Dear Rob,

I worked for Graham Hill’s team in 1974 and ’75, and even now can clearly remember the phone call from Chris Amon late that freezing night. We had both heard on the TV news of an accident to ‘a light aircraft en route from Marseille to Elstree’ – immediately that set off alarm bells in both our minds because everyone was down at Paul Ricard testing, and Hill always flew out of Elstree. “I’m hearing that it might be Graham…” said Chris, and so it proved to be. Five members of the team, including Tony Brise, of course died with him, and so the funerals began.

Would Graham have proved as successful a team owner as driver? It’s a question to which we’ll never know the answer, of course, because the Embassy Hill team was still in its infancy when he died. I have to say, though, that I somewhat doubt it, not least because the statistics were against him. Historically, if you think about it, great racing drivers tend to make – at best – indifferent team owners, and usually they’re not as good as that. Nor do I confine myself to Formula 1 here – look at some of the great NASCAR drivers, like Cale Yarborough, who got nowhere when they tried to run their own teams.

I’m not saying definitively that Hill would not have made a success of his team, but I do think the odds were against him. The problem with retired racing drivers is that they continue to believe they know more about cars than the guys they hire to drive for them, and that invariably leads to ructions. Graham’s stubbornness was one of the highest cards in his hand as a driver, but I suspect it would have worked against him in his subsequent role of team owner…

Dear Jacqueline,

A return of ‘competitive single-seater racing’ to the original Nürburgring, the Nordschleife? Unfortunately, I’d say there’s about as much chance of Gordon Brown admitting to destroying the British economy. Zilch, in other words.

In 1970 the Grand Prix drivers collectively decided they would not participate in the German Grand Prix there, after which the event was switched – at extraordinarily short notice – to Hockenheim.

We have to remember that this was an extraordinarily dangerous time in motor racing. Feelings were running very high when the drivers met in London to discuss the matter of the Nürburgring: that morning they had been to a memorial service for Bruce McLaren, and the day after they were due to attend the funeral of Piers Courage. Three months later Jochen Rindt was killed in qualifying at Monza, becoming the sport’s first posthumous World Champion.

Safety had long been a subject barely discussed – motor racing was dangerous, always had been, always would be – but now, thanks especially to the efforts of Jackie Stewart, that was changing. For some years changes to the Nürburgring had been requested, and ignored – there was no doubt that the track was regarded as sacrosanct, that the German Grand Prix would always be run there no matter what, and when the drivers opted to boycott it, the organisers were more than shaken.

It worked, though. At once work began on the old, 14-mile track and when the drivers returned there, in 1971, they found it greatly changed – not in terms of the actual circuit layout, but in the way it had been opened up. Vast numbers of trees had been felled, Armco barriers installed in places where there had been none, and there were even minimal run-off areas in places.

The purist in a man like Chris Amon was dismayed in a way, for, as he said, knocking all the trees down took away much of the challenge, in the sense that a driver could now see much further ahead: part of the satisfaction, he said, had always come from committing to a corner when you couldn’t see all the way through it.

Even Amon agreed, though, that the changes had been necessary – and no one for a second thought that the Nordschleife had suddenly become safe. It was merely less perilous than before.

“It’s very nice to reminisce about the Nürburgring,” says Stewart, who won there three times, “on a cold winter’s night, sitting by a log fire! Of course it was an incredibly satisfying circuit to drive round – but I don’t believe there was ever a driver who didn’t feel relief when he drove out of there…”

True enough – and what finished the Nürburgring in terms of Formula 1, of course, was the accident in 1976 which so nearly killed Niki Lauda. The race was immediately red-flagged, and when it was eventually restarted Amon – of all people – declined to take part. Like many drivers, he had stopped at the scene of Lauda’s accident, and what he couldn’t accept was the length of time it had taken for rescue crews and medical personnel to reach Niki. Chris and Hans-Joachim Stuck, indeed, took it upon themselves to find a field telephone, to alert race control to what had happened.

Amon was that day driving an Ensign, which had already suffered suspension failure more than once that season, and well knew that if a car were going to break anywhere it was more likely to happen at the ‘Ring, with all its ‘yumps’, than anywhere else. Were that to happen, he said, he would hope that marshals and doctors could be swiftly on hand, but from what he had seen of the Lauda accident that was not the case. It was impossible to provide adequate cover at a 14-mile track.

I’ve driven countless laps of the Nürburgring in a variety of road cars, some very quick, and a few years ago had a never-to-be-forgotten lap in a Merc with Bernd Schneider, but I’ve never really been able to conceive of what it must have been like to go round there at F1 speeds.

A few years ago, for a BMW publicity stunt, Nick Heidfeld drove one of the team’s F1 cars – with greatly increased ride height to cope with the undulations and surface – round the Nordschleife. Although he didn’t go hard he was entranced by the experience, and very regretful, he said, not to have raced in an era when circuits like this were in use for F1. That said, Heidfeld admitted that he simply couldn’t imagine how a German Grand Prix must have been in those days…

[caption id="attachment_13871" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Elio de Angelis and Nigel Mansell"][/caption]

Dear Dave,

To be honest, I can’t really think of anyone in F1 today who really puts me in mind of Elio de Angelis, whom I always thought of – in terms of attitude – as the Chris Amon of his time. In one important respect they were different, for Amon was as good a development driver as ever there has been, and loved testing, whereas de Angelis loathed it – but essentially both were lovely guys, who regarded motor racing as one of the good things in life, rather than life itself.

Of today’s drivers, Mark Webber strikes me as the most ‘normal’ and down to earth, certainly well aware that there is life beyond Formula 1. He has the typical Aussie’s interest in virtually all sports, from cricket to speedway, and goes to events as a pure fan, what’s more. I was invited, in 2009, to be a guest in his box at the Speedway British Grand Prix in Cardiff, and was mighty disappointed that last year’s event clashed with Silverstone. So, too, was Mark – to the point that he later, on a weekend off, flew to Poland for a round of the championship.

As well as that, I admire Webber for being brave enough to say what he thinks about all aspects of F1, including ‘political’ hot potatoes that most of his colleagues decline to discuss on the record. Very good company, Mark.

Not all drivers have motor racing as their only interest. Fernando Alonso, for example, has been fascinated all his life by magic, and is very skilled at sophisticated card tricks. And Adrian Sutil, like Elio (and François Cevert) before him, is a classically trained pianist.

If I had to pick one driver above all, though, who strikes me as being different from the norm, it would be Dario Franchitti, whom I have always regarded as a great loss to F1 (although I’m not sure, given the life he has in the US, he would necessarily agree). Franchitti, like Webber, is a ‘proper bloke’, well-informed and interesting on a wide variety of topics – not least the history of his own sport, which makes him close to unique in 2011 (although India’s two F1 drivers, Karun Chandhok and Narain Karthikeyan, both have a knowledge of the heritage of F1 which would put their colleagues to shame…)

Dear Andrew,

On two occasions AJ Foyt was entered in a Grand Prix – by BRM, curiously, at the US Grand Prix in 1964, and by Eagle at the Belgian Grand Prix in ’67. The latter was the weekend after AJ and Gurney won the Le Mans 24 Hours, and Dan went on to win at Spa, too. Unfortunately, though, Foyt took part in neither Grand Prix, and thus we have the frustration of never knowing how he would have gone in an F1 car. Swiftly, I suspect. Aggressive as he was, AJ’s driving style was silky-smooth, and he made incredibly few mistakes.

Same with Rick Mears, but he did at least test an F1 car – a factory Brabham-Cosworth at Riverside early in 1981. At the time Brabham was seriously thinking about Mears as a team-mate for Piquet, and they thought even more seriously about him after that test – for he was quicker than Nelson! The deal fell through, however, when Mears – already a superstar in Indycars – learned that Bernie Ecclestone would require him to ‘bring money’ if he were to get the drive. Rick politely – and correctly – declined, but to this day Herbie Blash, on hand that day at Riverside, describes him as ‘the great lost World Champion’…

Let me add a third name to this list, Andrew. At the end of 1963 Colin Chapman invited Parnelli Jones – who had won the Indianapolis 500 that year, with Clark second – to partner Jimmy in the Lotus F1 team for 1964. Parnelli was tempted, but turned the offer down: for one thing, there was considerably more money to be made in America; for another, he was only too aware that ‘the second Lotus’ was not the most desirable drive in the world, the team understandably tending to focus all its attention on Clark.

Jackie Stewart has said that, as far as Indianapolis was concerned, Parnelli was the greatest he ever saw there. And Chris Amon, who raced against him in Can-Am and other US events, goes even further: “I always say Clark was the best driver I ever encountered, but on raw talent I’d put Parnelli up there with Jimmy…”

Dear Richard,

Ye Gods, it seems a very long time since I wrote Grand Prix Greats, and indeed it is – if memory serves, the book was published in 1986, since when quite a lot has happened in Grand Prix racing, if you think about it.

The sub-head on the cover of the book reads, ‘A personal appreciation of 25 famous Formula 1 drivers’, which is exactly what it is. At no time was it ever intended to be my assessment of the 25 best drivers – the publisher asked me simply to write about a selection of drivers I found particularly interesting, and inevitably some of those included were personal favourites, notably my childhood hero Jean Behra, Chris Amon, Clay Regazzoni and Patrick Depailler.

When the book was published, many were surprised by the omission of Tazio Nuvolari – believed by many to be the greatest driver who ever lived – but I left him out because so much had already been written about him, and I felt there was little I could add. As well as that, when, as a kid, I read about the drivers of that era, Bernd Rosemeyer and Nuvolari’s great rival Achille Varzi for some reason interested me more, and both are included in the book.

Over the years many have asked me if I planned ever to write a revised edition of Grand Prix Greats, and perhaps one day I will. Whenever I’ve discussed it with the publisher, though, I’ve made it clear that I would be reluctant to drop any of the original 25. In many cases some of those would need updating, of course, but in my mind any new edition would have to be greatly expanded, so as to add chapters on others I think worthy of inclusion. Off the top of my head, I’d put in Mansell, Schumacher, Häkkinen, Alonso, Räikkönen, Hamilton, World Champions all, but also such as Montoya and Kubica, both of whom have talent to throw away. And from way, way back, Jean-Pierre Wimille…

Dear David,
It has never been proved that BRM was using a 3.3-litre engine at Spa in 1970, but, as Robin Herd said in Simon Taylor’s interview with him in the March issue of Motor Sport, “It’s generally accepted now that Pedro had a 3.3-litre engine that day. We knew it right after the race…”

All I can tell you is what Chris Amon told me a couple of years after the race. Amon had qualified his March 701 on the front row, alongside the sister (Tyrrell-entered) car of Jackie Stewart, and the Lotus 49 of Jochen Rindt. Rodríguez, meantime, started from the third row.

Amon passed Stewart for the lead on lap three, and Rodríguez passed him a lap later, to move up to second. On lap five Pedro took the lead, and for the rest of the race he and Chris ran together, finishing a second apart. On the last lap Amon steeled himself to take the Masta Kink without lifting, and set a new lap record, six-tenths faster than Stewart’s pole time, but even so he could do nothing about the BRM.

Amon was invariably brilliant at Spa, but so was Rodríguez, and if Chris was disappointed – yet again – to be denied a Grand Prix victory, he was… surprised, let’s say, by the BRM’s speed on race day. “You’d expect a ‘twelve’ to have an advantage over an ‘eight’ at a place as quick as Spa, but Pedro hadn’t been that quick in practice, and when I saw off Jackie I thought I’d cracked it. Then I saw this white thing in my mirrors, and thought, ‘Where the hell did he come from?’

“That was one thing. What really amazed me, though, was the way Pedro overtook me. I got out of Eau Rouge better than he did, but up the hill to Les Combes he just drove past – didn’t even bother to slipstream me! That thing was unbelievable in a straight line – I was pretty disappointed to be beaten that day, because I honestly don’t think I could have driven any harder, but later on someone who’d then been part of the BRM team told me I shouldn’t feel too bad about it…”

It’s a lovely thought – now to award the victory to Amon, one of the greatest drivers, crowned or uncrowned, as you say. But I guess it will for ever remain in his ‘if only’ box…

Dear Phil,

Certainly I consider myself a ‘sporting motorist’ in the sense that I have always enjoyed driving fast, and always had high-performance cars – as I tell people with great pride, I’ve never owned a four-door car in my life.

Over the years I’ve been driven by a good many racing drivers, and very rarely been frightened – indeed, the last time I saw the late James Hunt, once a hellraiser of some consequence, he was a model of decorum as we drove into Wimbledon for a hamburger.  We were, mind you, in James’s beloved A35 van.

As a youth, I went to the Brands Hatch racing school, drove Formula Fords and the like, and then later, as a journalist, drove such as a Lola T70 sports racing car. Thought I knew a bit about driving on a track, in other words. Then, in 1975, Chris Amon took me round Oulton Park in a Ferrari 330P4.

This, to me, was the most beautiful sports racing car ever built, and it had won at Daytona and Monza in 1967, driven by Amon and Lorenzo Bandini. Now, eight years on, its current English owner wished to see it driven properly once more.

Amon was an artist in a car. He could steer as readily with his foot as with his hands, and Old Hall Corner was a favourite. Crammed into a passenger seat never intended for actual use, I watched as he went to work with the throttle, his hands barely moving, beyond applying just the right touch of opposite lock. Every time round the left-rear wheel would kiss the grass at the exit, and Chris would glance across as if to say, “How was that? Was that OK?”

Jenks, as you say, was indeed a very experienced racer, in a variety of ways. He never lost his love of being driven by racing drivers – nor, for that matter, his exacting standards. One year we were invited to Silverstone, to be driven round in a factory Porsche 935 by one of the team drivers – a man, I should say, who had won a Grand Prix.

As was only right, DSJ was the first to go, and when he emerged from the car at the end of the run he was grinning wildly, clearly exhilarated. “How was it?” I asked. “Jesus!” he replied, then, after a pause, “Just think what it would have been like with a proper driver…”

In 1978 the Le Mans 24 Hours was won by a turbocharged Renault A442B, driven by Didier Pironi and Jean-Pierre Jaussaud, and later that year I was invited to Paul Ricard, to be driven by Pironi. Opportunities of that kind were much more common back then, before what Martin Brundle calls, “The days of plain vanilla Health and Safety…”

That remains the most electrifying ‘motoring’ experience of my life. At first everything seemed stupefyingly fast, but after a lap or so I was accustomed to the pace, and able to concentrate on the road ahead, and how Pironi was dealing with it. There were great lunges of power, and brakes to drag the breath from you, but a pattern of the circuit took shape, and I thought the surprises were done.

The one really daunting corner at Ricard was Signes, a right-hander at the end of the back straight, and our last lap through there was altogether different from those before, with the Renault sliding much more, and Pironi working harder, flicking the wheel this way and that.

The moment was over almost before it had begun, the car back on the straight and true. Pironi looked at me, winked, and gave one of those floppy-wristed French gestures that means something like, “That was a close one, huh?” At over 150mph we had hit oil put down by René Arnoux’s Renault F1 car, which was out on the circuit at the same time…

At the same track, late in 1982, I drove the Renault F1 car. Actually, that’s not quite the truth: we journalists were allowed to try it on the airfield, to experience the acceleration and braking. It was wet, and freezing cold, but I was very impressed with the car – until I somehow contrived to spin it in a straight line! I can still remember Eddie Cheever’s glee afterwards, but later in the day I began to feel a bit better about it when Jenks did the same…

In the mid-’90s, before he went to Ferrari, Michael Schumacher drove me round Silverstone in a road-going Escort Cosworth, and what made the experience memorable was the realisation – yet again – that ordinary mortals have no clue as to what a car can be made to do. I was reasonably familiar with Cosworths, but the day was horribly wet, and at first Michael seemed to be going into corners at an impossible speed.
It was kids’ stuff for him, of course; on our last lap he simply showed off, rescuing the car from impossible angles – and doing it all with his right hand, while the left remained on the gear lever.

Johnny Herbert was out at the same time in another Cosworth, and of course Michael just had to catch him, and put him in his place. “Did you enjoy that?” he grinned, as we came in. I nodded assent. “Well,” he said, “imagine what it’s like in F1 cars. When we mean it…”

Dear Craig,

When I began writing about racing, in 1971, it was very much at the deep end – the very first race I ever covered was the Spanish Grand Prix at Montjuich Park, and I arrived there knowing literally no one in the paddock.

As a fan, I had long supported Chris Amon, and on the first day of practice approached him about doing an interview. That was what you did in those days, for there were no PRs, no intermediaries, to bar your path.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, we did the tape, and, for whatever reason, just hit it off. Chris, together with Rob Walker, was the first person in F1 to befriend me, and these two not unnaturally occupied a special place in my affections.

Given that Amon went home to New Zealand for good at the end of 1977, I see him very infrequently these days – the last time was at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in ’97 – but, more than 30 years on, I still regard him as a close friend.

Why did he never win a Grand Prix? Well, for a start, it had nothing to do with lack of talent. Mauro Forghieri says to this day that Amon should have been World Champion in 1968, his second year with Ferrari. “It was our fault,” he says. “We let Chris down too many times. In my opinion, he was as good as Jim Clark.”

Any number of times Amon looked on course to win a Grand Prix, and any number of times his car then failed him. There’s no doubt that his luck was truly appalling – but even Chris would admit there was more to it than that. For one thing, he had what amounted to a genius for going to the wrong team at the wrong time. As well as that, he was – and is – perhaps the most disorganised bloke I have ever met, and I don’t think he would deny it. More than anything, though, I think – and it’s an old cliché – that Amon truly was too nice a guy for the profession he chose. He loved racing for its own sake, and had a supreme talent for it, but the politics of F1 repelled him – and we’re talking now about the ’70s!

By the end of 1976 Amon had had enough of F1, but wasn’t yet through with racing. When Walter Wolf, in addition to launching his own F1 team, proposed to build a Can-Am car, he asked Chris to run the car, and to drive it, and the offer was accepted.

Problem was, it was a terrible car, utterly wayward in its handling, and I think there’s no doubt that Amon, very much coming to the end of his driving career, was extremely ill at ease in it. “I think I might put that kid Villeneuve in it,” he said to me on the phone one night, and, sure enough, right after the Can-Am race at St Jovite, that was what he did. This was indeed the last race of his life – and at a circuit at which he had previously excelled. This was when you saw him, and your impressions were absolutely right: he was tired, running the team as well as driving, and that car definitely unsettled him.

Years later, at a Grand Prix somewhere, Gilles was talking about the shortcomings of his Ferrari 126C, which, he said, was so short of grip it was laughable. “Is it the worst car you’ve ever driven?” I asked, and he laughed. “Hey, come on, are you forgetting the Wolf? Nothing will ever come close to that!”