewhere between 12 and 20 million people died in the gulags under Joseph Stalin. Ninety percent of the people sent to the camps died,a dn most did not survive more than two years. They worked in freezing conditions on starvation rations and no-one expected those who were sent to Siberia to ever return.

Kuzmicki realized that if he stayed there, he would likely die and so he took the decision to escape and take his chances. He walked south being arrested once during his journey but escaping again. He kept walking all the way through Siberia and what is now Kazakhstan to the city of Tashkent, in modern Kyrgyzstan. From there he walked on to Samarkand, in what has become Uzbekistan. Finally, he reached British India and the city of Bombay. This 4,000-mile trek, living off the land, would cause him health problems for the rest of his life - but he was alive. He was sent by the British on a liner to Liverpool, arriving in June 1942. His older brother Mieczysław, who was serving as a navigator with the RAF in the Polish 301 Bomber Squadron, vouched for him and so Leo was able to join the RAF and serve as a flight engineer. He was never a fighter pilot, as some stories suggest. Mieczysław was killed in action in 1944 when his Liberator crashed in Brindisi, Italy, returning from a special mission dropping arms to the Polish resistance.

Leo remained with the Royal Air Force until 1947 when one of his fellow officers Jack Ball asked him if he would like to join the AJW motorcycle company, which Ball had just bought and had set up factory in Bournemouth. Kuzmicki was a director of the firm and the chief designer. His first designs were the Grey Fox, a motorcycle powered by a 494cc JAP engine and the Speed Fox, a 500cc racing machine. Kuzmicky obviously made an impression because he was offered a job by Norton Motors Ltd in Bracebridge Street, Birmingham.

There are many stories about Kuzmicki's life that are not true, including the tale of how he was working at Norton as a cleaner when it was discovered that he was an engine researcher. The reality was that he was hired because of his skills, but his role was deliberately kept quiet because, in the paranoid Cold War world of the times, he was scared that the KGB might come after him. He chose to say little and let others take the credit for his work.

His development of the one-cylinder Manx Norton engines resulted in Geoff Duke winning the Isle of Man TT in 1950 and Norton win the 350cc and 500cc World Championships in 1951 and the 350cc in 1952. Kuzmicki married a local girl Nancy Taylor and settled in Birmingham. But then, as the new multi-cylinder European bikes began to outperform the Nortons, Duke left to join Gilera and Kuzmicki was asked by one of the Norton directors, Tony Vandervell, if he would consider moving to Vanwall in Acton, west London, to be the company's chief engineer of racing.

Vandervell had run modified Ferraris in 1952 and 1953, under the Thinwall Special banner, but he wanted to build his own Grand Prix cars and Kuzmicki was asked to design a two-litre engine. F1 cars in that period were running to F2 regulations and Vanwall was rather caught out when the rules changed in 1954 to 2.5-litre engines.

Kuzmicki followed the ideas which he had developed at Norton and created the Vanwall four-cylinder by effectively placing four 500cc cylinders in a row and integrating them together. The car, built by Cooper, was debuted at the British GP in 1954 and it was, not surprisingly, underpowered compared to the opposition. Kuzmicki worked to stretch the engine to 2.2-litres and then 2.5-litres, and by the end of 1955 it was clear that the engine was competitive. The problem was that the chassis was not and so Vandervell hired Colin Chapman and Frank Costin to build a new car for Kuzmicki's engine. This resulted in the firm's first non-championship F1 win early in 1956 with Stirling Moss at Syracuse.

The car was developed that winter and Moss, Tony Brooks and Stuart Lewis-Evans joined the team and Vanwall began winning World Championship races in 1957, leading to the Constructors' World Championship in 1958.

By then Kuzmicki had moved on, becoming the Deputy Chief Engineer at Humber Ltd in Coventry, where he headed the design team of what would become the Hillman Imp engine, derived from the 750cc Coventry Climax FWM. Humber would be bought in 1964 by the Rootes Group but three years after that it became part of Chrysler Europe, after which he was appointed head of engine and transmission design. In 1968 he moved to a cottage in the village of Preston Capes, to the north of Silverstone, in preparation for his retirement in 1975, although he continued to work as a consultant for the Octel research firm in Bletchley and as a consultant to Hesketh Motorcycles in 1981. He died a year later at 72.

The Cold War meant that Kuzmicki always shied away from publicity lest someone realize who he was…

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

3 March 2018
Fascinating F1 Fact: 97
Joe Saward


Racers come from different backgrounds, but the majority of them have at least some money behind them, although sometimes the cash comes from unusual sources.

It is a little known fact that Stirling Moss's father Alfred was the first dentist to compete in the Indianapolis 500.

I know that sounds unlikely but it is nonetheless the truth. Alfred Ethelbert Moss, the son of Abraham Moss (who was born Moses rather than Moss, but changed the name, presumably to seem less Jewish and more English), was born in London in 1896. The family was fairly well off and that allowed Alfred to start competing in 1921, when he was 25, at the wheel of an AV Bicar, a 1000cc cyclecar that was built at the time in Teddington, in the Essex Motor Club Winter Trial through Epping Forest. In March 1923 he entered a Crouch-Anzani in the Junior Car Club's Trial at Brooklands and that season won some minor races at the celebrated speedway. He then managed to convince his grandfather that Indianapolis was the best place in the world to learn about dental bridgework and enrolled at the Indiana Dental College in order to study during 1924. However, it seems that the primary purpose of his visit was to race in the Indy 500 and on May 30 1924, Moss was at the wheel of one of the 22 cars that lined up for the big race at the Brickyard. This was one of the three "Fronty-Fords" entered by Indianapolis Ford dealers Hale Barber and Clarence Warnock, built by the Chevrolet brothers under the Frontenac name. The cars were raced by Moss, Bill Hunt and Fred Harder and finished 14th, 16th, and 17th. Alfred would go on to race at various other dirt tracks in the course of 1924 and 1925 before returning home, a better dentist.

Back in the UK, he built himself a Fronty Ford from a Model T chassis and raced it at Brooklands winning the Short Handicap at the August Bank Holiday Meeting in the summer of 1925. The problem was that his dental business was getting more and more successful and he did not have time to race. He then complicated matters still further by marrying the feisty Scot Aileen Craufurd in 1928 and at the end of 1929 they had their first child, Stirling Craufurd Moss. The couple started out living in Thames Ditton but then moved to Bray in Berkshire, where they invested in a riverside mansion known as Long White Cloud, where the children had a governess and the parents went rallying with Lagondas and Alfa Romeos. Stirling learned to drive on the land around the house, which had originally been owned by one of Queen Victoria's ladies-in-waiting and later was where Edward Elgar wrote several famous pieces of music.

In the late 1930s Stirling attended Haileybury Junior School in the next village of Clewer before being sent off to board at Haileybury College, near Hertford, in 1943. Alfred Moss, in the meantime, designed an indoor air raid shelter which was adopted as the Morrison Shelter, replacing the basic Anderson Shelter that was used early in the war.

Stirling did not enjoy the school experience, being bullied because of his Jewish background and he would leave in the summer of 1946, after finishing his School Certificate examinations. But during the last year he was joined in the school by a youngster called Michael Parkes, the son of a Royal Air Force officer who after the war had been appointed the managing director of the Alvis car company.

Moss could not wait to go racing (and his sister Pat also took up motorsport and became a leading rally driver), while Parkes stayed on until 1949, excelling at rowing and rugby and then joined the Rootes Group as an apprentice. Both he and Moss would climb the ladder to Formula 1, Moss making his debut at the age of 21 and enjoying most of his considerable success in the late 1950s, finishing second in the World Championship in 1955, 1956, 1957 and 1958. His career was effectively ended with a crash at Goodwood in 1962, which left him in a coma for a month and partially paralysed for six months.

His father continued to dabble in the sport and established, starting the British Racing Partnership (BRP) with Ken Gregory in 1957 to run cars for Stirling when he wasn't racing for a factory, using customer cars from Cooper and Lotus. The team changed name several times becoming Yeoman Credit Racing in 1960 and then UDT Laystall Racing in 1961 and 1962 before attempting to build its own cars in 1963, using designer Tony Robinson, powered by a BRM engine and being known as the BRP-BRM. The team competed in 13 Grands Prix and scored 11 World Championship points - and even ran a couple of cars in the Indy 500 in 1965. After that Moss faded from the racing scene. He died of cancer in 1972.

Moss's old schoolmate, Mike Parkes, made it to Formula 1 in 1966, at the age of 34, after working his way up as a test driver and development engineer for road car companies and a parallel career in sports cars. Ferrari found itself short of drivers after John Surtees quit early in 1966 and Parkes made his debut at Reims, finishing an impressive second to Jack Brabham. He was second again at Monza later that autumn and in 1967 was fifth in Holland. It was a remarkable career but fate intervened at Spa when he crashed at high speed at the exit of Blanchimont after losing control on oil and broke both of his legs. After a long recovery he settled into a management role at Scuderia Filipinetti before joining Lancia in 1974 to lead the development programme of the Ferrari-engined Lancia Stratos.

In the summer of 1977 he was killed driving in a rain storm in a head-on collision with a truck, near Turin.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

3 March 2018
Fascinating F1 Fact: 98
Joe Saward


Nanni Galli's impact on Formula 1 was not really related to his driving. He came from a family which had set up a business in Prato, a town in Tuscany, near Florence, in 1932, selecting and preparing high quality wool, which was then sold to clothing manufacturers. The business was a success and soon expanded into the finest lamb's wool, cashmere, angora and even silk. The family had money and so Nanni - which was short for Giovanni - raced karts as a teenager before switching to cars when he was 23 years old.

Initially he raced a Steyr-Puch befor switching to a Mini Cooper. Good performances led to him being recruited in 1966 to race a GTA for Autodelta, the Alfa Romeo factory team. He tried his hand at single-seaters with a Formula 2 Brabham in 1967 but it was with Alfa Romeo that he made his mark, finishing second on the Targa Florio in 1968 with Ignazio Giunti and fourth at Le Mans. In 1969 he joined Tecno in Formula 2, alongside Francois Cevert who was third in the championship, while Galli was seventh. That year he did a number of sports car races with Matra. In 1970 he tried to qualify an old McLaren at the Italian GP (and failed), but his sports car career continued to go well with second at Sebring in 1971.

That year he raced a March F1 car to fifth in the Jochen Rindt Memorial Trophy race at Hockenheim and then made his World Championship debut in Holland, with a March-Alfa Romeo, while also racing for Tecno in F2. He would go to race for the Tecno F1 team (pictured above), although he finished third in a non-championship F1 race at Vallelunga, behind Emerson Fittipaldi and Andrea de Adamich. His big chance came at the French GP when Ferrari asked him to stand in Clay Regazzoni after the Swiss driver broke his arm playing football. He finished 13th. In 1973 he drove briefly for Frank Williams's Iso-Marlboro team at the start of 1973 but decided that he had had enough and retired at the age of 33. It had been a decent career but nothing special. But Galli's big moment had yet to come.

In the years that followed he concentrated on his family's wool business and on building up his franchise for the "Fruit of the Loom" fashion brand. This led to a small sponsorship deal with Williams in 1978. His business brought him into regular contact with the Benetton family, who ran a woolen goods business which expended dramatically in the 1970s. To support that growth the Benettons were looking for a way to promote their brand and Galli suggested that it would be a good idea to try Formula 1. That led to a sponsorship deal with Tyrrell in 1983 with drivers Michele Alboreto and Danny Sullivan.

The sponsorship was moved to Alfa Romeo in 1984 and 1985, with Riccardo Patrese and Eddie Cheever. This led to the purchase of Toleman and the launch of Benetton Formula in 1986 with drivers Gerhard Berger and Teo Fabi and the Austrian's first victory for the team in Mexico. Benetton would go on to win World Championships and was the basis for the team that is now Renault Sport Racing F1.

The family firm Galli Filati was sold to the Benettons in 1990.

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

 

Remembering Thomas Maldwyn Pryce of Ruthin, Denbighshire, Wales’ only top-class F1 driver, killed on this day in ’77 at Kyalami. We should also remember Frederik Jansen van Vuuren, the marshal who fatally ran into the path of Pryce’s car that day.

Pic: Shadow DN5, Anderstorp ’75.

 

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

5 March 2018
Fascinating F1 Fact: 99
Joe Saward

When the winners of a Grand Prix spray their champagne these days, their antics are accompanied by music from George Bizet's opera Carmen. This was a big hit at the end of the Nineteenth Century, although its first performance at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1875 unsettled the audience because the opera told an immoral tale of a Spanish nobleman who fell for a wild gipsy woman.

It was based (loosely) on a novella written in 1845 by Prosper Mérimée, which itself was based on a story told to him by the Countess of Montijo when he toured Spain in 1830. The book was not a great success but the opera was a smash hit and its success quickly spread, with productions all over the world in the 1880s. It was particularly popular in Germany where the Chancellor Otto von Bismarck saw Carmen no fewer than 27 times. Another man who was a fan was Emil Jellinek, the son of a rabbi, a preacher at the Leopoldstadter Temple in Vienna. Emil (born in 1853) was a poor student and at 17 was sent to work as a clerk in a railway company in Moravia. He was sacked two years later when it emerged that he had been organizing train races…

In disgrace, he was sent abroad and thanks to his father's connections was able to get a minor diplomatic job in Morocco, initially in Tangiers and then in Tetouan. It was there he met Rachel Goggmann Cenrobert, an exotic young woman, born in Morocco to a Sephardic Jewish French family. He went into partnership with her father to trade Algerian-grown tobacco in Europe and moved to become Austrian Vice-Consul in the port of Oran, in Algeria. He then decided to join the Aigle insurance company. He married Rachel and in 1884 he took his wife and two small children back to Austria, settling in Baden bei Wien, where he expanded his insurance business and where in 1889 his first daughter was born. She was named Adrienne.

Jellinek grew very rich as a result of his insurance business and the family started to winter on the French Riviera but disaster struck in 1893 when Rachel fell ill and died. Adrienne was just four. Emil decided to move to Nice fulltime, acquiring a large mansion of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, although he kept his property in Baden as well. Adrienne was adored by her father, who nicknamed her Mercedes, Carmen's best friend in Bizet's opera.

Emil was always looking for ways to make money and saw great potential in the new automobile. In 1896 he travelled to Germany to visit Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft (DMG), where he ordered a Phoenix Double-Phaeton to take back to Nice.

In 1897 there was a race between Marseilles and Nice which proved such a success that in March 1898 Nice hosted a week of automobile events. Jellinek dominated in his Phoenix, using the pseudonym Mercedes. As a result of this success he took orders for six of the cars. In 1899 he did the same and sold 10 cars. It was a good business, but he was convinced that the cars could be even better and in April 1900, in league with Léon Desjoyeaux, the manager of Credit Lyonnais in Nice, he put together the money to fund an order of an impressive 72 cars from DMG: 36 of them the standard 8HP model and 36 of them a new model, built to his specifications, to be called the Daimler-Mercedes. These were to be delivered to him on October 15. This was largely the result of troubles that he was having with Panhard, which owned the licence to use the Daimler name in France. The new brand got around the problem and, as part of the deal, he became a board member of DMG and the exclusive dealer for the new Daimler-Mercedes brand across Europe and in the United States.

The prototype Daimler-Mercedes arrived in Nice in December 1900, by which time it had already been sold to Baron Henri de Rothschild, and in the Nice Speedweek in 1901 the new Mercedes impressed everyone. Sales poured in, causing DMG to expand from 340 workers in 1900 to 2,200 in 1904. The name Mercedes was trademarked by DMG in 1902, while Jellinek went so far as to change his family name to Jellinek-Mercedes. The business expanded with a German bicycle manufacturer called Charlie Lehmann doing a deal to sell the cars in Paris and the United States. A big showroom was opened on the avenue des Champs Elysées.

The success brought Jellinek further wealth and he purchased a second Mercedes Villa on the promenade des Anglais, in addition to buying the Hotel Royal and the Hotel Scribe in Nice and the Astoria in Paris. He built a 50-room mansion on his land in Vienna, and acquired a vast villa called Chateau Robert at Vallauris-Golfe-Juan. But he spent most of his time at the Villa Mercedes, where he built his own workshops to repair and service the cars.

HIs relationship with DMG was stormy and gradually the deal faded away and he became the Austrian Consul-General in Nice and moved away from the business to concentrate on his revived diplomatic career, which would take him to Mexico and then to Monaco. The First World War threw his life into turmoil. He was accused of being an Austrian spy by the French and had to flee Nice and all his properties in France were seized. He had problems in Austria because his second wife was French and he ended up impoverished in neutral Switzerland. He died there in January 1918.

The name Mercedes lived on and when Daimler and Benz merged in 1926 it became the name of all the company's production cars.

Today, Mercedes dominates in F1 and it is somehow apt that the drivers hear Carmen when they spray their champagne…

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

5 March 2018
Fascinating F1 Fact: 100
Joe Saward


In 1990 the Canadian F1 writer Gerald Donaldson was commissioned to write a book called "Grand Prix People", telling the stories of more than 100 people working in the Formula 1 world at the time. "It was a fascinating assignment," Donaldson said. "Whenever I switched on my tape recorder I was prepared to be enthralled. I was never disappointed. But I was constantly surprised."

The book concludes with Bernie Ecclestone's assessment of Grand Prix People. "They're all a bit mad!" he said. "That's all…" The more people you meet in Formula 1, the more you appreciate that they are very often special people, folk with many and varied talents and motivation to get things done and to take risks that others would not take to get what they want. Life is for living. It’s a gamble…

That was, quite literally, the case with Fred Gamble, a member of the Formula 1 fraternity back in the 1960s. Fred was an American, and there were not many of them in F1 in those days. He had been a Grand Prix driver himself, which was quite an achievement in itself. Ultimately he left a mark, having set up Goodyear's racing operations in Europe, which led to a remarkable 368 F1 victories in 494 starts, providing tyres for 24 World Champions and 26 Constructors' titles. For some of that time Goodyear was a sole supplier, but the statistics show that this was no more so than Pirelli or Bridgestone, who each had their own periods of monopoly but are still nowhere near Goodyear’s total.

Gamble was the son of an architect, who had a Masters from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lectured at the University of Michigan. Fred was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but the family soon decided to try something new and headed south to Florida where they settled in Fort Lauderdale and Harry Gamble went to work with the celebrated Miami architect Russell Pancoast. It was a good time to be an architect in Florida, with the Art Deco district in Miami developing and the city beginning to recover from the Great Depression. More and people more people had money and that meant more and more people had automobiles. The young Fred Gamble was fascinated by them.

Sadly, his father died in 1947, when Fred was only 15 and at high school. The teenager began to get involved in illegal street races in 1930s machinery and also helped a family friend run occasional races on the runways of an old naval base at nearby Davie. He then join the US Army Air Force in order to qualify for a university education, under the terms of the GI Bill. He served two tours in Korea, working as a radio operator during the Korean War. In his last year of service he was posted to Castle Air Force base in Merced, California, where he got into the booming local sports car scene for a while before returning to Florida to attend the University of Florida in Gainesville, studying at the School of Journalism and Communications, while at the same time running the university sports car club.

In 1958 he acquired a disassembled Crosley Hot Shot, which he rebuilt as a special called the Gambini MK1, which he raced that summer. After graduation he took a job as the assistant advertising manager of Jarrard Motors in Pensacola, a dealership which imported European sports cars and ran a team of Triumphs in local SCCA events. Gamble also started writing for various motorsport publications. This allowed him to fund some races with an MGA and, at a race meeting in Miami, he ran into Lloyd Casner, a PanAm pilot who was known to the Racing world as "Lucky".

Casner was planning to take a team to Europe and Gamble volunteered to join without pay, aiming to make a living as a journalist going to the European races. The Casner Motor Racing Division (Camoradi) was indeed lucky. Casner’s project came just as Goodyear decided to get into racing and in January 1959 the company agreed to provide Camoradi with substantial financial support and all the tyres it needed. Chevrolet, which was not supposed to compete because of an agreement between the manufacturers not to go racing, provided two Corvettes and covert support, while other big name companies joined the operation as associate supporters when they heard that Goodyear was involved. The team headed to Europe in September 1959 and quickly went into action, buying a birdcage Maserati sports car from the ailing Italian company and two Porsches from the estate of Jean Behra: a lightweight Carrera sports car and the Behra-Porsche Formula 2 car. Camoradi USA became, in effect, the Maserati works team that summer as the factory could not afford to race and the so the well- funded US team attracted a string of star drivers in the summer of 1960, with Gamble racing when the opportunities arose.

Casner was often back in Miami, so Gamble effectively ran the European operation, living in Modena, Italy. That summer Fred landed an entry for the Behra-Porsche in the German Grand Prix, but Porsche's racing boss Huschke von Hanstein vetoed the plan because the car still had a factory engine fitted. In September, however, another opportunity arose when the British F1 teams decided to boycott the Grand Prix of Europe at Monza after the Italians decided to run the event on the high banking. This opened the way for Formula 2 cars to join the entry and Gamble jumped at the chance, firstly because he wanted to be an F1 driver and secondly because of the not inconsiderable starting money on offer. He raced the Camoradi Behra Porsche. He qualified 14th out of 16 and finished 10th and last. But he was a Grand Prix driver…

Finding Casner's business methods rather dubious, Gamble decided to quit Camoradi and returned to the US that autumn, where he found a job in the advertising department of Standard-Triumph North America. He moved on from there to join Carroll Shelby, selling Cobras in California where he soon met Goodyear's Director of Racing, Tony Webner. The latter was looking for an assistant to set up operations for Goodyear in Europe and, hearing about his experiences with Camoradi, asked Gamble if he was interested.

And so in 1964 Fred headed off to unglamorous Wolverhampton to set up Goodyear's motorsport operations in Europe. The result was a string of success for the Akron tyre-maker with three Le Mans victories in 1965, 1966 and 1967 and Goodyear's first F1 victory with Ritchie Ginther's Honda in Mexico in 1965. In 1966 the company won four races and took the World Championship with Jack Brabham. The success was repeated in 1967 with Denny Hulme.

In 1968 Gamble decided to move back to the US to switch into a more senior role in Goodyear's sales division, handing the motorsport job over to a young Leo Mehl, who would be the dominant name in Goodyear's racing until his retirement in 1996.

After retiring from Goodyear, Gamble went on to promote a ski resort in Snowmass, just outside Aspen in Colorado, before retiring to Hawaii, where he kept fit with regular surfing, even in his seventies.

A man of many talents...

(And with that, folks, this season's Fascinating Facts comes to an end... If you’ve enjoyed the series, look out for a book of them in the near future).

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

1968 Gurney Eagle F1 restoration a labor of love
Tuesday, 13 March 2018
Marshall Pruett / Images courtesy of Justin Gurney




Still reeling from the loss of his legendary father Dan Gurney, All American Racers CEO Justin Gurney has found the perfect project to honor the Big Eagle by restoring and finishing the 1968 Eagle Formula 1 car that was never completed.

Following Gurney's iconic win at the 1967 Belgian Grand Prix in the AAR-built Eagle Mk. 1 chassis, plans to improve upon the car for 1968 went as far as fashioning a new tub and ancillary components. But with a steep reduction in funding from AAR tire partner and sponsor Goodyear, Gurney's F1 program was shuttered soon after the 1968 season began.

Using a modified version of the Mk. 1 in those early rounds, the 1968 chassis was moved to the rafters where it sat for decades. Now, back where it belongs on the AAR shop floor, Gurney has made the car an after-hours priority to celebrate family history.



"Walking down the hallways, there's just an empty, weird feeling in the shop, and of course there are pictures of Dad everywhere," he told RACER. "I was just thinking about what we could do to bring everyone together, and I'd talked about building that car with Dad several times, but we never found time to do it. I know he always thought it was always on the sketchy side, and all those cars from back then were, but we've already had a lot of people contact us about helping with it."

The use of lightweight titanium and magnesium in the Mk. 1 was carried over to the 1968 chassis, and as Gurney recalls, his father raised an eyebrow on the topic of driver safety.

"I do recall Dad telling me of that picture with him sitting in it that it felt really thin," he said with a laugh. "It had magnesium skins like the Spa winner, and he said, 'It feels kind of thin and flimsy...I don't know if I'm liking this...' So they didn't do many F1 races in 1968, and did it with the 1967 car that sprouted some wings, and when they shut that program down, they concentrated on the 1968 Indy car."



The 1968 car, designed by Tony Southgate, was meant to be powered by the same Weslake V12 engine featured in the Mk. 1. Two main challenges will face AAR in the restoration project, with the first centering on the acquisition of rare Weslake parts to finish the motor. The second hurdle, more on the stylistic side of the project, will be to decide on the looks of the car.

"I've been in communication with Tony Southgate on it, and he's been really helpful," Gurney said. "But since the car was never completed, all we have to go on is a couple of clay mockups they did. The tub looks a lot like the 1968 Indy car that Tony also did, but some of the [F1] renderings go a lot further and make it look like what they built for Indy in 1969. There are no drawings of the finished car, so that's a decision we'll have to make on how it will come out. I tend to like the 1968 look more, which is where I'm leaning."

With plenty of work to do, Gurney says the project could extend into the next decade.

"I'm not sure how long it will take, but I'd guess it would be at least two years," he continued. "We have to take care of all our paying work first, so it will have to get done on our own time. It's locating the missing engine parts that will take some patience. The block attached to the tub had some pistons and rods in it, but we've already started contacting Miles Collier at the Collier collection (who owns the 1967 Spa winner) to see what he might have for motor parts. The rest we can build here."



Some of the original but long forgotten 1968 parts also made a recent return to AAR.

"One of the guys in the original picture at the front, Terry Malone, is still around and he even brought some of the front suspension pieces over," Gurney said. "He told me they'd been sitting in his tool box for ages – since they were new. So we've got those, and I'm in contact with a few other guys like Pete Wilkins' sons; their father did the original headers.

"There were also some other miscellaneous pieces in the tub when we brought it down, so when it really gets going, I know a lot of people want to help. Tony Southgate's done some new drawings of the car and emailed them to me. We're excited about getting the car finally done and ready to make its first appearance."

[/13/Ален Шмит/]

Izašao dokumentarac o Ferariju 312b na torentima, obavezno skinite i pogledajte