Although it hasn’t been widely reported, and while certain factions of the racing community are keen to keep it hush hush, Formula One may be about to happen upon its very first night race.
It’s difficult to escape the fact that the upcoming Grand Prix is an evening affair, and Inside Track is no exception. In this edition we hear from current drivers, ex-drivers, and the men behind the men, about what might lie in store this coming weekend.
Welcome to F1 People, a short series from Sidepodcast presenting a biography of the names you need to know. In this fifth episode, we’re looking at Jackie Stewart.
John Young Stewart, better known as Jackie, was born on June 11th 1939 in Dumbartonshire, Scotland. He was immersed into the world of cars and motorsport from the very beginning. The family business was a Jaguar dealership, where Jackie apprenticed as a mechanic. His father had raced motorcycles in his spare time, and his brother Jimmy was becoming a renowned local racing driver. After an accident at Le Mans saw Jimmy injured, their parents discouraged any interest in the sport. Jackie took up shooting, instead, and just missed out on a place in the 1960 Olympics.
Despite the disapproval from his parents, Jackie accepted an offer from a customer of the garage to test cars at Oulten Park. He entered many races and won a lot of them but the most important win was probably at Goodwood. He impressed everyone present and Ken Tyrell, then running the Formula Junior team for Cooper, heard of this new rising talent and made some calls. Jackie tested a new Formula 3 car against Bruce McLaren, and outshone him, resulting in an offer from Tyrell right there and then.
He made his debut for Tyrell in Formula Three in 1964. His debut race saw him gain a lead of over 20 seconds after just two laps, extended to over 40 seconds by the end of the race. On the strength of this, he was offered a Formula 1 driver with Cooper, but he chose to remain at Tyrell and get some experience. He lost just two races and became the F3 champion.
The next year he impressed Colin Chapman at a Formula 1 test for Lotus, but again declined the drive and chose Formula Two instead.
1965 saw his first full season as an F1 driver for BRM, and he continued his impressive form. Through his career he drove for Tyrell, for March, and Matra, winning 27 races and three world championships. He is one of the few drivers to choose to leave the sport at the top rather than see his performance drop off. He retired in 1973.
During the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix, it rained considerably and there were many crashes. Jackie Stewart found himself upside down, trapped in his car by the steering wheel, with fuel pouring around him, for 25 minutes. Two other drivers had to free him using tools from a spectator. Thankfully, he emerged relatively unscathed, but the incident wakened Stewart’s senses to the need for improved safety considerations. There were no crews to extricate drivers from damaged cars, and there were no medical facilities on track. His wait for an ambulance was unpleasant and long. Racing conditions
were dangerous and unnecessarily so. During a period of ten years, Stewart knew over 50 friends and colleagues that died during races – the chances of a fatal accident during that time were two out of there.
Stewart teamed up with his BRM boss Louis Stanley to campaign for better safety provisions at races. Safety barriers were a rarity until Jackie called attention to it. He hired a private doctor to attend races, until the medical situation could be improved. Seat belts, helmets, fireproof clothes, all of these are down to Stewarts unwillingness to give in. He rallied track owners to sort out their facilities, and he called on the drivers to boycott races if they were not up to scratch.
After his retirement from Formula 1, Stewart became a consultant for Ford, and a commentator for NASCAR, and even returned to the sport with his own Stewart Grand Prix racing team. He set up the team with his son Paul, and they worked on it together until 2000, when Jackie retired. The team had then become Jaguar Racing. Both his son Paul, one of two, along with Mark, and Jackie’s wife Helen were diagnosed with cancer, and in 2002, Stewart himself had an operation to remove a tumour from his cheek. He continues to be an active spokesman for safety, and is currently having an argument through the media (and through lawyers) with FIA President Max Mosley. His
autobiography has just been released.
But his most important post-racing activities were the amazing safety improvements he almost single-handedly brought about. Of course, he upset many people along the way, but in his eyes, safety is more important than
popularity, and in 2001, the knighthood that made him Sir Jackie Stewart, proves just that.
That’s all for this episode. Tomorrow we will be looking at another important person from Formula 1, so please, join me then.
Welcome to F1 People. This is the second in a Sidepodcast series giving you an insight into the names that have shaped Formula 1. Yesterday we took a closer look at Mr Ecclestone, and today we will be introducing his partner in crime, Max Mosley.
Max Mosley was born in 1940 to Sir Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford. Oswald Mosley was a former leader of the British Union of Fascists, and Adolf Hitler was a guest at his wedding to Diana Mitford.
Mosley spent the majority of his childhood in Ireland and was sent to school in France, then Germany and then Oxford. By 1961, he had graduated from a college in Oxford with a degree in physics. He qualified as a solicitor after studying in London.
Visiting Silverstone in the early 60s convinced Mosley to join in the fun, and he raced in a few club events, before moving on to Formula 2, where he founded his own London Racing Team. He retired from racing in 1969, but stuck around in motorsport to become one of the founders of the March team. During the 60s, Mosley was an election agent for his father’s Union Movement Party. He ran as a candidate for a constituency in London but withdrew before the 1964 elections.
March was modestly successful within Formula 1, with three wins under their belt, most notably Jackie Stewart in 1970. The company was more successful as a production company for the Formula 2 series, and March cars won many championships below the top Formula.
Max Mosley joined Bernie Ecclestone within the Formula One Constructors Association, as legal advisor, and became very involved in the battle between the FOCA and the FISA. He was instrumental in the creation of the Concorde Agreement. After the agreement was signed and sorted, Mosley decided to take three years out of the sport but he returned as President of the Manufacturer’s Commission for the FIA in 1986. In 1991, he was elected President of the FISA – the motorsport subsidiary of the FIA – taking over from Jean-Marie Balestre. Mosley decided to resign after a year, but was re-elected for a four year term. He continued to be re-elected, and reigns to this day.
Most recently, Max Mosley has begin to lose favour within the sport, for many reasons. The relationship between Bernie Ecclestone, who gave him a break within the sport, seems to be falling apart slowly. The pair’s views and actions appear to be drifting gradually apart.
Max is not shy about making enemies. His previous success with Jackie Stewart in the March team is easily forgotten, and this year the pair have had a slanging match which includes lawyers. Stewart has called for Mosley’s resignation but he is not prepared to step down for anything he has said. Some think he has begun to say things that are completely unnecessary, and some of the things he says and opinions he shares are not really becoming to the President of the governing body.
Mosley’s current term expires in 2009, and he has announced that he will consider the options next year, but it is widely speculated that he will withdraw from the position. He has mentioned the absurdity of governing drivers who are young enough to be his grandchildren. But, at age 67, he is still going strong.
Thank you for listening to F1 People. Tomorrow we’ll have a look at our third important name in Formula 1.
Welcome to Sidepodcast’s History of F1. So far we’ve travelled from the 1900s through to the end of the 1960s, and seen the Formula 1 World Championship begin to take shape, and some of the legendary drivers stamp their mark on it. Now we take a look at the 70s where safety concerns and car development were top of everyone’s priority list.
In 1970, the revolution of aerodynamic engineering began to take place. It started with the creation of wings, which meant more downforce for the cars. Essentially this meant they had more grip and could coast round corners much faster than previously. In the early days, the wings were not fastened particularly securely, and it wasn’t unheard of for them to fall off at unexpected moments. After a few too many accidents, wings were banned for a short time.
The early 70s saw the rise of a new star for Lotus, Emerson Fittipaldi, a young man from Brazil who won his first race in 1972. The rivalry between he and Jackie Stewart meant that the next four championships were alternated between the two of them, until Stewart retired in 1973. Stewart almost made it to the 100 Grand Prix mark, but gave up one short of the feat. Why would you do that?
In 1975, Ferrari began to make their comeback – despite the fact that the season was littered with protests about driver safety. In the Spanish race, a car came off the track and actually hit the crowd, killing four people, and causing some drivers to refuse to continue to participate.
Ferrari driver Niki Lauda won five races and had nine pole starts to take his first championship. He went on to win two more. The next year, 1976, Lauda was involved in a horrific accident at the Nurburgring, which saw his car burst into flames. Lauda suffered facial burns and inhaled toxic gases, so much that he was not expected to survive. However, Lauda did manage to pull through and was miraculously driving again only six weeks later. The Nurburgring track was taken off the calendar, but returned in a dramatically altered and much shorter state.
Niki Lauda’s main competition came in the form of James Hunt, a British driver for McLaren. He won the 1976 championship, but only just. Lauda was leading the championship by 3 points in the last race, but had to retire after torrential rain. That handed the championship to Hunt, who finished the race in the terrible weather, without knowing where he had placed or if he had clinched the title.
Lauda reclaimed the crown the next year in 1977, despite quitting the team with two races to go. The team calculated the position he needed to finish in to claim the title – 4th – at the US Grand Prix, and Lauda delivered and then joined Bernie Ecclestone’s Parmalat Brabham team.
In development terms, the cars began to sport air boxes above their heads to increase flows around the engines. Engineers changed their titles to designers, and began to increase their knowledge of aerodynamics. The cars began to take shape, using a streamlined body and undertray developments to the downforce and speed things up. There developments were called “ground effects” and impressed a lot of the drivers.
They were not without their problems though, because the new developments meant the setup of the car was incredibly important. One tiny degree the wrong way would mean the cars were unstable and ultimately not race worthy. F1 became a highly sophisticated balancing act. Eventually, the effects were banned in 1983, to make F1 more about driver skill and less about car setup.
That’s all for this episode of Sidepodcast’s History of F1, join me for the next instalment were we look at the 1980s.
Welcome to Sidepodcast’s History of F1. The last episode focused on the early years of the World Championship, and the emergence of some new champions. Now we’re going to have a look at the 1960s, a decade that began to see the drivers taking attention away from the cars.
The 1960s in Formula 1 saw great changes afoot, both in developmental technologies and the teams that gained the benefits from them. Team Lotus was the dominating force of the decade, and Jim Clark was the driver of the early 1960s who really could get the most out of the car. Lotus were the first team to demonstrate the monocoque, which is the idea of the car being made up of one singular chassis, with the driver perched in the middle. When rear engines made their debut in the 60s, it was clear that F1 was a step ahead of other motorsports.
Jim Clark was not short on controversy, being involved in a fatal accident at Monza in 1961, that claimed the life of Wolfgang von Trips. The championship was handed to American Phil Hill, who was racing in the Ferrari. In 1962, Clark instigated a fierce battle with Graham Hill, but he eventually lost the championship, just barely, due to an oil leak early exit from the lead of the final race. Clark won the championship in 1963 and 1965, after taking maximum points throughout the championship for both season. He would quite often take the entire month of May off, and therefore miss the Monaco Grand Prix, preferring to head to the States and compete in the Indy 500. It was a good choice though, as he became the first British driver to win it.
In 1965, he led every lap of every race he completed – a stunning achievement – and he broke all manner of other records, including most career victories from Fangio. He took the record during the early races of the 1968 season, but his career was short-lived. A couple of months later, Clark took part in an F2 race at Hockenheim, and died after crashing into the trees. The accident is still rather mysterious and unexplained.
Graham Hill was more than happy to continue the British dominance after Clark’s death, and he took the 1968 title in a Lotus, fitted with the new Ford-Cosworth engine. The car was also notable for having the first sponsorship and logos appear on the exterior – how different F1 would be without those!
But Hill himself was soon surpassed by Scotsman Jackie Stewart. He was something of a protégé of Jim Clark’s, as it was he who arranged for Stewart’s very first test drive. Jackie Stewart went on to break his mentor’s career victories record and took three World Championships between 1969 and 1973.
Jackie Stewart’s most memorable win was at Nurburgring, for the German Grand Prix. There was awful rain that day but Stewart kept his head and outpaced the second place driver by over four minutes. That’s an incredible lead and you wouldn’t find anything like that in modern F1.
That’s it for the 1960s, in the next show we’ll move on to the 1970s, a decade where safety concerns became paramount.
The autographed McLaren team jacket, which belonged to Hamilton, failed to reach its reserve price at Bonhams Auctioneers in a sporting memorabilia sale.
Each member of the McLaren team has their own named jacket and this one and it was due to be sold with photographs showing Hamilton signing it.
