Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One

by Charles Jennings

  The upshot was this. Clark absolutely pulverised the opposition in 1963, taking the Drivers’ title by twenty-five points from Graham Hill. In ’64, ex-biker John Surtees took the title for Ferrari by one point from Hill (with Clark in third place) and became the only man in history to win World Championships on two and four wheels. In 1965, Clark and Lotus came roaring back, winning six out of ten races, and leaving Hill the runner-up again. It looked like a marriage made in Heaven. How long could they keep it going?

  10

  THE TRACKS

  By the mid-1960s, the geography of Formula One was starting to acquire some consistency. The cars came from England; or Italy. The drivers came from all over, but were based in Europe. And the circuits which dominated the Grand Prix season were the hard core of Monaco, Silverstone and Brands Hatch, Nürburgring, Spa-Francorchamps, Monza, Zandvoort.

  Which meant that, clearly, the old, improvised, anywhere-there’s-room ethos of earlier days was pretty much defunct. Jump back to the 1950s, and any list of Formula One venues would have included: the Oscar Gálvez track in Buenos Aires; Bremgarten, near Bern; Pedralbes, near Barcelona; Pescara, on the east coast of Italy; Boavista, near Oporto; Ain Diab, in Casablanca. And these were just the venues for the Grandes Épreuves. Non-Championship F1 races happened at all kinds of unpredictable locations. Whatever happened to Syracuse? Dundrod? Pau? Bari? Gavea? Aix-les-Bains? Crystal Palace? Albi? Eläintarhanajot? And what on earth were they like when you got there?

  Syracuse, for instance, in the south-eastern corner of Sicily, was a 3½-mile-long street circuit, shaped a bit like a wedge of cheese, threading its way around what Cicero called ‘the greatest Greek city and the most beautiful of them all’, a key settlement in Magna Graecia and with a cathedral dating back to the seventh century. The exact opposite of Silverstone, in fact. Tony Brooks made his little piece of motor racing history there in 1955, when he won his non-Championship race in a Connaught. Spectators liked it, because they were right on top of the racing; drivers quite liked it, because, being a street circuit, there was no room for error. As Brooks put it, ‘At Syracuse there is none of this business of using a foot of grass, as on an English airfield circuit, and then bobbing back.’ Instead of grass and open spaces, there were things made for destroying cars: concrete walls, trees, telegraph poles, picturesque buildings, an awful lot of bumps. The track punished you.

  And what went for Syracuse went, in many ways, for the others. On the old road circuit at Albi, in the south of France, the track went sprinting up through the unyielding bricks and stonemasonry of the village of St Antoine, before turning a 320° hairpin at St Juery, going over a level crossing and then launching cars into the air over a vicious hump on the way down to Montplaisir Corner. Pau, in the Pyrenees, was – still is – a street circuit in the Monaco style, many delightful buildings, absolutely nowhere to go if you make a mistake. Gavea, at Rio de Janeiro, was known as ‘The Devil’s See-saw’, or alternatively, ‘The Devil’s Trampoline’, on account of its unspeakable hairpins – five of them together in the space of half a mile. Ain Diab, west of Casablanca, another street circuit, had a fine stretch along the shoreline, was very fast and extremely dangerous, being both quick and cramped. Poor Stuart Lewis-Evans burned to death there in 1958, and they never raced Formula One again. Bremgarten was lined with trees, had an unpredictable surface and unnervingly wonky light conditions; but at least it only menaced drivers for a few years, given that the Swiss banned all motor racing in 1955. Dundrod, in Northern Ireland, was narrow, way up in the hills, and had a surface that was worse than emery paper for wearing out tyres. Pescara (birthplace of Gabriele d’Annunzio) was a kind of Italian Nürburgring, terribly long, terribly dangerous: Moss won there in ’57, a non-Championship race, but the place was littered with straw bales, wandering goats and vulnerable spectators. Eläintarhanajot was a mixture of cramped street racing and (like Donington) dense parkland filled with completely hittable trees; it was also in Finland.

  So what happened to all these venues? There was no mystery about it: as the cars got faster, so the circuits had to offer more consistent layouts, better surfaces, more space to run off, better protection against hazards. Around this time Stirling Moss said that he didn’t advocate ‘taking out trees, for instance, eliminating things that make for interest’, claiming that he and other professional drivers ‘like the natural hazards. We’d like to race around Hyde Park or Central Park without any changes at all in the topography. We accept the hazards, as at Monaco, of hitting a building or going over a drop; after all, it’s no fun gambling for match-sticks.’ But there was risk-taking and risk-taking. Crashing was okay. Dying horribly – in the manner of Lewis-Evans, or Orjan Atteberg, crushed by his own car at Eläintarhanajot – wasn’t. The old tracks had to go. Soon, only Monaco would be left of the street circuits, sustained by its ineffable glamour as well as its historic centrality.

  Not that this meant that the other, bigger, tracks were very much safer or less capricious. The terrors of the Nürburgring were well known from before the war. But so were those of Spa-Francorchamps, the ‘Ring’s 9-mile-long junior sibling. This was on the Belgian side of the border, but not that far from the great German track, and sharing many of its characteristics – including some very fast sections, unpredictably awful weather, extensive hilly scenery and a persistent reek of danger. Many drivers loved (still do) its stupendous challenges. Others thought it was something you were grateful to get through alive. The Masta Kink alone was enough to cause nightmares: a vicious twiddle in the long straight between Malmédy and Stavelot, approached at top speed – 180 mph, say – which forced you to jump to the right, then left, then straight on again, leaving you (you hoped) heading flat out towards the Stavelot hairpin. And this on a track lined with about as many hard objects as you can think of, almost nothing in the way of crash protection, with marshals and safety crew both untrained and strung out at odd distances, plus a good chance of a downpour at some point in the race.

  Zandvoort, near Haarlem in Holland, was evidently much less terrifying. But it was a trifle cranky. Home of the Dutch GP, it was a track built on roads once laid down by the invading German Wehrmacht, containing a bend named Tarzan and was so close to the sea (separated, in fact, by a long, straight, dune) that sand frequently blew across the track, playfully ruining tyre grip and filling engine intakes with grit. Or there was Watkins Glen, a funky old track in upstate New York, with a corrugated surface and some real he-man bends; where the starting and prize money made the cash on offer at the European tracks look like loose change; where the fall colours lit up the countryside; and where races were started and finished by a man called ‘Tex’ Hopkins, who chomped a comedy cigar and wore a lavender suit. Or Reims, on-off home to the French GP, a kind of poor man’s Le Mans (and similarly old-school, an old open-road circuit), with a fantastically long slipstreamers’ straight, shimmering heat, and nothing between you and the open fields on either side, except possibly a hoarding for Total petrol and a Frenchman with a camera …

  Or, consider Monza. The name alone has to be one of the most potent and evocative words in the whole of motor racing. And with good reason. Like Spa and the Nürburgring, the track has tremendous historical resonance, dating back to well before the Second World War. Unlike Spa and the Nürburgring, Monza is really only about one thing: the lust for sheer speed. If you want to hit 200 mph and more, Monza is the place to do it. And it is also a great place to crash.

  The original layout saw twenty-seven spectators and one driver killed in an appalling accident in the 1928 Grand Prix. Three drivers were killed in the 1933 GP. After the war, the circuit was completely rebuilt – still as a temple to speed – only for Alberto Ascari to die there in 1955, and for Taffy von Trips to die in 1961, in a catastrophe at the Curva Parabolica in which fourteen spectators were also killed, after von Trips’ Ferrari came into contact with Clark’s Lotus. The famous banked curves (as at Brooklands, or Avus) were still there in the mid-1960s, but only i
n the background: concrete expressions of risk, now shunned by the Formula One drivers. The vast straight, on the other hand, leading out of Parabolica and heading down to the Curva Grande, still meant nothing less than a sweltering drag race followed by a hugely fast right-hand bend. From the opening of the track in 1922, up to 1965, some twenty-five drivers lost their lives, trying to bring Monza to heel. Well into the 1990s, Professor Sid Watkins – Formula One’s revered safety Godfather – still found much to detest about the circuit. ‘It is the place,’ he wrote, mordantly, ‘I approach with resigned reluctance; it is my personal nightmare of the year.’ Monza was, and would remain, a sacred monster.

  In other words – and this is the real issue – although the really dodgy, small-time circuits, the idiosyncratic non-Championship tracks of the 1950s, had been edged out as the sport became bigger, the ones that did remain were pretty much the way Fangio, Ascari, Hawthorn knew them from a decade earlier. So it was said of Jim Clark that he ‘caressed the Nürburgring into surrender’ – when he won there in ’65, fifteen seconds ahead of second-place Graham Hill, leading all the way from pole position and setting the fastest lap, nearly a minute quicker than Fangio’s time in ’57: an advertisement of modernity. But Fangio, going back a whole racing generation, would have felt entirely familiar with not only the track that Clark caressed into surrender, but the bleak absence of safety precautions. The view would have been the same for both drivers: pine trees, concrete fence posts, rocks, earth banks, all lining the tarmac for mile after mile, only an occasional under-prepared track marshal to help if things went badly wrong.

  It was the same at Monaco, where pre-war-style sandbags were still being tied optimistically around stone bollards to cushion the effects of a shunt, and where there were plenty of those surprisingly hard straw bales to smash into. Even at comfortable old Brands Hatch, the earth banks and steel poles (holding up ads for Girling and Dunlop) were only ever a few feet away from your relatively low-grip tyres. It was a world, according to Jackie Stewart, of ‘grass banks that were launch pads, things you went straight into, trees that were unprotected’. It was a world of hazards.

  But the cars – hadn’t the cars got safer, even if the tracks hadn’t? Well, they had, of course, evolved, enormously. Fangio sat up at the wheel of a Ferrari or Maserati, in a gale of dust, engine heat, pulverised brake linings, small stones, the whole lot four-wheel-drifting with the uneasy composure of a powerboat on a lake. When Clark raced, on the other hand, he was in the supine, modern position, only his head getting the worst buffetings, the steering-wheel tiny in comparison with the dustbin-lids Fangio had to use, the gearlever a stub by his hand, his car snipping out the corners. He also, by the second half of the 1960s, had twice as much bhp coming out of the engine as Fangio, plus a combination of chassis and tyres that Fangio would have marvelled at.

  And yet the cars of the mid-1960s weren’t an awful lot safer than the ones of the mid-1950s. Like Fangio, like Moss, like Hawthorn, like all of them, Clark wore no safety belts, had no proper flameproof overalls, was surrounded by raw petrol slapping around in easily ruptured plain steel tanks, could find himself on the wrong end of a catastrophic tyre failure or mechanical collapse at any time. He sat in a monocoque that was stronger than the old spaceframes, but which was probably going to experience higher-impact speeds in the event of a crash; and which had the same fantastically hard objects hurtling towards it, the same tough old circuits. Things were changing; and yet nothing had changed.

  11

  THE SPANISH GRAND PRIX, JARAMA, 12 MAY 1968

  Why the 1968 Spanish GP? Was it a great race? Did it herald the arrival of a new driving star? Was it a disaster? Or was it just one of those moments which now acts as, not just a snapshot, an encapsulation of where Formula One had got to, but also a harbinger of the way things were going to be: an emblematic event?

  It was, first of all, an occasion overhung by tragedy.

  On 7 April 1968, Jim Clark was killed, driving a Lotus, in a Formula 2 race at Hockenheim. There are certain observations that routinely come to mind whenever Clark’s death is recalled. The most common, among the racing fraternity, is that Clark was indestructible, the one man who could cheat death: if it could happen to him, then everyone felt their mortality that bit more keenly.

  The second observation, common among spectators of the sport, is, what was he doing flogging around in a Formula 2 race anyway? He was Formula One World Champion in 1963 and ’65; he was well paid; in 1968, he had the best car on the grid and every prospect of winning a third Championship. Why was he at Hockenheim at all?

  In answer to this second point – well, there was a lot less job demarcation in the 1960s. Grand Prix drivers took part in all kinds of other events, much as they used to do in the ’50s. They appeared at Indianapolis (Clark actually missed Monaco in ’65, in order to go and win the Indy 500). They took part in the Tasman Series – an off-season series of races held in Australia and New Zealand. They raced in Formula Two – Hill, Brabham, Clark, Stewart – for money, and because they were contracted to. They raced in sports cars. They raced in the Can-Am series. There weren’t so many Grands Prix to get through – twelve in 1968, as opposed to seventeen in 2009 – and they liked to keep busy. That was what they did.

  As to the first point. Well, Clark had survived many a spin, many an incident, both racing and in practice, thanks to reflexes and a genius for interpreting situations. But he knew perfectly well that death was all around him and that dealing with it was just part of the job. ‘I don’t think I am callous,’ he said, speaking of track fatalities, ‘but I have been blessed with a bad memory for such things.’ A day after someone else’s death, ‘You feel a little better.’ Three days later, ‘You start packing your bags for another race.’ His own demise was the result, almost certainly, of a sudden tyre deflation at around 170 mph, an event which turned him from a driver into a passenger, somersaulting through the air, then smashing into a tree. There was nothing he could have done about it. He knew that it could happen to him, just like it could happen to anyone.

  At the time of his death, he had won more Grands Prix and taken more pole positions than any other driver in the sport. He was thirty-two.

  Faced with this disaster, Colin Chapman went to pieces. Later, he would say of Formula One: ‘I can’t say I’ve ever felt quite the same about it since ’68.’ At the time, he simply disappeared, not even turning up for the Spanish GP. The rest of the team arrived, but no Chapman. ‘Nobody knew where Colin was,’ said said Bob Sparshott of Team Lotus. ‘It was Graham Hill who pulled the team together.’

  But Hill already had plenty on his plate, even before Clark died. For a start, he and the rest of Team Lotus were still getting to grips with the Lotus 49 and its magical new Ford-Cosworth DFV 3-litre engine, which had first appeared a year earlier: powerful, awkward and destined to become the most successful racing engine of all time.

  At the Dutch GP in ’67, the first competitive outing of the new combination, Hill had taken pole position, a blistering three and a half seconds quicker than the previous year’s time. Clark, meanwhile, won the race (after Hill’s engine had given up) and set the fastest lap, apparently without even trying. But he was trying, quite hard. When Hill first tested the Lotus 49 Cosworth DFV in early 1967, he announced, cheerfully, ‘It’s got some poke: not a bad old tool.’ But Clark was much less flattering. ‘When the power comes in at 6,500 rpm,’ he complained, ‘it does so with such a bang that the car is almost uncontrollable. You either have power or you haven’t.’ The car and engine both looked fantastic: but the chassis had its quirks (including a marked tendency to dive under braking); and the engine was clearly intractable.

  It was also less than reliable. Lubrication snags let to major failures, and the major failures meant that, however rapid the new Lotus was, the 1967 Championship went to Denny Hulme in an unburstable Brabham-Repco – completing a highly impressive back-to-back with Jack Brabham, who had taken the ’66 title. Still. As the
engine reliability improved, confidence grew. Clark took the opening race of the ’68 calendar, at South Africa, the last Grand Prix he would win.

  In the meantime, though, Chapman had taken another giant conceptual leap forward. The Lotus 49s which raced in South Africa were painted a conventional, chaste, British racing green with a yellow Lotus stripe down the middle. The single Team Lotus car which turned up some four months later, in Spain, was epically different in appearance. It had a white lower half, a red upper half, and a gold-painted nose. An escutcheon on each side read ‘GOLD LEAF TEAM LOTUS’ and in the centre of this was an image of the John Player & Sons iconic cigarette-packet sailor boy: an only slightly camp naval rating in a beard, surrounded by a ship’s life ring. The whole effect was as tasteful as a gangster’s bracelet and as unexpected as a macaw in a suburban back garden. Gold Leaf Team Lotus, as everyone had to get used to calling them, had clearly sold their soul.

  Not that there wasn’t already commercial sponsorship in 1968 – there was plenty of it. Tyre companies, petrol and oil companies, spark plug manufacturers, all contributed to the budgets of the Formula One teams – around £50,000 per team, when put together. As a rule, though, any promotional logos were still confined to nothing more than a label sewn onto a driver’s overalls, or perhaps a modest sticker on the side of the car. No one thought that the time would come when Grand Prix cars would be tarted up like Indy 500 competitors – with their acne of sponsors’ logos, and their primary funding from business envelope manufacturers. No, the graphical palette available to teams at the end of 1967 was pretty much the same as that available in 1957: cars were painted green, red, blue, silver or white. And they could put stripes – white, yellow, or red – on their machines if they liked.