While Brad Pitt’s F1: The Movie failed to earn anything more than a best sound Academy Award back in March, 60 years ago the seminal film Grand Prix, directed by John Frankenheimer, collected three Oscars.

The big difference between the two was that in 1966 there was no CGI or matte – everything you saw on the Cinerama screen was actually filmed, in glorious widescreen Super Panavision 70, using on-boards, camera cars and helicopters, over five months at six European circuits.

Leading the cast was American Pete Aron, with a ruthless determination to win the world championship at any costs. James Garner played the unlikely protagonist but, at over 6ft, had trouble fitting in single-seaters.

I was at Grand Prix’s December 1966 opening at London’s Soho Casino Cinerama, so to meet Garner more than 30 years later, at the 1999 Japanese Grand Prix, was special. The first thing I did was to accuse him of stealing my car. He looked startled. I explained that in early 1966 I had just started as a 19-year-old pupil at the Jim Russell Racing Drivers’ School at Snetterton, and after my initial test in a Lotus 31, I returned for my first lesson, only to find all the Formula 3 cars had been sold to Frankenheimer for the film.

Instead, we would be given single-seaters with Ford Cortina engines in the back, something called Formula Ford, about which we were not at all happy. He apologised, and asked if I had carried that grudge against him for 33 years. “No,” I replied, “but I would like to think that it might have been ‘my’ car which won you the world championship…”

“In 1966 there was no CGI. Everything you saw on the Cinerama screen was actually filmed”

In January 1966, Russell had been approached by Carroll Shelby, who had been tasked by Frankenheimer with getting cars to replicate the F1 Lotuses, Ferraris, BRMs, McLarens and Eagles of the coming grand prix season, which would mark ‘The Return to Power’ 3-litre era of grand prix racing.

“You’re the only one with a big enough fleet of racing cars and the expertise to train up the actors,” said Shelby. “And by the way, you have just nine weeks to do it.”

Russell replied, “To do that I’d have to close down the school tomorrow and sell the cars to MGM.” MGM promptly put down a deposit cheque for £10,000 to secure the school’s 18 F3 Lotus 31s.

These were then dressed up with F1 bodywork fabricated by London coachbuilders Williams & Pritchard, exhaust pipes and widened wheels, then painted to match the new 1966 season cars which Frankenheimer would be filming that year. Engines were 1000cc Ford Cosworth or Holbay units, highly tuned ’screamers’, giving around 105bhp at up to 10,000rpm. For the movie cars, revs were limited to 6000 by using a modified rotor arm.

“They were either going to have to make the cockpit longer or cut off my feet”

The script had been written around Lotus with Aron as its star, but then Colin Chapman refused to let Russell see his new 1966 F3 cars, despite Jim placing an order for 18 of them. In retaliation Russell cancelled and persuaded Frankenheimer to change the lead movie team to BRM, so Aron became a Jordan-BRM driver, teamed with actor Brian Bedford, a Jim Clark lookalike, playing Scott Stoddard.

In the meantime, Garner was tutored at Riverside and Willow Springs by Bob Bondurant, before he and his co-stars were put through the Jim Russell school course to learn their single-seater skills, with doubles such as Tony Lanfranchi, Jo Schlesser, Paul Frère, Teddy Pilette and Bondurant himself in attendance, at a bleak, windswept Snetterton.

They had seat fittings in the F1 mock-ups in the school’s Downham Market workshops, but for Garner’s lofty 6ft 2in frame it was a tight fit, despite his allocated chassis being cut and lengthened.

“They were either going to have to make the cockpit longer or cut off my feet,” he laughed. “It was further sorted by having no seat and a higher rollover bar. My backside was on a sheet of aluminium just 10cm off the ground going round Monaco and Monza. And we had no seatbelts!”

Time was now of the essence, as everything – cars, drivers and even nine Japanese students trained up as F1 mechanics – had to be at the MGM Nice base by May 2, as filming would start with the Monaco GP. There were 18 cameras in total, and Phil Hill and Chris Amon were to drive the camera car, Ford GT40 P/1027, which would have no problem keeping up with the F3 ‘kiddy cars’ as the crew named them, although once Steve McQueen’s ‘rival’ film Day of the Champion was cancelled, several pukka F1 cars – among them Brabham, Lotus, BRM and Ferrari – became available. They appeared in some sequences in the hands of experts and Garner, the only actor allowed to drive them.

Frankenheimer’s filming at Monaco concluded with a spectacular set-piece crash between the BRM team-mates, Stoddard hitting a cliff face and Aron ending in the harbour: “I had to get in the water to be rescued after the dummy had been fired and it was freezing – then I was kept waiting for further shots. I almost died of the cold and had a big fallout with the production guys.”

At that point, BRM sacked him, and Aron went to Ferrari to ask for his former drive back, but was turned down. “We filmed that in Maranello,” said Garner. “Nobody had been allowed to do that before.”

He went to the ‘French GP’ at Clermont-Ferrand as a TV reporter, where on-board use was made of his Shelby Mustang 350 road car together with Jessica Walter, whom along with Eva Marie Saint and Françoise Hardy provided the film’s love interests. There, he was picked up by Japanese team owner Izo Yamura to drive for his Honda lookalike team.

Next race was Spa, where the script called for rain, and it was a wet race – but the following week the Ardennes forests were bathed in sunshine for the fill-in filming. “We had to get in the local fire brigade to provide the spray for our scenes,” recalled Garner. “They were none too careful where they directed it, and we all got soaked through. But at Brands Hatch I could have used them when I caught fire…”

“We were upstaged by Graham Hill, Phil Hill, Richie Ginther and Bruce McLaren”

Garner’s Yamura had been rigged up to catch light as he crossed the finish line of the British Grand Prix, filmed in the days following the actual race. I was among spectators invited back to make up the crowd extras, for which I was paid a princely £5.

“We had two switches, one which fired a gas jet at the rear of the car and the other alongside the cockpit, which I was to fire once I had got out. But it was a US-type switch, which you flick upwards for on, and I caught it before I was out. I nearly got roasted, but for the cameramen pulling me out.”

The film’s insurers, Lloyd’s of London, were already concerned that he was doing his own driving at 125mph in the rain. After the fire they refused to cover him altogether, and he had to complete the movie uninsured.

One of the film’s best scenes is a drivers’ meeting at Spa, where the fledgling Grand Prix Drivers’ Association is discussing whether or not to race at Spa in the wet. “Yves Montand and I were the actors, but we were upstaged by Graham Hill, Phil Hill, Richie Ginther and Bruce McLaren – they had such charisma,” Garner remembered.

By the time they got to Monza – having also filmed footage at Zandvoort and Clermont-Ferrand – Montand’s character was to be killed off in the Italian GP finale to the film, which used the old banking, redundant since Wolfgang von Trips’ death in 1961. And as in real life, an American became champion after a Ferrari driver’s death.

The film premiered in London, New York and Los Angeles in December 1966, after a short production period of just seven months: Frankenheimer’s editors and sound crews had worked on the movie through the season. For their troubles, they won three Oscars, for Best Editing, Best Sound and Best Sound Effects.

Garner was not worried that neither he nor his co-stars got Academy Awards. “We had a whole year of fun mixing it with F1 stars in beautiful cars and racing ourselves, and it is right that others got the bigger credit. Frankenheimer himself said the stars cost thousands of dollars, and the cars thousands of cents, but the cars were the stars.”

Although he would go on to make further TV series, Garner never appeared in another movie of the stature of Grand Prix. It was the 10th highest-grossing film of 1967.

Graham Hill and Bondurant both remarked that the actor could have been a successful driver. After the movie he stayed interested in racing his whole life (he died in 2014), running his American International Racing team on circuits and off-road, and drove the pace car at the Indy 500 three times. “I would have loved to have carved out a second career on the track,” he said, “but my determination to race was exceeded by my insurer’s determination that I did not.”

What were his memories of Grand Prix? “Being among the giants of motor sport who treated us as equals – that was a privilege. The worst was falling out with Steve. While filming The Great Escape in England we discovered Mini Coopers, took them home and raced them in the Los Angeles canyons. My blue Cooper S was the best car I ever owned.”

“Being among the giants of motor sport who treated us as equals – that was a privilege”

After my Japanese meeting with Garner, we made a Grand Prix retrospective documentary with BAR Honda at the end of 1999 on the old Monza banking, and even at 71, he was as enthusiastic as ever about four wheels.

We talked about F1’s golden days. “I was working with some of the greatest drivers the sport has known,” he said. “Even Juan Manuel Fangio was in the movie, and I made friends with Graham Hill, Phil Hill, Bruce McLaren, Jack Brabham, Dan Gurney, Jo Bonnier, Jim Clark and many more. It was a glorious time.”

The final shot of our Monza documentary was of Pete Aron walking the walk – a little stiffly by now – down the deserted pitstraight of the Cathedral of Speed, echoing the final, haunting sequence of Grand Prix, where the ghosts were already closing in around the 1966 world champion.