“It may be 60 years gone, but Tony Brooks has the details of his abortive 1957 Pescara Grand Prix to hand, in the racing journal he kept throughout his driving career. For him Pescara was a race to look forward to, a proper road race, a circuit of grandeur with all the hazards of everyday life on the Adriatic coast.

“He arrived by Hillman Minx coupé with his fiancée Pina and Roy Salvadori: “It was a test car loaned to Roy. The Aston Martin drivers didn’t like to drive other team members. He left me the driver’s seat, but didn’t know I liked driving on the continent so I enjoyed the trip.”

“Not having driven Pescara, Brooks had mugged up: “I’d done my usual preparation by studying a map of the track. My technique was to pick a corner that couldn’t be mistaken and learn that section thoroughly, so that if you lost yourself on the lap you waited until you came to a corner you could identify and then picked up from there. Essential at the Nürburgring, but not quite so vital here – although it was 15½ miles it didn’t have 176 corners like the ’Ring!”

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The Ford F3L: Blue Oval’s doomed ‘other’ 1960s sports car

It had the best engine, a proven design team, prime drivers, Ford’s blessing, and it looked sensational. How could the F3L fail?

To preface this article with some anecdote or little-known historical fact would be to miss the crux of the Ford F3L. Twenty-seven years ago, the mechanics at the Byfleet-based Alan Mann Racing Limited wheeled out, by my way of thinking, the most beautiful racing car to be built on these shores. An automotive Rita Hayworth from those all-aggression, long-eared spinners, surely Boadicea-inspired, to the schoolboy’s daydream doodle, aluminium body.

Initially free of spoilers, bibs, dams and flaps, and punctuated only by a clutch of NACA ducts, this long-tailed, lowline machine (just 35 inches to the top of the windscreen) looked all set to gobble up the Mulsanne Straight on its way to a comfortable Le Mans victory.

And if it looks right…

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Forced out of F1: the final days of privateer teams

The late Seventies should have been the Formula 1 privateers’ heyday — cars were cheap and engines were plentiful — but instead they proved to be their swansong. Gary Watkins explains exactly how they were squeezed out of an increasingly businesslike paddock

“The McLaren M23, unfamiliar in blue and white, tried to leave its pit. A ‘heavy’ in a Goodyear shirt blocked its way. Threats were issued and the car was (temporarily) prevented from going out on the long Brands Hatch circuit to try to qualify for the 1978 British Grand Prix.

“Anyone watching from the grandstands would have been bemused at the strange goings-on around Tony Trimmer‘s Melchester Racing garage. Few could have known that this was one of the closing skirmishes in the battle to remove the privateer from Formula 1.

“When Trimmer and fellow British F1 series front runner, Geoff Lees, failed to make the cut at Brands, grand prix racing changed forever. Never again would a team running someone else’s chassis be able to pitch up, as and when, and attempt to qualify for a world championship grand prix. It was the first step on the road to the highly structured world of F1 we know today…”

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Cosworth DFV’s second life: its success outside F1

The Formula 1 wins tally for Cosworth’s DFV topped 150 but as Gary Watkins writes, away from the GP world this Ford-badged V8 packed a punch in a variety of series

“Keith Duckworth and his team at Cosworth designed the Ford DFV for one task and one task only – to win in Formula 1. One hundred and fifty-five world championship victories over three decades says they didn’t do a bad job. Yet the Double Four Valve turned out to be much more than a successful grand prix engine, despite its creator’s reticence – hostility even – towards the use of his masterpiece in other disciplines.

“When famed sports car team boss John Wyer revealed that he intended to go to the Le Mans 24 Hours with a DFV in the back of a new prototype bearing the Mirage name in 1972, Duckworth told him not to bother. Parnelli Jones’s idea to put a turbo on the DFV for IndyCar racing was met with scorn, and when the team owner ploughed his own development path with the engine, Cosworth didn’t make life easy.

“The successes of the DFV in sports car and IndyCar racing, first under the auspices of the United States Auto Club and then CART, says Duckworth got it wrong when it came to his original stance on broadening the DFV’s application. Not only did the Cossie triumph at Le Mans twice, but what became known as the DFX won the Indianapolis 500 10 times on the trot between 1978 and ’87…”

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Mike Spence: Racing’s ‘Quiet Man’

Shy Mike Spence spent most of his career in the shade. Paul Fearnley looks back at a man who was blossoming when he was killed at Indy

“The lights blinked yellow before the day-glo car hit the wall. The puff of dust as it dived into Turn 1 had told USAC chief observer Walt Myers all he needed to know: too high, out of the groove, trouble.

“Impacting at 45 degrees, Lotus 56/2 screeched along the concrete for 400 feet, then veered back down onto the track. It slid for a further 240 feet before coming to rest, its Pratt & Whitney turbine still emitting that eerie whine. The rescuers were already on their way. The car didn’t look too bad, considering. But its driver was inert – and helmetless.

“Mike Spence was rushed to Methodist Hospital, where he died a little over four hours later. There wasn’t a mark on his body. But the rubber smear across the top of his crash helmet, which was found with its chinstrap still fastened, told its own grisly story…”

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Grossglockner – Nazi race track lost in the mountains

The Nazis intended Grossglockner to be the ultimate mountain race. But safety and weather worries put paid to that. Damien Smith dodges the clouds to rediscover the Austrian Alpine course

Just minutes after picking up the mountain pass we come to the first hairpin. I look at my photographs of behemoth Mercedes and Auto Unions scrabbling around tight Alpine bends and stop at one that I know must definitely be the site of this picture. The jaw-dropping backdrop, the contours of the road: it all matches. Yes! I knew that I couldn’t go too far wrong in finding the right locations. The Grossglockner Hochalpenstrasse is just one road over a mountain, after all.

Straightforward? No. Oh no. Not with my sense of geography.

After a good hour photographing the Boxster retracing the lines of Stuck, Lang and von Brauchitsch we take a break. I wander over to browse at a roadside map to doublecheck exactly how far we have come up the pass. My heart skips a beat – and then sinks with realisation and dread: we’re on the wrong side of the mountain. Idiot!

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The Lotus that brought active suspension to F1: Colin Chapman’s last big thing

Lotus founder Colin Chapman was famed for his drive to innovate; even his final racing car, the Lotus 92, boasted one principle that would change the face of F1

Even at the height of summer, Snetterton can be a bleak and chilly place, so imagine how it must have been for members of Team Lotus on December 17, 1982 as they prepared to run their new Grand Prix car, this car, for the very first time. “It was the day after we lost Dad,” recalls Clive Chapman. Peter Wright was there too and remembers: “We had expected Colin to come. Instead Peter Warr arrived to give us the news.”

There must have been those who wondered if Lotus could even exist without Colin Chapman. His genius and maverick approach didn’t just influence everything Lotus: it defined it.

Still there was work to be done, for this was no normal grand prix car.

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