Formula One and Beyond

by Max Mosley

  Alan Rees was an outstandingly good judge of drivers, picking both Ronnie and James. Alan and Robin wanted Jochen Rindt to drive for us in Formula One for 1970 and, having seen him in action from close up, I could only agree. But we knew he would probably not accept. Nonetheless, I drove to Geneva to try to persuade him, and he and his wife, Nina, put me up for the night and were very hospitable. However, he was dismissive of the new project and didn’t believe in our plans – to him it was all just ‘schoolboy dreams’, with a Formula Three car being built in Graham’s ‘shack’ mainly from other people’s components.

  Jochen’s manager at the time was a certain Bernie Ecclestone. I didn’t know him back then although, of course, I knew of him. I never imagined that we would meet up a couple of years later and begin a significant working relationship. Bernie had been urging Jochen to drive for Brabham in 1970 rather than for Lotus, whose cars Bernie thought dangerous. When my attempt to recruit Jochen reached Bernie’s ears, he realised that Robin was planning to leave Cosworth to be the designer and a partner in a new Formula One team. He immediately tried to persuade Robin to go in with him and Jochen. This would be a much better way, he said, to start a new team.

  Bernie had some good arguments: he had money, we didn’t; and in Jochen he also had the driver everyone thought was the quickest around, with the possible exception of Jackie Stewart. Fortunately for the March project, Robin’s response was that he had agreed a deal and was not prepared to go back on it. In the end, Bernie also failed to convince Jochen to go to Brabham. Had he succeeded, Jochen might not have died at Monza in September 1970.

  By now, I had given up the Bar. My clerk thought it was a temporary aberration and I would be back once I had got motor racing out of my system, but I was fully engaged on March. My first priority was finding a factory, somewhere convenient for Robin, who lived near Northampton, as well as for Alan Rees and Graham Coaker, who were both based in Slough. I went looking one weekend with Jean and found a small unit on an industrial estate in Bicester, one of a group of four across two buildings. Each was 3000 square feet, including a small office. We took one unit and found ourselves sharing the building with a dairy in the other part. Sometime later we took the remaining two in the other half of the development. It was a reasonable journey for the other three and I was quite happy to drive down from London each day.

  We opened the factory in September 1969 with no significant capital to speak of but hoped we could manage without. We each put in £2500. I borrowed mine from my mother; Robin and Alan both won theirs by betting on the 1969 World Championship; while Graham Coaker, who at 37 was more grown-up than us 30-year-olds, actually had some savings. We announced we would design and build Formula One cars and compete in the Formula One World Championship with our own team in 1970. Given the cost and complexity of modern Formula One, it would cost hundreds of millions to mount an equivalent operation today if, indeed, it could be done at all.

  Our business model was based on us also building Formula Two, Formula Three, Formula Ford and CanAm cars for sale. These were for international racing series and championships through which a driver could eventually reach Formula One. The entry level for a driver was national club racing of the kind I had competed in with my U2. Next came Formula Ford, which was sometimes international, then Formula Three, a fully international FIA formula from which a very successful driver could go straight into Formula One. Formula Two was just below Formula One, with very similar cars.

  CanAm was a North American series for powerful open sports cars. Apart from these there were races such as the 24 Hours of Le Mans for sports and GT (closed) cars as well as touring cars. The top drivers back then would take part in all sorts of races, sometimes even in a support race at a Formula One event. All you needed to compete, even in Formula One, was an international licence issued by your national sporting authority.

  Our announcement caused a sensation in British motor sport because something so ambitious had never been attempted before. There was much speculation about who was behind it, and The Times ran a long piece explaining that no one would try such a thing with less than half a million (about £16 million in today’s money). I never suggested we had the money but did not feel it was my job to deny the rumours. We came close to attracting a major sponsor from the outset. Bayer AG, the German industrial giant whose trademark case I became involved with, had developed a self-skinning plastic foam that we thought might be suitable for a chassis. It would have been like Frank Williams’s proposed Reynolds Metals deal only bigger and more spectacular, but sadly the technical complications were too great and the deal never materialised.

  Having failed to secure Jochen, we hoped to run Chris Amon, a friend of Robin then driving for Ferrari. The second driver would be Ronnie Peterson, with whom we now had a three-year contract. Robin managed to persuade Chris to join us, which was quite a coup because he was an absolutely top driver whose presence in the team gave us credibility. He was having a difficult time at Ferrari, who were going through a very bad patch, finishing the 1969 season joint last of the six teams competing in what was then the International Cup for Formula One Manufacturers, the forerunner of the modern Constructors’ World Championship.

  Sports car racing was much bigger than Formula One when March opened for business. Events such as Le Mans, Sebring and the ADAC 1000-kilometre race attracted huge crowds and large fields of cars, including Ferraris, Porsches and Ford GT40s. For the 1970 season, Porsche needed a Formula One seat for Jo Siffert, their top driver, to stop him going to Ferrari where he would have been able to drive in Formula One as well as the all-important sports cars. With all the publicity about the new March Formula One team, Porsche thought this might be a solution for Siffert. Their racing manager arranged to visit us in Bicester, which was a nerve-racking experience. Porsche were then, as now, a formidable company with immensely high standards and we had almost nothing in the factory, even in the way of basic machine tools.

  So less than six months before our first Grand Prix I had to show Porsche’s racing boss round a small, almost empty unit next to a dairy. Somehow we convinced them we were serious and a deal was done. Siffert was a top driver so this gave us added credibility and Porsche’s contribution covered almost 30 per cent of our Formula One budget. From a historical perspective, that is a measure of how much more important sports car racing once was compared with Formula One. That the position today is reversed may have something to do with how the two series have been managed for the past 40 or so years. Long-distance races for sports cars, or so-called sports prototypes, continued to be organised in the traditional fashion but, as we shall see, Formula One was about to enter a new era.

  Then we had another stroke of luck. Ken Tyrrell had just won the 1969 Formula One World Championship with Jackie Stewart driving a French Matra with a Cosworth engine. This was known as a Ford Cosworth because, thanks to Walter Hayes, a senior Ford executive, Ford had put up the money for Keith Duckworth to develop it. The Cosworth DFV eventually became the most successful Grand Prix engine of all time. For 1970, Matra wanted their car to run with their own newly developed V12 engine, but Jackie and Ken trusted the Cosworth. They also had a relationship with the Ford Motor Company they were not prepared to break.

  Matra refused to let Tyrrell run a Matra chassis with a Ford engine and none of the established Formula One constructors would sell them a chassis, so they came to us. We sold them three rolling chassis – i.e. cars with no engines or gearboxes – for £6000 each. (‘What good is a car with no engine?’ asked one of my aunts when I tried to explain what we were doing.) This was the supposedly profitable price we had worked out from our budget. Walter Hayes, who had arranged for Ford to pay for Tyrrell’s chassis, called Robin and me to his Regent Street office and told us the price was £9000, not £6000. I said: ‘We can’t possibly do that – we’ve agreed £6000 with Tyrrell.’ His reply was, ‘Leave Ken to me. It’s £9000.’ If he had not done that, March would have folded within the year.


  To much scepticism and disbelief, we announced we would run the new March Formula One car at Silverstone on 6 February 1970, less than five months after we had opened the factory. Someone said ‘March’ stood for Much Advertised Racing Car Hoax, but we had some amazing individuals working with us, all of whom Alan, Robin and I had come across in our previous racing activities. All were attracted by the prospect of a new and very different venture. They included David Reeves from the Meadspeed days; Jon Redgrave, my former Formula Two mechanic; Pete Kerr and Pete Briggs from Alan Rees’s Formula Two team at Winkelmann Racing; Bill Stone, the New Zealand racing driver who had built the original March Formula Three car; and Ray Wardell and John Muller, who were known in the sport as being at the very top of their fields, and others.

  John Thompson, a sheet metal expert who had worked with Robin at McLaren and then Cosworth, was a key figure because of his expertise in monocoque construction. A monocoque is a structure in which the loads are supported by an external skin, like an eggshell, rather than the classic framework of steel tubing. Intuitively, you would expect it to be less crash-resistant than the steel tubing, and Colin Chapman was criticised on safety grounds when he produced the first monocoque Formula One car, the Lotus 25, in 1962. In practice, though, monocoque structures are much stronger and safer than the earlier space frames and eventually became ubiquitous. Among his other achievements, John Thompson was very involved with the first Ferrari monocoque.

  Quite early on, Robin discovered that the petrol tanks on our Formula One car would not hold enough fuel to finish some of the longer races and he came up with aerodynamic-looking side pods to house additional tanks. We didn’t want anyone to think there had been a mistake, so I put out a press release saying these were ‘low aspect-ratio wings, specially designed to work in the turbulent conditions between the wheels’. That sort of hyperbole amused the technical experts, but Robin was tolerant and it kept the press happy. There was also a degree of truth in it. The original plan was to fit them for the 20 per cent or so of races that needed additional fuel, but we all liked the look and kept them on even when not strictly necessary.

  The side pods were styled like aerofoils by Peter Wright, then with Specialised Mouldings, the leading supplier of fibreglass components to the racing car industry. He had tried the idea on a BRM in 1969 hoping to find some downforce, but decided they had no real effect. However, they were just what Robin needed to contain the extra fuel tanks. Peter was later to develop the idea further at Lotus, where he eventually designed the first ground-effect car. Once the gap to the side was closed, there was a massive increase in downforce with little increase in drag. In a way, the March 701 was ahead of its time. More recently, Peter has been head of the FIA GT Commission and a key member of the FIA groups dealing with safety and technical matters, both track and road.

  We hired Silverstone to showcase the car and the international motor racing press, together with the entire British Formula One establishment, turned up on the day. Some of the other teams had probably come to watch us fail. In a quiet moment, I went to one end of the paddock and surveyed the scene. It was an extraordinary sensation seeing the area full with almost everyone who was anyone in British motor racing and realising our small group had achieved this – and in such an astonishingly short time. To everyone’s surprise, two Formula One cars actually ran: one in Tyrrell’s colours for Jackie Stewart; the other, our own factory car, for Chris Amon. I think there was a suspicion that we would mock up a Formula One car and run the old Formula Three car from the previous autumn.

  It is difficult to exaggerate the impact we made by producing two functioning Formula One cars. Now we had real credibility for the first time. Stewart and Amon both went out, as did the other team drivers, Johnny Servoz-Gavin for Tyrrell and Jo Siffert in ours. Ronnie Peterson did a few laps, his first in a Formula One car. He spun the wheels in top gear on the Hangar Straight, no doubt due to the low temperature and cold tyres, loved it and clearly could not wait to have another go.

  To all this we added a sensational and unexpected announcement: we had sold a car to Andy Granatelli, the American boss of STP (a well-known fuel additive), who were going to compete in the 1970 Formula One World Championship with Mario Andretti driving. Granatelli was more or less the king of American racing and Mario was the number one US driver, having just won the 1969 Indianapolis 500 in an STP car. To back all this up, Granatelli was at Silverstone in person, accompanied by Mario and a large entourage. And, to top it all off, we were able to announce that our own team was going to be sponsored by STP. It was one of those days you never forget and I had to keep reminding myself it was real. But the first round of the 1970 championship was only four weeks away. We still had a great deal of work to finish and, despite all the publicity, there was very little hard cash coming from STP.

  The first race was the South African Grand Prix on 7 March 1970, not quite six months after we opened the factory. The cars were flown out almost immediately after our Silverstone debut and Robin went on ahead to do some testing with Chris Amon, who was an outstanding test driver. Jackie Stewart was there, doing the same for Tyrrell. Both covered several hundred laps using Firestone and Dunlop tyres respectively.

  Firestone were paying the cost of our testing, as well as helping greatly with the process of setting up the cars. Their money was keeping us going. At one point Robin, who was anxiously waiting for some parts, sent me a telex saying their failure to arrive was ‘screwing the whole issue’. I sent him one back saying if we didn’t get the miles done for Firestone, there wouldn’t be an issue left to screw. Fortunately, Robin had a sense of humour even at that difficult time.

  Come the race, to everyone’s surprise Amon and Stewart recorded identical fastest times in practice, Jackie taking pole because he had set his time first. A hitherto sleepy Formula One (as already noted, there had been only 13 cars at some races in 1969) suddenly woke up. As we walked down the track to the grid before the start feeling very pleased that everything we had set out to accomplish had been achieved, I cannot deny that a touch of hubris infected Robin and me. But the hostility of the other teams was palpable: not only did we have the two fastest cars on the grid at our very first race, we had upset the established order. We had five cars at Kyalami because Mario Andretti was there in the STP in addition to two each for us and Tyrrell. This meant there would now be too many entries at some races and not all would make it on to the grid at races where only 16 starters were allowed. This did indeed cause problems later in the season, particularly at Monaco and the Spanish Grand Prix. It took the other teams a long time to forgive us.

  Some of our cars lacked reliability in that first race, but Stewart left everyone behind and would have won easily had his tyres not given him problems. He still finished third but Amon had a collision on the run into the first corner. Then came two races which didn’t count for the championship (as was usual back then), with Stewart winning the Race of Champions at Brands Hatch and Amon the International Trophy at Silverstone, while at the next round of the World Championship, the Spanish Grand Prix, Stewart not only won but lapped the entire field.

  So within seven months of opening our factory in a small building shared with a dairy we had won three of the first four Formula One races of 1970 and had led the fourth. To complete the picture, one of our cars had lapped all the other competitors in only its second World Championship race. No wonder the Formula One establishment was unhappy.

  This was all achieved despite time being a massive limitation on the design of Robin’s March 701. Apart from the difficulty of setting up a factory and building a Formula One and other cars from scratch, Robin had to settle for components that were readily available, such as a heavy front radiator. He also had to use an external oil tank because there was no time to obtain a fuel tank that included space for an oil tank. This meant, among other problems, a very high moment of inertia, making the car reluctant to turn into corners and bad over bumps. Robin knew this would happen,
but there was nothing to be done if we wanted to get to the first race. At least he knew the car would be fine on smooth tracks with fast corners.

  The arrival of Jo Siffert meant that there was no car for Ronnie Peterson in the works team. Since we had promised him Formula One in 1970, we made an arrangement with Colin Crabbe, an enthusiast who had a successful business restoring and dealing in historic cars. He had run Vic Elford, a top race and rally driver, as a private entrant in Formula One and was, we thought, just the right person to run Ronnie. Colin did an excellent job and was rewarded when Ronnie finished seventh in his very first race, the 1970 Monaco Grand Prix.

  Immediately after doing the deal with Colin, we were off with the other teams to the Spanish Grand Prix at Jarama, near Madrid. Arriving in a group at the airport we were accosted by an English solicitor, who told the other team principals, much to their amusement, that I had recently secured his acquittal on a dangerous driving charge in front of a jury. I don’t think they really believed until then that I’d ever been a serious lawyer.

  At the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa, the race after Monaco, Chris Amon missed winning by a hair’s breadth, finishing only 1.1 seconds behind Pedro Rodriguez in the BRM. All through that race, with Amon just behind Rodriguez, Robin kept saying: ‘Don’t worry, the BRM will break – they always do.’ Just that once it didn’t, but it was an outstandingly brilliant drive on the old Spa circuit by Amon, who also set fastest lap.

  Our early elation vanished when the season began to take on a grim aspect. In June, Bruce McLaren was killed testing at Goodwood, then Piers Courage was killed in the Dutch GP at Zandvoort and later Jochen Rindt died during practice for the Italian GP at Monza in September. These were all people I knew, and in the case of Jochen and Piers knew really well. Combined with the earlier deaths of three of the 21 drivers on the grid at my first Formula Two race (all in that first summer) it was an awful toll of young lives. I resolved once again that if I ever had anything to do with it, motor racing would become much safer. That feeling became even stronger over the next few years as more drivers died, some of them, like Roger Williamson, in horrific circumstances. We did what we could as constructors, but I had to wait 20 years before I could mobilise the governing body to bring about real change.