Watershed at Aintree

Browse pages
Current page

1

Current page

2

Current page

3

Current page

4

Current page

5

Current page

6

Current page

7

Current page

8

Current page

9

Current page

10

Current page

11

Current page

12

Current page

13

Current page

14

Current page

15

Current page

16

Current page

17

Current page

18

Current page

19

Current page

20

Current page

21

Current page

22

Current page

23

Current page

24

Current page

25

Current page

26

Current page

27

Current page

28

Current page

29

Current page

30

Current page

31

Current page

32

Current page

33

Current page

34

Current page

35

Current page

36

Current page

37

Current page

38

Current page

39

Current page

40

Current page

41

Current page

42

Current page

43

Current page

44

Current page

45

Current page

46

Current page

47

Current page

48

Current page

49

Current page

50

Current page

51

Current page

52

Current page

53

Current page

54

Current page

55

Current page

56

Current page

57

Current page

58

Current page

59

Current page

60

Current page

61

Current page

62

Current page

63

Current page

64

Current page

65

Current page

66

Current page

67

Current page

68

Current page

69

Current page

70

Current page

71

Current page

72

Current page

73

Current page

74

Current page

75

Current page

76

Current page

77

Current page

78

Current page

79

Current page

80

Current page

81

Current page

82

Current page

83

Current page

84

Current page

85

Current page

86

Current page

87

Current page

88

Current page

89

Current page

90

Current page

91

Current page

92

Current page

93

Current page

94

Current page

95

Current page

96

Current page

97

Current page

98

Current page

99

Current page

100

Current page

101

Current page

102

Current page

103

Current page

104

Current page

105

Current page

106

Current page

107

Current page

108

Current page

109

Current page

110

Current page

111

Current page

112

Current page

113

Current page

114

Current page

115

Current page

116

Current page

117

Current page

118

Current page

119

Current page

120

Current page

121

Current page

122

Current page

123

Current page

124

Current page

125

Current page

126

Current page

127

Current page

128

Current page

129

Current page

130

Current page

131

Current page

132

Current page

133

Current page

134

Current page

135

Current page

136

Current page

137

Current page

138

Current page

139

Current page

140

Current page

141

Current page

142

Current page

143

Current page

144

Current page

145

Current page

146

Current page

147

Current page

148

Current page

149

Current page

150

Current page

151

Current page

152

Current page

153

Current page

154

Current page

155

Current page

156

Current page

157

Current page

158

Current page

159

Current page

160

Current page

161

Current page

162

Current page

163

Current page

164

Current page

165

Current page

166

Current page

167

Current page

168

Current page

169

Current page

170

Current page

171

Current page

172

Current page

173

Current page

174

Current page

175

Current page

176

Current page

177

Current page

178

Current page

179

Current page

180

Current page

181

Current page

182

Current page

183

Current page

184

Current page

185

Current page

186

Current page

187

Current page

188

Current page

189

Current page

190

Current page

191

Current page

192

Current page

193

Current page

194

Current page

195

Current page

196

Sixty years ago, the eighth season of the FIA’s Formula 1 world championship started with a race whose runners, riders and results seemed to confirm the well established order of Continental supremacy. At the finish of the 1957 Argentine Grand Prix, held in the broiling January heat of the Buenos Aires autodrome, the first four places were occupied by the Maseratis of Juan Manuel Fangio, Jean Behra, Carlos Menditeguy and Harry Schell. Next came a pair of Ferraris: Froilán González and Alfonso de Portago sharing one car, with a second crewed by Cesare Perdisa, Peter Collins and Wolfgang von Trips. They were followed by two more Maseratis, another Ferrari and – bringing up the rear – a seventh Maserati. Four Ferraris were non-finishers. You would hardly have thought that the era of domination by two factories located barely 20 kilometres apart in Emilia-Romagna was under threat, and that its end would come within months.

Fangio and the Maserati 250F would win the next two races, in Monaco and at Rouen-les-Essarts. But then, at Aintree, came the great convulsion. Held on the clockwise perimeter road of the Grand National course, the Grand Prix d’Europe – incorporating the 10th British Grand Prix – welcomed four entries apiece from the works Ferrari and Maserati teams in a field of 18 starters. A hint of change in the air came when the Vanwalls of Moss and Tony Brooks flanked Behra’s 250F on the front row, and although the Frenchman blasted away into the lead, Moss had displaced him by the time they reached the first bend. With Brooks feeling the effects of a leg injury suffered at Le Mans and losing places, Moss led comfortably until the 19th lap, when his engine began to suffer with a faulty fuel pump. As the rules then allowed, he took over Brooks’s car, restarting in ninth place. After overtaking the Maseratis of Schell, Menditeguy and an off-colour Fangio and the Ferrari of Musso, he had a streak of luck when the cooling system on Collins’s Ferrari broke, the clutch of Behra’s Maserati disintegrated and a piece of metal punctured one of the tyres on Hawthorn’s Ferrari, while Stuart Lewis-Evans stopped with a broken throttle linkage on the third Vanwall. 

In these slightly chaotic circumstances, Moss and Brooks thus became the first British drivers to win a world championship Grand Prix in a British car. “Enthusiasm for this hard-fought victory knew no bounds, and the crowds flooded on the track to acclaim the greatest British victory of all time,” Denis Jenkinson wrote in these pages, overcoming his dislike of the “flat and uninspiring” circuit and the smell – “Oh dear!” – from its neighbouring factories. A follow-up would not be long delayed. After Fangio had secured a fifth title with his masterpiece at the Nürburgring, Moss won first in Pescara and then at Monza, the consecutive victories on Italian soil emphasising the shift in the balance of power. Cooper would win a Grand Prix for the first time the following year, BRM in 1959 and Lotus in 1960.

Would all that have happened, had the catastrophe at Le Mans in 1955 not spooked Mercedes into withdrawing from Formula 1 at season’s end, having won two straight titles with Fangio? It’s easy to hypothesise that Fangio could have won his fourth and fifth titles with the Untertürkheim cars, before retiring and leaving Moss to assume the leader’s role.  

Probably the surge of British success and its consequences, including the fact that seven of the 10 teams on this year’s F1 grid have their factories in England, would have happened anyway, although not in the same way or at the same speed. All those ingredients – the technical ingenuity of men like John Cooper, Colin Chapman and Frank Costin, the effect on their design concepts of the smooth British airfield circuits that shaped Formula 1 racing from the 1960s onwards, and the supply of talented young drivers denied the chance to fly Spitfires in the war but still yearning for glory – would surely have converged in a moment of destiny. 

With Mercedes out, the Italians must have assumed the familiar battle between their two top teams would resume. But the financial troubles that would soon end Maserati’s full-scale competitive activity and the conservatism that led Enzo Ferrari to delay building a lightweight mid-engined car opened the way for a generation of British designers and team owners who pared away excess kilos from both their cars and their thinking. It was the British, who had grown up tinkering in sheds with war-surplus bits, whose gift for improvisation and creative thinking led to the Formula 1 of today, in which the drive for continuous development is the engine of success.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the modern Mercedes team, winner of the last three titles for drivers and constructors. I still pinch myself when I think that the cars carrying the three-pointed star into today’s battles were designed and made in British factories – made, in fact, by the heirs to a story that has now dominated almost exactly half of the sport’s entire history and shows no sign of wilting as it begins its seventh decade.