He may be largely unrecognised in his home country, but Justin Wilson is one of the UK’s finest racing drivers.

At Daytona the weekend before last he showed his stuff yet again as part of Mike Shank’s winning team in the Rolex 24 Hours. It was Justin’s first race since suffering a compression fracture of his T5 vertebra in an IndyCar accident at Mid-Ohio last August and he had no problems at all in the race. Wilson drove three times during the 24 hours, beginning with a double stint lasting almost two hours.

“I got out from the first stint and I could feel a tingling from a lot of the muscles in my back that hadn’t been worked-out for a while,” Justin said. “I thought, ‘this might not be good.’ But the second time I got in the car after four hours rest I felt much better and when I got in for my third stint, I felt great. I did four stints in a row from 5.50am until 9.10am – three hours and twenty minutes – and I felt 100 per cent.”

Justin and his team-mates – AJ Allmendinger, Oswaldo Negri and John Pew – enjoyed a faultless race. “The car was fantastic,” Justin declared. “There were no reliability issues whatsoever. We didn’t have to do anything to the car – we put fuel and tyres on it, changed brake pads, and that was it. We refilled the driver’s drink bottle a few times and it went pretty much perfectly.

“Everyone was focused on what we needed to do and although we didn’t talk about it, we all knew. We just got in and did it. AJ did a great last three hours and Ozz did a fantastic three hours before that and John Pew was driving really fast. It all came together.”

Wilson has nothing but praise for team owner Shank who’s also trying to put together an IndyCar team this year with Paul Tracy driving. “Mike is a great person, a great team owner and someone you always enjoy driving for,” Justin says. “There’s no hidden agendas, nothing going on in the background. What he says is what he’s going to do and it just happens. There are no games with Mike.”

After his crash at Mid-Ohio last summer Wilson wore a plastic back brace stretching from his shoulders to his hips for 10 weeks. Fortunately the compression fracture in his back was such that an operation wasn’t required and after four weeks wearing the brace he started swimming on a daily basis.

“You just had to be very careful. I did six lengths the first day and slowly built it up. Being able to use the muscles without risk of damaging your spine anymore sped up the rate of recovery. By eight weeks I was feeling really good and just itching to get back in a car.”

The first time he drove a racing car after the accident was in January’s three-day Rolex 24 test session at Daytona. He had been out of action for five months. “The first lap around Daytona up on the banking was a strange sensation. It was, ‘OK, I’ve got to get the body used to this again.’ But after a couple of laps you forget about it and get back into a rhythm. It wasn’t too bad. I was able to get back up to speed and built it up over that test and it all felt good.”

Justin has rejoined Dale Coyne’s team for the upcoming IndyCar season with Honda engines. Bill Papis will engineer his car this year. Papis was his engineer when Wilson scored Coyne’s only win at Watkins Glen in 2009. Todd Phillips has joined Coyne from Newman/Haas and will be Wilson’s crew chief.

“We’ve got some good people and hopefully we can win some races again,” Justin remarked. “I think we’ve got a good opportunity with Dale and the Honda engine. If we do some good testing I think we’ll be in with a shout. We just have to work it out. I think it’s going to be an exciting year. I’m really looking forward to it. It’s a great opportunity and a chance to really build something and hopefully win a few more races.”

A Formula 1 superstar he may not be, but Justin Wilson is an excellent driver and true racer. If you want an underdog worth cheering for, he’s your man.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

About this time of year in 2007 I watched Casey Stoner and his wife Adriana walk out of the back of the pits at Sepang, get into their hire car and drive back to their hotel.

It was 4.30pm and everyone else was still out on track, hunting for a lap time and a setup. I knew then that his rivals were in big trouble. He ended up dominating that year’s World Championship.

This time Stoner didn’t leave the recent season-opening Sepang tests early but he started very late and the result was just as daunting. An old back problem prevented him from doing all but four uncomfortable and slow laps on day one, so his rivals were already a full day ahead when he rode out of the pits on day two. And yet it took him just three laps to set the second fastest time so far.

That is utterly, breathtakingly remarkable. Stoner hadn’t ridden a MotoGP bike since early November and yet it took him only a few minutes to reacclimatise himself to life at 200mph, with a lap time just tenths outside the lap record.

This has always been one of the many glittering weapons in Stoner’s armoury and – even if it won’t specifically win him a race – it leaves his rivals dumbfounded and afraid because it’s something they can’t do. While they work steadily up to speed, looking for some feel from the tyres, Stoner gives it full throttle and leaves his instincts to deal with the consequences.

This otherworldly ability comes from Stoner’s childhood spent on the Aussie dirt track scene when he would ride dozens of races a day, most of them lasting no more than a few minutes. In other words, no time for getting up to speed, just ‘Wide F****** Open’ from the starting gate every time.

Stoner always shrugs off comments about his ability to reach lap record pace straight from the pits. “I learn naturally, it’s not a big deal to do those times so soon,” he says, which must freak out his rivals even more.

The reigning MotoGP World Champion and his Repsol Honda RC213V completed the three days at Sepang almost six tenths ahead of 2010 champ Jorge Lorenzo (Yamaha) and his Repsol Honda team-mate Dani Pedrosa. Stoner did his fastest lap of the tests just second time around on the final morning! Lorenzo’s team-mate Ben Spies closed the session in fourth, a further three tenths down, with Valentino Rossi fifth on Ducati’s ‘90 per cent new’ GP12.

It’s still early days yet but Stoner already looks a strong favourite for retaining his title. The only thing that might trouble him is that back problem, the legacy of a crash from his Aprilia 125 at the 2003 Dutch TT. The injury came back to haunt him on the first morning at Sepang when he was doing his pre-ride stretching exercises – his back fully locked up and he needed immediate treatment from the team physio. Last year the injury caused him difficulties during the Estoril GP and resurfaced on and off for the rest of the season. No doubt Stoner will be visiting a few back specialists before 2012 kicks off for real in Qatar on April 8.

Rossi’s debut on the redesigned Ducati V4 – with conventional aluminium frame replacing the factory’s unique carbon-fibre monocoque – was much awaited and yet at the close of play he was 1.2 seconds off, which is pretty much where he was last season. Rossi nonetheless seemed upbeat because he believes Ducati have sorted much of the front-end woes – “the f****** black hole” – that tormented him throughout 2011.

Ducati mechanic Alex ‘Axle’ Briggs put it like this: “We have problems to solve but the good news is that they are new ones, not old ones”.

Only time will tell if Rossi’s new problems are easier to fix than the old…

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

When Toyota’s Lexus luxury brand was launched all its established European rivals must have been quivering at the prospect.

The LS400 set new standards of ride and refinement not just for that type of car, but for the entire automotive sector. Then when Lexus let it be known that the LS400 was its ‘practice’ car the inference was clear: just wait for the finished article.

Well, we’ve been waiting over 20 years now and the closest Lexus has come to building another as talented as the LS400 is the extraordinary but ultra-expensive and low-volume LFA supercar. Every Lexus that any mere mortal might be able to buy has been, at least by comparison to the stratospheric standards of the first, a disappointment.

On the surface this new GS has the ability to buck that trend. It’s a good-looking car, the petrol/electric hybrid motor gives performance, economy and CO2 figures to rival the best European diesels, and the packaging issues that blighted the old GS have now been resolved: it’s as big in the back and boot as you could reasonably expect such a car to be.

So far so good. Step a little closer, however, and you’ll see why that far from being the second coming, the GS is another missed opportunity.

The interior may have the largest navigation screen yet to inhabit the inside of a road car, but it will take more than that to imbue the class and style that provides such a sense of occasion in Mercedes, Audis and Jaguars. It looks like a top-of-the-range Toyota.

And when you drive it you discover that while the performance is strong, it’s not particularly pleasant: the continuously variable transmission making the not very sonorous V6 sound like it’s attached to a permanently slipping clutch. Its ride is also too firm. Lexus was keen to point out how well its new four-wheel steering system makes the GS handle on the limit, and it does handle well. But I couldn’t help feeling that if they’d tried as hard in other important areas of an executive saloon car’s endeavour, a rather more rounded and impressive product might have resulted.

Factfile
Engine: 3.5 litres, six cylinders, with hybrid electric motor
Top Speed: 155mph (limited)
Price: £50,000 (approx)
Power: 338bhp at 6000rpm
Fuel/co2: 47.9mpg, 137g/km
www.lexus.co.uk

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

“Racing’s comin’ at ya” proclaimed the headline on the front page of the Daytona Beach News-Journal as I made my jet-lagged journey to work last Friday morning.

“Let’s go racin’” yelled the banners in Bill France Boulevard as we approached the Daytona International Speedway, a bull ring of a racetrack just inland from what the locals assure me is the “best beach in the world”.

Now, I might argue with the description of the beach, but not with any of the claims made about the 24-hour race that has made Daytona famous all over the world.

This was my first trip to Daytona, just as it was for young Brazilian racing driver Felipe Nasr. Have you heard about Felipe Nasr? If not, let me tell you that you are going to be very aware of him in years to come. He is 19 years old, comes from Brasilia and is the reigning British Formula 3 Champion. And, since last Sunday afternoon, the subject of a great deal of attention. This guy is very talented, as you will discover.

Last December Nasr went to the speedway to test his Riley-Ford Daytona Prototype having won his drive through a Sunoco competition to find a suitable young driver. Boy, did they find one. He was immediately quick, raising eyebrows right down the pitlane. Before the race on Sunday I sat down with him to talk about the experience.

“You know, coming here is unbelievable, such a great opportunity for me,” he says, a grin all over his face. “I’m just amazed by everything, I’ve only raced in Europe before, I’ve never before raced a car with a roof, something so big and heavy compared to my F3 car. First laps out in practice I was laughing inside my helmet, I was enjoying myself so much. Wow, I couldn’t see where I was going because I don’t see my front wheels like in a single-seater, and there’s 600bhp and the thing is pulling me pretty hard.

“Then I got in the banking, just kept my foot down and, wow, that was something special. The infield is quite narrow and cars will be three abreast, you know, but hey, I’m ready for that. I’m not used to so many cars on the track and I reckon I will overtake more cars than ever before in my life. The key, I think, will be patience, not damaging the car, and keeping up the pace, bringing the car home.

“My goal is Formula One but this race is more time in a racing car, a chance to learn new things, to do long stints, learn about tyre degradation, to deal with traffic, and to race against really good teams and drivers. We have good plans for the future, I just need to make the right decisions, but right now, here at Daytona, I want to be in good shape for the race and I can’t wait to get out there.”

The result on Sunday afternoon could hardly have been more impressive. Late on Saturday night he was dicing with Juan Pablo Montoya, took the lead for a while, he and JPM weaving in and out of the traffic. Standing on the podium in third place, he looked surprised, delighted, elated and just a little bit tired.

The following day I met him as he sat down for lunch at the North Turn restaurant by the beach where Bill France staged his first ever races, on sand, in 1936. This is a haven for any NASCAR fan, a museum as well as a place to eat.

“You know, it was incredible, just incredible,” says Felipe. “Unless you were in the car I cannot really describe what it was like. The darkness, the lights, the traffic, and flat out all the time. Just a fantastic result for me.”

As I said earlier, you will hear and see a great deal more of Felipe Nasr. Yet another hugely talented Brazilian joins the fray.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

The combination of Triple Eight Engineering and Jason Plato, with more than 160 wins and 12 titles between them – the most successful team and driver in the championship’s history – will give MG a jump-start on its BTCC return this season.

It’s great that the Octagon is back. That badge still means a great deal to people – me, for instance – who have had hours, days, years of fun in MGBs and Midgets 1275 and 1500.

But it doesn’t – can’t – mean as much as it did on October 23 1980, which is when the final proper UK-spec B rolled off the line at Abingdon, a victim of BL-zeebub.

Every time Sir Michael Edwardes spots an MX-5 – or when his chauffeur points one out to him – he must surely emit a Homer-like ‘Doh!’ He has admitted since that the closure of MG is the biggest regret of his time as the boss of British Leyland. But even had he rescinded that decision on October 24, MG would not have been the same. Its thread had been snapped.

Motor sport at all levels and in all forms was central to old MG’s success. Indeed, it was the catalyst, its EX-perimental cars of the 1920-’30s proving the competitive worth of their constituent parts before being filtered forthwith to the next road-going model.

Killjoy Lord Nuffield called a halt to this feverish process in the mid-1930s. To be fair, the company then rode the wave for the next 25 years. It was the arrival of Midget and B – plus that of Stuart Turner as BMC’s comps boss – which triggered another burst of competition success in the 1960s.

Cue a personal Top 10 of MG motor sporting moments:

1. 1933 RAC Tourist Trophy

Legendary Tazio Nuvolari accepts an offer to drive a K3 at Ards. Its pre-selector gearbox is explained to him, extra cushions are placed beneath and behind him, and off he rockets. He wins, of course, but not before he’s given a fright by local hero Hugh Hamilton in a smaller-capacity MG J4.

2. 1933 Mille Miglia

An approaching engine note. The expectant Italian crowd sways forward for a closer look at the first car home. It’s BRG. This K3 doesn’t win outright – Nuvolari’s Alfa Romeo 8C does – but it wins its class, George Eyston/’Johnny’ Lurani beating team-mates Earl Howe/ Hamilton by just over a minute after 18 hours of racing. MG take the Team Prize too.

3. 1957 Bonneville

Stirling Moss feels exposed, isolated and helpless. He’s laying flat on his back and grasping a horizontal steering wheel. A supercharged 290bhp B-series is screaming in his ear, and the salt swishes eerily below him. Despite losing third gear, he sets a 1500cc record for the flying mile in the saucer-shaped EX181: 245.11mph.

4. 1939 Dessau

Stuffy Nuffield relents and sanctions record-breaking attempts. Maj Goldie Gardner buys Capt Eyston’s EX135 and has Reid Railton design a streamlined body for it. Just three months before WW2, he clocks 203.2mph for the flying mile in an 1100cc car – on an autobahn. The following day, after some overnight reboring, he breaks the 1500cc class record too: 203.8mph.

5. 1931 Montlhéry

The race against Austin to crack 100mph in a 750cc car is of vital promotional importance.  Eyston wins it for MG with a speed of 103.13mph at the speedbowl near Paris. Seven months later, in the same supercharged EX120, he crams 101.1 miles into an hour – before baling out when his gallant machine catches fire.

6. 1966 Marathon de la Route

The racing replacement for the epic Liège-Sofia-Liège rally is a 72-hour regularity blind around the Nürburgring’s Nordschleife. Deemed too easy, it is extended to 84 hours. Despite crashing at a recently resurfaced corner on the second lap, the B of Julian Vernaeve/Andrew Hedges covers 5620 miles to claim victory.

7. 1966 Targa Florio

Rallying superstar Timo Mäkinen is famous for ragging Minis and Big Healeys. But he comes up trumps when Turner places him in a B for Sicily’s famous road race. An overnight storm drags tons of mud onto the 41-mile circuit and Timo, superbly supported by Mini dicer John Rhodes, is in his element. They finish ninth overall and win the GT category.

8. 1963 Le Mans 24 Hours

This works B is ostensibly a privateer. Fitted with an extended nose, it’s capable of more than 130mph. Disaster strikes early when it’s involved in another’s accident. Alan Hutcheson, digging it furiously from a sandbank, comes within 10 minutes of exclusion. He and Paddy Hopkirk drive brilliantly thereafter to finish 12^th overall and win the 2-litre GT class.

9. 1934 Prix de Berne

Richard Seaman’s stripped K3 is relegated to the last row of nine by ballot and no one gives him a second look. They do when he takes the lead of the season’s most important Voiturette race after just 11 laps of the daunting Bremgarten circuit. He wins, and Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union take careful note of this bright young star.

The 10th is open to debate below because I’m in danger of exceeding my word count.

Of much greater importance, however, are the myriad opportunities that these everyman sports cars have provided enthusiasts from around the globe to cut their teeth, from Seaman, WTCC contender Rob Huff and the recently deceased Roberto Mieres to the tens of thousands of contented MG clubmen still racing/rallying/etc today.

Yes, one MG is back. The other MG, the proper one, never went away – in the motor sport sense at least.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

News that Land Rover is considering building the new Defender in India has already been greeted with some fairly predictable howls of outrage from those thinking that a Defender not built in Solihull is barely worthy of the name and clearly unaware the car has already been built in the Far East, Middle East, Africa and Europe.

But it’s an interesting point: does the location of a car factory actually matter?

To some it clearly does. A decade ago BMW spent some hundreds of millions building a final assembly plant for its newly-acquired Rolls-Royce brand because it was felt ‘Built in Munich’ was perhaps not the best tag to hang on the car when relaunching the marque from new. Likewise Volkswagen chose to rebuild entirely the ageing and underinvested Bentley factory in Crewe in preference to the far cheaper and easier solution of transferring production to Dresden where the Continental’s quite close cousin, the VW Phaeton, was in production.

Others have been far less squeamish. I wonder, for instance, how many Porsche Boxster drivers realise it is overwhelmingly likely that their car was built not by Porsche in Stuttgart, but a company called Valmet in Finland? When Aston Martin ran out of capacity at Gaydon, it had no qualms about getting Magna Steyr in Graz, Austria to build the Rapide which is, incidentally, the best built Aston I’ve ever driven. It’s V12 engines have always been built in a German Ford factory.

So what? Clearly it is essential for a car company to have an identity, and it helps for that identity to be linked to a nationality, but that doesn’t mean it needs to lose a competitive advantage by insisting everything it does has to happen in that country or not at all. Volkswagen understands this very well: no car company has exploited the potential of platform sharing better, which is why under the skin certain Audis, Skodas, Seats and VWs are structurally identical. But Skoda’s head office remains in the Czech Republic, Seat in Spain and VW and Audi inconveniently far apart in Germany. Don’t expect Porsche to leave Stuttgart any time soon, any more than Lamborghini will quit Sant Agata or Bugatti leave Molsheim.

For me it is all about credibility. Car companies can build what they like and where they like so long as the customer believes the product to be the genuine article.

It goes wrong when manufacturers start playing badge roulette and hoping the customer either won’t notice or doesn’t care. This is what makes me fearful of Fiat’s strategy for Lancia and Chrysler, which is to badge Lancias as Chryslers to sell where Chrysler has a presence and vice versa. But is calling a Lancia Delta a Chrysler Delta really going to increase it’s chance of sale in the UK? Are the Italians going to be duped into thinking a Chrysler 300C is really a Lancia because it wears a blue shield? I think not.

Otherwise it doesn’t matter. Ferrari can build cars in Germany, Australia, Patagonia or on the moon for all I care: so long as they’re designed in Maranello by people who work for Ferrari, Ferraris they will stay.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

Well here I am, still recovering from a gruelling Rolex 24 at Daytona, but to be honest it must have been one of Grand-Am’s best events ever.

It’s a shame our new Spirit of Daytona Corvette car wasn’t able to figure a bit more in the mix at the front, but we were pleased to have lead at the six-hour mark and bring a brand new car home in the top 10. The 50^th running of the race was certainly the biggest Daytona event I’ve been to, and both the series and track pulled out all the stops to make it special.

We got into the lead by good team work and strategy, but ultimately the Ford-powered cars had too much of an advantage over us and, barring a mechanical mishap for them, one of them was always going to win. The winners got a special watch from Rolex… from one tall racing driver to another, congratulations to Justin Wilson!

This race is exceptionally tough because, for most teams and drivers, it’s the first race of the year and it can catch people out. Most 24-hour races take place later in the season. Nürburgring, Le Mans or Spa are between May and July, so there’s a long lead time for people to get to know their cars and get plenty of hours behind the wheel. At Daytona, if you come out with a new car, you inevitably will only have had it a month or so before the biggest race of the US season.

I got a fair amount of ribbing over the weekend because the team was sponsored by GoPro, a maker of compact digital movie cameras, and I had to wear one of their HD HERO2 cameras on a head band to the drivers briefing, autograph session and the driver/car presentation on Saturday morning.

It’s part of the ever-changing social media world in which we live and they wanted a driver’s view of these events to use in their marketing. I’m not sure it’s something I’d do every week because we all like a bit of anonymity from time to time and you stand out enough as it is in a race suit. When you’re wearing one of these you might as well have a red nose and big shoes on… well according to my team-mates anyway!

It was great to see some top drivers from lots of different categories such as NASCAR, IndyCar and the World Endurance Championship come together to take part like Juan-Pablo Montoya, Dario Franchitti, Scott Dixon, AJ Allmendinger and Allan McNish to name just a few. There were also full factory driver line-ups from Corvette, Ferrari and Porsche. The drivers’ briefing on Saturday morning was the one time you get us all in the same place and we are addressed by the race’s Grand Marshal who, this year, was supposed to be AJ Foyt. He’s recovering from an operation on his knee and his doctors banned him from attending at the last minute so Sir Jackie Stewart (there on Rolex ambassadorial duty) was drafted in as a substitute. He must have been hot in those tartan trews, but as always he was very entertaining, taking the mickey out of Messrs Franchitti and McNish in particular.

After the briefing there was a picture of all the British drivers in the race, plus some high profile former winners. I was chatting to Derek Bell and ACDC’s Brian Johnson who was competing in the wonderfully named 50+Predator/Alegra Daytona Prototype. He said to me, “Ah, Oliver Gavin! I’ve heard your name and seen your behind many times but never met you in the flesh.” It’s the first time my behind’s been talked about by a rock star!

At this particular race 75 per cent of the teams are catered for by one provider instead of having their own motor homes or catering units. ‘Marion’s’ consists of a large marquee with rows and rows of trestle tables and one large buffet. You’ll see everyone from Patrick Dempsey to Dario to Dixie, all queuing up with their mechanics to get their meals – quite a sight. If only Formula One could be like that.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

What a pleasure it was to watch Mike Shank’s team run a faultless race to win the Rolex 24 at Daytona.

It was the first major win for Shank’s burgeoning team and the first Daytona 24 Hour win in 13 years for Ford. It was also a great win for drivers Justin Wilson, AJ Allmendinger, Oswaldo Negri and John Pew, all of whom shared the delight of scoring the biggest victories of their careers.

Shank is a former driver who won the Formula Atlantic C2 Championship in 1996 before starting his team, first in Atlantic, then moving into the Grand-Am’s Daytona Prototype category in 2004. Shank’s cars have always been powered by Ford engines and they’ve been able to win three Grand-Am races over the last eight years and have challenged unsuccessfully to win at Daytona.

But this year Shank was ready with two of the new generation of Riley Mk XXVI-Fords. Both of his cars were in the hunt all the way and as the long night wore on Shank’s lead car, driven by Wilson/Allmendinger/Negri/Pew, established itself in front and over the race’s last half they were the men to beat. The strongest challenge came from Chip Ganassi’s lead Riley-BMW driven by last year’s winners Scott Pruett/Memo Rojas/Graham Rahal/Joey Hand, but Shank’s Ford-powered car was quicker on the banking and Pruett and his team-mates admitted it was going to be tough to beat Shank.

In the middle of the night Ganassi’s second car driven by Juan-Pablo Montoya/Dario Franchitti/Scott Dixon/Jamie McMurray fell out of contention because of a broken gear lever. Other leading lights to hit trouble included all four of the new Corvette Daytona Prototypes. Most notable of the Corvettes was Wayne Taylor’s car driven by Max Angelelli/Ryan Briscoe/Ricky Taylor and Bob Stalling’s Gainsco car driven by Alex Gurney/Jon Fogarty/Memo Gidley. Taylor’s car suffered a valve train failure after only a few hours while the Gainsco Corvette ran into trouble with a failed water pump and then a crash, which required a change of nose.

By the time the sun came up on Sunday morning only three cars remained on the lead lap – Shank’s and Ganassi’s number one cars and Starworks Motorsports’ lead Riley-Ford driven by Ryan Dalziel/Alan McNish/Lucas Luhr/Enzo Potolicchio/Alex Popow. The Starworks car started from pole and stayed on the lead lap all the way, eventually claiming second place when Pruett/Rojas/Rahal/Hand hit gearbox trouble. A long stop was required to change the Ganassi car’s gear stack, which lost four laps and dropped Pruett and his team-mates to sixth at the finish.

Meanwhile Allmendinger/Wilson/Negri/Pew ran the distance without any trouble or mistakes to score the biggest win of all their careers. Allmendinger brought the winning car home, driving the last three hours without relief and scoring his first win in five years, since departing Champ Car for NASCAR at the end of 2007. “It’s such a prestigious race,” Allmendinger said. “It’s one of those races you want on your résumé. It’s just amazing. I’m going to cherish it. This is the biggest win I’ve ever been a part of and those last three hours were some of most fun I’ve ever had in a race car.”

It was also a great accomplishment for Wilson who was driving his first race since breaking his back in an IndyCar accident at Mid-Ohio last August. “This is a tough race,” Justin said. “It was flat-out all the way. We gave it everything, every lap. That’s the way it has to be in order to be competitive and win this race. I’m really pleased for Mike and Ford, and the whole team.”

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

It’s been a while since Jaguar’s XJ220 debacle, but those involved at the time will never forget it.

In 1988 Jaguar showed a very beautiful concept car powered by a 48-valve V12 motor driving all four wheels. In the tertiary stage of Thatcher’s bull market, orders were not hard to find. But when the car went into production in 1993, it and the world were very different. It was not just the economy that had shrunk in the interim: the XJ220 was smaller, had lost its all-wheel drive and dropped half its cylinders. Ugly rumours that its V6 was based on that in the Metro 6R4 rally car abounded. Suddenly the £403,000 list price didn’t look so appealing after all.

It’s been almost 20 years since the XJ220 project turned sour, but it’s only now that Jaguar has felt able to offer a car for sale with a six-figure price tag. The XKR-S convertible is a very different kind of supercar to the XJ220, but, coincidentally or otherwise, has the same 542bhp and, at £103,000, is pushing the Jaguar brand back into a territory in which it has long feared to tread.

As I’ve mentioned before, I think the fast open sports car is a fundamentally flawed concept, but it should be said that this Jaguar has impressive answers for the inherent issues of structural weakness and refinement at speed. Besides, despite being Jaguar’s most sporting open car for many years and its pumped-up appearance, it’s still not a true sports car. It’s a sporting Grand Tourer whose ageing and tonsorially-challenged owners are unlikely to require it to deliver ultimate dynamic finesse. It’s more likely they’ll want it to be comfortable, fast and make a great noise.

Such buyers will not be disappointed. This is one of those rare rapid machines that is actually improved for the removal of its roof: the performance loss is negligible, the gain in automotive theatre palpable. Roof down, you can hear the 5-litre supercharged motor in all its glory. And if I tell you that even in North America, where the noise of a V8 is part of the soundtrack of daily life, that one blip of the throttle is enough to gain the undivided attention of an entire street, you’ll have a good understanding of this Jaguar’s simple but undeniable charms.

Factfile
Engine: 5.0 litres, eight cylinders, supercharged
Top Speed: 186mph (limited)
Price: £103,000
Power: 542bhp at 6500rpm
Fuel/co2: 23.0mpg, 292g/km
www.jaguar.co.uk

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

I wonder if there is a single motoring journalist who has visited the launch of three new Porsche 911s.

It doesn’t seem like much of a claim for people who earn their living this way, but it is. I’ve been to two, but before this month the last had been in 1997. The third I missed on account of not having been born. In the little more than 48 years since Porsche revealed a 2+2 sports car at the 1963 Frankfurt Motorshow and called it the 901 (until Peugeot cried foul and forced a change in digit), the 911 has been modified hundreds of times, but only replaced twice.

So there is rather a lot riding on this, the 911 we must get used to identifying by its internal ‘991’ call sign. It’s an odd number considering its predecessor was coded ‘997’, but Porsche says it helped combat industrial espionage in the project’s early days. Hmm.

Had its enemies found out what Porsche was up to with this car, they might have been surprised. Of course the new 911 would still have a flat-six engine behind its rear axle, but the 100mm extension to the wheelbase and the adoption of electric power steering smacked of a word not normally included in the 911’s lexicon: conformity.

And that’s exactly how it feels. The characteristics that once would have been the last thing you’d notice about a 911 – if they were there at all – are now the first. You sit in a more spacious cabin and survey a landscape of elegantly crafted surfaces, thoughtfully positioned switches and an ergonomically optimised driving position. Crank the motor (which still sounds the same, thank goodness), pull the gear selector into drive (because very few manual versions will be sold despite the novelty factor of their seven forward gears) and ease away.

You’ll notice next how comfortably this car rides, and then, as your speed rises, how much quieter it is. I’m not sure where the tyre roar of old has gone, but gone it has.

You could drive it all day, all year or all your life like this. In the role of continental cruiser or daily driver, it gives little or nothing to the Audis, BMWs, Jaguars and Mercedes that more traditionally play this role. There’s even a substantial amount of additional rear room, though it remains defiantly a 2+2.

This is exactly what Porsche has planned. There’s no car I’ve studied harder nor spent more time in than the 911, not just in my career but in my life. And I know the reasons most people buy a 911 and the reasons they would like others to think they bought a 911 are entirely distinct. However they would like to be perceived, the last car in the world most would want is one that behaved in archetypal 911 fashion, locking its brakes on the approach to a wet corner, indicating apparent terminal understeer on the way in and exhibiting actual irretrievable oversteer on the way out. What they are after is the intrepid image of the 911 driver without actually driving a 911.

Which is exactly what Porsche has provided. Goodness knows what you’d have to do to get into trouble in a 991 – certainly nothing I could throw at it during a full day of hard running in California’s Santa Ynez mountains ruffled its composure to any discernible degree. You could, of course, make it slide, and at either end, but if you turn the electronics off and try hard enough you could say the same of any rear-drive car. The point is that the car would do it only in reaction to deliberate and specific provocation. It could never happen inadvertently for there are no unforeseeable circumstances in which you’d happen to be driving with safety nets disabled, turn into a corner very fast on a trailing throttle, and then bang the throttle wide open. There are 15-grand hatchbacks that are trickier to drive on the limit than this.

At first I feared this might not be a good thing. Is a 911 with the challenge removed worthy of the name? Of course it is. Fact is, Porsche has been removing what is loosely thought of as ‘911-ness’ almost since the car’s birth. In the ’60s came the first of what have so far been three extensions to the original wheelbase.

The ’70s bought the high grip, low-profile tyre, the ’80s power steering and a quicker rack to help you arrest that fast-moving tail. But the real transformation came in the ’90s with the arrival of proper, wishbone-based rear suspension for the 993 series and traction control (and a yet longer wheelbase) for the 996. The last decade saw the introduction of Porsche Active Stability Management, which works less like a Get Out of Jail Free card and more like immunity from prosecution. It’s so good you’ll often be entirely unaware of how hard it’s working to save you from yourself.

The 991 takes this to the next logical level where it doesn’t need to get you out of trouble because, unless you’re insane or catastrophically unlucky, you’re never going to get into trouble in the first place. Of course the electronics are there, but only because the market commands that they are, not because the car needs them in anything other than freak emergencies.

I know this because I was so concerned that the process of domesticating the 911 had finally gone a step too far, that I resorted to some fairly base techniques to see if, under all that sleek sophistication, still beat the heart of the world’s greatest sports car. In short, it got thrashed.

It was a humbling experience. The limit of adhesion is now so high that driving it through a curve as quickly as it will go, you fear for the reactions of other road users – not because the car is sliding (it’s not), nor using an inch more road than it is entitled to (it doesn’t), but because it’s going so damn fast. And that steering, while not so garrulously communicative as 911 die-hards might like, makes every other electric steering system I’ve tried look nothing less than incompetent.

So the result is almost two cars in one. There is the very fast, all-purpose daily weapon whose suaveness and civility will enhance your commute to work or long motorway slog. Then, if you know where to look, there’s a hard-core driving machine which, for sheer point-to-point pace, is possibly as nuts as any earlier 911 and far more prejudicial to your licence and liberty. The car’s single biggest fault is that you have to search too hard to find this other side of its character, so hard that I fear many owners may never get to appreciate what an extraordinary machine they have bought.

What astounds me is that this is just the start. In time will come the Turbos, GT3s and, lordy me, even GT2 variants – each faster and more ferocious. But if you believe in starting as you mean to go on, it’s hard to see how Porsche could have done a much better job of replacing its icon than this.

Factfile
Engine: 3.8 litres, six cylinders
Top Speed: 189mph
Price: £81,202
Power: 395bhp at 7000rpm
Fuel/co2: 29.7mpg, 224g/km
www.porsche.co.uk

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

Twenty-four years into my journalistic career and finally a story lands in my lap.

When my new neighbour expressed an interest in motor sport our conversation soon turned to her father’s racing of a modified Ford Escort at the old Kyalami.

During the recent festive break it was my pleasure to meet the man himself. We yarned about Rhodesian Gary ‘Socks’ Hocking – Howard was present at Durban’s Westmead in December 1962 when the 1961 350cc and 500cc world champion crashed a Lotus 24 with fatal consequences – and riffed on a wide variety of motor sporting obscuriana. At no time, however, did he mention his family’s part in a compelling racing-car mystery. His USA-based brother lobbed that grenade a week or two later, via email: Warwick Fitzwilliam is the last-known registered owner of the IGM-Ford.

This poor-man’s ‘Lotus 7’ was a homebrewed South African special. According to Warwick, its welding “was not up to expert quality” and its handling was “iffy on Dunlop racing tyres”. Yet it was touched by greatness: the poor man who designed it was Ian Gordon Murray, first link in the chain of thought and deed that connects Colin Chapman to Adrian Newey.

The inspiration behind those gorgeous Nelson Piquet Brabhams and peerless McLaren F1 supercar, Murray was studying engineering at Durban’s Technikon when that racing flame burning within ignited his gas welder.

“The IGM looked like it did because I used a Lotus 7 nose and wings; it was cheaper than making new moulds,” he says. “The frame was a lot lighter, more triangulated and stiffer than a 7’s. It was a completely different layout.”

It looked like a kit car but was in fact bespoke: “I bought a 1-litre 105E Anglia engine, made my own pistons and bored it to 84mm: 1073cc. Most people imported Mahle pistons and went out to 85mm – 1098cc – but I couldn’t afford to. Buying a pair of Weber 40DCOE carbs had broken the bank.

“I lightened some Consul conrods. Made my own camshafts. Reworked the cylinder head. Fitted Jaguar inlet and Peugeot exhaust valves. Made my own manifolds. And lightened the flywheel by much more than was reckoned safe by the British tuning magazines. They also said that you must fit a steel crankshaft to rev beyond 7500rpm. I used a standard cast crank. I reckoned that if you carefully balanced every part – reciprocating mass as well as rotating – you could get away with it. I did so to within a tenth of a gramme and revved to 8500rpm for two seasons with no problem.

“It only had 90bhp but the car was quick because it was so light: about 400kg. The only thing I didn’t touch was its four-speed Ford gearbox. I made my own fuel tank from 22-gauge steel, the suspension, even the seats. I learned to weld on that car. One of my crashes at the Roy Hesketh circuit was caused by poor welding.”

Murray met with considerable national success from 1967-68, winning his class at Roy Hesketh and at the Polly Shortts and Burman Drive hillclimbs. But when wealthier opponents began to import Elfins and Lotuses, he decided that it was time to move on. The IGM went swiftly through several pairs of hands after he relocated to England in 1969. Warwick bought it from a Durban lawyer in 1971 and set about a series of updates.

“Gordon had used a coat-hanger to weld with, and it showed,” he says. “I reskinned the body, replaced the windshield and front mudguards and lowered the headlamps.” He also extended the central facia so that it blended with the wide transmission tunnel. “The A-bracket locating the rear axle was worn, which made it tricky at the limit. Howard drove it too, but we never raced it. Gordon had learned a lot by the time he joined Brabham.”

The car was sold in 1972 – at which point its scent goes cold.

“I spent 15 years looking for it,” says Murray. He even flew to Cape Town to cast his eye over a contender for the title, but came away disappointed. “Eventually a lawyer friend of mine in Durban put a private detective on the case. He tracked down the documentation and we concluded that it had been written off and not rebuilt.”

There might now be another avenue to explore, however. Although Warwick has no record of the man who bought the car – the sale was made through an intermediary, racing driver John Rowe – he takes a different line on its possible fate and whereabouts.

“My feeling is that it’s in East London,” he says. “I saw it, circa 1975, in the back of a furniture-removal truck, the registration of which was prefixed CE for East London. That’s in Cape Province, a relatively remote area. If the car has since been sold, chances are that it would have been bought by other local enthusiasts.”

He has kept some of his telltale mods secret to obviate the creation of an unauthorised facsimile, and so hope still remains that Murray and the IGM will be reunited.

Should that occur, Murray – no doubt with much emotion – would be able to reaffix the hand-made badge that Warwick long ago prised from that discarded Lotus 7 nose and forwarded to him as a keepsake.

“I have the original hand-made steering wheel too,” says Murray, “and a large proportion of the original drawings. I’m considering building a replica and doing some historic racing before I get too old.”

See, badge engineering isn’t all bad.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

Never exactly one to kowtow to convention, Patrick Head. But then great race engineers never are.

It’s written in their DNA to kick against established thinking as they search for ‘the next big thing’, the ‘unfair advantage’ – the clever techie breakthrough that might expose another grey area in the rules and exploit it to the maximum.

For over 30 years, such thinking has been the sole motivating factor in Patrick Head’s professional life at Williams Grand Prix Engineering. His contribution to the sport, from the eras of ground effects to turbos to ‘active ride’ and on into these days of ever more restrictive rules, has been immense.

And as he steps away from the F1 frontline to concentrate on the technologies of the future at Williams’ hybrid power offshoot, we acknowledge that contribution with a special celebration of an incredible career in the March issue of Motor Sport – including a mammoth ‘Lunch with’ interview that breaks our record for length. It’s a glorious monster!

Typically, Patrick breaks a few myths in the issue as he reflects on some of the high points of life at Williams. He’s written, especially for us, the definitive account of the ‘gizmo’-laden masterpiece and game-changer, the FW14B in which Nigel Mansell totally dominated Formula 1 during 1992. In terms of technical excellence, those days are considered a ‘golden era’ when Grand Prix racing broke through new boundaries – to the point where the rule-makers had to drag the designers back and ban their clever systems for the good of the sport. But Patrick rejects the ‘halcyon days’ theory.

“There were more freedoms within the regulations in those days but I would not call it a ‘golden period’ for engineers,” he writes (without frills, as you’d expect).

“I have heard the FW14B described as one of the most technologically advanced racing cars ever built but the technologies we see today are of a very high standard right across the field and things like KERS and DRS are still a strong engineering challenge.”

In other words, the idea that F1 was more advanced 20 years ago than it is today is a fallacy. F1 cars in 2012 are created to a tighter rulebook, but they are vastly more sophisticated than they ever have been. Even to the layman’s eye (in other words, mine!), our new photoshoot of FW14B emphasises just how far F1 cars have come, particularly in terms of packaging and aerodynamics.

But even if the current generation of cars are vastly superior pieces of engineering than those of the early 1990s, what cannot be denied is that they are far uglier. As Pat Symonds predicts in our most recent podcast, the 2012 cars won’t be remembered for their aesthetic qualities – as the first sight of the new Caterham F1 confirms (it’s all to do with new regs lowering the noses, but not the front bulkheads, as Pat explains here).

Back in the issue, Patrick also talks about the drivers he’s worked with over the years, and as I highlight in Matters of Moment, his matter-of-fact verdict on Mansell again challenges convention. Let’s just say his view would not have been shared by the late Peter Warr, whose posthumous autobiography is reviewed this month…

From Williams and the analysis of ‘active ride’, we make a seamless shift (geddit?) on to Lotus and the car where the system was pioneered. Andrew Frankel’s piece on Colin Chapman’s final F1 car, the Type 92, is fascinating and complements Patrick’s article perfectly. Firsthand insight from Peter Wright and Tim Densham tells the story of how Chapman once again found inspiration from an idea that would change everything – in this case long after he had departed…

Elsewhere, Nigel Roebuck talks to Martin Brundle about his controversial move from the BBC to Sky – in his words, like going from Manchester United to Manchester City. If you’ve leapt to conclusions about his decision, take the time to read his side of the story. It’s quite revealing.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about this one. Part of me – a big part of me – resents having to pay Rupert Murdoch to watch F1. But I don’t resent having to pay for coverage per se, and I am intrigued by the plans Sky have for a dedicated channel. The BBC has done a great job, but I suspect the ‘evil empire’ is about to come up with a game-changer that is the TV equivalent of active ride…

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

What is now known as the Rolex 24 Hours was founded 50 years ago as a three-hour race called the Daytona Continental.

The race was run over three hours in 1962 and ‘63, then extended to 12 hours in 1964 before becoming a 24-hour grind two years later. The first Daytona Continental in 1962 was won by Dan Gurney driving Frank Arciero’s Lotus-Climax 19 and he did it in memorable fashion, coasting beneath the chequered flag after his engine blew on the last lap.

Gurney first raced Arciero’s Lotus 19 near the end of 1961 in the LA Times Grand Prix at Riverside. He didn’t finish at Riverside but was second to Stirling Moss’s UDT-Laystall Lotus 19 at Laguna Seca the next weekend and scored his first win with Arciero’s 19 at Nassau in November. Dan was ready for Daytona in February of 1962.

The 2.5-mile Daytona International Speedway opened in 1959 and was the first modern, high-banked super speedway in America. A 3.8-mile road course running through the infield, that used more than half of the banking, was ready to go in 1962 and Bill France Sr. went all out to attract a quality field for Daytona’s first sports car race.

A star-studded line-up arrived including a NART Ferrari 246SP driven by Phil Hill/Ricardo Rodriguez, a NART Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa for Rodriguez and Canadian Peter Ryan, Jim Hall and his front-engined Chaparral 1, Stirling Moss and Innes Ireland in Ferrari 250GTs, Pedro Rodriguez in another Lotus 19, Roger Penske in his own Cooper Monaco, Jim Clark in a Lotus Elite, plus American stars AJ Foyt, Fireball Roberts, Marvin Panch, Joe Weatherly, Rodger Ward, Walt Hansgen and Dick Rathmann.

While some teams used two drivers, Gurney drove Arciero’s 2.5-litre Climax-powered Lotus 19 alone. Near the end of the first three hours Dan was leading by almost two minutes only to have his engine fail on the final lap about three-quarters of a mile from the finish line. He coasted down the front straight and with great presence of mind stopped at the top of banking just short of the start/finish line, waiting for the starter to wave the chequered flag at the expiration of the three hours.

Gurney then turned the wheel and allowed his car to coast down the banking to win the race. Legend has it that he used the starter motor to cross the line but that’s not true.

“The engine blew pretty seriously and I thought a rod had probably gone through the block, so the starter motor wouldn’t have turned the engine,” Dan explains. “I just put it in neutral, then used the banking to let the car roll down and across the line.”

Phil Hill/Ricardo Rodriguez finished second aboard Luigi Chinetti’s Ferrari sports racer with Jim Hall’s Chaparral third and Stirling Moss taking fourth place in Chinetti’s Ferrari 250GT.

The following week Gurney made both his NASCAR stock car and oval racing debut in the Daytona 500 driving a Holman-Moody Ford. Dan was the first F1 driver to try NASCAR and would go on to win five NASCAR races at Riverside, his home road course. Jim Clark would follow Dan five years later, making a one-off outing in another Holman-Moody Ford at Rockingham, North Carolina in 1967.

Gurney finished fifth in his hundred-mile qualifying race, and was running with the leaders in the 500 before his engine blew. In spite of that disappointment he thoroughly enjoyed his first taste of NASCAR. “All the great names of NASCAR were there like Lee Petty, Fireball Roberts, Junior Johnson, Curtis Turner, Banjo Matthews and Lee Roy Yarbrough, and Smokey Yunick and Cotton Owens were big names among the car owners.

“The marques included Dodge and Plymouth, Ford and Mercury, Chevrolet and Pontiac, with Firestone and Goodyear both supplying tyres. It was plenty serious racing, no doubt about it.”

50 years later it’s a very different sport, but Gurney is still going!

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

A moment of idleness turned into an interesting experiment last week.

Having succumbed some time ago to the somewhat dubious charms of Twitter I posted a tweet asking if a new supercar offering less power, but a better power to weight ratio than its predecessor would help or hinder its sales.

With one exception, everyone who posted a reply thought sales would be harmed. More interestingly, every one who expressed an opinion said they thought the car itself would be improved.

Now of course this might say as much about the curious kind of cove who thinks following my Twitter feed a worthwhile activity as it does about the future of the supercar, but it still got me thinking.
Are we really saying that people who buy supercars are more interested in a headline power figure than what the car is like to drive? Is the need to demonstrate that ‘mine really is bigger than yours’ so overwhelming they’ll happily accept a compromised car to achieve it? Certainly according to one small section of Twitter-literate car fans, that appears to be the case.

All manufacturers have been adding more weight and power to models

If this is true, those who feel that way cannot be blamed for it. The fault lies with car manufacturers and the people who help form opinions about the cars they make. Like me.

The incentive for a car manufacturer to make each successive sporting or supercar more powerful than the last is easy to see. Put bluntly, performance has to be seen to improve from one generation to the next and it is far easier, cheaper and commercially effective to do this by adding power rather than removing weight. But more power requires more control, which means beefed up suspension, brakes and bigger wheels and tyres. This not only adds weight but, crucially, adds it just where you don’t want it, as unsprung mass.

But can they really be blamed for providing what their customers tell them they want? Should we, the motoring media, not think a little harder before lavishing praise on a car whose weight has risen another 100kg to the detriment of every single area of dynamic endeavour save ride quality? Should the fact the 0-60mph time has fallen another couple of tenths only because even more power has been added really be seen as such an admirable, aspirational thing? I think not.

The good news is the ship is starting slowly to turn around. I can’t think of a mainstream manufacturer who’s recently launched a fast car with less power than the one before, but it seems that at least the ever-spiralling weight gain is in the process of being checked. Ferrari was the only manufacturer to spare the time to wade into my impromptu Twitter debate and while the next 599GTB will have over 700bhp (can you imagine how good that’s going to sound?) it is expected that the weight will remain the same.

But more needs to be done: sporting car manufacturers and car magazines, websites and television programmes should talk about weight first and power second, and make the power to weight ratio the figure the number owners want most to brag about in the pub.

I guarantee you this: the first supercar manufacturer who replaces, let us say, an 1800kg car with 600bhp with one weighing, say, 1650kg with just 570bhp will have a car that’s quicker to accelerate, slow down and corner, will use less fuel and emit less CO2 and which will, all other things being equal, be better to drive in every way that matters to every car enthusiast. Surely that has to be preferable to a bit more power?

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

The 2011 Brazilian Grand Prix, which closed the season, didn’t exactly go the way Rubens Barrichello might have wished.

Having qualified his Williams-Cosworth 12^th – a position which considerably flattered the car – he then made a terrible start, so that even a fine drive thereafter got him only as high as 14^th at the flag.

It wasn’t the race Barrichello had been hoping for, but then his luck at home had always been famously awful. More than once, in the Ferrari days, he had the race bought and paid for, only for something to go wrong. Born within shouting distance of the circuit, Rubens not surprisingly wanted to win at Interlagos more than anywhere else, but the cards never fell his way.

Last November, though, the race had an added ingredient for him, because the chances were high that it would be the last time he would race a Grand Prix car – not merely in front of his own people, but anywhere. In difficult circumstances he had done an excellent job for Williams – particularly in 2010, his first season with the team – but while cash-rich Pastor Maldonado was sure to keep his drive for ’12, there was no word as to who would partner him. Barrichello, although closing on his 40^th birthday, had his hopes of staying on to enjoy a 20^th season in Formula 1, but other, younger, men were in the frame, some of them ‘with a budget’, and many doubted that Rubens would get the nod.

He refused to contemplate such a thing, however, brushing away suggestions that he should turn the Interlagos weekend into an emotional farewell to his fans. Barrichello well knew that the moment would come to call time on his F1 career, but in his mind he wasn’t there yet. Sadly, as with Jean Alesi, others made the decision for him.

I say ‘sadly’ because, of all the Grand Prix drivers I have known, only Clay Regazzoni matched Barrichello in his pure love of what he was doing. Rubens was 19 when he made his F1 debut with Jordan back in 1993, and in the intervening years never gave so much as a momentary thought to retirement – indeed if anything his enthusiasm for life as a Grand Prix driver only increased as he got older.

Like Regazzoni, Barrichello was occasionally a winner, and on merit, but neither man was driven in the manner of a Senna, and each had values not always found in their contemporaries. It is often said of a driver who fails to make it to the very highest echelon that he was ‘too nice a guy’, and perhaps Rubens comes into this bracket. He lacked the killer instinct probably necessary to make it to the very top – not so much on the track as in his behaviour off it. Not long ago he told me that, whereas most top drivers would insist, if only one new front wing or whatever were available, on having it, such a thing made him feel only guilty: he preferred to compete on equal terms. Trust me, you don’t meet many like this…

Because of that, and because his Latin heart was always so obviously on his sleeve, some of Barrichello’s rivals considered him a bit ‘soft’, but I always thought that unjust. Certainly Rubens was always more emotional, more willing to say what he thought, than most, but he was no push-over on the race track – even if, like Alain Prost, he had a strong sense of right and wrong, and would never endanger a rival.

Like Prost, too, Barrichello was superb at setting up a race car, and when he had it to his liking, and the mood was on him, sometimes he could be unbeatable. I think now of the 2003 British Grand Prix at Silverstone – the notorious race in which a lunatic ran amuck on the Hangar Straight – when his drive was a masterpiece of controlled aggression. Twice he took on, and passed, Kimi Raikkonen, first getting by the McLaren on the outside into Abbey, then later daring to threaten Kimi into Bridge, which made him run wide at the exit, and settled the affair once and for all.

For six seasons as Schumacher’s Ferrari team mate Barrichello was obliged to race under severe constraints, often – as in Austria two years running – being obliged to obey Jean Todt’s orders, and give way to Michael after consummately out-driving him. No, of course he didn’t enjoy it, but he would argue that at that time the second Ferrari was better than the first anything else, and it was difficult to take issue.

Finally, after an incident at Indianapolis in 2005, Rubens concluded that enough was enough, and asked to be released from his contract a year early, so as to join Honda. After three seasons with uncompetitive cars, partnering Jenson Button, there followed an Indian Summer with the team – now reconstituted as Brawn: in 2009 Barrichello won twice, and was a factor everywhere. We’re only talking about a couple of years ago…

Now, though, with Bruno Senna signed at Williams, it seems to be all over for Rubens in F1, and in Brazil he will be grieving, for he has known nothing else. It’s unlikely now that he will ever be offered a worthwhile drive again, and – maybe I’m wrong – it’s difficult to envisage his being tempted into a lesser form of motor racing, so entirely has his career been based around F1. So I offer a salute to a very fine Grand Prix driver, on occasion a great one, and a delightful man, with values from another time.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

Unless you’re at the sharp end of racing – frantically fettling in readiness of the new season – this can be a grey time of year.

Which is why we have to be thankful that Philip Morris still like spending money on the sport, even though they get precious little (virtually nil, in fact) coverage for it. Every January the “wicked tobacco barons” take over upmarket ski resort Madonna di Campiglio in the Italian Dolomites to present the Ducati MotoGP and Ferrari Formula 1 teams. The five-day Wrooom event must bring tears to the eyes of their accountants – the town is painted red, though Uncle Phil stops short of dying the snow.

Madonna is very flash – it seems like it’s a legal requirement for women to wear fur coats while promenading of an evening. Pretty much the only ladies who aren’t swaddled in deceased wildlife belong to the red army of PR operatives who fuss around Valentino Rossi, Nicky Hayden, Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa.

The climax of the week was an ice-racing evening in which Rossi took on Alonso, Massa, Giancarlo Fisichella and Marc Gené in karts and Fiat 500s. Rossi – who knows almost as much about going fast on four wheels as he does on two – won the kart race and finished second in the Fiats, behind Massa and ahead of Alonso. He’ll be trying very hard not to brag too much about that.

Traditionally Ducati uses Wrooom to reveal its new Desmosedici (16-valve desmo) MotoGP bike. Last year the GP11 was helicoptered to the top of a mountain where it was unveiled by the riders to great fanfare. The phrase ‘more money than sense’ comes to mind. This year, however, there was no helicopter. And there was no motorcycle either. The official excuse for the GP12’s absence was that the team was still finalising the livery. Yeah, right.

There are two more likely reasons for its failure to get to Madonna. Either Ducati doesn’t want its rivals to see the GP12 any earlier than necessary because the bike is so radically different, or Ducati mechanics were still wielding their spanners in Bologna, readying the machine for its first shakedown tests this week at Jerez. Rossi and Hayden (if he’s fit from a recent training accident) will get their first go on the bike at Sepang at the end of the month.

We already know that the GP12 is a whole new departure for Ducati – following the factory’s nightmare 2011 season it needed to be. Chief engineer Filippo Preziosi is trying desperately hard to please Rossi and has replaced his unique carbon-fibre monocoque with an aluminium beam frame, just like those used by the Japanese factories (though the GP12 item is fabricated by Buckingham-based FTR).

Some engineering purists consider this to be big step backwards, but Ducati hopes the new chassis will work better with MotoGP’s Bridgestone control tyres. It will also make it easier for engineers to adjust engine position from race to race in search of better front/rear grip balance.

The big mystery that swirls around the GP12 is its engine. Ducati only does one configuration – the 90-degree vee – which has been its trademark since the 1970s. All street bikes manufactured by Ducati are powered by 90-degree v-twins and the Desmosedici MotoGP bike runs a 90-degree V4 (which Ducati cheekily used to call a “super twin”).

Some insiders suggest that Preziosi has now forsaken Ducati’s beloved right-angled architecture and built a narrower-angle V4, like Honda’s RC213V. the man himself has even dropped hints that he might build a 72-degree V4 because he knows that a shorter engine would definitely help him build a more compact, more balanced chassis.

The bigger question is this: after decades of doing things very much its own way is Ducati turning Japanese?

*Apologies for the tricky headline, but it piqued your interest, didn’t it?

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

Welcome everyone to our first podcast of 2012.

Pat Symonds is the only podcast guest we’ve had more than once, and when you listen you’ll realise why. He’s a straight-talking F1 engineer who not only tells it how it is, but also has the ability to explain even the most technical parts of the sport to people who haven’t got an engineering degree (i.e. us).

We hope you enjoy it and do let us know your thoughts on everything we talk about.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

Carlos Reutemann was a racing driver from Central Casting: blue eyes, chiseled jaw, dimples, brooding Brando brows, luxuriant hair, tanned.

To think, he shared F1 grids with Peter Revson, François Cevert and Jacky Ickx. Now, there’s handsome for you.

Forty years ago this Elvis lookalike – I’m thinking Comeback Special, not Vegas catsuits – joined Mario Andretti in an elite club: pole position on world championship debut. Only Jacques Villeneuve has joined it since.

Unlike the others’ – a 1968 Lotus 49B and a 1996 Williams FW18 – Reutemann’s ‘Lobster Claw’ Brabham BT34 was not the fastest thing in the joint. In theory. Graham Hill had driven it throughout 1971 and hardly been enamoured.

The car was old hat but the team had a new cap: Bernie Ecclestone. Having recently bought it from Ron Tauranac, he arrived in Argentina accompanied by Ralph Bellamy and Keith Greene, his new, ahem, designer and team manager. Another recruit was New Zealand mechanic Kerry Adams.

“Herbie Blash, who I worked with for Frank Williams, persuaded me and Bob Dance to join – and then left on our first day!” says Adams, today a renowned restorer and preparer of historic racing cars.

“He couldn’t get on with Tauranac.

“It was a difficult situation for Ron, but he kept interfering as we tried to prepare the cars and there was a chance that we might not be ready. Eventually Bernie banned him from the F1 shop.” Strong-minded men both, their partnership would soon be dusted.

Adams: “Bernie was the most straightforward guy I worked for. If you needed something to do your job properly – bang! – he got it for you. That’s how he ended arguments, and because you had nothing to moan about you had to just get on with it.”

Adams joined Scotsman Derrick Walker of subsequent Indycar fame on Reutemann’s car: “Carlos had finished third in an old McLaren M7C in the non-championship race at Buenos Aires the year before, but I’d been too wrapped up with Henri Pescarolo’s Williams-run March, which finished second, to take much notice of him. I did now. Impressive. Very calm. Never complained. Showed no emotion. You just knew that he was going to be good. And then he put the damn thing on pole.”

Reutemann’s confidence was high. He had finished runner-up to March’s Ronnie Peterson in the 1971 F2 European Trophy and to Lotus’s Emerson Fittipaldi in the subsequent South American F2 Torneio. At almost 30, married with a daughter, this cattle rancher’s son knew that he was ready.

The pressure was intense, however. Not since 1960 had his country’s race counted towards the world championship. And not since Fangio’s retirement had racing’s most fervent fans had something to cheer about.

Reutemann was on the pace immediately: fourth, 10th and sixth in the first three two-hour practice sessions on the afternoons of Friday and Saturday. Then it happened – with 20 minutes of the final hour to go. Fitted with Goodyear’s super-softs, his fourth lap was a second faster than anything that had gone before. Double-takes and cross-checks rippled along the pit lane.

Motor Sport was impressed and called his unflurried performance “Clark-like”. The crowd went berserk, while its beloved ‘Lole’ sat at the pit counter and watched the established stars flounder in his wake. Stunning qualifying laps and that calm assurance that he – and often no one else – could go no faster were to become Reutemann motifs.
Jackie Stewart’s Tyrrell 003 – the runaway combo of 1971 – got within 0.22sec.

Adams: “The atmosphere was electric as Derrick and I pushed the car onto the grid: 100,000 people went ballistic. It was a magical moment rather than intimidating. I’d never experienced anything like it. Carlos simply gave a calm little wave.” He wasn’t going to be distracted.

“It was very hot. They had these strange devices that looked like sprayers for weedkiller but which dispensed Coca-Cola. Derrick and I got through about 34 cans. I didn’t pee once.”
Stewart got the jump at the start but Reutemann wouldn’t let go – until his soft rear tyres began to go off within 10 laps.

“I thought that we had been given bad advice,” says Adams. “But I’ve since read that it might have been a team decision. Perhaps Carlos could have treated them a bit better early on.”

Still, he adapted brilliantly and was holding fourth when finally he pitted just before half-distance. This dropped him to 14th, but fresh rear rubber – and talent – saw him recover to an eventual seventh.

Two months later he won the non-championship Brazilian GP at Interlagos. Three days after that he crushed an ankle when his Rondel-run F2 BT38 sheared a rear hub at Thruxton.

This wouldn’t be the last time that motor racing suddenly became difficult for the enigmatic man who could make it look so easy.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

Just when you thought you’d mentally sorted your plug-in hybrids from your range extenders, your NiMh batteries from your lithium-ions, steel yourself for another twist in the hybrid tale, heading your way with gathering speed. What’s more is that we have Formula 1 to thank for it, in part at least. Which is just one reason it’s fascinating.

When we think of ways of temporarily storing energy, a battery is quite naturally the first thing that springs to mind. But in the context of a car, a flywheel will do it far more simply and efficiently. Instead of converting kinetic energy into chemical energy and thence into electricity which can then be used to generate kinetic energy, as does a conventional hybrid car, using a flywheel instead of a battery merely transfers the kinetic energy from one place to another.

Williams selected this mechanical energy recovery system when KERS was mandated in 2009 and now Porsche has a highly evolved system in its GT3R Hybrid prototype, which I was lucky enough to drive late last year. So long as you have a long enough stab at the brakes, it will recover enough energy and store it in a flywheel sitting next to you in the cockpit to provide a 200bhp burst of power for seven seconds. Which, aside from the added weight of the flywheel and some frictional losses, is essentially free power.

The advantage to a lap time in a racing car is clear, but it could be equally effective in slashing fuel consumption and therefore CO2 emissions from road cars.

The reason flywheels are only reaching the agenda now, well over a decade after hybrid first got a grip, is that they are not without their problems. Clearly they cannot store power for as long as a battery. But their real drawback until now is that for a flywheel to be effective, it needs either to be extremely heavy (which would negate its point) or spin so fast it could fly apart.

Happily physics lends a hand, because while the energy a flywheel can store increases in direct proportion to its weight, it squares in proportion to its speed. So if you double its speed, you can store four times the energy. Which means it’s now possible and far more efficient to build small fast carbon-fibre flywheels that won’t self-destruct, than big, heavy steel ones that will.

The other potentially huge benefit will come when people realise how environmentally unfriendly is the process required to make and eventually scrap large battery packs such as those used in hybrids for the last decade. There are no nasty chemicals in a flywheel, just a single clean disc of carbon fibre.

Will flywheels take over the world, and make wasted all those billions poured into conventional hybrid systems? Clearly not: right now it is hard to see how a flywheel will be able to combat the new generation of green machines that derive most of their power from neither energy recovery nor an internal combustion engine, but by plugging into the national grid.

But these systems are fiendishly expensive and the more affordable conventional hybrids below them are soon to be obsolete. What is needed is something simple, affordable, clean and effective to plug the gap they will leave. And what could have greater potential than the simple, humble flywheel to do just that?

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

We are in the silly season, a period of posturing and positioning.

The Grand Prix teams, and their drivers, are setting out their stores, limbering up for the battles that lie ahead.

Testing starts next month, then we will have some idea of what to expect in the first few races. For now, however, there are plenty of words flying about, scraps for the media to chew over, before engines are fired up and the cars roll out into the Spanish sunshine.

At McLaren the talk is already of young Mr Lewis Hamilton who took his baggage into the winter promising to return a new man. Back at Woking managing director Jonathan Neale says that “Lewis is in the right place, doing all the things he should be doing, and training hard. I speak to him most weeks and he is back on track”. So what we can read into that? Not much at all, try as we might.

Meanwhile arch-rival Fernando Alonso, never one to beat around the bush, has popped up in high spirits. “There will be some good races, with some good emotion”, he predicts, “this is a golden era, there are six World Champions on the grid, it will be exciting, and the spectators will enjoy it.” Hear, hear to that Fernando. Team chief Stefano Domenicali has promised that Ferrari will not repeat the mistakes of last year, that they will not be slow off the mark this time around. President Luca Montezemolo will be pleased to hear that.

In Milton Keynes a new Red Bull is taking shape and that’s always an intriguing prospect. Sebastian Vettel says waiting for his new car is like having a baby and he can’t wait to see what Mr Newey produces for 2012. At least nobody has to wait nine months to find out.

Lotus, formerly Lotus-Renault, have invented an adjustable ride height system which the FIA has inspected and approved. Could this be the start of another double diffuser saga? Will all the teams have to follow suit? Far too soon to say, but one to watch.

The other Lotus team, now called Caterham, has announced that it will be taking another step forward this year and will move closer to the midfield. No big surprises there. What else are they going to say? On the driver front, rumours persist that Vitaly Petrov will replace Jarno Trulli who is perceived, by some, to have reached end of his F1 career.

Moving on to beleaguered Williams, all the winter chat had, until Tuesday, been about drivers. The signing of Bruno Senna leaves only one spare seat, alongside Pedro de la Rosa at HRT. But that’s unlikely to attract a big name. Senna at Williams has emotive connotations, for obvious reasons, but is a big chance for Ayrton’s nephew to prove he has what it takes. Dropping Barrichello in favour of Senna will have triggered some heated debate in the bars of São Paulo and surely marks the end of Rubens’ distinguished career in Grand Prix racing. He will be much missed in the paddock, if not by everyone at Williams.

What else? Not much, apart from the on-going worries about the rights and wrongs of going to Bahrain, the possible cancellation of Valencia and the imminent appearance in court of Adrian Sutil on a charge of GBH which goes back to the Chinese GP last year.

All this, and more, will keep Grand Prix racing in the headlines until the flag drops and the bulls**t stops in Melbourne. And that’s good news for Sky TV and the BBC who will be competing for the ratings this season.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

Today, in case you had not noticed, is Friday the thirteenth of January. Lucky for some, not so for others.

If you were unaware, or simply don’t care, it is likely that you are not a superstitious person. You are fortunate because superstition can, at its worst, be an affliction.

Over the years there have been a surprising number of superstitious racing drivers. They did not go out of their way to make this information public, but if you spend time close to drivers you can’t help noticing their habits and foibles as they go about their business.

Of the current participants in Grand Prix racing, we know that Michael Schumacher likes to race with odd numbers on his car. Apart from 13, of course, which does not even appear on the grid. Nico Hulkenberg always gets into his car from the left-hand side and I think, from memory, so does Mark Webber.

In Moto GP, Valentino Rossi surprised many by revealing that he always puts one boot on before the other, one glove before the other, and mounts the bike the same way every time. Some do say that even Sebastien Vettel keeps a lucky coin somewhere about his person. Worth checking out.

In the old days Tazio Nuvolari always raced with his lucky charm – a tortoise pin. There will be others who do that today, though the precious object may be hidden under layers of fireproof clothing. Not to mention Stefano Modena who used to wear one of his gloves inside out, amongst many other superstitions.

More recently David Coulthard had his lucky underpants, though they surely must have worn out before his retirement. Alex Wurz always wore different coloured racing boots, right from his earliest days in Formula Ford.

Historically, green cars have been a worry for many drivers. Before the days of widespread sponsorship, some even refused to race a green car. Mind you, such trivia never bothered Stirling Moss who liked nothing more than to win in a British Racing Green machine. More bizarrely, many NASCAR drivers have had an aversion to peanuts in their shells, banning them from garage or pitlane at a race meeting. Shelled peanuts are, however, acceptable. This, according to legend, goes back to pre-war days when peanuts shells were found in the wrecks of cars involved in serious accidents.

Yes, superstition is weird. But it won’t go away. Underpants or peanuts, every racer wants to arrive at the grid feeling totally comfortable, relaxed and in control. If that means his race numbers do not add up to eight, or he has a coin up his sleeve, then so be it.

And, by the way, practice for the Grand Prix of China in Shanghai is on Friday 13 of April this year. Keep your eyes peeled for any strange rituals in the pitlane…

Am I superstitious? Well, let’s just say I won’t be walking under any ladders today. And if I see a magpie I will bid him Good Morning! Have a good day.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

Michael Andretti announced this week that James Hinchcliffe has joined Andretti Autosport and will drive the team’s Go-Daddy car in a three-car team with Ryan Hunter-Reay and Marco Andretti. Michael says he hopes to add a fourth car before the season begins.

Hinchcliffe, 25, comes from Toronto and ran his rookie IndyCar season last year with Newman/Haas where he was teamed with veteran Oriol Servia. Hinchcliffe led at Mid-Ohio and finished fourth in three races, beating JR Hildebrand to IndyCar’s rookie of the year honours. When Newman/Haas closed its doors in December Andretti decided the promising Hinchcliffe was just the man to fill the void in his team created by Danica Patrick’s move to NASCAR and Dan Wheldon’s death in Las Vegas last October.

Prior to his death Wheldon had agreed to replace Patrick in Andretti’s Go-Daddy-sponsored car and Michael explained why he selected Hinchcliffe to fill Wheldon’s shoes. “What caught my eye last year was Oriol is a very good, very experienced and very fast guy,” Andretti remarked. “And many times and many places James out-raced Oriol and out-qualified him. That said something. That was a good benchmark to look at.

“We’re really excited to have James join us,” Andretti went on to say. “We feel like he’s going to fit right in. I think he’s going to be really good with the chemistry with Marco and Ryan. He did an awesome job last year. He proved that he can run up front and he’s a great personality. He’s going to be perfect for our team.

“When you have a multi-driver team it’s very important that everybody gets along and we feel that the three of them are going to get along really well. I think James is a team player. I asked Marco and Ryan their opinions of James and they both had high marks for him. So that made it a no-brainer. You’ve got to have good drivers who are capable of winning and I think we’ve put together a really strong driver line-up. I’m really excited about it.”

After many years with Honda Andretti’s team has switched this year to Ilmor’s new Chevrolet turbo V6. Hunter-Reay has driven IndyCar’s Dallara-Chevrolet test car and the team will start testing the first of its own cars and engines this coming weekend at the West Palm Beach road course in Florida before moving on to IndyCar’s open four-day test at Sebring the following week.

“I’m excited about the way things have been going with Chevrolet,” Michael said. “We’ve got a lot of development programmes we’re doing within the team and the excitement on the floor of our shop and in the engineering room is quite high. We have high expectations for coming out strong right away.”

Hunter-Reay will drive for two days at West Palm Beach. Marco Andretti (above with Wheldon) then takes over for two days with Hinchcliffe running his first test with the team at Sebring the following week. “We have a pretty aggressive test programme,” Michael said. “We were involved in every one of the tests so far with Chevrolet and I think we’ve learned a lot. It’s been good for us and helps us to get going with our own cars. We’ll start on Saturday at West Palm Beach. We’ll be on the track for the first time with our own cars and we’re ready for it. The guys have been working extra hours to get the car prepared.

“We’ve got a lot of days booked before the start of the year. We’re flat out on it. We’re going to be out every week for sure. Right now we have only one car. We get our second car next week and then we’ll start running two cars and multiple drivers at each test.

“We’re working hard on a fourth car,” Michael added. “We’ve got a lot of irons in the fire. The chances I would say are 60 to 70 per cent, definitely better than 50-50. Hopefully, we’ll have something done in about two or three weeks.”

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

There’s so much sport on the goggle-box these days that even the most ardent armchair hero must pick and choose.

Beyond motor sport – I draw the line at Supermoto – my required viewing is: Wimbledon, plus the latter stages of the French Open; the final 18 holes of the British Open; the Six Nations; baseball’s World Series; the mountain stages of the Tour de France; England Test matches – via radio and TV highlights; and the Lauberhorn and Hahnenkamm.

The latter are the blue riband events of the men’s Alpine downhill-skiing season. Both are throwbacks to when Formula 1 raced at the old Nürburgring and Spa-Francorchamps. Bar the addition of catch-nets and some easing of jumps, these hills – mountains, more like – are as they have always been: terrifying. Held on consecutive weekends in January, they are sport’s purest tests of skill, speed and courage.

Switzerland’s Lauberhorn, at 2.8 miles, is the longest on the calendar. Competitors exceed 90mph, leap from a rock face and arrow through a tunnel as narrow as Donington Park’s Stone Bridge. Fringed by the spectacular Eiger and Jungfrau peaks, it always seems to be held beneath an azure sky.

Austria’s Hahnenkamm is renowned for its vertiginous start, the freefall at Mausefalle, the ice wall of the Steilhang, and the jumps and compressions of the finish straight. It always seems to be run in mist and fog.

Given the balance and balls required, it’s no surprise that downhillers have often turned to motor sport for a speed fix after their knees have buckled. Winter Olympic Games gold medallists abound on the list of converts.

Henri Oreiller (above at Le Mans in 1962), the Parisian who grew up in Val d’Isère and won – by 4.1 seconds! – at St Moritz in 1948, switched to cars in 1952 and was a back-to-back winner of the prestigious Lyon-Charbonnières Rally. Sadly he crashed to his death driving a Ferrari 250 GTO in the 1962 Coupe du Salon at Montlhéry.

Jean-Claude Killy, the Frenchman who completed a gold clean sweep – downhill, giant slalom and slalom – at Grenoble in 1968, had only the year before teamed up with motor sport journalist Bernard Cahier to drive a Porsche 911S on the Targa Florio. They finished seventh overall and won their class.

In 1968, Killy shared a 911T with Jean Guichet, the 1964 Le Mans winner, in the 1000km races at Monza and the Nürburgring. They finished second and third in class. And in 1969, he co-drove a works Alpine A210 at Le Mans alongside Bob Wollek, who had been a team-mate of his in the French ski team. Broken suspension sidelined them after 20 hours.

Austria’s Franz Klammer, the greatest, most compelling downhiller of them all, a windmilling winner at Innsbruck in 1976, met with a modicum of success in the DTM and ETCC of the late 1980s in Mercedes-Benz 190Es.

Americans, too, have had a taste for this transition.

Buddy Lazier (below), winner of IRL’s maiden Indy 500 in 1996 and its overall champion of 2000, was an Olympic hopeful in 1984.

Dean Hall, a leading speed skier – the world’s fastest non-motorised sport – raced against Lazier in CART in the early ’90s, having won New Zealand’s Formula Pacific Championship, but ultimately met with less success.

Philadelphia-born Peter Ryan provides one of the bigger what-might-have-beens en piste and on track. Scion of the family that owned the Mont-Tremblant resort in Québec, his ski dreams were compromised by a Can-Am squabble – he wanted to represent Canada without having to renounce his American citizenship – and then shattered by a heavy fall.

Ryan was a natural in a car too. He was just 21 when he won the inaugural Canadian GP at Mosport in the presence of Stirling Moss in an identical Lotus 19 sports-racer.

He was a whiz out of the cockpit as well: Roger Penske was a friend and fan, as was Luigi Chinetti, the influential boss of NART. Ryan looked potentially set to follow in the Ferrari wheel tracks of Phil Hill, Dan Gurney and Richie Ginther.

He arrived in Europe in mid-1962 on the promise of a Team Lotus Formula Junior drive, only for Colin Chapman to foist him on Ian Walker Racing, his semi-works outfit. Annoyed, Ryan won his heat at Monaco, ahead of the works Lotus 22 of Alan Rees, and the following weekend pipped Team Lotus’s category ace Peter Arundell at Mallory Park.

The laconic Frank Gardner, third in that race at Mallory, reckoned Ryan to be the fastest, albeit not necessarily the safest, road driver that he had ever sat alongside. John Pledger, Walker’s chief mechanic, who endured a wild trip to Reims in late June in the passenger seat of Ryan’s new E-type, concurred.

Pledger also undertook the onerous task of driving the Jaguar home after its owner had crashed fatally while battling for the lead of the first heat.

Ryan would have graduated to Formula 1 – had he escaped his first big accident – because he not only had the skill, but also because he had changed career path early enough. That’s how Patrick Tambay and Teo Fabi managed it in the 1970s and ’80s.

Tambay (above with Villeneuve and Scheckter) was a junior ski champion and a member of the French B squad during the Killy Era before being advised that he should return to his studies. Fabi, who as a teenager twice skied for Brazil in the World Championships of the early 1970s, was persuaded by his kart-besotted younger brother Corrado to steer a new course.

It was different in Piero Taruffi’s time. Either side of WWII a driver wasn’t considered to be in his prime until he was in his late thirties. The Italian ‘Silver Fox’ – a top-rank skier, excellent bobsledder, bike- and car-racer pre-war – was 45, and driving a works Ferrari 500, when he scored his only World Championship GP win, the 1952 Swiss at Bremgarten.

Things were different again for Hertfordshire’s Divina Galica.

To be honest, I’d always been sniffy about her F1 fast-tracking by Brands Hatch’s publicity-conscious boss, John ‘Spider’ Webb: she DNQ-ed her Surtees TS16 at the 1976 British GP. She twice failed to qualify on her attempts with ailing Hesketh in ’78 too, although the good Lord was no doubt thankful for her Olympus money.

Three strikes, and Galica was out. Upon a reflection – and after a bit of digging into the results of Britain’s Shellsport G8 Championship – that might have been harsh. She had earned her second chance.

Twice in 1977 – at Snetterton and Donington – she had been within a place of becoming the first women to win in a Formula 1 car. Tony Trimmer, a star of early Formula Ford and the 1970 British F3 champion, denied her on the latter occasion, but Galica’s sister TS19 matched his fastest lap. She finished second at Zandvoort too, in 1978’s inaugural Aurora F1 series.

In 1980, Desiré Wilson, another Webb protégée, did become the first and so far only woman to win an F1 race. She was unquestionably a better driver than Galica. But then again, the South African never represented her country at three Winter Olympics, nor did she finish in the top 10 of the giant slalom at two of them: Galica was eighth at Grenoble and seventh at Sapporo in 1972.

Aged 47, having also competed in nimble sports-racers and rumbling trucks, Galica returned to the Olympic slopes in 1992 to contest the ‘demonstration sport’ of speed skiing.

Turns out that balance is the only prerequisite.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

Seven years after ceasing production, Honda has not only publically committed to building a new NSX, it has this week unveiled a concept of what it might look like at the Detroit Motorshow.

Actually don’t pay too much attention to the appearance of the slick slice of avant garde automotive exotica sitting on plinth in the middle of Detroit’s Cobo Hall – from this far out it is highly unlikely the finished article will bear more than a fleeting resemblance. Focus instead not on what it is, but what it might mean.

First and most simply it means the return of one of the names most missed by supercar cognoscenti. I know the NSX sold in Sinclair C5 numbers in the UK, but that says everything about our endemic badge snobbery and nothing whatever about the greatest supercar of the late 20^th century.

Few cars can consider themselves a work of genius but the old NSX could. While Ferraris of the era were tricky to drive and impractical to use, the NSX was no more difficult than a Civic to master. And it demanded that you used it everyday. Yet, and this was where it was so clever, that sense of the exotic, that frisson of excitement you feel when approaching any true supercar, was not only present in the NSX, it was there in spades.

The car I most liken it to is the 1973 Porsche 911 2.7 Carrera RS which had the same ability to fit into your life yet left you in no doubt at all that on the right road it would be absolutely mesmerising. And the NSX did not disappoint.

I remember my first drive in one. It was 1990 and that day it seemed we had the Welsh mountains to ourselves. One of the most blissful afternoons I’d spent in a car was interrupted only by the photographer sitting next to me letting me know that if I insisted on driving like that, he was going to walk home.

This, of course, is the car trumpeted as having been developed by Ayrton Senna which is, of course, rubbish. The great man did drive it a few times and provided some worthwhile input into the car, but nothing should be allowed to detract from the job done by Honda’s passionate, perfectionist engineers. One look at its forged aluminium wishbones is all you need to know how much care went into this car. I’ve heard it said that Honda lost money on every one it made which I can quite believe.

So what of the new car? Well we know it too will be powered by a mid-mounted V6 engine, but that it will also have a hybrid drive providing power to the front as well as the rear wheels courtesy of two electric motors mounted either side of the nose of the car. We know too that Honda is not going to be joining the power struggle – the new NSX will achieve its performance through lightweight and efficiency, not brute force.

But consider also what this car means to Honda. It smacks to me quite strongly of a car company rediscovering its mojo and remembering that it has one of the proudest engineering heritages of any car company not just in Japan, but the world. Of course very few will have the money to buy an NSX but the attitude which says it can be built cannot help but shine down on more affordable Hondas of the future.

Though time alone will reveal the true significance of the NSX, it would now not surprise me at all to discover that Honda has decided its days of building nothing but worthy and dull cars are over, and that the time has come to go back to doing what it does best. And for that we should all be very happy.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

I have to agree with Rob Widdows’ words about John Surtees.

Without doubt the man deserves a knighthood and here’s hoping the honour will soon be bestowed. Here in America, of course, we live without such lofty titles so our greatest American racers will remain merely Misters. Debating who the greatest are in any field is a typical mid-winter pastime so here are my thoughts about the USA’s greatest racing men.

One thing that’s hard to debate is Mario Andretti’s claim to achieving more than any other American racing driver. A dozen years ago votes from both fans and media chose Andretti as the USA’s greatest driver of the twentieth century and it’s an uncontested fact that Mario’s record of success over a wide range of racing categories – and an abnormally long and competitive career – puts him in a league of his own, undisputed by his many challengers.

But there’s more of a debate about who America’s greatest overall racing man of all-time may be. You could nominate Bill France Sr. and his son Bill Jr. for founding and building NASCAR into the USA’s most successful form of racing. You could also nominate Roger Penske for creating America’s definitive race team of the past 50 years. Or you could reach back and select a guy like Harry Miller, who designed and built the fantastic Miller Indycars from the 1920s and ‘30s.

Then of course, there’s Dale Earnhardt who has become even more of an icon of stock car racing in death than he was in life, or Richard Petty, NASCAR’s King, with an incredible 200 wins to his credit. And there’s Andretti for not only making himself the personification of the international American racer but also for transcending the sport and becoming a renowned example of the American immigrant made good.

But there’s no doubt in my mind that Dan Gurney is America’s greatest overall racing man. Dan’s driving career is one of the few that rivals Andretti’s for diversity and achievement while his remarkable second career, spanning more than thirty years as a team owner and innovative car builder, elevates Gurney to a unique category.

Dan was as versatile as they come, winning in Formula One, long-distance sports cars, Can-Am cars, Indy cars, NASCAR stock cars, Trans-Am cars and almost anything in between. He always preferred to do his own thing and his record as a driver in F1 is probably less impressive than it might have been had he chosen not to pursue his dream of building and racing his own Eagle racing cars out of his All American Racers shop in Southern California.

Gurney raced F1 cars for twelve years from 1959-’70. In that time he won four world championship Grands Prix and three more non-championship F1 races of which there were many in those days. He finished third in the 1961 world championship, tied with Stirling Moss, and was fifth in the championship in 1962 and ‘63, sixth in ‘64, and fourth in ‘65. He started from the front row twenty-two times in 86 world championship starts and set track records at true driver’s tracks like Spa and the Nürburgring.

As a long-distance sports car driver Gurney was as good as they come. Dan won the Sebring 12 Hours and the Tourist Trophy at Goodwood with Ferrari in 1959; the Nürburgring 1000Kms with Stirling Moss in a birdcage Maserati in 1960; scored a famous win in the inaugural Daytona international sports car race in 1962, run over three hours; and co-drove a Ford Mk IV with A.J. Foyt to win at Le Mans in 1967 the week before winning at Spa in his own F1 Eagle-Weslake.

Dan’s driving career is unrivalled by any American other than Andretti, but his highly successful second career as a team owner and car builder sets him apart. All American Racers built and raced winning cars for many categories – F1, Indy/Champ cars, GTO & GTP cars – over a 34-year stretch running from 1966-’99, starting with the beautiful and very competitive 1966 and ‘67 F1 and USAC Eagles. AAR’s record of wins over that time includes fifty Indy/Champ car wins in USAC and CART, two F1 wins, four in IMSA’s GTU category, six in GTO, and 21 in GTP.

So there you have it. No other American racing man measures up to Dan. And with the Delta Wing, he’s still at it.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

The New Year’s honours list for 2012 was, as ever, a matter of interest for the motor racing industry.

This is one of those British traditions that never fails to be controversial. Only recently, in this magazine, Patrick Head expressed his surprise that designers and engineers such as John Barnard and Gordon Murray have so far not been recognised by the British establishment.

On my travels away from my homeland I find that the majority of folk are amused and intrigued by this ancient custom, by our love of titles. In the main they go back to the days of the British Empire, as in Order of the British Empire (OBE) or Member of the British Empire (MBE), both of which are sporadically awarded to British racing drivers. In case you’re wondering, Lords and Ladies are traditionally inherited titles, although the House of Lords also includes those who have been elevated on account of their good works for the nation.

Anyway, all that aside, this year saw Nigel Mansell, already an OBE in recognition of his achievements on track, receive a CBE. This stands for Commander of the British Empire and was given in honour of his work for the young people’s charity UK Youth. His efforts have included going on an extremely long and arduous bicycle ride around the country. For clarification, you do not now refer to Nigel as Commander Mansell.

Also on the list for 2012 was Adrian Newey who received an OBE for his ‘services to motor racing’ which are self-explanatory and include the design of world-championship winning Grand Prix cars for Williams, McLaren and Red Bull, not to mention his success in Indycar and the fact that the man is a genius.

And there is of course a connection here as Nigel Mansell won his 1992 World Championship at the wheel of a Williams FW14B which was, in part at least, designed by Adrian Newey. So far, so good, then.

But what is perhaps more interesting is why certain other motor racing people have not been recognised. The most obviously glaring omission is the only man ever to win world titles on motorcycles and in cars. I refer, of course to John Surtees who should long ago have received a knighthood, entitling him to be called Sir John Surtees. I have no idea why John has not been honoured in this way and I can think of no logical explanation.

For Christmas I received an excellent new book by Stuart Codling called ‘Real Racers – Formula 1 Racing in the 1950s and 1960s’. The book is notable for, among other things, some truly wonderful images from the collection of the great photographer Louis Klementaski.

‘Real Racers’ is also notable for a list of contributors printed on the front cover.

Sir Stirling Moss, Sir Jack Brabham, Sir Jackie Stewart, Sir Frank Williams, all of them quite rightly Knights of the Realm, and John Surtees, the lack of a ‘Sir’ in front of his name standing out like a – well, like a sore thumb, as we say, in this land of traditions.

I hereby call upon the British government to confer a knighthood upon Mr Surtees or, at the very least, to explain to us why this British rider, driver and engineer has for so long been overlooked.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

The Dakar is but a shimmering mirage in Britain’s public sporting consciousness.

Thirty years ago, however, it was suddenly front-page news: Mark Thatcher had gone missing in the Sahara. TE Lawrence meets PG Wodehouse.

PT Barnum would have loved it.

The saga began at the 1980 Le Mans 24 Hours, where ‘Scratcher’, a motor sport dabbler, was sharing an Osella-BMW with Lella Lombardi. There, a sponsor proffered him an invitation to contest the newfangled rally-raid. As people in positions of power and privilege tend to, Thatcher accepted airily. In his defence – never thought I’d write that – La Sarthe was the rather more pressing engagement.

His yeah-whatever came home to roost mere weeks before the 1982 long-range desert jaunt. Called ‘out of the blue’ to attend a Paris press launch, Thatcher, a man unencumbered by doubt and bursting with misplaced confidence, decided to give it a go.

“I’ve now raced in Le Mans – and other things. This rally is no problem,” he reckoned. Gauche and naïve at best, cocky and arrogant at worst, the Prime Minister’s son was hard to like.

He was teamed with experienced racer Anny-Charlotte Verney – scion of the founding Le Mans dynasty and therefore French motorsport ‘royalty’ – and mechanic Jacky Garnier in a four-wheel-drive Peugeot 504. This long-wheelbase machine would give its crew a rough ride over the bumps.

Thatcher’s became detached from a small, befuddled convoy on the 334-mile section to Timeiaouine in southern Algeria when its back axle broke free. (The section, I kid you not, began in a village called Tit. Rallying comedy gold.)

The others pressed on to the finish and informed the organisers of Thatcher’s plight and whereabouts. Sort of. They got the mileage approximately right, at 25, but were 180 degrees awry: east, not west! Hardly helpful in the days before GPS.

The French-run event, this being just its fourth year, had a laissez-faire attitude. Shoulders were shrugged, fingers crossed. Only when the Iron Lady – in a right old tizzy – got involved did a search begin in earnest.

Thatcher, sipping two polystyrene coffee cups of water per day, wisely stayed with his crippled car, confident that ‘The Boss’, aka mummy, would come to his rescue. Six days after it had gone missing, a circling military Hercules spotted his stranded white 504. It was 30 miles off rally route.

Fleet Street’s finest had been scrambled unceremoniously to Tamanrasset and Thatcher greeted them with a breezy rendition of Bruce Forsythe’s famous catchphrase before admitting that he had done no preparation – “Nothing” – for the event, and that all he wanted now was a beer and a sandwich, a bath and a shave. It had been a humbling experience.

That soon wore off, as the population of Equatorial Guinea will testify. If somebody asks you to sponsor an air ambulance in Africa, don’t accept airily. It might turn out to be a mercenary’s helicopter gunship.

“The Mark problem”, as exasperated senior Tories labelled it, was never solved. When he asked Chief Press Secretary Sir Bernard Ingham how best he could help his mother to win the 1987 General Election, Mark was gruffly told: “Leave the country.”

The blunt Yorkshire civil servant might have been better telling him to get lost. For the maternal tears shed by Mrs T in her son’s sandy absence had provided the perfect PR counterbalance to her stentorian steeliness during the Falklands War. Weirdly, misdirected Mark had contributed to her becoming top of the pops.

Today’s Dakar is very different. Threats of terrorism forced it to relocate in 2009 to South America, where the terrain is challenging and remote but lacking the romantic beauty of the Saharan dunes.

That will be of no concern to BMW should a Mini All4 Racing win. Only those motorsport fans north of the English Channel are bemoaning the decision not to give the wildly talented Kris Meeke a full-time Mini ride in the WRC. For those all points south of La Manche, the Dakar is all-encompassing and engrossing. Huge.

As I write, the not-so-Minis of Leonid Novitskiy, Stéphane Peterhansel, Krzysztof Holowczyc – all of whom have taken turns at the lead – and ‘Nani’ Roma are battling against the hammering Hummers of Indy/NASCAR/Baja hero Robby Gordon and Qatar’s Nasser Al-Attiyah, the winner last year with VW.

The British mainstream press remains resolutely disinterested, of course, and Mark Thatcher will never be welcomed in Argentina – and several other countries. No, the Dakar has had its 15 minutes of UK infamy.

05/01/2012 update: Al-Attiyah has lost another 30 minutes today because of an emptying radiator. Minis 1-2-3, ahead of Gordon’s Hummer. The leader board reads…

1. Stephane Peterhansel, Mini, 9h43m20s
2. Giniel de Villiers, Toyota, +5m41s
3. Nani Roma, Mini, +6m44s
4. Krzysztof Holowczyc, Mini, +8m10s
5. Robby Gordon, Hummer, +16m23s
6. Leonid Novitskiy, Mini, +26m25s
7. Nasser Al-Attiyah, Hummer, +30m44s
8. Carlos Sousa, Great Wall, +30m45s
9. Lucio Alvarez, Toyota, +33m11s
10. Erik Wevers, Mitsubishi, +36m42s

06/01/2012 update: Holowczyc has taken his first stage victory of the 2012 event and has dramatically closed the gap to Peterhansel. Rain and snow shortened stage five by 30 miles and stage six has now been cancelled because of the bad weather. The leader board reads…

1. Stephane Peterhansel, Mini, 11h58m03s
2. Krzysztof Holowczyc, Mini,+4m18s
3. Nani Roma, Mini, +10m39s
4. Robby Gordon, Hummer, +13m32s
5. Giniel de Villiers, Toyota, +21m01s
6. Leonid Novitskiy, Mini, +30m51s
7. Carlos Sousa, Great Wall, +40m55s
8. Nasser Al-Attiyah, Hummer, +50m47s
9. Erik van Loon, Mitsubishi, +53m33s
10. Lucio Alvarez, Toyota, +59m10s

08/01/2012 update: Nasser Al-Attiyah and Robby Gordon both made up ground on stage seven aboard Hummers.

1.  Stephane Peterhansel, Mini, 15h32m53s
2.  Krzysztof Holowczyc, Mini, +11m22s
3.  Robby Gordon, Hummer, +13m09s
4.  Nani Roma, Mini, +18m05s
5.  Giniel de Villiers, Toyota, +34m07s
6.  Nasser Al-Attiyah, Hummer, +42m54s
7.  Leonid Novitskiy, Mini, +54m26s
8.  Carlos Sousa, Great Wall, +1h12m50s
9.  Lucio Alvarez, Toyota, +1h41m38s
10.  Erik van Loon, Mitsubishi, +1h48m39s

10/01/2012 update: Stephane Peterhansel’s lead has been cut dramatically after Roma and Gordon both dominate stage eight.

1. Stephane Peterhansel, Mini, 20h05m15s
2. Robby Gordon, Hummer, +7m36s
3. Krzysztof Holowczyc, Mini, +7m48s
4. Nani Roma, Mini, +12m27s
5. Giniel de Villiers, Toyota, +37m45s
6. Nasser Al-Attiyah, Hummer, +45m25s
7. Leonid Novitskiy, Mini, +1h07m33s
8. Carlos Sousa, Great Wall, +1h23m29s
9. Lucio Alvarez, Toyota, +2h04m15s
10. Erik van Loon, Mitsubishi, +2h19m04s

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

We still haven’t heard the results of the official investigation into Marco Simoncelli’s fatal accident, but we do know who will ride the Honda RC213Vs originally intended for the hirsute Italian.

For some weeks it wasn’t even certain that the bikes would be there to ride. Simoncelli’s team boss Fausto Gresini (below) – a twice 125 World Champion during the 1980s – seriously considered quitting the sport following the accident that claimed his rider’s life last October. Gresini had good reason to wonder whether he should continue – he had already lost one rider, Daijiro Kato, who died after crashing his Honda RC211V at Suzuka in 2003.

Finally Gresini decided to keep on keeping on: racing is his life, he announced, there was no way he could stop. Immediately there were two men in line for Simoncelli’s berth: Suzuki MotoGP rider Alvaro Bautista and Moto2 firebrand Andrea Iannone.

Both were great choices. Iannone has been one of the truly great finds of the nascent Moto2 class, already notorious for its thrills and spills. The 22-year-old Neapolitan looks like a young assassin stalking the backstreets of Naples, and he rides like one too, slicing past his rivals with barely an inch to spare. In that sense alone, he would’ve made a perfect successor.

Simoncelli and Iannone were arguably the two toughest riders in the MotoGP paddock last season and they had a keen mutual respect for each other. When the Simoncelli witch hunt was at its height last summer, Iannone was one of the few to leap to his compatriot’s defence.

“Simoncelli is a good rider, a little more aggressive than some, but I don’t think he’s ever done any illegal manoeuvres – risky maybe, but not illegal,” Iannone told me at Barcelona last June. “This is motorcycle racing – it’s not the swimming pool. You have to fight. I think the other riders don’t like Simoncelli because he is new and fast.”

Damn right, sir.

Some believed that Iannone’s nationality might help him secure those much-coveted RC213Vs – Gresini Honda is Italian (the team is based at Misano) and is sponsored by Italian snack manufacturer San Carlo – but finally Signor Gresini opted for the more experienced Bautista. The Spaniard has been around for a while – he won the 125 world title in 2006 – and has been in MotoGP since 2010.

No worries, Iannone (above) will get his chance in MotoGP before too long.

On the face of it, Bautista is a very different person from Simoncelli. He seems more boy band than scruffy rock and roll star, with carefully sculpted hairdo – hair gel, highlights and all. But inside he’s just as much a maniac as Simoncelli ever was, with a similarly entertaining riding style.

Remember that it was with Bautista that Simoncelli spent his final few laps, jousting back and forth around Sepang. Like Simoncelli the 27-year-old possesses a willingness to push it to the very limit and beyond. He is certainly error prone – he crashed out of the final three races of 2011, though some would argue that his frequent tumbles last year could be blamed on his determination to get the under-powered Suzuki closer to the front.

In fact Bautista’s reputation goes back further than that. He was favourite to win the last-ever 250 World Championship in 2009, when he had the best bike on the grid, but mucked it up by crashing out of three races. By then he had already fallen out with reigning 250 champ Simoncelli, following several vicious on-track encounters. Last season – as fellow MotoGP wild men – they made up and became friends.

Bautista admits he was “f**ked up” for some while after Simoncelli’s death and he knows that taking over a dead man’s ride will be an extra burden. He says his main concern this year is “to do a good job for Marco”. There’s certainly a good chance that he will be every bit as exciting…

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

Like most industries, the car business awards itself a large holiday over Christmas and New Year.

So every year I park the moderns and spend a fortnight chuntering around in my 30-year-old Series III Land Rover (below). This is no self-flagellating ritual to purge my soul of all the automotive excesses of the year but simple common sense: for the last three winters there have been times where no modern car on normal tyres would have got through the snow, while this year the winds have knocked down enough timber around here for me to have spent most of my spare time in the fields felling, sawing, chopping and storing. I’d love to see what the inside of a modern Range Rover would look like after a fortnight of that.

But this year more than most I have been thinking about the car that must, in time, replace the much loved Land Rover, be it a leaf-sprung car like mine or the be-coiled Defender of more recent years.

Land Rover has got so much right in recent years. It has figured correctly that what matters most is not that you produce the best car in the class, but merely the most desirable. The Range Rover and Discovery are excellent examples but none illustrates the point better than the Range Rover Sport (below).

By some margin this is the worst car Land Rover makes, yet it has been an outstanding success because its creators knew its brutish get-out-of-my-way appearance would find favour among the more unreconstructed elements of the community. Basing the car on the Discovery but charging far more for it clearly helped too.

The new Evoque (above) adheres closely to this theme. With its cramped rear quarters, average engines, letter-box rear screen and ergonomically flawed driving environment it is an easy car to fault, but do I think any of this will stand the way of its success in the showroom? Clearly not, any more than will the huge prices Land Rover is asking for them: it shares its platform with the Freelander but because it’s badged as a Range Rover and looks the way it does, prices start fully £6000 further up the scale. And queues are forming.

So it seems that in all things Land-Rover perception is more important than reality. The irony of function being made to follow form in this, the company that built its brand on practical values, will be lost on no-one.

So will it work with the new Defender (below, as a concept)? The Freelander underpinnings are about the right size and with some squared off bodywork the right kind of look could undoubtedly be achieved.

And it would be a disaster. The only reason Land Rover has been able to sell all those Range Rover Sports and Evoques is that, underpinning it all, is an authenticity the brand has carried since birth, the authenticity provided by the original Land Rover. In exactly the same way, it was the 911 that allowed Porsche not only to get away with but also to make such an outstanding success of the Cayenne.

So Land Rover has to accept that the Defender will be expensive to build, because it can’t be based on anything else. It should have a ladder chassis, because then there is no limit to the amount of different bodies it will accept, and an interior you can quite literally take a hose-pipe to. It must be without question the best off-roader in the market, with approach and departure angles that are unbeatable, just as those of my ancient Series III are to this day. It must be able to be repaired easily and anywhere, by anyone with only basic mechanical skills and tools.

The bad news is that it won’t make as much money as a repurposed Freelander, at least not in the short term. But over time, the rewards it will bring Land Rover as a company, in providing more bedrock upon which the brand can grow further, mean that its contribution will be incalculable. Land Rover will enter its 65^th year in 2012, and that original design – albeit somewhat evolved – is still out there despite the approaching pension. The rewards of making the next Land Rover a truly authentic car worthy of this heritage may take time to arrive, but when they do it’s hard to imagine anyone saying that the extra effort and expense were not worth it.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

As January arrives the torpor of the holiday season begins to fade and in the northern hemisphere we start to enjoy a welcome lengthening of the days.

Already our thoughts are turning to the new season and Chip Ganassi and Dario Franchitti are among those looking forward to America’s first big race of 2012 – the 50th Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona on January 28/29.

Chip’s Grand-Am team, led by Scott Pruett, has won the Grand-Am championship five times and the Rolex 24 Hours four times in the past six years. Grand-Am champions Scott Pruett and Memo Rojas (above with Chip) shared Ganassi’s winning Riley-BMW last year with Graham Rahal and Joey Hand while Scott Dixon/Juan Pablo Montoya/Dario Franchitti/Jamie McMurray completed Ganassi’s first one-two sweep at Daytona. As you might expect Chip is looking forward to flying down to Florida at the end of this month.

“You go down there in late January and it’s just a great event,” Chip says warmly. “Everybody’s there, not only our guys from our three different teams (NASCAR, IndyCar and Grand-Am), but a whole field of people from all over the racing world that you know – drivers, managers, engineers, mechanics.

“You see a lot of people down there and it comes at a time of the year when championships aren’t on the line and everybody’s fresh from a little vacation. Everybody’s in a good mood and with our success there it’s really jump-started the season for us the past six or seven years. Having some success in that race starts our season off with a little spark.

“At the end of the day it makes absolutely no sense that it’s the first race of the year, but then it’s so damn fun. We go down there and we’re as serious as we can be because we’re sort of the target these days. I feel so lucky and so honoured to have the group of guys that I have. They’re all taking shots at each other all weekend but they’re just so damn serious when it comes to driving the car.

“I remember Montoya’s first race there when he came back from Formula One and he ended up winning it. I remember him saying, ‘man, we’re doing so well. I just don’t want to crash the car.’ And since then he’s probably hit everything except the guy selling hot dogs!”

Franchitti won the Rolex 24 in 2008 co-driving one of Ganassi’s cars with Pruett, Montoya and Dixon. Dario finished second last year co-driving with Montoya, Dixon and Jamie McMurray and they will be together again this year. Last year in particular Montoya used his best fender-bashing NASCAR skills to push many other cars out of his path and Franchitti joked about their reputation.

“Our biggest problem with the Rolex 24 is getting the other drivers to understand when Montoya’s in the car and when we’re in the car,” Dario grinned. “We’re going to have a sign on the car this year when Monty goes out saying ‘Montoya’s in the car’. Then they’ll know it’s not us because last year he hit about everything out there and when we would go out people would take their revenge.

“All joking aside, I look forward to working with Scott, Juan and Jamie again. We always have a good time but we’re pretty competitive about the whole thing too. So we’ll be giving it our best shot. Being the 50th anniversary it’s a big one and everybody wants to go there and win the watch. It’s a great way to start the season.”

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine