Denis Jenkinson wasn’t impressed with the diminutive Dijon-Prenois circuit, which had just staged its first world championship grand prix – and offered up sub-one-minute lap times. “The mini-Grand Prix of France,” he sniffed in his report of August 1974, and you can understand such a stance from someone who had attended French Grands Prix at Rouen, Reims and Clermont-Ferrand.
But the event offered plenty of musing potential for Jenks, who had attended a Goodyear party on the eve of the race weekend to celebrate the tyre company’s 25th consecutive grand prix victory. Here, he got talking to Ferrari star Clay Regazzoni, who at the time was in a multiway title fight with team-mate Niki Lauda, Emerson Fittipaldi of McLaren and young Tyrrell tyro Jody Scheckter.
At 34, Regazzoni was an elder stateman of F1 – old enough to have watched Jenkinson in his former life alongside Eric Oliver during the 1949 season, in which they became world sidecar champions. “The subject of languages came up,” noted Jenks of his chat with ‘Regga’, “his natural language being Italian, coming as he does from the Ticino province of Switzerland, which is the nice part south of the Alps.
Unprecedented riches await Adrian Newey if he can recreate Red Bull’s success at Aston Martin, writes Matt Bishop. A new factory and Honda power are in place for 2026, but which drivers will be fighting for championships?
“His hometown is Lugano and when he said, ‘You must have learnt to speak Italian in Lugano,’ I was a bit surprised and asked him why he should say that. Smiling rather sheepishly into his thick moustache he explained that when he was 10 years old he had seen me racing motorcycles in Lugano. Little Regazzoni had climbed up on a wall with some other kids.
“In those days we also raced at Locarno, but that was too far for the small boys to travel, he explained. Oddly enough, that same year on the northern side of the Alps, at Bern another small Swiss lad was seeing his first motor and motorcycle race, and that was poor old Joseph Siffert, and we won that sidecar race as well.”
Back on the French roads after seeing Lotus driver Ronnie Peterson win the race, DSJ said, “I don’t recommend them for Ford suspension or British sports cars, and certainly not for caravans.”
To read the full story visit our online archive. Get daily doses of period reports and interviews by signing up to our free Great Reads e-mail newsletter via our website.
