Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One

by Charles Jennings

  Both opinions were valid. Rindt was quick, and he knew it; he was, indeed, arrogant; he held grudges against people and was pathologically keen to freeze out anyone who had crossed him. He was also droll, good company, and, if you kept on the right side of him (if you were Jackie Stewart, say), he was a stalwart friend. He was ambitious, too, and famously remarked that he was so desperate to win the World Championship that he would even consider leaving the amiable Brabham team (with their relatively sturdy, but not superfast, spaceframed cars) and sign up for the unnerving potentialities of Lotus.

  Which he did, full of misgivings, for the 1969 season.

  It didn’t take long for Rindt and Colin Chapman to start bickering. Rindt had been with Lotus barely six months before he felt compelled to write to Chapman, complaining about the fragility of the cars he was being asked to drive. Having noted that in three years with Cooper and then Brabham, he had had all of two crashes, he went on to observe that, in less than a year with Lotus, he had already had three shunts. ‘Your cars are so quick,’ he said, ‘that we would still be competitive with a few extra pounds to make the weakest parts stronger.’ In desperation, he added, ‘Please give my suggestions some thought. I can only drive a car in which I have some confidence and I feel the point of no confidence is quite near.’ The only effect this had was to get on Chapman’s nerves. He would later ask, rhetorically, ‘What am I going to do with this bloke? He has lightning reflexes, is bloody quick, but keeps telling me how to design my cars.’

  To add to the friction, Rindt took a while to achieve his first GP win, slogging through the majority of 1969 without even getting onto the podium. Denis Jenkinson, by now the doyen of motoring correspondents, particularly loathed Rindt and declared that the day Rindt won a Grand Prix, he, Jenkinson, would shave off his trademark hedge-like beard, confident that the day would never come. It did, eventually, in October ’69, when Rindt won at Watkins Glen, driving a Lotus 49B, coming home a convincing forty-six seconds ahead of another great pal, Piers Courage, in a Brabham. ‘I genuinely hope Jochen gets success,’ said Stewart, shortly afterwards. ‘Not too much of it, but I hope he gets it.’ A bitter Jenkinson duly shaved off the beard.

  And then Chapman produced the Lotus 72. Well, how epochal do you like your Grand Prix cars? All right, it didn’t have Cooper’s paradigm-shifting insight of pushing the engine round to the back, but it was pretty close. Chapman (and his designer Maurice Phillippe) had taken the radiator off the front of the car and reconstituted it as two mid-mounted sidepods. This allowed them to locate a bit more weight within the wheelbase and at the same time shape the car like a wedge of cheese (an idea left over from the promising, but banned, 4WD gas turbine Indy car), and thus significantly reduce wind resistance. They also threw in torsion bar springing, inboard front brakes, anti-dive suspension geometry, an airbox for the fuel-injection trumpets (for the British GP) and a terrifically businesslike tripartite rear wing. It was the shape of the future, and Rindt had it in time for the 1970 Spanish Grand Prix.

  It got off to an uneasy start. The fancy suspension was not to the drivers’ liking, and Rindt, for one, was already in a state of mild paranoia about the lightness and fragility of the new car. ‘I can’t get on with this car,’ he told his mechanic, Herbie Blash, ‘it’s going to break.’ But then, according to Blash, ‘He just had to drive it because it was so fast.’ At Jarama, Rindt showed typical ingratitude (so far as Chapman was concerned), by spinning the car when one of the inboard brake shafts snapped in practice, stomping back into the pits and annoucing loudly that he wasn’t ‘going to get in that bloody car again’. At Zandvoort, a couple of months later, a driveshaft disintegrated at speed as Rindt was going past the pits. Bits and pieces went everywhere, all over the track and into the pit lane, a hailstorm of shredded engineering – one fragment actually hitting McLaren team boss Teddy Mayer – but left Chapman unscathed. Rindt couldn’t believe it. ‘What do you think?’ he seethed, ‘That car disintegrated right in front of Chapman’s eyes, bits all over the place, and not one piece hit him.’

  Nevertheless, Chapman stoically buttoned his lip and spent a good deal of time caressing and cajoling his star driver to use the brilliant machine at his disposal: with the required effect. As Graham Hill sagely observed, ‘Colin will put his arm round Rindt’s shoulder and lead him away for a friendly little chat … and Jochen will eventually get back in the car.’ One particularly informative picture taken around this time shows old pals Rindt and Stewart, seated in front of the Lotus pits, grinning hugely at some private joke; with Chapman perched on the counter some way back, staring at his number one driver with fierce and undisguised suspicion.

  Nevertheless, and despite all this, Rindt and Chapman were rewarded with four wins on the trot – Zandvoort, Charade (the French GP), Brands Hatch and Hockenheim – after the last of which Rindt cracked, telling Chapman ‘A monkey could have won today in this car. Thank you.’

  And the opposition? Stewart was temporarily marooned in a less-than-perfect March 701; Jacky Ickx in the Ferrari 312B was getting faster (and more reliable) all the time, but had probably left it too late in the season to overhaul Rindt; Ickx’s team-mate, old-school wild man Clay Regazzoni, was too undependable, as well as being too far behind in the points.

  Everything was set for Rindt to take the Championship, fulfil the potential he had shown in the past, silence the Denis Jenkinsons once and for all.

  But Formula One was still a very dangerous place to be. Death kept stalking the circuits. John Taylor had died at the German GP in 1966; Lorenzo Bandini died at Monaco in 1967; Jo Schlesser was burned to death at the French GP in 1968. 1970 was turning into an even worse year. Bruce McLaren was killed at the start of June, testing a Can-Am sports car at Goodwood. Later in the same month, Rindt’s great friend, the dashing Piers Courage, died in another ghastly fireball, this time at the Dutch GP. Rindt was so affected by the death of Courage that he started talking openly about taking the title and then giving up racing. For all his ambition and arrogance, he didn’t want to stick around in a sport which had become an exercise in mourning.

  Monza, therefore, became a crucial battle in the campaign. Rindt had retired at the preceding Austrian GP, allowing Ickx to pick up his first win for Ferrari. But a win in Italy would pretty much fix the Championship – and set Rindt free from the treadmill he now found himself on.

  During practice, he decided to take off both the rear wing and the winglets on the nose, in order to get the maximum possible speed – over 200 mph – down the mindblowingly fast straight going into the Curva Grande. Maybe this was a good idea. Maybe not. Maybe it was Chapman’s idea anyway. Rindt’s team-mate, John Miles, flatly refused to drive the car set up in this way: wingless, it was hugely unstable at just about any speed. Chapman and Rindt, locked together by competitive desire, prowled around in the heat, stony-faced. Rindt went out on fresh tyres, going for an unbeatable lap. As he charged towards the Parabolica, a front brakeshaft failed; he ploughed into an imperfectly secured crash barrier, which broke, allowing him to smash into one of the barrier stanchions.

  Not properly strapped in, Rindt shot forward in the cockpit and slid at 150 mph through his own safety harness: the buckle of which cut his throat. The car came to a halt in the dust, its front torn off, Rindt’s legs protruding from what was left of the chassis. ‘Rindt has stuffed it,’ someone shouted in the silence which followed.

  The mess was cleared up. Rindt’s body was taken off to hospital in Milan. Practice went on in a desolate kind of way. The race went on, too, and Italian-Swiss Regazzoni won, in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans. Jacky Ickx then won in Canada and Mexico, but Rindt was not to be denied his macabre, posthumous Championship. He took it by forty-five points to Ickx’s forty.

  And Jackie Stewart? He was now losing motor racing friends and acquaintances at a rate of something like five a year, and was starting to get very slightly sick of the whole business. Speaking of those crashes which happened to other
drivers, he once said, ‘I isolate myself immediately. I lock myself into a numb condition, without any feeling or emotion until after the race. One has to do that.’ But such strategies could only work for a while. Not long after Monza, he confessed that Rindt’s death ‘has had a profound effect on me, my attitude and feelings for motor racing, perhaps for ever.’ In November, he had to present the widowed Nina Rindt with Jochen’s World Championship trophy. After that, was it really worth going on?

  13

  HAIR, HOTPANTS AND THE FIRST BRAZILIAN

  Who was it who made Rindt’s posthumous title safe? Emerson Fittipaldi: the first Brazilian to make it big in Formula One.

  It was at Watkins Glen, October 1970, and Fittipaldi was making only his fourth start in Formula One. Team Lotus had now been whittled down to him and a Swedish driver called Reine Wissell. In just over two years, they had lost Jim Clark, Graham Hill and Jochen Rindt, to fatalities or major accidents – Hill having broken both legs horribly at the Glen in 1969.

  Fittipaldi was twenty-three years old, brought up in the schools of hard knocks of Formula Ford and Formula Three, clearly a talent to watch, but not necessarily the person you would pick to defend prospective Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships: especially with Jacky Ickx having won two out of the last three Grandes Épreuves and enjoying the clear mathematical possibility of stealing the prize out from under your nose. It was a situation as fraught as Jarama, ’68, when Hill had dragged the team back into existence after Clark’s death – the principal differences being that, in spring 1968, Hill was a massively experienced Formula One driver; and there was no title actually on the line.

  Fittipaldi was quick, amiable and laid-back. Nelson Piquet was a fan, and would remark, admiringly, ‘Emerson was a fantastically quick driver, but he was very intelligent. He was soft on the car and even when he did not qualify very well he was usually at the finish. He was nearly always on the podium.’ The Lotus 72 was still devilishly fast, but so were the Ferrari 312s; to say nothing of an extremely efficient new Tyrell being driven by Jackie Stewart. As it turned out, all the rivals (including Pedro Rodriguez in a surprisingly modish BRM V12) broke down or had fuel problems, and young Emerson, with his go-go sideburns and beaming grin, kept the slippery Lotus going and was rewarded with a sight he had only ever associated with Clark, Rindt and Hill: the spectacle of Colin Chapman jumping up and down in the pit lane, throwing his little Bob Dylan hat in the air as the car crossed the finish line and Tex Hopkins (as ever, in his lavender suit) threshing around with the chequered flag. Fittipaldi had won his first Grand Prix and secured the titles for his new team.

  Fittipaldi’s appearance also denoted something else: we were now definitely into the 1970s and as that untidy decade progressed, a highly typical mixture of hairiness, militancy and corporate fuddling began to fill the air.

  Collective allegiances were being formed on all sides. On the one hand, the GPDA threatened to boycott circuits they considered unsafe; and started pressing the car builders to make safer cars – not an unreasonable request, given that the death rate showed no signs of slowing, with BRM alone managing to lose two key drivers in 1971 – Jo Siffert in a non-Championship race at Brands Hatch; and Pedro Rodriguez, in a sports car race.

  On the other hand, big business was also on the rise, the leaden hand of commercial involvement becoming increasingly obvious.

  Just take a look at the various corporate colour schemes on offer, on a 1971 grid. BRM, for instance, were now being sponsored by the tweedy Yardley cosmetics company (desperate to rebrand itself), and their handsome P153 sported a chi-chi white, gold, black and auburn colour scheme. All those years of doughty, determined, British racing green: gone overnight, in return for Yardley’s money. The exciting March-Ford 711 not only had a kinky tea-tray spoiler on its nose (something of the Starship Enterprise, oddly, in the effect), it also had lurid red sponsorship from STP, the fuel and oil additives company that had been ubiquitous in American motor racing since the 1950s. Team Lotus were still dressed up as giant Gold Leaf fag packets. Tyrrell had ELF petroleum, their principal backers, plastered all over Stewart’s car. New boys Surtees (started by the 1964 World Champion) were being funded by Brooke Bond Oxo, of all people: a car running on gravy. Only Brabham, Ferrari and McLaren were wearing much the same colours they wore in the past – although Ferrari were making plenty of their association with the Heuer chronometer company, and McLaren were about to thieve Yardley from BRM, for 1972. The relative innocence of a mere four years earlier – cars racing only in national or écurie colours – had quite vanished.

  Then, again, motor racing was itself becoming a big, although disarticulated, business: around one and a half million people a year in Britain alone were reckoned to pass through the turnstiles at motor races; thirteen million watched it on the telly. And, as the sport grew, so the cars at the top end got more complex, and the personnel needed to create and service them grew more numerous, and, what with one thing and another, the cost of keeping a presence in Formula One ballooned. At the start of the 1970s, you needed around £140,000 a year to run a two-car Formula One team, of which at least £70,000 went on two cars and a spare, plus engines from Ford Cosworth. Transportation costs came in at another £20,000 per annum; the same, for engine rebuilds. The drivers themselves could hope to make an annual income of £15,000 and more from the sport, mostly from starting money and prize money. Of course, in Jackie Stewart’s case, this was nearer £100,000, thanks to all his cunning business tie-ins; and the fact that he won a lot of races. But he was, as he would have been the first to admit, unusual.

  Either way, everybody needed money, lots of it, and nobody cared terribly where it came from. At the same time, if you were a top-of-the line business and you wanted to put your name about, a Formula One car was an increasingly visible, internationally mobile and really quite glamorous kind of billboard to stick your name on. The BRM deal alone was believed to have cost Yardley £100,000. A new synergy was born: another little bit of the modern world.

  Stewart, meanwhile, was not only reshaping the earnings potential of the average Grand Prix driver, he was also taking key steps in reshaping the sport’s collective image.

  Throughout the 1960s, the cars were beautiful, but everything else wasn’t. Jim Clark wore his hair short, and kept a cardigan handy, in case his mother came round. Jack Brabham was a mysterious half-bearded pantomime uncle. Graham Hill was an RAF squadron leader, now retired on half pay. John Surtees looked like a cranky schoolmaster. Even funky, lordly, Jochen Rindt, in his early days, looked a bit like a boy scout without a whistle. The mechanics were worse: toiling grease monkeys dressed in the filthiest clothing you had ever seen. The fans and hangers-on were either boys wishing they were men, or men wishing they were more than the men they actually were. And Denis Jenkinson was a chipmunk in a tweed jacket.

  But Jackie Stewart was, as ever, thinking ahead. He started to grow his hair. By 1969, it was down to his collar. By 1971, his second World Championship year – when he won seven out of eleven races and took the title by a runaway twenty-nine points, ahead of Ronnie Peterson in the March – it was past the collar and nearing the shoulders. He had been wearing a horrible Donovan/Dylanesque hat (in his off-duty moments) for some time, a bit like Colin Chapman, that eternal spiv. Now it became known as a Jackie Stewart hat, from which a tangled mat of barnet routinely emerged. He then teamed this up with some heavy flares and a pair of ludicrously outsized aviator sunglasses. The effect – especially when seen in partnership with Helen, his dishy wife – was simply electrifying. It was, at last, The Seventies.

  A battle promptly broke out between him, Emerson Fittipaldi, Ronnie Peterson, and the insanely good-looking François Cevert – Stewart’s team-mate – as to who could sprout the most uncontrollable haircut and densest sideburns. Almost overnight Formula One drivers started to look like first-division footballers, or roadies for the Moody Blues. Throw in the increasingly sexy prominence of their wives and girlfriends
, plus the distant rumble of personality girls and female PR manipulators – courtesy of those new, non-traditional sponsors – and the sport was starting to look dangerously swinging.

  Which was ideal, so far as Fittipaldi was concerned. Like so many racers on the up, he had been given sage advice by the exemplary Stewart: ‘He was great with me,’ Fittipaldi later said. ‘He taught me how to behave with regard to advertising contracts, relationships with fans and agreements with sponsors. He was a real friend.’

  But young Emerson was also a Brazilian – not the very first to drive in Formula One (that was probably Hernando da Silva Ramos, in the 1950s) – but certainly the first to make it big. And he brought a certain Brazilian flair to his work. Team Lotus had to get used to something called ‘Emerson time’, the time he thought it fit to turn up for testing, or sponsorial work, or whatever – sometimes completely punctual, sometimes an hour or more later than everyone else. He also liked, as the years went by, to travel with an increasingly colourful Latin American entourage: glamorous wife Maria Helena; his father; mother; kids. The air was filled with Portuguese, previously not much heard in and around the pit lane. Conventional Northern European reticence took a back seat. Beaming, hairy, benign, mildly exotic Emerson was introducing a new sense of other worlds.

  And, to his lasting glory, he translated all this groovy, whiskery otherness into the World Championship in 1972. The Lotus 72 in which Rindt won the Championship in 1970 had been reworked into the 72D and given a striking new appearance, courtesy of Imperial Tobacco, who had decided that their latest brand of cigs needed promoting. So Team Lotus bowed to the inevitable: the cars were painted black and gold and renamed John Player Specials. They looked like flying coffins.