An ageing champion, an ugly Brabham, and a revolutionary gas-turbine Lotus conspired to produce one of motor sport's most enchanting afternoons at the 1971 International Trophy, as Matt Bishop recounts
Uncharitably dubbed the 'lobster claw', Brabham's BT34 carried Graham Hill to his final win in an F1 car at Silverstone
There are some Formula 1 races that resonate not because they crowned a new F1 world champion, nor even because they affected the course of an F1 world championship, but because they were wonderful events that captured something ineffable about F1 at a particular moment in time: its characters, its curiosities, its technical eccentricities, and its capacity for surprise. Non-championship F1 races, the last of which was the 1983 Race of Champions at Brands Hatch, often did all of that.
But today I want to hark back a little farther than that, to May 8, 1971, on which dry and sunny Saturday at Silverstone the non-championship F1 International Trophy proved to be precisely such a wonderful event. Now, almost exactly 55 years later, it repays reflection not merely as a joyous statistical footnote to a fabulous motor sport career – for it was the scene of Graham Hill‘s final F1 race win – but as a vignette of an era when our sport was more anarchic, more inventive, and more down-to-earth than it is today.
By 1971, Hill was already a relic and a legend in equal measure. A double F1 world champion (1962 and 1968), an Indianapolis 500 winner (1966), and a dapper and urbane ambassador of motor sport, he had long since secured his place in racing’s pantheon – which I guess is my polite way of saying that, at 42, he had passed his prime as a top-class F1 wheelman. Indeed, as he strolled into the Silverstone paddock on May 8, 1971, he had not so much as stood on an F1 podium, let alone won an F1 race, since he had scored his fifth and final Monaco Grand Prix win on May 18, 1969, almost exactly two years before.
Moreover, as the new decade was pulling on its bell-bottom trousers and its platform shoes, younger men — led in 1971 by 31-year-old Jackie Stewart, Clay Regazzoni (also 31), Pedro Rodríguez (31), Chris Amon (27), Ronnie Peterson (27), François Cevert (27), Jacky Ickx (26), and Emerson Fittipaldi (24) — were redefining F1’s competitive landscape. By contrast Hill, still sporting the kind of neat pencil moustache that had been popularised by Hollywood icons Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, and David Niven in the 1930s and 1940s, but which fashionable men had abandoned in the 1950s, now seemed destined to fade gently into dignified irrelevance, his F1 greatness acknowledged but his F1 pomp apparently a thing of the past.
Aged 42, almost two decades older than Fittipaldi, Hill was the veteran in the Silverstone field
Grand Prix Photo
Yet motor sport has always had a soft spot for the improbable comeback, particularly when it involves a driver of Hill’s stature and charisma, and the International Trophy, although it was a non-championship F1 race, offered precisely the sort of stage on which such narratives could unfold. Freed from the rigidities of points-scoring imperatives, such events often became theatres of experimentation and opportunity, where unusual machinery could shine and established hierarchies might be upended. Such would be the case in 1971.
The format itself was unusual, for there were two heats, aggregate times deciding the overall winner. In the first heat, Stewart, then at the height of his powers, did what he tended to do throughout 1971: he won, conducting his Tyrrell 003 with the precision and authority that would carry him to that year’s F1 drivers’ world championship. Meanwhile, Hill drove his Brabham BT34 to a respectable but distant third place. Finishing between Stewart and Hill, in second place, was Rodríguez in his BRM P160. It was a predictable echelon.
The second heat would immediately turn that narrative on its head. On lap one Stewart’s Tyrrell 003 suffered a stuck throttle at Copse, causing it to spear off into a grassy bank, abruptly and irretrievably ending his participation, and with the dull thud of aluminium and fibreglass smiting muddy earth went his aggregate upper hand. He was shaken, stirred, yet thankfully uninjured, but it was the sort of moment that underscores the fragility of racing success in any era, but particularly one in which safety margins were so slender.
Hill, buoyed by his good showing in heat one and advantaged by Stewart’s sudden absence from heat two, tackled the second leg with an unruffled blend of intelligence and opportunism. He duly won it, expertly managing the gap to Amon’s second-placed Matra MS120B, crossing the finish line 5.2sec ahead of the New Zealander, placing him first overall on aggregate. It was a victory that owed something to circumstance, a little to luck, and quite a lot to another’s misfortune, but to dismiss it as merely fortuitous would be to misunderstand both Hill and the nature of racing at that time. One still had to be there to inherit the opportunity; one still had to drive with speed, consistency, and mechanical sympathy; and 42-year-old Hill had mastered all three.
Hill at the wheel of his Brabham during the Silverstone shakedown
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That he did so in a Brabham BT34 only adds to the story’s texture. The ‘lobster claw’, so-called because its ungainly twin radiators were mounted ahead of its front wheels, was not a car that stirred the soul aesthetically. Even in an era not short of visual eccentricity it stood out, and that is not a compliment. Moreover, it was by no means one of Brabham design legend Ron Tauranac’s fastest creations. Indeed, its sole world championship-status F1 points arrived three long months later, at Österreichring, where Hill raced it to an attrition-assisted fifth place, crossing the finish line the thick end of a minute behind Jo Siffert‘s winning BRM P160. To be fair, the ‘lobster claw’ would win one more non-championship F1 race, in the hands of Carlos Reutemann at Interlagos in 1972, but that was an ill-attended event that only 11 drivers started and only six drivers finished, so the BT34’s F1 career has to be classified as a pretty mediocre one.
There is, however, a certain poetic justice in all of that. F1 has always had room for the flawed genius, the beautiful failure, and the machine that occasionally transcends its limitations. So it is that, at Silverstone in 1971, the Brabham BT34 — awkward, idiosyncratic, and none too rapid — nonetheless found its moment of glory in the hands of an ageing driver who was also defying expectations, and I love that about both of them.
If Hill’s victory provided the 1971 International Trophy with its emotional core, the presence of the Lotus 56B lent it an additional layer of fascination. Conceived with characteristic audacity by Colin Chapman and designed by Maurice Philippe, the car had originally been devised and intended for Indianapolis, where in 1968 it had demonstrated formidable speed but lamentable fragility. Its Pratt & Whitney gas-turbine engine and four-wheel-drive system represented a radical departure from conventional single-seater powertrain philosophies, and, in an age when innovation was generally encouraged and often indulged, Chapman saw an opportunity to adapt it for F1.
The B-spec version of the car duly made its F1 debut on March 21, 1971, in the non-championship F1 Race of Champions at Brands Hatch, and Fittipaldi’s performance in it encapsulated both the promise and the limitation of the concept. In a rain-soaked practice session he was devastatingly quick, exploiting the traction advantages of four-wheel drive to outpace the rest by a significant margin. One can only imagine what might have happened had Brands Hatch’s asphalt been similarly drenched on race day, but it was not; on a dry track the 56B’s advantage evaporated, and Emerson anyway DNF’d after 34 laps with suspension failure.
Winner of the 1971 International Trophy’s first heat, Stewart came to grief in a grassy bank during Heat 2.
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Three weeks later, on April 9, in the non-championship F1 Spring Trophy at Oulton Park, Reine Wisell qualified the 56B ninth, albeit with a lap 7.8sec slower than Stewart’s pole time in his Tyrrell 001, and Wisell DNF’d after 17 laps owing to a puncture.
So the 1971 International Trophy was the Lotus 56B’s third outing, and Fittipaldi drove it brilliantly, finishing third in the second heat and thereby securing the car’s best ever F1 result – although, having DNF’d with suspension failure after only three laps of heat one, he would be classified only 22nd overall on aggregate.
The 56B, of which Lotus built only one, was then raced in three world championship-status F1 grands prix later that year, albeit without success. Dave Walker shunted it after just five laps at Zandvoort, Wisell badgered it to a race finish of sorts at Silverstone, albeit 11 laps behind Stewart’s winning Tyrrell 003, and Fittipaldi raced it to a creditable eighth place at Monza, albeit a lap behind Peter Gethin‘s winning BRM P160. Nonetheless, the car’s sensational wet-weather performance at Brands Hatch had been a tantalising glimpse of potential never tapped.
Yet, in a broader sense, although it was never raced again, the Lotus 56/56B left a lasting legacy. Its wedge-shaped profile, which had been partly an aerodynamic conceptualisation and partly a by-product of packaging considerations for its unconventional powertrain, would influence the shape of Chapman’s and Philippe’s next creation, the Lotus 72, which made its F1 grand prix debut at Jarama in 1970, two years after the 56 had oh-so-nearly won the 1968 Indy 500 in the hands of Joe Leonard. After the stupendous success of the 72 – which went on to win two F1 drivers’ world championships, three F1 constructors’ world championships, and 20 F1 grands prix – the wedge shape became a cornerstone of 1970s F1 aerodynamic theory. Thus the Lotus 56/56B’s influence endured, albeit in a form that had little to do with the chief reasons for its creation and was poles apart from the attempted powertrain revolution that had originally made it so notable.
The 1971 International Trophy also serves as a reminder of a time when non-championship F1 grids were eclectic, their composition not rigidly stratified. Indeed, the inclusion of Formula 5000 cars within the same event – for, believe it or not, both heats were official rounds of that year’s European Formula 5000 Championship – is emblematic of an openness that has long since disappeared from international motor sport. Mike Hailwood, better known for his exploits on two wheels, acquitted himself admirably in his Surtees-Chevy TS8, finishing fifth on aggregate and emerging as the highest-placed F5000 competitor.
Amon, Stewart and Fittipaldi at the head of the Silverstone field
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Then there were all the characters, for early-1970s F5000 was populated by individuals whose stories extended far beyond their cockpits, and the 1971 International Trophy brought together a particularly intriguing cast. Jean-Pierre Jaussaud, for instance, eighth in a McLaren-Chevy M18, was a driver whose talents have often been underestimated. He would go on to achieve great success in endurance racing – he won the Le Mans 24 Hours twice, in 1978 in a RenaultAlpine A442B and in 1980 in a Rondeau M379 – allegedly sustaining himself with the odd tot of well chilled Chablis during his team-mates’ driving stints – and those glorious performances are what he is best known for. But he had also been very quick in F3 and F2 before then.
Frank Gardner, ninth in a Lola-Chevy T192, was not only a fine racer but would also become one of the most capable and respected driver coaches of them all, his insights distilled in a book whose title would, decades later, be repurposed for an altogether different kind of motor sport narrative: Drive to Survive (1980). It has been out of print for years, and second-hand copies are expensive, but you should buy one if you can.
There were quite a few more F5000 characters who raced F1 stars Hill, Stewart, Rodríguez, Amon, Peterson, Fittipaldi et al that day – among them Jim Clark’s old mate Jock Russell, sometime cigar smuggler Tony Dean, light aircraft pilot and tall ships captain Fred Saunders, Supermarine Spitfire owner and amateur pilot Robs Lamplough, and more besides – and, as my short descriptions of them confirm, they were not only drivers but also colourful personalities whose racing focus was often distracted by weird and/or wonderful hinterlands to their lives.
What, then, are we to make of the 1971 International Trophy, 55 years after it was run? Well, as a motor sport event, I think it still matters. It matters because it encapsulated a transitional period of F1 history, when grand prix racing was balancing on a tightrope between its amateurishly improvised past and its increasingly professional future. It matters because it staged a final triumphant flourish from one of the all-time greats, and a reminder that grit, graft, and class – Hill’s inimitable hallmarks – do not evaporate with age. It matters because it showcased technical innovation in all its ambitious but imperfect splendour, from the ugly Brabham BT34 to the revolutionary Lotus 56B. Above all, it matters because it is a great story – and, in the end, it is great stories that we who love motor sport return to, again and again, isn’t it?
