Pondering on Kimi Antonelli’s precocious run of early Grand Prix successes this year highlights the Italian’s youth at the time of his first World Championship-qualifying Grand Prix victory at Shanghai, China. The date was March 15. Young Antonelli’s age entered the record books as the second-youngest winner of a Championship-qualifying Grand Prix at 19 years, six months and 18 days.
This was ‘beaten’ only by the youngest-thus-far GP winner, Max Verstappen, whose 2016 Spanish GP triumph at Barcelona set a new mark at just 18 years, seven months and 15 days. This ‘youngest ever’ feat had previously been set by Sebastian Vettel, in the 2008 Italian GP at Monza, when he was already an elderly gent of 21 years and 74 days. Before that, Fernando Alonso – 22 years and 26 days at the 2003 Hungarian GP.
But prior to Alonso, Bruce McLaren had held the record for the youngest driver ever to win a World Championship-qualifying F1 Grand Prix. His record endured for 43 years, from his victory in the December 12, 1959 US GP. That was the deciding round of the year’s title chase. Bruce had been running consistently second behind his Cooper team leader Jack Brabham, until Jack’s engine suddenly starved of fuel and fell silent just two corners from home.
It’s all part of legend now how Bruce, then aged 22 years, three months and 12 days, was startled beyond belief to catch his World Champion elect team-mate’s coasting car. He braked almost to a standstill alongside him, seeking some kind of instruction, or struggling to think how he could possibly help the Australian. Jack shouted at him, signalling frantically for the young Kiwi just “…to floor it and take the win, I’ll be all right pushing this one home…” And indeed he was, manhandling his silent single-seater to the chequered flag to finish fourth overall, and to clinch the first of his eventual three Formula 1 Drivers’ World Champion titles.
“Bruce was startled beyond belief to catch his team-mate’s coasting car”
Before Bruce it had been a young American IndyCar driver, Troy Ruttman, who had become the youngest-ever winner of what was technically a World Championship-qualifying race when he took the flag first in the 1952 Indianapolis 500 Miles – at that time included in the FIA list of qualifying Grandes Épreuves. Young Ruttman was then 22 years, two months and 19 days old. His JC Agajanian-owned Kuzma-Offenhauser became the last dirt-track car to win the money-rich ‘500’.
Following this thought-train then reminds me of one of the first young American drivers to make his name not in US track racing, but in European-style road racing – on both sides of the Atlantic. He was wealthy New York socialite David Loney Bruce-Brown, who notched his breakthrough victory in the American Grand Prize at Savannah, Georgia on November 12, 1910. So how old was he at the time?
For more than a hundred years that proved to be a very good question. Contemporary reports held that Bruce-Brown had been born in March 1890, which would have made him only 20 years old at the time of that breakthrough triumph.
But several years of further research by contributors to the Autosport Nostalgia Forum website unearthed intriguing evidence. He lived with his wealthy mother, Mrs George Bruce-Brown (née Ruth Arabella Loney), at 189 East 59th Street, New York City. He began racing cars in 1908 – when he would indeed have been nobbut a lad. According to his gravestone inscription in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, his birth date was actually August 13, 1889. Therefore, at the time of that first American GP win at Savannah in 1910 (he won again in 1911), David Bruce-Brown would have been aged 21 years, two months and 30 days. However, he had an elder brother, whom some accounts credit with having sparked David’s interest in racing cars in the first place. Brother William had been born on July 22, 1887. Some suggest young David claimed that birthdate as his own. In that case the ‘boy’ driver at Savannah would have been 23 years, three months and 21 days old.
