The Best Becomes the Worst
Le Mans (Sarthe), June 12th
The Le Mans 24-hour race gave promise of being a gigantic battle this year, and on the Tuesday and Wednesday before the race the cars were presented for scrutineering. The official scrutineering saw that the cars were as quoted on the entry forms and that they complied with all the regulations; it took place in the town of Le Mans and it was...
Ni e
Roebuck
66
ho's fast?" someone said, arriving at the side of a track years ago. "They're all
fast..." Denis Jenkinson murmured.
Typical Jenks response, and he was right, of course. Think of a safety car period, when all the Fl cars circulate behind the Mercedes SLS AMG, driven by Bernd Maylander. I've been driven by Maylander, and trust me, he can move a car along. When he is pacing the Fl...
An exciting race
After the Pau G.P. the points position in the F.2 Manufacturers' Cup gave Cooper 22 points for their wins at Brussels and Pau and second place at Syracase, Ferrari had eight for their win at Syracuse, Porsche gained 10 for their second place at Brussels and third at Pau, and for their fourth place at Syracuse Lotus earned three points. As in the F.1 Manufacturers' Championship,...
The start was inauspicious, the end undistinguished. But on its good days, there wasn’t a car on the planet that could keep up with those from Team Lotus. Mark Hughes remembers our greatest grand prix marque
Grand Prix racing was a changing world by 1958. And after the opening race of that season, in Argentina, it would never be the same again, for a tiny rear-engined Cooper conquered the...
Graduates from Two Wheels
Sir,
The days when a top racing motorcyclist could switch to four wheels and slot straight into the front ranks of a Grand Prix grid belong to the past. Mike Hailwood, who is the subject of an article in your September issue, might well have progressed further on four wheels had he sacrificed the years spent on two.
It was not always so, right up to the second World War...
AT THE top end of the Zolder circuit beyond the pits the track runs alongside the Albert Kanal that joins Antwerp to Maastricht and traffic along it is fairly heavy, so that during practice, if you are on the spectator slopes and have time to take your eyes off the racing cars, you can watch the barges and tugs ploughing silently past. It seemed a good place in which to reflect, but the...
What caused you and Mike Parkes to come to a dead stop in the 1967 Le Mans 24 Hours?
Ross Ainscow, Anglesey
It was not a plan, it was a spur of the moment decision on my account. Mike was very good at racecraft and he knew very well that ours was the only Ford remaining in the race. He knew, too, that his best chance of winning for Ferrari was to get me back into racing driver mode rather than...
(Oct. 10th)
The final meeting for 1954 on the Montlhèry track near Paris took place on the Sunday of Paris-Salon week and included races for modified production cars, the Monomill Circus and sports cars, the last-named group competing for the major award of the day, the Coupe du Salon. Practice on Saturday afternoon was held on a damp track that was decidedly slippery, the actual circuit in use...
Thanks to Sir Jackie Stewart’s wife Helen, we now have a unique perspective on his racing careerBy Nigel Roebuck
I have always loved scrapbooks. When I was a kid, I kept one devoted to the doings of Jean Behra, my great hero, and absolutely nothing got in the way of it – I would blithely, to the horror of my father, cut photographs even from Automobile Year so as to have them where they belonged...
Onofre Marimón was starting to shine on Europe's tracks under Fangio's guidance. The future looked promising, until an accident at the Nürburgring, 50 years ago. Tony Watson explains
Before examining Onofre's demise, we should go back to his seventh world championship grand prix start, the 1953 season-closer at Monza. Qualifying had gone well, and from the second row he had quickly latched onto...