Wilson failed to qualify for the 1980 British GP after a controversial episode with RAM
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On a mild April afternoon in 1980, Desiré Wilson drove an ex-Jody Scheckter Wolf WR4 to victory in the Evening News Trophy at Brands Hatch.
She led from the start, won by more than 15sec and set the fastest lap. It was not a world championship grand prix, but it was an F1 race, and no other woman has ever won one since.
You might assume that a result like that opened doors. It didn’t. Three months later, Wilson arrived at the real thing, the 1980 British Grand Prix, and by her own account the weekend was lost before she turned a wheel.
The drive came from John Webb, the Brands Hatch promoter, who offered her an ex-works Williams FW07 with John MacDonald’s RAM Racing team. It was a current F1 car and a fast one.
“It had sliding skirts,” Wilson recalls in an interview with Motor Sport‘s Matt Bishop, “so Johnny Mac’s Williams was a lot quicker around the corners than anything I’d ever driven before.”
The pre-event test had gone well. With more than 20 cars present, including the works Williams, Brabham, McLaren and Ligier teams, she was around 12th quickest.
Her team-mate Rupert Keegan, in the other RAM car, was unable to match her times.
Wilson knew the team had swapped her car since the test
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“I was happy, because I knew there was more pace in the car that I’d be able to unlock during the grand prix weekend,” she adds.
Then she climbed into the car for the race weekend and got a nasty surprise.
“Nothing fitted me. The seat was wrong. The pedals were wrong. They said nothing had changed, but I knew that it had.
“‘Just drive the bloody thing,’ they said. I was almost 3sec a lap slower than I’d been in the test. ‘This isn’t the same car,’ I said. ‘Of course it is,’ they answered.”
Qualifying made things worse. Wilson says Jacques Laffite, in a Ligier, came up behind her at Surtees. She hugged the outside line and lifted to let him through on the inside, but she says he lifted as well, placed his car alongside hers and pushed her off the track.
The contact smashed her car’s sliding skirts and ended her session.
“Later I gather that he was heard to say, ‘No effing woman is going to be in an F1 grand prix.’”
The next day, she says, she learned she had been right all along.
“I’d been given a different car, and the RAM Racing guys had been lying to me.” She found around a second a lap in the car she was given, but it “still felt evil”.
She failed to qualify. Keegan took her car and put it 18th on the grid.
“I was gutted,” she admits.
Wilson’s career was a sequence of one-off deals, unfamiliar cars and circuits she had never seen, and she kept winning anyway.
She was run out of South Africa after cigarette sponsors, she says, couldn’t accept their stars being beaten by a woman.
She later had a Brabham seat at the 1981 South African Grand Prix turn into a Tyrrell drive, and that race was subsequently declared a Formula Libre event, so she never started a world championship-status grand prix. Her verdict on her own career is typically understated: “stop-start”.
Read the full interview, in which she talks through the other 149 cars, the Le Mans exclusion, the South African pressure and why she says she felt “invincible” at Brands Hatch.
