Formula One and Beyond

by Max Mosley

  Money was increasingly a problem but one of the ways we kept afloat was selling Formula One cars. Thanks to Walter Hayes’s price increase (which we retained for all subsequent sales) this was a profitable part of our business. One of our customers was Hubert Hahne, a German driver to whom we delivered a car just in time for his home Grand Prix, painted silver in the German tradition. Although a competent driver, he was out of his depth in Formula One and, along with other professional racing drivers, failed to make the grid. He sued us, claiming we had sold him a dud, and his lawyers managed to get a court order to seize our transporter and cars in Germany on the way back from the next Grand Prix.

  From my days at the Bar I had some legal contacts in Germany and managed to secure the release of our cars, but it was a major inconvenience at the height of the season and an expense we couldn’t afford. To settle the issue, we agreed with Hahne and his lawyers that he would bring the car to Silverstone and Ronnie Peterson would drive it. If he got under an agreed time that would be the end of the matter. In those days Woodcote was a fast continuous corner and on his third lap Ronnie came through it flat out and on slight opposite lock. He was under the agreed time. I think Hahne realised then just how much ability it took to be competitive in Formula One. No one could blame him for not matching Ronnie.

  Despite repeatedly denying rumours, Ken Tyrrell abandoned his March cars after Monza and raced with his own Tyrrells.

  The final race of that first 1970 season was in Mexico City. Spectators climbed over the fences and lined the sides of the track with nothing between them and the cars. The risks were obvious and none of the teams wanted to start the race. The FIA officials agreed, saying it was impossibly dangerous for the public. Pedro Rodriguez, as the top Mexican driver and a national hero, went round the circuit pleading with the crowd to get back behind the fences, but to no avail. In the end the police asked us to race despite the obvious danger, arguing that the crowd would riot if the race was cancelled and that would be even more perilous.

  The race took place between walls of humanity and Chris finished a creditable fourth in what was his last appearance for March in Formula One. He continued to drive our CanAm car in America and, when Robin was present to set the car up, he was able to run comfortably with the all-conquering McLarens. March came third in the 1970 Constructors’ Championship, partly thanks to Stewart and Tyrrell’s successes in the early part of the season.

  Late in 1970, Graham Coaker left the company. Things hadn’t really worked out and he was not able to contribute as much as he and we had all hoped. Part of our settlement with him was a Formula Three car, which he took testing at Silverstone, had an accident and broke his leg. Graham was taken to the local hospital in Northampton and all seemed well, but then complications set in and tragically he died. I couldn’t help feeling it would have been better if we’d left him alone and not involved him in March at all.

  At the end of the season we still owed Chris most of his retainer, which was a problem because we had no money left. We gave him the two CanAm cars in lieu but I’ve always felt bad about that. His fee was originally agreed by Robin and Alan, who overruled me when I said we couldn’t afford him and should make do with Siffert and Peterson as our works team. Chris nevertheless made a great contribution in testing and set-up. He was a major talent, one of the greatest of his generation, but, extraordinarily, he never won a World Championship Formula One race although he came very close indeed at the 1970 Belgian Grand Prix.

  The following season, driving for Matra, Chris had pole at the Italian Grand Prix and looked certain to win. Bernie Ecclestone bet me a pound he wouldn’t. Handing over the pound after the race, I asked how he could be so sure. He said Chris’s luck was so bad, something would happen even if he were leading on the last lap. Perhaps a cow would walk across the track and stop him, but he wouldn’t win. In fact, it wasn’t a cow: Chris went to remove a tear-off from his helmet visor when leading the race with nine laps to go and the entire visor came off, leaving him blinded by the airflow at 200 mph. He eventually finished sixth. But Chris was lucky in the most important way of all – unlike so many of his contemporaries he survived. He became a successful farmer and is a well-known figure in his native New Zealand and still active in the local motoring community.

  6

  A DIFFICULT BUSINESS

  With Jo Siffert joining BRM and Chris leaving for Matra, we decided we would just run Ronnie Peterson in 1971, backed up by drivers who brought money. Robin Herd designed a revolutionary new Formula One car with an unusual front wing. It also had side radiators like Colin Chapman’s Lotus 72, a layout for Formula One that continues to this day. The first iteration had inboard front brakes like the Lotus 72, the main purpose of which was to reduce unsprung weight, but we had two successive shaft failures of the kind that were believed to have caused Jochen Rindt’s fatal accident. No one could explain the failures because the calculated stresses in the shafts at maximum braking were way below the point at which they would be expected to fail, so Robin went back to the classic outboard configuration.

  We used copper brake discs in return for money from the American Copper Industry Association, who hoped copper discs would be adopted by the car industry. Unfortunately, they never worked properly – they seemed to have a variable coefficient of friction, which was disconcerting for the driver. Even so, we persisted with different variants because we needed the funds. We also fitted an Alfa Romeo engine in one of the cars, again for money. Andrea de Adamich, an Italian lawyer who had won the European Touring Car Championship for Alfa Romeo in 1966, usually drove that car. Andrea was a delightful person and he and I got on well, both being lawyers.

  Peterson surprised everyone at the Monaco Grand Prix, including Robin, Alan and me. He overtook several top drivers to finish second, a particularly difficult feat on the Monaco circuit. He later told me that this had given him real confidence for the first time because he now realised he could match the top drivers of the day. We were already convinced, but it is surprising how many outstanding drivers doubt their own ability at first. Peterson eventually finished second in the World Championship that year despite all the troubles with the copper discs, and March finished joint third with Ferrari in the Constructors’ Championship. Robin also designed very successful monocoque Formula Two and Formula Three cars that year.

  At the last race of the season, a non-championship event at Brands Hatch, all the Formula One team principals were invited to race each other in Ford Mexico saloon cars. All had raced professionally and two were former world champions, so what had been intended as a bit of fun got very competitive – and so much damage was done to the cars that we were never invited to do it again. It was my last ever race, albeit not a serious one, and I had a start-to-finish battle with Frank Williams. I was ahead of him in practice but he just beat me in the race. Only Jack Brabham and John Surtees, the two ex-world champions, plus Colin Chapman (a brilliant driver whose bankers would never let him race seriously) ended in front of Frank and me.

  It was the only time my parents ever came to a race. There was a disaster in the main event later that day, when Jo Siffert, our driver from the previous year who was then driving for BRM, died trapped in his burning car. My parents never wanted to come again. I think the black smoke and knowledge that someone had just died on a beautiful autumn day reminded my father of his time in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War.

  Earlier in 1971, Niki Lauda had turned up at the factory with some money. He was by no means a typical racing driver, but was obviously intelligent and had great charm. Jean and I took him to our favourite Indian restaurant in Bute Street and we both liked him. Robin and Alan were very happy to run him in Formula Two. He was competent but there was little sign yet of just how good he would become. Niki was determined to do both Formula One and Formula Two the following year and we did a deal with him for a big proportion of our budget, but the money failed to arrive. He explained that he had a bank that was going to suppo
rt him but his grandfather, a major Austrian business figure, had persuaded the bank to cancel the deal. Understandably, he didn’t want Niki to be a racing driver with a high chance of dying when it was already clear he was someone who would be a success in the business world.

  Niki told me not to worry – he’d find another bank. In the meantime, he gave me a suspicious-looking letter that he said was from his father, confirming we would get our money and, amazingly, we did. Our own bank manager in Oxford could hardly believe it when the payment arrived, saying it was like someone getting the Trustee Savings Bank to pay for Formula One. It showed what an extraordinary character Niki was, even in his early twenties. His grandfather died not long after and never saw Niki become one of the most successful Austrians of his generation, not only a three-time world champion but also the founder and owner of a successful airline.

  Despite Niki’s contribution, we were still desperately short of money. We were trying to run a capital-intensive business with virtually no capital. Robin and I raised some money from our families, but my contribution was minimal because my father would not get involved and all I could raise was a modest sum from my mother and my half-brother, Jonathan Guinness. The total was a long way short of what was needed to capitalise the business properly. We drew very small salaries, a lot less than we would have earned had Robin worked for a team and I stayed at the Bar.

  We lost another of the four founders when Alan Rees decided to leave the company, but we all remained on good terms and Alan later enjoyed success with the Shadow Formula One team. Some of our competitors tried to recruit Ronnie Peterson, but he had one more year on his contract and stayed completely loyal despite our financial weakness.

  Robin designed another revolutionary Formula One car for 1972 but this one didn’t work. Because of his extraordinary talent, Ronnie managed to extract a reasonable performance from it, but Niki, in the second car, deemed it undrivable. Niki was right, but because he was a relatively inexperienced paying driver and Ronnie had just finished second in the World Championship, we listened more to Ronnie. It did not take long for Robin to recognise Niki’s talent as a test driver. He was getting quicker and quicker, combining his rapid progress with great analytic ability. When driving for us he was hardly ever as fast as Ronnie, but he was the one who went on to win three World Championships. In a way, that may be a measure of Ronnie’s outright speed.

  We had a serious dilemma – it was mid-season, the car wasn’t working as we’d hoped and our resources were very limited indeed. Earlier in the year we had supplied a Formula One version of our very successful Formula Two car to a group of City financiers who were sponsoring Mike Beuttler, and it was obvious that this car was better than ours. Halfway through the season we gambled on abandoning the revolutionary car and adopted the same solution as Beuttler for our works team. However, we never recovered that season and Ronnie’s abilities were largely wasted in the final year of his first contract with us.

  With hindsight, had Robin developed the 1971 car over the winter we would have been contenders the following season. It was already a very good car and, given time and our 1971 experience, it would almost certainly have been a race winner in Ronnie’s hands and might have persuaded him to stay at March. Things would have been very different for us in Formula One. But racing has always been full of ‘ifs’. After that, we used modified Formula Two cars for the remaining years of our involvement in Formula One.

  Robin had been doing all the development work with Niki from mid-season and, with Ronnie unhappy and about to leave us for Lotus, the obvious move was to run him as the lead driver in 1973. But the problem was that we could only compete in Formula One if we had a driver with sponsorship and Niki had already spent all his money. He and Robin had assumed that one way or another we would be able to run him, so it fell to me to tell him we couldn’t give him a drive for 1973. It was a terrible moment for him (and for me), which I later learned had even led him to consider suicide.

  Earlier in the 1972 season, the head of Ford Competitions in Germany, former top sports car driver Jochen Neerpasch, asked us to run a car in a Formula Two race at the Nürburgring for Jochen Mass, a promising young German driver. Neerpasch was already running him in touring car racing. We couldn’t afford to but we did it anyway. Mass won the race and Neerpasch was delighted. A few weeks later we met at the Monaco Grand Prix, where he revealed that BMW were coming back to racing in 1973 and that he was going to join them and be in charge of the programme. He also told us that BMW already had a Formula Two engine that had been developed by Paul Rosche ‘in the cellar’ – i.e. without management’s official sanction. Neerpasch said we could have the engine exclusively for 1973 if we bought the entire production of 50 units. Robin and I both took a very deep breath and agreed. As part of the deal we agreed Robin would concentrate on our BMW Formula Two cars – all the more reason for the later decision to run a modified version in Formula One.

  Our 1972 Formula Three team was not a success, and during the Monaco race weekend our works driver, James Hunt, told the press (possibly truthfully) that the car was no good. I sacked him, telling him that a works driver should never say such things even though I understood his frustration. He had a wonderfully laid-back attitude and was great company, at the track and off it. James took the sacking in his stride and we remained friends, even laughing about it later. He needed to keep racing for his career, so we lent him a 1971 Formula Two chassis which was still a very competitive car but needed an engine. He told me some time after that he’d found himself standing next to Lord Hesketh in a gentlemen’s loo and got talking to him. It was an auspicious meeting because Hesketh ended up buying James an engine, making him a serious rival to our works Formula Two team of Peterson and Lauda, but, more importantly from James’s point of view, it was the start of a relationship with Hesketh that would take them both into Formula One.

  When the first BMW engine was delivered, their mechanics came from Munich to help with the installation. They removed the cylinder head to reveal cans of beer hidden inside. They were sure we would open it up as soon as it arrived to look at its secrets and were surprised we hadn’t. It was the start of a great collaboration between the two companies and we sold a lot of Formula Two cars for the 1973 season on the strength of the BMW engine. By then we had a fully professional manufacturing operation with David Reeves in charge of the factory. Cars were delivered on time and were very well finished. It was a proper business, hampered only by the Formula One team.

  It only became apparent how much of the factory’s resources were being consumed when we eventually stopped competing in Formula One. In those days a leading independent Formula One team might have 20 employees. Ours had about half that but the team personnel used constantly to go to the production side for ‘just’ jobs – as in, ‘could you just do this please?’ – to the detriment of the commercial side of the business. By contrast, a top modern Formula One team has upwards of 700 employees plus significant outside contractors, but one questions whether there has been a corresponding increase in its appeal to spectators.

  Jean-Pierre Beltoise and Jean-Pierre Jarier drove for our STP-sponsored Formula Two team in 1973, and Jarier won the first race at Mallory Park in Leicestershire. We would have been delighted but for several of the BMW engines blowing up, including Beltoise’s. A lump of his engine came bouncing down the track and finished almost where I was standing with Paul Rosche, BMW’s race engine expert and the man who had kept the engine programme alive when officially it had been terminated. He turned to me and said in his strong Bavarian accent: ‘I think we have a problem . . .’ We did, but at least it meant we didn’t have to take delivery and pay for the remaining engines until we could afford to.

  We won the 1973 European Formula Two Championship with Jarier but our 1973 Formula One team was not a contender. With Peterson having gone to Lotus, we gave Jarier the Formula One drive, but when his modest French sponsorship money did not come through, we put Roger Williamson in
the car for the British Grand Prix. He was a very talented British Formula Three driver and had backing from Tom Wheatcroft, the owner of the Donington Park circuit. Unfortunately, there was a multiple collision at the end of the first lap that eliminated Roger and eight other drivers. A fortnight later, Roger died in a horrific crash during the next race, the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort. The car was upside down and on fire. David Purley was the only Formula One driver who stopped to help. Despite his desperate attempts to wave down the other drivers none of them stopped; the race continued and was won by Jackie Stewart in a Tyrrell. The marshals were afraid of the fire and stayed back. Despite being uninjured, Roger was unable to get out from under the car and could only shout for help. By the time a fire engine arrived, it was all over.

  Had any of the other drivers stopped they could have helped Purley but, despite his desperate attempts, he could not lift the car on his own. A former captain in the Parachute Regiment, he was a tough individual, but I don’t think he ever really recovered from the terrible experience of hearing Roger shouting for help in the fire yet being unable to reach him. Roger’s father was with me in the pits, asking if his son was all right. Having watched the terrible scene unfold on a television monitor in a broadcast van behind our pit, I had the awful job of saying I didn’t think he was.