Grand Prix Rejects

When the last of the Goodwood meetings came around, Tony Crook and I had both accumulated the same number of points and we both won our scratch races, so the destiny of the Motor Sport Trophy was to be decided by the handicap, which we had both entered. Tony, who was well known as a tremendously hard trier, was driving a Frazer-Nash and I had a start over him. Working it out according to the best laps we had each done, I thought I could just about win, but I knew I was up against an experienced driver who would not miss a trick and on the last lap I had an anxious time as I saw him in my mirror streaking up behind me on the Lavant Straight. I flung the Riley into the Woodcote corner right on the limit and then watched him coming up in the mirror as I hared for the finishing line. There was no chicane in those days, so it was flat out all the way, with the Riley giving it all I had got; I just managed to reach the line first.

In the 3 1/2 mile Formula 2 race the only serious opposition came from George Abecassis, who was getting a lot of wheelspin on the H.W.M., and I won fairly comfortably.

Then came the handicap event, in which Duncan Hamilton was driving the H.W.M., and we found ourselves together on scratch. General Loughborough was starting the race and, as he went from car to car with his flag and his watches, Duncan and I with engines roaring were edging forward inch by inch. When it came to our turn, the General raised his flag and I edged forward a bit more, then Duncan got his nose in front again, the General dropped his arm slightly, Duncan let the clutch in and he was off. This was too much, so I let in the clutch and roared away after him and as we got to the first corner I looked back and there was the General still standing with his flag raised, and not a soul in sight.
I soon got past Duncan, but he was already an old hand with a load of experience and he kept tight on my tail, worrying me and trying to pass at the slightest opportunity. It was the first time I had this treatment and I started sliding all over the place, making a horrible mess of things. Duncan was roaring with laughter, and when he eventually got past me again I could picture him saying to himself: "That'll teach the young whippersnapper!" but his joy didn't last long, for his back axle broke, probably as a result of all the wheelspin that had been going on. I made the fastest lap, but I wasn't placed in the race.

It was a 2-litre event and on the first practice day I made the fastest lap in 2 minutes dead, equal to 87.81 m.p.h., but the next day I got involved with Duncan again and I learned another lesson the hard way. I had overtaken him just before going into Abbey Curve and, just as I got into the corner, the flag marshal waved a blue flag at me, indicating that someone was trying to overtake. I knew Duncan was the only one behind me and I should have ignored it, but half-way round the corner I glanced in my mirror, and that started it. In a flash I had spun round and then went hurtling along the straw bales backwards, bouncing from one to the other. I was very frightened, as I thought it was going to turn over. I had a quick glimpse of Duncan taking avoiding action and when it was all over he just came up and said cheerfully: "That'll teach you, boy!"
He often helped me with advice on a circuit I did not know, saying: "Use third there, boy", or "Take that one in top".

It started to rain for the race - it quite often does over in Spa - and I was having a dice with Ken Wharton who was driving one of the Frazer Nash single-seaters with a Bristol engine in it. It was an ungainly looking car, with rather a high chassis, and was not terribly quick, but Ken had more experience with this type of racing than I had and we kept changing backwards and forwards for several laps; then I got in front and I noticed he was missing. I did another lap and coming up the back I noticed a crowd of people. I glanced over the side of the road - the ground fell way down a steep grassy hill with a wood at the bottom. Just sticking out of this wood was the tail of the Frazer Nash. Evidently Ken had spun on this corner and gone off the road. Fortunately he ducked his head, the barbed-wire fencing tore his shirt off his back and ripped along the top of the car. He went spinning down the field and crashed into the wood, but did not hurt himself very badly. If he had not ducked, the barbed wire would probably have cut his head off as has happened to one or two other people racing.

Charles Cooper and his son John had come out with three Cooper-Bristols, two for Alan Brown and John Barber and one which was eventually driven by the Argentine driver Schwelm, who once made a brief and meteoric appearance in the Mille Miglia.

On the 21st lap, a broken axle stub on Schwelm's Cooper sent a wheel careering into the crowd, injuring several.

Some excitement was caused during the practice by the arrival of Argentina's own Grand Prix car, the Autoar. It was unloaded from its truck under heavy guard and turned out to be none other than the almost legendary 1 1/2-litre supercharged Cisitalia, which had been built just after the war but never raced. The car had quite a romantic history. It was designed by a team of Porsche engineers for Piero Dusio, who had made a fortune during the war and was spending a lot of it on Cisitalia. Ferdinand Porsche was at that time held prisoner by the French and the money paid by Dusio was used to put up a bond which secured the old man's release.
The car had a flat-twelve engine behind the driver, fed by two vane-type superchargers and designed to produced [sic] 500 horsepower. As the car only weighted [sic] a ton, wheelspin would obviously be a problem and there was a small lever on the steering column by which the driver could obtain four-wheel drive for maximum acceleration. It was potentially one of the fastest cars designed for the immediate post-war formula (1 1/2 litres supercharged and 4 1/2 litres unsupercharged) but Dusio ran out of cash before it could be finished and tested. He skipped over to the Argentine, where he started the Autoar car factory making station wagons with parts of Jeeps. The Grand Prix car eventually followed, but there was no one who knew how to develop it and make it go properly; there would have been little hope of finding enough money if they had. So here it was on the Autodrome, but obviously far from ready to race. Clemar Bucci, the Argentinian driver, did a few slow laps on it and I believe Bonetto was invited to try it, but it eventually stopped in a cloud of smoke, with the engine swimming in oil, and that was the last of what Laurence Pomeroy describes in his book The Grand Prix Car as "one of the most ingenious design studies in the whole history of motor racing".

Stirling had been held up by gearbox trouble and Duncan just managed to stay ahead after an epic chase by the Connaught.

The 4 1/2-litre V-12 Ferrari driven by Maglioli and Carini was in the lead, and had set up a new sports-car lap record at 114.7 m.p.h. for the circuit which had just been increased in length to 5.19 miles.
In the early hours of the morning the car was seen to be running without side-lights before the permitted time for switching off and after a re-fuelling stop it was pushed for a short distance when it re-started. The Ferrari personnel argued that other people had also switched their lights off and the pushing at the re-start was simply to get the car clear of spilt fuel which might have started a fire. However, the organisers took the extraordinary course of announcing that no further times would be taken for the car, while still permitting it to go on running.
Eventually, after an extraordinary series of half-hearted - and incorrect - efforts to stop it the car was called in and withdrawn. Whereupon the French crowd booed and hooted and jeered in an extraordinary demonstration against the race officials.

During the first few laps Redele, the French driver, hit an oil patch on his 1063 Renault saloon, which rolled over several times and threw him out onto the track. I managed to dodge it, but Bob Said, who was running second on a Ferrari, came round the curve to find the track blocked by the upturned Renault, an ambulance with the doors open, a stretcher party and the prostrate Redele. At one moment it looked as if he was going straight up into the ambulance among the stretchers. He managed to swerve clear, but swiped the corner of the ambulance in passing and wrecked the Ferrari.

The only car now in front of me was Macklin's Austin-Healey and as I came up alongside I worked out whether there was room to pass him and then pull into the pits. In my view there was, so I kept on and then as the pits drew nearer I put up my hand, put the brakes on and pulled in. I was nearly there, when out of the corner of my eye I saw something flying through the air. It was Levegh's Mercedes which went cartwheeling over the safety barrier, bounced once and disintegrated with the force of an exploding bomb. Simultaneously Macklin's Austin-Healey came past spinning round backwards, then slewed across in front of me towards the pits.
It was all over in a second or two, but it remain [sic] fixed in my mind like a slow-motion film. There were three people standing in front of the pit right in the path of the crippled green car; a gendarme, a photographer and an official. I could see the car was going to hit them, and they could see it, but they stood there frozen with horror and the car mowed them down. Then it bounced off, spun round again and finished up a crumpled wreck on the opposite side of the track, where Lance Macklin, miraculously unhurt, jumped out and ran for cover, while a tyre spun lazily in the middle of the road.

Back at the pits, the track was littered with debris. The mangled wreckage of the Mercedes, minus engine and front suspension, lay blazing on top of the earth barrier and beyond it, mercifully hidden from us by the dense cloud of smoke, rescuers were already moving the dead and injured from the public enclosure. I only wanted to get away from it and blot out the scene from my mind. I staggered from the pit saying that I was finished with racing and was not going to get into the car again. I suppose I was near hysteria as a result of the shock, coming on top of the concentrated nerve strain of the previous two hours I was led away by Duncan Hamilton and his wife Angela who took me to their caravan, sat me down and put a drink in my hand while Duncan talked to me like a father, trying to calm me down.

As I swung in, Macklin, pulled out, blocking the path of Levegh, who was coming up on the outside at around 150 m.p.h. Levegh just had time to put up his hand as a warning to Fangio, who was behind him, then tried to squeeze through between the Austin-Healey and the protecting barrier. He struck the barrier, crashed into the back of the Austin-Healey and then leapt into the air. The car mowed down the spectators in a small club enclosure and then hurtled on to crash in flames on top of the earth barrier, while the engine and front suspension, torn away by the force of the impact, cut deep swathes through the closely-packed ranks of the spectators in the main enclosure. It was quite clearly the worst accident any of us had ever known, but even then we had no conception of its true gravity.

When I passed Macklin, I was travelling about 25 m.p.h. faster than he was and I decided I had ample time to get ahead before braking for the pits. I certainly had ample time to get ahead before braking for the pits. I certainly had disc brakes which could pull me up very quickly, but so did he. But when a faster car passes you it is almost automatic to glance in your mirror to see if there is another one coming. Now during the briefest possible glance in the driving mirror, Macklin's car would have travelled 80 to 100 feet. And if he happened to miss my signal and found me braking unexpectedly, he would travel another 50 feet before the brain would get a message to the foot to put the brakes on.
What we do know is that Macklin, taken by surprise, for some reason, pulled over to the left and from that moment Levegh's plight was desperate.
The Mercedes would travel about 70 feet while his brain was registering the emergency. We know that he then put his hand out, for Fangio says he owes his own life to this last gesture by Levegh, but while he made the gesture he would have travelled another 250 feet. The footbrake would not slow him down very fast from about 150 m.p.h. and there was no time to get the air brake into action' and so he careered helplessly into the Austin-Healey and the earth barrier.

We rank among the greatest motor-racing exploits [Hawthorn's] win at record speed in the Le Mans 24-Hour Race, ably if quietly backed by his co-driver Ivor Bueb, a star of the 500 c.c. racing firmament, who did exactly what was asked of him in keeping the Jaguar where it was wanted while Hawthorn rested.

The tests concluded, I left for Sebring, where three works Jaguars, painted in the American colours of blue and white, had been entered by Briggs Cunningham. Titterington and myself had one car, Bueb and Hamilton another, and Briggs drove the third with John Gordon Bennett. The British drivers of the team, with Colin Chapman and Bryan Turle, flew out via New York, where we spent an amusing evening, but it snowed during the night and next day there were no planes leaving for Palm Beach. We settled down to a game of poker.
Suddenly the phone rang. I answered it and Lofty England said we had half an hour to make a train for Washington where we could pick up a plane. I broke the news and made a dive for the kitty.
Everybody got something except Duncan Hamilton who sat there bellowing: "You can't stop now. I've got four aces!"
I have noticed since that it is always Duncan's luck to be stuck with the best hand ever, when the game breaks up.

Brooks's car had not been ready in time for practice so he was in the back row, but my car made a beautiful getaway and I led for 1 1/2 laps before being overwhelmed by Archie Scott-Brown on a Connaught and Stirling Moss who were fighting a wheel-to-wheel battle which only ended when the Connaught disappeared in a cloud of smoke and dust with a broken crankshaft.

Young A. F. Dennis, a newcomer driving Duncan Hamilton's D-Type Jaguar, got first gear instead of third when approaching Woodcote; the wheels locked and the car slid into the infield where it overturned and he was killed.

I had a good tussle with Chapman, Salvadori and Moss in a Lotus and two Coopers, to finish third in the heat, but I could not do better than fourth in the final, which was won by Stirling after a stirring struggle with Colin.

I made a good start, but left my braking rather late at one corner and was so busy concentrating on holding the car straight that I did not have time to change down. By the time I had got the lower gear in, Archie Scott-Brown had whipped past. I managed to get past him again on the straight and concluded he was probably trying to save his engine in view of the Goodwood blow-up. However, he was pressing me hard when I tried to brake going into Cottage Corner. But there were no brakes; not only that, there was no pedal! I stamped my foot down again, thinking I must have missed the pedal, but all I succeeded in doing was catching my foot against the accelerator and I went careering off the road onto the open grassland.

Some furious work went on to get it ready in time. We had fitted long-range fuel tanks and hoped to get through on two stops at 3-hour intervals, but we found that the oil consumption was likely to be rather high, so had to instal [sic] an oil cooler and an extra oil tank. Brit Pearce finally got it away on the lorry and we followed by air. Before going to Monza for practice I took it down the Autostrada for a test run, with Duncan and Brit following me in the lorry. They went by when I stopped for petrol and soon afterwards black smoke started pouring out of the bonnet and flames came writhing out of the carburettor air duct. I stopped, grabbed the fire extinguisher and squirted like mad. This put the flames out and I found that one of the pipes to the oil radiator had burst and the escaping oil had caught fire. We therefore by-passed the radiator and went on to Monza, but as I drove into the park there was a horrible grinding noise and the gearbox fell to pieces. There was no hope of getting a new gearbox in time so I approached Sculari and Amorotti to see if there was a chance of driving a Ferrari in the race and it seemed our luck was in. I was given the chance of driving with Peter Collins and Duncan was paired off with Phil Hill. Unfortunately Sighinolfi, the chief tester, crashed Fangio's car on the way to the track, so the Hill car was taken for Fangio and Duncan was left without a drive.

On the second day of practice, Colin Chapman followed me round. He had taken a large part in the design of the 1956 Vanwall chassis and was being given his first chance to drive one.
We were going down to the Thillois turn at the end of the long straight and I was just about to take the corner when there was a terrific crash at the back of the car. My head flew back and hit the headrest and my car was shunted down the escape road. I looked back just in time to see Colin's Vanwall, with its bonnet flying into the air, plough onto the grass, hit a small concrete post and then bounce into a big one. I ran back and was relieved to find he was all right, but the car was a sorry sight. The body was crumpled, the chassis bent and the radiator smashed, but I noticed that nothing on the steering had broken, which suggested that it was solidly made.
Evidently his offside front brake had locked on as he was coming up behind me and when he took his foot off the pedal the brake had stayed on, pulling him into the back of my car. Poor Colin was terribly upset, especially as this was his first time out on the car, and he went through a bad time as we walked back to the pits together but Tony Vandervell took it wonderfully. He just shrugged, said: "That's motor racing" and got busy organising the repairs. Colin's car was hors de combat but his tank was put onto mine, which after minor repairs to the chassis frame was ready to race again.

The Lotus, fitted with a new gearbox, was driven by Ivor Bueb and Mackay Frazer in the 1,500 c.c. sports-car event, but they had no luck as the new gearbox gave trouble and then a connecting rod broke, wrecking the engine. The centre main bearing had failed, allowing the crankshaft to whip and straining the big-end bolts, which finally parted. The crankshaft was salvaged, which was a little bit of luck, as they were hard to get, but it was an expensive blow-up.