Shaken, stirred & on the rocks: Inside Tecno's chaotic F1 adventure

The Tecno’s opening two grands prix set the tone for a year in which Galli and Bell completed just 126 racing laps between them in six GP starts. The highlight was Galli’s third place in a poorly attended non-championship race at Vallelunga.

This lack of success explains why Yorke decided to take matters into his own hands and build a ‘British’ Tecno with Martini money. But why he chose a company set up by a designer of dumper trucks and a journalist to produce the car is a mystery Yorke took to his grave.

Gordon Fowell was an old friend of Yorke’s, but his only involvement in motorsport up to that time was as an amateur driver and partner to journalist Alan Phillips in a company that released audio tapes of racing engines. Goral Engineering was their next venture.

Pederzani, meanwhile, wasn’t to be outdone and decided that he would also produce a monocoque car. He touted around a number of British-based designers and ended up recruiting McCall, whose Tui Formula Two and Atlantic machinery had shown promise over the previous couple of seasons.

“Luciano was offended because Yorke had suggested that Italians couldn’t do monocoques,” says McCall. “My car was intended as nothing other an exercise to show that he could build his own tub.” Work on the McCall Tecno started on New Year’s Eve, 1972. Just 10 weeks later, PA123-006 — which retained only the type number and the rear end of the previous design — was on its wheels. How this chassis came to be taken over by Yorke isn’t clear. McCall claims that the idea to race his car came up only as it neared completion.

“When Pederzani saw the thing he suddenly got excited about racing it,” remembers the designer, who corroborates press reports of the time that the car could have raced as a Tecno Tui. “He went out and found some sponsorship and asked me to find a driver.”

The name McCall put forward was Chris Amon. But the former Ferrari driver’s recollection of events is that he was approached by Yorke, not McCall. His return to the works March squad, having fallen through in early January, Chris was glad of the approach.

“When I agreed to drive I had no idea what car I’d be driving,” explains Amon, whose contract was with Martini. “Then Yorke filled me in, explaining that the McCall chassis was nearly ready and that Fowell’s would be for later.”

“As soon as Luciano found out he went home and said that he would never be seen at a racetrack again”

It was an awkward time. McCall claims that Yorke “rode roughshod over the Pederzanis” with the result that Luciano “felt insulted”. McCall’s right-hand man, Eddie Wies, recalls “the British turning up one day, covering our car in Martini stickers and claiming it as theirs”. It was the start of an irreconcilable breakdown in the relationship between the British and Italian sides of the team.

“After that Luciano said he was only going to fulfil his obligations, and no more,” explains McCall, who left Tecno immediately after his creation’s first test. “His contract was to supply engines, transport and the mechanics. He’d built something like 12 engines, but no development was undertaken. He didn’t even put them on the dyno.”

That tallies with Amon’s description of the engines getting worse through the season, and explains why he and Yorke went home for good after qualifying for the Austrian Grand Prix, claiming no engines were available.

Anglo-Italian liaisons became ever more fiery as Tecno’s involvement in grand prix racing drew to a close. On one occasion, Luciano Pederzani floored Yorke during an argument. On another, Amon’s frustration boiled over in Tecno’s offices and he picked up an ashtray and hurled it across the room. A journalist had been standing outside throughout and the proceedings were reported in detail in the following morning’s Gazzetta dello Sport.

The McCall Tecno did have its moments, however. Once again, the team’s season started in Belgium, this time at Zolder, where Amon qualified 15th and came home sixth despite struggling with high temperatures inside the cockpit. At Monaco, the car started 12th and was running seventh when the engine overheated after 24 laps.

“It wasn’t a bad chassis at all,” claims Amon. “It was a little bit too heavy, but in handling terms it was probably a match for anything around. On the tighter tracks it went well, but once we got to somewhere like Silverstone we were in trouble.”

The team skipped the Swedish Grand Prix but was meant to be back for Paul Ricard. Amon and Yorke arrived from England, but the truck from Italy was nowhere to be found. By this point, the Fowell chassis, known as the E731, had run for the first time after interminable delays. Bruce McIntosh, an Italian speaker after seven years with Serenissma, had been employed by Yorke to put the car together.

“We built the monocoque over here at John Thompson’s place, but we never had a dummy engine,” McIntosh recalls. “So I had to take the tub to Italy and work out all the systems at the rear end.”

The car first ran down a back alley behind Tecno’s workshops on Via Ducati. It was subsequently transported back to England and tested at Santa Pod. Both times it spewed out oil. Amon has no recollection of driving the E731 until British Grand Prix week. He briefly tried it in free practice at Silverstone, though his ultimately unsuccessful efforts to qualify for the race came aboard the old car.

The Fowell car was tried again at Zandvoort, where Amon notched up the final F1 start by a Tecno, and again at the Osterreichring. Amon claims PA123-006 was the better car, but he concedes that the Fowell chassis didn’t get a fair crack of the whip: “It was a beautiful looking car, but it lacked development”. Indeed, the E731’s potential was never unlocked, according to those involved in the project.

“Fowell was a clever guy,” says McIntosh, who remained with the designer to work on Amon’s own F1 car the following year. Thompson recalls the final Tecno incorporating a host of “different ideas”. It was the first F1 chassis, he claims, to run a Fibreglass rear wing.

Luciano Pederzani was another talented engineer; that’s something upon which both McCall and McIntosh, who were on different sides of the political divide, agree. McCall describes the Italian as “a hands-on mechanic and a real smart man”. McIntosh remembers him as “an intuitive engineer”.

The end appears to have come at Silverstone, and explains why the team ran out of engines two races later. The story below was told to Wies by a Tecno mechanic years later…

“He told me that a very long top gear was put in our chassis. The idea was to try to make the British car look better than it was.” That might explain why the Tecno did not qualify that weekend. “As soon as Luciano found out he went home and said that he would never be seen at a racetrack again.” Work on a flat-eight F1 engine was immediately stopped. And it seems that Pederzani kept true to his word right up to his death in the late 1990s.