The sympathetically reconstructed Spa-Francorchamps circuit is quick – Mark Webber’s fastest race lap of 2011 was set at 142.6mph – but it’s not as quick as its ‘daddy’ used to be.
There was a time when tracks – and I’m talking trees-and/or-houses road circuits, not banked ovals like Brooklands’ Outer Circuit, and not there-and-back blinds like Berlin’s AVUS – cared not a jot for safety nor health and instead blatantly vied to be the outright quickest.
The original Spa, you might be surprised to read, wasn’t really at the races in this respect. So it took drastic action. Back then ‘Eau Rouge’ was hardly white-knuckle. Two 90-degree lefts connected by a hairpin right, it was lumbered with a tardy nomenclature too: Virage de l’Ancienne Douanne. Ooh, feel the speed. It was sufficiently slow for Rudolf Caracciola, on his way to winning the 1935 Belgian Grand Prix for Mercedes-Benz, to smell a spectator’s wisping cigar smoke.
That changed in 1939 when a radically reprofiled road cut a lazier yet much faster ess down, across and up out of the valley. No more anciennes douannes, this was red-blooded: that’ll be the real Eau Rouge, thank you. Its ramping effect, however, was diluted by the rain that fatally caught out Dick Seaman on the opposite, return leg of the circuit: Hermann Lang, Mercedes-Benz W154 (with M163 engine), 101.4mph.
By 1950 and the inauguration of the (second) World Championship, Spa had undergone further surgery. Its tight right-hander on the outskirts of Stavelot town was by-passed with a new Stavelot – a sweeping, helpfully cambered right that opened invitingly at its exit. ‘Nino’ Farina thus uncorked an 115.1mph race lap in his Alfetta, faster than team-mate Juan Fangio’s subsequent season’s best at Reims in France (112.3mph) but slower than the Argentinian’s timesheet topper at Monza (117.5mph).
Reims’ rapid response was to undercut its photogenic but nadgery Gueux village section with a flat-maybe right of its own. This was linked by a new section of track to Muizon, a tight-ish right that usefully extended the subsequent hidden-dip fang along Route Nationale 31 towards Thillois. Merc rookie Hans Herrmann lapped this revised layout at 121.5mph in 1954, the first year of the 2.5-litre Formula 1 (Apologies to D.B., but I think we can overlook its 750cc-supercharged effort.)
Monza, suddenly lagging in the speed stakes, went several steps beyond in 1955 when it merged a new steepling oval with its long-established parkland blat: Stirling Moss, Mercedes-Benz W196 Stromlinienwagen, 134mph.
Trumped, Spa continued to smooth, ease, straighten and neaten, and had (un)comfortably topped 130mph by 1958.
It was nip and tuck by 1960:
Reims: 135.1mph
Spa: 135.4mph
Monza: 136.7mph – though no doubt this speed would have been higher still had not the British teams boycotted the Italian GP in protest of the unsubtle reinsertion of the oof-ow-ooer oval.
The 3-litre ‘Return to Power’ of 1966 marked Reims’ F1 hurrah, Lorenzo Bandini circulating at 141.4mph before having to jury-rig his Ferrari 312’s broken throttle with a stretch of wire snaffled from a fence. Team-mate ‘Lulu’ Scarfiotti’s fastest lap at Monza that year was ‘only’ 139.2mph. And it had rained at Spa, scattering the field hither and yon.
These speeds, though, were put into context in 1967 when Dan Gurney’s Eagle-Weslake clocked a 148.8mph race lap at an overcast but thankfully dry Spa. (Jim Clark’s Lotus 49-Cosworth DFV had cracked 150mph in practice.) It’s little wonder that wings sprouted here in 1968.
It couldn’t last, of course. Spa was given a chance to ‘redeem’ itself by a resurgent GPDA, but its extra Armco and unsatisfactory Malmédy chicane of 1970 could only ever be a stay of execution: Chris Amon, works March 701, 152mph. The 1971 Belgian GP was cancelled and Nivelles-Baulers – the 2.3 miles of anodyne anonymity that not long ago morphed into the trading estate that surely it was destined always to become – loomed.
This ‘speed war’ thus won by 1971 – Henri Pescarolo, in Frank Williams’ March 711, 153.5mph – Monza was no doubt less concerned about having to dam its slipstream with a chicane or two in 1972.
Forty years on, back-to-back grands prix at the still-majestic Spa and historic Monza will provide a much-anticipated kick-start to a championship that has been on hold for a month, while the subsequent dotting and capping of its extended denouement by Suzuka and Interlagos will carry me through the other, homogenised races, where, like as not, only the results will catch my eye.
Amazing competition these three had back in those great days…. I have always liked the photos of the French GP at Reims – especially start pictures – there’s something almost surreal about the calmness of the farm fields and the noisy Grand Prix in the middle of all of it. I see those pics and wish I had been there, in the small grandstand to witness first-hand….
Got up early one summer’s morning while staying near Spa in 2003 and drove out to the old part of the circuit (public road as always) in a fast-ish sort of car. The sun shone and there was no traffic in either direction. Floored the loud pedal and went happily through Masta. I got a small impression of what it might have been like and at least I could say I’d done it …
The first time i saw the Masta Kink on aerial imagery thought it looked a “bit daunting”. Then when i saw the aerial photos on the LAT archive from 1970 and realised that it seemed to go through what’s now the layby on the outside of the road… my thoughts can’t be printed. How was that possible? Can anybody confirm (or not!) that it has actually been eased? The old circuit’s a scary enough place to walk on, i can’t imagine what it was like to drive.
Much as i regret the passing of places like Spa and Reims (Monza is at least still fundamentally in one piece), in favour of some of the identikit, faceless Berniedromes we see now, i don’t want to imagine the speeds a modern F1 car would be doing on them…
Thanks for a wonderful article and three great photographs, very evocative. I sat in that March last year at Hampton Downs, 40 years after I sat in Jackie Stewart’s sister car in Glasgow.
But ‘nadgery’ and ‘steepling’? We’re in Rambling Sid Rumpo territory here, surely?
Dave, if you’ve seen film/video footage from Rheims, it’s all the more so as you’ve described.
I do wish it were possible to have Grand Prix races on the open road, w/o them being concrete canyons. I know that will never happen again, but it would really be something.
It should be remembered that the fastest lap ever recorded in a race at Spa was Henri Pescarolo in the Matra during the 1973 Spa 1000kms at 163mph….. I was lucky enough to have been there….as well as the ’74 and ’75 1000km races….and the Masta Kink was certainly not altered or eased at anytime during this period…..it was still the same during the ’77 and ’78 24 hour races, and always easy to watch from as it was in the middle of nowhere between a few houses and farms, along a disused railway track, which you could walk along from Malmedy via the Masta to Stavelot…..it could never be any better than that…..!
I can remember Jacques Villeneuve terrible shunts at Spa in 1998 and 1999. The legend said that it was possible to take eau rouge flat out….if you had a really good chassis. So Jacques decided to try theirs two years in a row!
…..BTW, his shunts showed the ’98 Williams and the ’99 BAR weren`t the best F1 chassis around, but he indeed knew that first hand and decided to try anyway….that’s what I call a brave driver, Gilles would have been proud of him….
Lewis Lane, the layby on the outside of the left hand entry to the Masta Ess / Kink was actually a chicane built for one of the mid 70s bike grand prix ( if you visit, look closely at the exit as you can still see the marked kerbs) and though used in practice was not used on race day. The public road today still follows the original line of the circuit used until 1978
Incidentally Eau Rouge is the left hand bend at the bottom of the hill. The virage – actually the epingle ( hairpin ) – des Douannes ( Customs House Hairpin ) was the right handed hairpin that followed and was by-passed in 1939 by the Raidillon ( Steep slope ) which is the uphill right hander that everyone seems to think is Eau Rouge but isn’t.
Thanks Chris. I did, as i said, wonder how the hell that could have been taken flat when i first saw the LAT photos! I wish i’d walked that far when i went in 91, but i got as far as Malmedy and figured that Masta looked a bit of a long way!
At some point in my life i’d love to do a driving holiday and take in places like Spa, Rouen, Reims, Solitude etc, because it seems that the history of our sport is slowly being erased bit by bit by modern life, and it would be great to see what past generations dealt with first hand before it all disappears entirely into ruin and developments…
I did that several years ago visiting and driving round Spa, the ‘Ring, Reims and Rouen in my Lotus Elise. Do it before it’s too late.
Ah , Reims , absolute magic !!!!!!