Back in 1979 Keke Rosberg was an eager young star, racing in both Formula 1 and the ‘new era’ Can-Am in America. Rosberg broke into F1 in 1978 driving various races for the Theodore, Wolf and ATS teams. In ‘79 he drove for Wolf through the second half of the year after James Hunt decided to quit mid-season. But at the start of ‘79 Keke had nothing in F1 and was committed to racing in the States in one of Paul Newman’s Lola-based Spyder Can-Am cars.

The Spyder was fast but fragile and burned up its front tyres. Rosberg won the season-opener at Road Atlanta and again at Watkins Glen in mid-summer. He also finished second to that year’s World Champion Alan Jones in Carl Haas’s Lola after a fierce battle at Mid-Ohio. But there were almost as many crashes.

“I had a bad year,” Keke recalls. “I was often very fast but I kept blowing front tyres. I pushed the fronts too hard, but they didn’t warn you. It just burst. It was the shoulder that went all the time. I had a huge shunt at Willow Springs in testing. I went about three miles across the desert in a cloud of dust.

“I had another big one at Laguna Seca. My first lap of qualifying was good, but not quite good enough. My brain said you should not do a second lap, but my heart said, ‘Go for it.’ And the right front tyre burst in turn one.

“In those days there was an earth bank and nothing else, and I hit the bank very, very hard in a Lola tub. The Lola limp was one of the best-known illnesses among racing drivers and I was lucky I didn’t break my legs. In fact, I didn’t break anything. But boy, was I messed up!

“It was a huge shunt. I had a girlfriend who used to fly for American Airlines and she nursed me that night because I was completely gone.

“When we did the warm-up on Sunday morning we taped my gloves to the steering wheel because I had no strength in my hands. I drove the warm-up in the spare car but I was so dizzy and felt so bad that I went straight back to the hotel and lay down for three hours. Then I came back and drove the race.

“I was running very strong. I think I was fourth, but of course I didn’t know where I was. I’d run out of brakes and was just not all there, and I didn’t have the strength to catch a slide out of the last turn. I spun and stalled the thing.”

Rosberg struggled home in sixth place a lap down and then recuperated in LA before the season-closer at Riverside. “My friend Mike Brockman took me to Los Angeles and I laid in his bed for nearly two weeks. I was so bad he came back from the office every day at lunchtime to feed me.”

At Riverside Keke put on quite a show, leading at one point but tearing off a bunch of bodywork after a collision with Geoff Lees. “I hit Geoff and took half the bodywork off, which wasn’t a problem. I was leading but Haas protested, so they black-flagged me. Otherwise I would have won that one, bodywork or no bodywork. That was the attitude in those days. As long as there were wheels on the car we would keep on driving.

“There were some good people in Can-Am in those days. Gilles [Villeneuve] came in and out, and Bobby Rahal was there and Price Cobb too, as well as guys like Jones and Jacky Ickx. It was a good time. But the tracks were so dangerous! The cars were very fast and the tracks were bad and it was a bad combination. At Watkins Glen you looked at the Armco and you didn’t want to think about it. It was a different time.”

Sometimes we forget how different.

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A few days after Christmas I had the pleasure of talking to Jacky Ickx for a book I’m writing about the history of Carl Haas and Newman/Haas Racing. Thirty years ago Ickx won the Can-Am championship driving a Lola for Haas’s team, and I wanted to talk to him about his 1979 season in America. Jacky celebrated his 65th birthday on New Year’s Day and he’s not only one of the most accomplished racing drivers but also a delightful, old school gentleman.

Ickx is proud that, much like Mario Andretti, he won races across a broad range of categories. Jacky won Le Mans six times, of course, but he also won 37 World Championship long-distance sports car races – more than any other driver – and two world sports car titles in 1982-83.

Ickx won sports car races driving Gulf Ford GT40s, factory Porsches, Ferraris and Mirages, and came to be celebrated as a maestro of Le Mans and endurance racing.

He also finished second to Jackie Stewart in the 1969 Formula 1 World Championship and was second again the following year to Jochen Rindt. He won eight Grands Prix between 1968-72 driving for Brabham and Ferrari, and claimed the European F2 championship in 1967 when he was just 22. Jacky retired from racing sports cars in 1985 but continued to compete in the Paris-Dakar rally until 1992, having won the gruelling event in ’83. “I had a career that was similar to Mario in a way because Mario did all kinds of racing successfully,” says Ickx. “He could go from a dirt track, to Indy, to long-distance racing or F1, and whatever he did he could do it well. And that’s what I did, too.”

Jacky says that over the years he’s gained a deeper appreciation for the people and teamwork that makes the sport happen. “When you’re older you don’t see things the way you did when you were a kid,” he says. “It’s a very individual sport and a selfish sport too for the drivers, and it takes time to understand that you don’t do anything without a large number of people – the engineers and mechanics and so on – who are working in the shadows with a lot of motivation and passion. Your success depends on their abilities and goodwill. They do their jobs with pleasure, but the only rewards they receive is when their driver wins.”

Jacky is also aware how lucky he’s been and how much richer his life has been made by racing. “In sport, your career is reasonably short,” he says. “Mine started when I was 16 in 1960 and I stopped in 1992. So it was very long and I was extremely lucky to survive 30 years of motor racing in those days. Today, when I meet Jackie Stewart or Carlos Reutemann or some people from that era, the first thing we say is how lucky we’ve been to survive such a big amount of racing miles in F1, long-distance racing, Can-Am, the Paris-Dakar and everything else without losing a wheel or having a major technical problem. It’s a miracle!

“That is why every day when I wake up I feel lucky. It’s also why I pay more attention to the human side than the score. To me, the score is not important – the fact that I won Le Mans six times, or that I won 50 long-distance races, the F2 championship or Paris-Dakar. What counts are the outstanding people I had the chance to meet.”

Jacky is also a devoted Motor Sport reader. “It’s the only racing magazine I buy,” he says. “You guys are doing a great job. Keep it up!”

Thanks for the compliment Jacky. Keep reading and we’ll keep writing.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

Lola has announced that it is starting a Formula 1 project following the recent cost-cutting measures introduced by the FIA World Motor Sport Council.

It is understandable that more parties are now considering Formula 1 in 2010, after the governing body outlined a £30 million budget cap option for the teams. But for a company that had such a disastrous F1 experience as recently as 1997 (above), Lola’s plans certainly came as a bit of a surprise.

Over the last 10 years, however, Lola has turned its fortunes around, culminating in an unprecedented seven cars on the grid for the 2008 Le Mans 24 Hours. In that time it has invested heavily in new technology, including an F1-standard wind tunnel, the latest CFD and FEA programmes, and a seven-post dynamic chassis rig – all part of the reason for its success. If a company was ever in a position to put an F1 car on the grid as early as 2010, it is Lola.

Martin Birrane, executive chairman of the Lola Group, said: “The current necessity for F1 to adopt a responsible approach in times of economic uncertainty has created the ideal conditions for us to consider developing a car for the World Championship.

“Lola possesses the technical resources and know-how to develop cars capable of competing at the very highest levels of international motor sport, including F1. We are therefore embracing the WMSC’s timely announcements and assessing a relevant programme for F1 with a view to making a formal entry in the coming weeks.”

Great news, I’m sure you’ll all agree. So, who should drive for one of the most British companies competing at the top of international motor sport?

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

The opening weekend of qualifying for this year’s 92nd Indianapolis 500 takes place this weekend. Favourites for the pole must be Scott Dixon and Dan Wheldon who have been the men to beat on oval tracks so far this year in Chip Ganassi’s pair of Dallara-Hondas. Other pole contenders include 2001 and ‘02 race winner Helio Castroneves and new team-mate Ryan Briscoe with Team Penske, and Tony Kanaan, Marco Andretti (above) and Danica Patrick (below) at Andretti-Green Racing.

Thanks to the unification of IndyCar racing thirty-four drivers are entered at Indianapolis this year and the field is a little stronger than in recent years. On the other hand, the previous two winners Dario Franchitti and Sam Hornish are missing from the field as they have moved their careers, for better or worse, to NASCAR. The only previous winners entered this year are Wheldon, Castroneves and Buddies Rice and Lazier.

Five Brits are entered – 2005 winner Wheldon, Darren Manning, Justin Wilson, Jay Howard and Alex Lloyd. Wilson, Howard and Lloyd are rookies, although Wilson has some oval experience from his four years in Champ Car and is the number one driver of course, at Newman/Haas/Lanigan, replacing Sebastien Bourdais in the team’s McDonald’s car.

This has been a tough week for Newman/Haas/Lanigan because the team’s most experienced and respected man Davey Evans was brutally murdered in an Indianapolis bar last Saturday night. Evans, 63, had worked for Carl Haas’s race team for forty years, going back to the original Can-Am and Formula 5000 series. Born in Sudbury-on-Thames, Evans started his working life in 1959 as a teen-aged engineering apprentice with HWM Motors. He moved on to Maranello Concessionaires before finding work at Lola Cars and then becoming a key man in America in Haas’s Can-Am and Formula 5000 teams before the creation in 1983 of the Newman/Haas CART team.

For many years Davey worked at Lola during the winters building Haas’s cars. Evans was an old-school artisan who could construct almost anything. He was not only Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing’s most experienced crewman, but also probably the longest-serving man in the contemporary IndyCar garage area.

“I have a tough time accepting it and I’m sure everyone else feels the same way,” Mario Andretti commented. “It’s such a waste of a wonderful life. For some meaningless human being to take another life that meant so much is a total travesty. There are very few people that I’ve known in my life who you could say, ‘I don’t think this guy had an enemy in the world.’ All the years that I’ve known and worked with him, whether it was with Carl’s Can-Am team or through Formula 5000 to all the years with Newman/Haas, Davey was always there with a smile, always kind. What can you say? He was a friend for life.”

Two memorial services were held in Indianapolis this week for Evans as many who knew him paid their respects to one of the sport’s most-liked men, fated to lose his life in deeply tragic circumstances.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine