Spitfire Monaco

Diamond heists at the Cannes film festival. Why didn’t the heisters try Monaco at Grand Prix time? When I covered the race in the 1970s I got to know a lot of ways round the circuit the most amateur footpad could have worked out. You could reach most of the corners by obscure little paths. There was even an underground passage from the Hotel de Paris that came out somewhere just above the exit from the tunnel. You could sprint to a little sloping garden there to photograph cars from above. It was necessary to get from place to place without hindrance during practice or race, so you had to know how to go from one side of the track to the other. Any self-respecting jewel thief planning to liberate a cache from some socialite’s bedroom in the Metropole would be able to make his way to the harbour front, while the gendarmerie and the commissaires were looking at the action on the track. They could have been on board a yacht and half way to Algiers before the rocks were missed. Raymond Baxter used to quip, during his commentaries at Le Mans or Rheims, how it was always a good day for French burglars when lines of white-gloved and belted gendarmes did their self-important sweeps of the pits or the starting grid.

Drove to Monaco in 1967 in this Triumph Spitfire with MLC of Motor Sport. Can’t remember how long it took before the days of the Autoroute, but we usually stopped overnight en route. Can’t remember much about the Spitfire either. It wasn’t a memorable car. I ran one for a while when I was on The Motor road test staff. It was still relatively new, having been introduced in 1962 on the Triumph Herald backbone mainframe, with somewhat agricultural high-pivot swing axle independent rear suspension. This would get up on tiptoe and operating on only the edges of the 5.20x13 tyres get quickly out of control. The one I took to Monaco was the newly introduced Mark 3 with a 1.3 75bhp engine and larger front calipers. It did 95mph but I never took to it, unlike its 1968 derivative the GT6 once its rear suspension had been fixed. A reversed bottom wishbone linkage and rubber doughnuts in the drive shafts transformed the handling. Everybody dubbed it a miniature E-type Jaguar, which it was with the emphasis on miniature. It really wasn’t a very big car yet I drove one to the Swedish Grand Prix at Karlskoga. We drove everywhere then. Never thought about a diamond heist.

Honda

Returning to Formula 1 in 2015 will be different from Honda's first shot in the 1960s. A splendid record in motorcycle racing prompted Denis Jenkinson of Motor Sport : “The 4-cylinder Honda motorcycle made a big impression and its production sports and mopeds continued its good name in racing. But we must not forget that Honda racing motorcycles started inconspicuously and progressed as the seasons went by. They did not appear on the scene and win immediately.” Above: Celebrating Honda in Formula 1 at Goodwood, below CDX 6 cylinder 1047cc

Jenkinson noted that Honda began on bikes by contesting classes where the opposition was weak, but this was not an option in Formula 1. Lotus, BRM, Brabham, Ferrari, and Coventry-Climax were well established. There was no weakness here and grand prix racing was full of team with recent world championships, such as Cooper. Even Porsche found it difficult to keep up, winning only once before pulling out at the end of 1965. Soichiro Honda radiated confidence in an interview with Günther Molter in 1962: “It is too early to talk of horsepower as the project is still at the development stage. Our grand prix car will have an engine performance unequalled by any of the others.”

Soichiro was up against V8s from BRM and Coventry-Climax, V6s, V8s, and flat12s from Ferrari, and an air-cooled flat8 from Porsche. Honda produced a radical little V12, with needle roller crankshaft bearings, revving to 11,500rpm. It was a jewel of an engine in a semi-monocoque chassis using suspension that owed something to Lotus and BRM, with tubular rear sub-frames and inboard springs. The transverse engine owed nothing to anybody however, and lived up to Soichiro's assurances with 20bhp (quite a big margin in 1962) more than any rivals, including the Ferrari flat12. The little V12 was a triumph for designer Tadashi Kume, a mechanical engineering graduate who had been assigned to racing motorcycle engines even though relatively inexperienced. 1966 RC149

“Nobody at Honda really expected the car to shatter the racing world at its first appearance but such was the publicity accrued from motorcycle racing that the grand prix car was preceded by almost fanatical expectations from Europe rather than Japan,” according to Jenkinson. The reason for established teams' apprehension was the proficiency Honda showed at high-revving engines with large numbers of small cylinders and four-valve heads. Ferrari was notably successful with V12s, and Coventry-Climax, also an acknowledged master of racing engines, had a 16-cylinder under development. Honda was half-expected to have a roller-bearing 16 of its own with prodigious power. John Surtees drive RA 300 at Goodwood.


Jenkinson's admiration for Honda was not shared throughout Europe. Italians complained that Kume's masterpiece resembled an engine designed by Giulio Alfieri for Maserati in 1961, test-bedded in 1963, but only made public in 1964 following the Honda. 1965 RA 262

Yet if the prevailing teams overestimated Honda's prospects, team manager Yoshio Nakamura probably underestimated. Honda's 1964 offensive lacked the refinement and style of its motorcycle racing department. The cars were a year late and never had the polished finish of a Lotus, nor the glamorous appearance of a Ferrari. It was 1965 before they gained a competitive edge, an achievement that had eluded Porsche, but given the expectations raised by the exquisite motorcycles, it was no less than expected.
1989 Brazil Grand Prix, Ayrton Senna McLaren Honda RA 109E

Grand Prix Grauniad

Jack Brabham “finished the race on half-pistons”, should have read “half-distance”, but phoning race reports to The Grauniad was always problematical. And copy-takers would laugh if you told them that Jack Brabham failed to finish because he had run out of petrol. The notion that the world’s best cars had not enough in the tank to see them through was jokey. If they had a puncture it was worse. Punctures were something that happened to ordinary people. Copy-takers never quite grasped the finer points of motor racing.

It would be just as bad now if you phoned on a crackly line from Monza that Lewis Hamilton’s tyres wore out after five laps. Decent tyres last 25,000 miles. Truly, racing has gone unrealistic, with regulations that have everybody diving into the pits and changing one tyre compound for another. Grands Prix were always something of a circus but what with DRS zones and obscure kinetic energy devices nowadays, they look bizarre.

Innocent lottery-winner interviewed the other day said he’d always fancied a drive in a Formula 1 car. Chances are he would never understand the game-station buttons on the steering wheel. The last kind of Formula 1 car that related to anything in his understanding would probably be something in the pre-wobbly wing era when drivers changed gear with a gear-lever and worked a clutch with the left foot. Back in Jack Brabham’s day.

(Top picture Brabham biplane, bottom Repco engine on the grid, Brabham golden helmet, Maxwell Boyd of The Sunday Times out of focus in the white jacket. Can’t tell which Hewland gearbox this is. Brabham began by upgrading a Formula 2 car with no more than an F2 Hewland, but had to change it for a Hewland DG. Gurney Eagle used to claim this meant Dan Gurney; Brabham said DG only meant Different Gearbox, so as not to confuse it with HD (Heavy Duty) and LG (Large Gearbox. They had simpler nomenclature then, like Cosworth FVA, which meant Four Valve type A, and DFV - Double Four Valve)).

Colin Chapman

Editing before re-publication to celebrate 50 years since Jim Clark won the world championship, our book has views on Chapman by Ford’s great director of public affairs, the late Walter Hayes: “Jim Clark had two centres in his life. There was Chapman. Not Lotus, - Chapman. And there was home in Scotland. He felt secure at home in Scotland, but he never quite felt secure with Colin, because when you would say to him ‘Well Jimmy if there’s something worrying you why don’t you sit down and ask Colin’. He’d say, ‘Well you know, it’s very difficult’. He admired Chapman. He had huge respect for him. In a way he loved him, but there was often a sort of nervous tension between them.”

By 1961 Chapman’s influence was overwhelming. The relationship was more than just that between the Lotus team manager and a world champion driver. He was essentially Chapman’s world champion driver. It became a close personal relationship in which they enjoyed each other’s company and, while drivers of other teams went out on their own of an evening after a race or a practice session, Jim would almost always have dinner with Chapman.

It was a symptom of the intense loyalty Chapman commanded. His leadership qualities transcended the creation of great racing cars, his enthusiasm was infectious, he brimmed with initiatives, but more than that he had a gift for persuasion. He put over his ideas convincingly. He was able to sell his philosophy his sense of style and his self-confidence on both sides of the racing world and when it came to it, on both sides of the Atlantic. It was a messianic quality.

Reflecting on his achievements, Chapman could say quite un-self-consciously: “A few of us have to achieve great things in life so that it gives hope to others who are striving to achieve.” He really believed that some people, like him, had to succeed extravagantly in order to light up the lives of others. If anyone else had said something of that sort it would have sounded arrogant. Chapman could say it so reassuringly that it seemed almost modest and quite self-evident. He had the natural vanity of a man who knew his ideas were better.

Walter Hayes was one of Chapman’s most loyal supporters: “He never was arrogant. He merely knew better than anybody else. He also knew more.”

Hayes as an editor, had taken Chapman on as a newspaper motoring correspondent: “I’d been told to reform the Sunday Despatch and cars were beginning to be the big thing. There was no popular ownership of cars in this country until 1955. Nobody owned a car unless they were a doctor or a lawyer or rich. There were governments after the war telling us that we shouldn’t have cars at all. Sir Stafford Cripps wanted to tax them pretty well out of existence.”

“I was looking for somebody who could encapsulate what I felt was going to be the age of the car, so I got hold of Colin Chapman who was beginning to be talked about. Chapman was willing to come along, because £5,000 a year was quite important to him. He was difficult because he loved road testing cars, but it was not easy to get copy from him on time.”

Hayes (above) was sensible to Chapman’s design flair. “He was not a particularly good engine engineer, he would sit in a restaurant with a paper napkin and he would draw a car, and when he got to the engine he would just draw a box and write ‘engine’ on it. I don’t think he knew much about engines. His mind was a ferment of ideas yet instead of saying we’ve got it now, let’s perfect it, he always assumed that there had to be something added for next year. If you look at all the things he initiated in motor racing, more than any other man of our day, you often find he never stayed with anything quite long enough.”

He compared Chapman with a later entrepreneur in a similar mould, Tom Walkinshaw, who also created a successful business building and racing cars. “Walkinshaw did everything he said he would do for me on the day and at the price better than I could have expected. The same went for Chapman, and I hear stories about him in which he is not recognisable. I know people are sometimes different with me. People are particularly nice when you hold the purse strings, but I went and got Chapman because I knew him and I trusted him.”

Chapman’s early trials cars were home-built, improvised and primitive masterpieces. His Austin was followed by a Ford-powered version, then a 750cc special for racing. He applied the same bent for engineering to them that he later applied to grand prix racing cars, a talent for innovation that blossomed into something approaching genius.

He was single-minded and obsessional at whatever he turned his hand to. He was an accomplished racing driver; he designed boats and flew aeroplanes, showing aptitude at all of them. His competitive spirit was acute. Chapman never accepted the old aphorism about what mattered was taking part not winning. He could never understand how anyone could want to do anything without winning, and his winning was done with style. He had a flair for appearance, a neat turn of phrase, and a gift for branding the Lotus identity firmly on all he did. His achievements were immense, and he made exciting, innovative - although sometimes exasperating - road cars.
A millionaire by his 40th birthday, he won five drivers’ and six constructors’ world championships, and was at the head of a £10,000,000 business and the controls of his own Piper Seneca two years before his 50th. He had charm; he could show patience, but anybody doing business with him needed to be important to merit much of either. He put in long hours at the factory, ran the racing team at weekends, and seldom stopped to wonder why others did not do much the same. Energy, drive, talent and success were his hallmarks.

So was his short fuse, which sometimes went off in public such as with an overzealous policeman at Zandvoort who arrested him in a trackside fracas. Despite Chapman’s valid pass, the heavy-handed officer refused to allow him to go where he wanted, provoking a well documented punch-up.

His credentials as a driver included a close race in 1956 with Mike Hawthorn at the Whit Monday meeting at Goodwood. Both were in Lotus 11s and Chapman won. Other gifts included an ability to read a rule book, decide what its compilers meant and then find a way to defeat them. He also had a powerful commercial instinct. Where other enthusiasts might have been content to dismantle or cannibalise their first car in order to work on their second, Chapman sold it.

Lotus Engineering grew on the premise that people would build their cars from kits, and went into business on January 1, 1952, in north London. Chapman made the firm his full time job in 1955, married Hazel Williams who had provided the initial capital of £25, and employed Mike Costin as his chief assistant. He developed aerodynamic sports-racing cars and hired out his talent as a designer to Vanwall and BRM. His self-confidence seemed justified when Lotus survived its first financial crisis, and a Lotus Formula 2 car with a Coventry-Climax engine was shown at the London Motor Show. The Elite road car appeared in 1957, a ground-breaking design in glass reinforced plastic of which nearly a thousand were made.

Chapman’s delight at outwitting the racing authorities over badly-framed regulations was only matched by the cavalier attitude he adopted towards customers. He was always careful never to become personally involved, but the sharp-practice manners of Lotus in its kit-car and early Elite period enraged buyers. Their dilemma was that no other car had the same appeal. No other car had the Elite’s combination of speed and roadholding together with purity of line and sheer raciness. Chapman held the technological aces.

Sir Jackie Stewart, campaigner

Jackie Stewart’s campaign for safety in motor racing was well acknowledged in last Friday’s TV documentary. There was no irony in the passing reference to Denis Jenkinson, Motor Sport’s Continental Correspondent. Perhaps Stewart’s most trenchant critic Jenks, once described by Stirling Moss, no less, as a National Treasure is all but forgotten outside the business. Stewart, though not without fault, remains a motor sporting exemplar.

There was little doubt about the daring of Denis Sargent Jenkinson 1920-1997, pictured seated in front of me in the press tribune at Monza. A student of engineering and a conscientious objector in the Second World War, he worked as a civilian at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, where he met Bill Boddy, keeping Motor Sport magazine going in difficult circumstances. Janks took part, notably as a sidecar passenger for Eric Oliver, winning a world championship in 1949. His small stature and robust physique suited him well in this most hazardous occupation, and he wrote about the experience vividly.

From the 1950s he travelled Europe, not earning much from the parsimonious proprietors of Motor Sport, but with a decent car (Porsche 356, E-type Jaguar) and adequate expenses to fulfil many a boyhood dream. He was deeply respected by leading drivers, including Moss, for whom he “navigated” to win the 1955 Mille Miglia. The result was a notable report that became a classic.

I got on well with Jenks for most of the years I was in motor racing. It was a convivial business. He never concealed his contempt for colleagues, particularly those writing for national newspapers, yet often acknowledged that I took motor racing seriously and reported less sensationally than most.

I don’t think Jenks trusted me after about 1970 because of my historic association with Tyrrell and Stewart. “John Young Stewart – World Champion”, a certain beady-eyed little Scot, whose … pious whinings have brain-washed and undermined the natural instincts of some young and inexperienced newcomers to Grand Prix racing and removed the Belgian Grand Prix from Spa-Francorchamps.” Jackie had advanced principles that were changing motor racing in ways Jenks abhorred. Barriers, debris fences, safety structures in cars, seat harnesses fireproof overalls and improved medical and rescue facilities was transforming the business and Jenks hated it. He was convinced that without the dangers, motor racing was no longer heroic.

He was by no means alone. Tracks forced to re-make corners, provide run-off areas and re-write rules to making things safer applauded his angry outbursts. “Can you really ask me in all honesty to admire, or even tolerate, our current reigning World Champion Driver?” Jackie responded with dignity, but his real response was unequivocal. He was simply faster than everybody else and in terms of lives saved his legacy is secure.





One way of covering the Monaco Grand Prix was to walk round the circuit during the race, by way of the pavement. I took this picture of Lorenzo Bandini (Ferrari) leading the first lap in 1967. Unthinkable now but I was by no means alone. Bandini was overtaken and from lap 15 to lap 81 of the 100lap race lay second. The Ferrari overturned at the chicane, caught fire, trapping him underneath for several minutes, inflicting fatal burns.

Bravery and bankings


Carlos Sainz seems to have braved the bankings on the old Sitges track. You-Tube videos show Ferrari and Porsche drivers accelerate like mad down the straights and pussyfoot the bankings, while last May Sainz took an Audi R8 round in 42.6sec for a Red Bull stunt. It looked a bit of an adventure, even for a twice World Rally Champion since the bumps and fractures in the 90 year old 60deg steep concrete sent the Audi bounding. Racing high on the bankings may have been all in a day’s work for Sainz, but hugging a low line suggests faint hearts in Ferraris and Porsches.


They have tidied the bankings since 1974, when I took the pictures with a road test Granada Ghia en route to the Spanish Grand Prix at Jarama. There were races at the Autódromo de Sitges-Terramar near Barcelona the 1950s, but it had been more or less derelict since its first season of 1923. A bit like Brooklands, but better built, it remains in surprisingly good condition.


Autódromo National SA was founded in 1922 to construct a concrete banked circuit for car and motorcycle racing. It took 300 days, and cost 4 million pesetas, for a 2km track in time for a meeting on 28 October 1923. Albert Divo won a race for 2litre GP cars in a Sunbeam, at 96.91mph, from Count Louis Zborowski in a Miller. There was no prize money and unpaid builders seized the gate receipts, leaving the organizers with nothing to pay the drivers. It was seven years before the birth of Bernard Charles Ecclestone.

The authorities forbade any more international racing. It was perhaps just as well; there had been complaints from drivers over the entry and exit from the bankings. They thought the change in camber from straight to banking and back again badly designed. It didn’t seem to upset Sainz. The local Catalunyan Automobile Club held races up to 1925 before the track was sold off in the 1930s. When I went there the surviving buildings, some beneath the well-made pillars of the banking, was a chicken farm.