Grand Prix 1961 to 1965 book review: Small can be beautiful too

How would we feel if Liberty Media and the FIA announced that the 2021 season would be run for 1500cc tiddlers, with no hybrid or electrical backup systems? Short-changed, annoyed, cries of anguish about a racing slowdown, and possible rumours about conspiracies behind the scenes, offset by a vague awareness that if the aim really was to increase safety no one should be resisting that…

That’s the background for this hefty book on the 11⁄2-litre Formula 1 era and what happened after the 1958 decision to chop a litre off capacity. Power plummeted, so did speeds, but guess what – racing went on, the best drivers won, there were intense battles with rivals in similar cars. And by the close of the era speeds had caught up and overtaken previous records. It really isn’t about size; witness Formula Ford, based for years on underwhelming engines from uninspiring family saloons, yet a scene of knife-edge racing that bred future champions.

A capacity chop had happened before of course, though for different reasons: in the early 1950s when Formula 1 entries became thin on the ground, grands prix switched allegiance to Formula 2, giving us 2-litre F1 for 1952–53. The crowds still came to watch, and the best drivers still came through… And more recently, repeated changes aimed at slowing things down have been steadily overcome by skillful designers and engineers.

Despite the size of this large square-format book (360 pages and over 500 photos) there is actually relatively little text, especially as it’s split between English and German; covering the five seasons race by race the authors provide a short summary of each event and a results table (though covering only the six points positions), with a useful season round-up and a brief look at each year’s winning car. These elements are separated by large and lavish photographs including an image of the official program from each race.

Thus the photos are the major part of it, and there are some crackers: Phil Hill’s distant Ferrari looking like a go-kart on a bare corner at Aintree while marshals and photographers chat by the trackside; two Lotuses in colours that echo the autumn leaves in the background at Watkins Glen; Surtees’ scarlet Ferrari against the egg-yolk yellow of the Shell fuel tanker, an overhead of Honda’s new sideways V12 at the centre of a fascinated crowd with our Denis Jenkinson closest of all. That said, on the review copy the photos were heavily inked, blacking out shadows and losing detail. Still enjoyable to browse through, though.

Wrapping the book up are biographies of all the era’s champions (Hills Phil and Graham, Clark twice, John Surtees) and also all those who made it to the podium – good to see the likes of Bob Anderson and Tony Maggs getting their due. Then there’s an assessment of each title winner’s year by German historian Hartmut Lehbrink, details of all the engines, and a discussion about the arrival of the aluminium monocoque, spearheaded in 1962 by Lotus and the 25. An overhead shot of a topless 25 in this section suggests that, thanks to Colin Chapman’s theory of the compressability of drivers’ bums, if you lifted Jim Clark’s feet up a bit he would be lying in pretty much the same position as Lewis Hamilton and his playmates today. Minus, of course, the towering protective bulwarks of today’s machines, which is why the Scottish ace isn’t sitting anywhere today.

So the information is all there, but it can’t be said that this finds any undiscovered stories or explores secret machinations in back rooms. It’s not quite a reference book thanks to those partial results; it is a useful, well illustrated summary with McKlein’s usual quality presentation.

The nearest it comes to discussing any undercurrents is in the introduction, which says when the changes were announced “the English went into a sulk, they even claimed that there was a conspiracy because the British were about to dominate Grand Prix racing”. (Pleasing discovery: the German for a sulk is schmollwinkel. I leave you to make any jokes.)

Yet that does not wholly explain the background: that the authorities did perceive a threat of mere ‘garagistes’ from Britain supplanting proper manufacturers, that this did come about once Vanwall had won the first championship for Britain, and that the imposition of a minimum weight (not I think mentioned here) would immediately benefit Ferrari and its heavier front-engined approach current at the time. Especially as Maranello’s 1500cc F2 engine was already winning and would provide a springboard.

The result was an attempt from Britain to keep the bigger 2.5-litre engines afloat with a rival series, the InterContinental Formula, hoping there would be so much support that the CSI would have to concede and re-adopt it. Shades of a more recent occasion when teams threatened to create a rival series… That sank, but it meant that the distracted home teams failed to get themselves geared up for the new formula and started on the back foot with their four-cylinder Climaxes, unlike Ferrari, which comprehensively swept up the first title. But things would change…

A Foreword by Richard Atwood, a driver who knows the period from the cockpit, reminds us of the huge progress in racing car design in this era, ready to catapult performance when big power arrived in 1966. And where was the safety argument then?

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Grand Prix 1961 to 1965

Jörg-Thomas Födisch, Rainer Rossbach, Nils Ruwisch

McKlein

€99.90