Matt Bishop: How about a Christmas GP in Africa? After all, F1 has done it before

Christmas, when it finally comes, is a welcome break during which we are entitled to look back as we wrap up the present and place a bow on the year almost gone. That being the case, as this column lands in your lap on December 23, with the turkey ordered, the tree shedding its needles like a quilling hedgehog, and Formula 1 exhaling after another globetrotting marathon, my mind drifts not to Abu Dhabi, or Qatar, or wherever the F1 circus last packed its flight cases, but to a far-away Saturday afternoon more than six decades ago, when the F1 world championship quietly turned 100. I will explain what I mean by that shortly.

The Saturday to which I am referring is Saturday, December 29, 1962, the date of that year’s South African Grand Prix, which was run on the Prince George circuit, East London, Eastern Cape Province, on the coast of the Indian Ocean. In those days the F1 powers-that-be, such as they were, did not yet know that late December was supposed to be sacrosanct. There was no off-season in the modern sense, no mandated shutdown, no talk of mental health breaks or social media detoxes. F1 folk simply went racing when and where they could – and, if that happened to be between Christmas and New Year, so be it.

Non-championship South African Grands Prix had been run sporadically since 1934, always on East London’s Prince George circuit, but the 1962 F1 calendar was the first that had contained a South African Grand Prix of world championship status. Moreover, it was the final grand prix of an F1 season in which the drivers’ world championship battle would go down to the wire. So it mattered. But I will come back to that.

South African Grands Prix have taken place in 1962 and 1963, from 1965 to 1985, and in 1992 and 1993, all but two of them (the 1966 and 1981 editions) being official rounds of the F1 world championship. It feels extraordinary that, a third of a century on, F1 has not returned to Africa. F1 marketers talk proudly and indeed endlessly about our sport being a world championship, and it is true that grands prix are held on five of the world’s seven continents: Europe, Asia, Australasia, North America, and South America. But Africa? No.

For the avoidance of doubt, even if this Christmas column contains more whimsy than most of my weekly offerings, I am not advocating an F1 grand prix in Antarctica, although I am quite sure that Max Verstappen would be super-quick on a circuit laid out on the Lambert Glacier. But I am bemoaning the fact that Africa remains absent, despite its rich motor racing heritage and its obvious political, social, and cultural significance. If we are in earnest about F1 being truly global, and if we are serious about the importance of F1 honouring its own history, then Africa deserves a place on the calendar. And, if we are feeling particularly mischievous, why not make it a Christmas race? After all, we have form.

Just imagine it: mince pies in the Paddock Club, crackers in the FIA press conferences, and Santa costumes on the prat perches. Well, I told you I was in a whimsical mood. So how about Christmas Day practice, Boxing Day qualifying, and a race on the 27th, the world watching it while leftovers are reheated and arguments about board games temporarily suspended? Tell me that that would not be cool.

OK, let us go back to 1962, and first to the Prince George circuit itself, which in my opinion deserves more than the footnote to which it has been relegated. Mention South African Grands Prix to F1 fans, journalists, and insiders, and the conversation will jump, swiftly and automatically, to Kyalami. That is fair enough, for the old Kyalami was a great circuit. But Prince George, or East London, was fascinating in its own right, for it was that glorious rarity: a fast and flowing racetrack laid out on temporarily closed public roads. It consisted of eight turns, only two of which, Cocobana Corner and Beacon Bend, were not fast sweepers. Potters Pass, Rifle Bend, Butts Bend, The Esses, Cox’s Corner, and the Sweep were all as quick as they were tricky. Moreover, the asphalt was bumpy all along its 2.436 miles (3.920km), and it was markedly narrow in places. It was not a circuit that flattered the hesitant. On the contrary, it rewarded old-fashioned daring, and on December 29, 1962, it provided the stage for a truly dramatic F1 world championship decider.

The numbers alone give it weight. It was the 100th world championship-status F1 grand prix — excluding the Indianapolis 500, which had been part of the F1 world championship in the 1950s but had always sat slightly apart, rather like eccentric uncles on Christmas Day. The field of 17 was small by later standards, the cars lithe and lethal, and the safety margins wafer-thin. Yet the significance was enormous. The previous F1 grand prix had taken place at Watkins Glen 12 weeks before – just imagine that – and two men arrived in East London with a chance of winning the F1 world championship, Graham Hill for BRM and Jim Clark for Lotus, and neither of those two great British drivers or those two great British teams had ever won it before. The stage was set. On the one hand we had Hill, the urbane, moustachioed, wise-cracking 33-year-old Londoner; the rower turned mechanic turned racer; the man who would one day be known as Mr Monaco. On the other we had Clark, the quiet, modest, neatly Brylcreemed 26-year-old Scot; a farmer at heart; but a genius at the wheel, already widely regarded as the fastest man in the world.

The championship arithmetic was almost as complex as was the emotional calculus. Hill headed the F1 drivers’ standings, 39 points to 30. Nonetheless, since both contenders had scored three wins, a Clark victory at Prince George, worth nine points, would give the Scotsman the title, regardless of Hill’s finishing position, because only the best five of the season’s nine rounds would count for the world championship, and only Hill would have to drop a score.

Clark’s Lotus danced across the East London bumps with that uncanny blend of delicacy and authority

What unfolded was a race that seemed, for much of its duration, to be drifting inexorably towards a coronation for Clark. He led comfortably, having taken the pole, his Lotus dancing across the East London bumps with that uncanny blend of delicacy and authority that already defined his driving. Hill, in his BRM, kept up the chase – professional and persistent – but Clark appeared to have everything well under control.

Then, with 20 laps to go, fate intervened. Oil began to leak from Clark’s Lotus, the slick betrayal seeping from somewhere deep within its Climax V8’s internals. There was no heroic nursing of the car to the finish, no last-gasp podium. The oil leak worsened, the engine’s life ebbed away, and Clark coasted into the pits and retired. In an instant, the world championship narrative had flipped. Hill — suddenly — was no longer a man vainly chasing an impossible dream, but the champion elect ready to grab his prize. He kept his composure, he brought the BRM home in first place, and with it he secured his first F1 drivers’ world championship. BRM duly took the constructors’ laurels, too.

The drama of that moment resonates still. Not because it was cruel — although it was, undeniably, for Clark — but because it encapsulates the essence of motor racing in that era. Car reliability was key, mechanical sympathy was an all-important element of race driving, and luck played a big part. World championships could and did turn not on iffy strategy calls or dodgy stewards’ decisions, as they can and do today, but on broken bits or finger trouble, that quaint old term that used to be so commonly used to describe mechanics’ errors.

Hill accepted his first F1 world championship with grace and perspective. Clark, who would go on to win two F1 drivers’ titles and to etch his name indelibly into the sport’s mythology, absorbed the disappointment with dignity. The 1962 South African Grand Prix was, in its way, a perfect ending to the sport’s first century of world championship-status races.

But there is another, more personal, reason why that day looms large for me. December 29, 1962, was the first world championship-status F1 grand prix to take place after my birth, which had occurred four days earlier, on Christmas Day. So while Hill was wrestling a BRM triumphantly around East London, I was presumably doing what newborns do: sleeping, crying, and having no idea that my life would become, in large part, entwined with the peculiarly wonderful sport whose season finale was being played out 6000 miles south of me. I like to think – entirely without evidence – that some infinitesimal echo of that race seeped into the north London world that I had just entered, and that the smell of Hill’s BRM’s Castrol R somehow mingled with the festive aromas of my proud parents’ Christmas lunch. After all, I do not think that either of them had even heard of F1 at that time, let alone liked it, yet I loved it with a passion that has never dimmed as soon as I knew what it was.