"The engine responds to wide throttle openings with an outraged gasp and a lurch forward; it's like pinching the Queen's bum." — Shaun Campbell, in a road-test report on the Volvo 340.
"I begin the day with a power breakfast. I eat on a slow in, fast out basis, just like my cornering technique." — Martin Vincent, accompanied by a photograph of him sitting on a loo, describing a day in his road-...
If Juan Manuel Fangio's first race at Monaco was stunning, his first race lap was unbelievable. Shaun Campbell recalls Fangio's 'lucky' debut win.
Juan Manuel Fangio called it luck. A simple word, expressed with a shrug, to explain how he remained alive when so many of his friends and rivals didn't. It seems a hopelessly inadequate explanation, but then luck means different things to different...
Is Formula One today merely a sad, bloated caricature of its once glorious past or have we, in fact, never had it so good? Shaun Campbell casts an impassive eye over the years and decides
Was there ever a golden time of Grand Prix racing and, if so, when was it? What gives it distinction? Are we experiencing one now, or the good old days finally gone forever? And they really that good? Is it even...
When a Lord, a superstar and a man named Bubbles started an F1 team, no one took them seriously. Until they won. Shaun Campbell looks at the short, glorious life of Hesketh
It looked like an extravagant joke, an extended April Fool's stunt played by a bunch of ex-public schoolboys with more money than sense. It ended, as everyone had predicted, in tears. But neither the initial appearance nor the...
Sir,
Space probably prevented Shaun Campbell from mentioning the brief connection of the mysterious `Williams' with the leading Anglo French Grand Prix team; Sunbeam-Talbot-Darracq.
Briefly, this unknown driver handled cars for STD, the Williams-Renault of his day. He drove both the Grand Prix car in the French GP the race of the year and one of the V12 Tiger/Tigress duo in the Formula Libre....
Is he best friend or mortal enemy? Do you follow your leader or push him off the track? Shaun Campbell investigates the curious world of the F1 team-mate
We call men who drive for the same marque 'team-mates', just as we do players in a football eleven or a rugby fifteen. But there the similarity ends. For motor racing is a team sport only in the sense that a large number of people are required...
They probably seemed a good idea at the time but there have been some diabolically dreadful GP cars, recalls Shaun Campbell
To motor racing historians the 1951 British Grand Prix was a watershed event. It was the first World Championship Grand Prix win for Ferrari which is an important enough reason in itself but it also marked the end of Alfa Romeo's postwar dominance of this class of racing,...
If you are at all a regular reader, you will not have failed to notice the battle that's been raging on our letters pages concerning the presence or otherwise in the magazine of contemporary Formula One. And, as a regular or not, you will not have got this far without noticing an extremely yellow and rather modem F1 car on our cover.
It's there because I wanted, once and for all, to take a long...
This is the most famous of all Lotus 49's. Shaun Campbell goes to Hethel to reunite John Miles with the car that took Hill's fifth Monaco win
John Miles beckons me over with a crook of a gloved index finger. He points to a smear of blue paint on the inside of the monocoque. "See that? This was the car I was to drive at Monaco in 1970. I didn't qualify it was my first time there and we lent the...
Hawthorn's first GP win set the superlatives flowing. No wonder, says Shaun Campbell, it was one of the great drives
For the tens of thousands of spectators who lined the public roads around the French town of Reims on 5 July, 1953, there was nothing to suggest that they were about to witness what one contemporary account would headline 'the race of the century'. On the contrary, the French...