Matt Bishop: The wild French GP circuit that was too dangerous for F1

The Formula 1 British Grand Prix took place on July 6 this year, only the third time that it has been run on that date, for traditionally it had been held a week or two later, following the F1 French Grand Prix in early July.

However, no F1 French Grands Prix have been staged since 2022, in which year Max Verstappen won for Red Bull on the truncated version of Paul Ricard, but previously they had been run for many decades at Magny-Cours, Dijon, Clermont-Ferrand, Rouen, Le Mans Bugatti, and Reims, and before the 1950 inauguration of the F1 world championship at many other venues too, many of them long forgotten. For example, who among us can put hand on heart and say that they know a lot about the circuit made up of public roads near Dieppe, on which French Grands Prix were run in 1907, 1908, and 1912? Not I.

Of the seven circuits on which world championship-status F1 French Grands Prix have been run, my personal best-to-worst ranking is: Clermont-Ferrand, Rouen, Paul Ricard (the original version), Dijon, Magny-Cours, Reims, and Le Mans Bugatti. To be fair, they were or are all pretty good, except Le Mans Bugatti, which is OK for motorcycle racing but was rubbish for F1 cars, even in 1967, the only year in which it has hosted them. Indeed, having taken the Le Mans Bugatti pole in a Lotus 49 that year, Graham Hill described the circuit as “a Mickey Mouse track”, which slur has since passed into racing argot.

Why was Clermont-Ferrand the best? Well, in my view, Charade, as it was also known, exemplified the difference between road circuits and street circuits, which now proliferate in F1. Yes, there have been some great F1 street circuits – Montjuïc and Long Beach spring to mind – but some of them have been, and/or sadly still are, decidedly Mickey Mouse. Road circuits – in other words racetracks in rural areas made up of temporarily closed public roads – are an entirely different matter, and the greatest of them in an F1 context were the old Spa, Pescara, and Clermont-Ferrand.

Just four French Grands Prix were held at Clermont-Ferrand – in 1965, 1969, 1970, and 1972 – after which it was abandoned by F1 as too dangerous. So what kind of circuit was it? Only one of its straights was actually straight, and all its 50 corners were challenging. Moreover, the roads it utilised were narrow, at just 23.5ft (7.2m) all the way around, and they were often lined on one side by rock faces and on the other by pine trees or even sheer drops, since the circuit ran on old roads in wild and untamed countryside around a dormant volcano in the Auvergne region of the Massif Central. The circuit’s 5.005 miles (8.055km) of abrasive asphalt rose and plunged relentlessly, there was little room for error and no space for run-off, and driving a fast lap required skill, rhythm, and nerve. There were no grandstands, although spectators thronged the tracksides to sit on grass banks or cling to rock faces to watch the exuberant opposite-lockery, to hear the sound of multi-cylinder engines echoing off volcanic stone, and to enjoy the heady scent of pine tree sap, tortured rubber, and hot oil in thin mountain air.

Races were first held there in 1958, starting with a sports car event won by Innes Ireland in a Lotus 11, followed by a Formula 2 sprint won by Maurice Trintignant in a Cooper T43. The following year, 1959, Clermont-Ferrand hosted the French Grand Prix for motorcycles, won by John Surtees on an MV Agusta. Soon after that, Stirling Moss raced there for the first time, winning the 1959 non-championship F1 Auvergne Grand Prix in a Rob Walker-entered Cooper-Borgward T45, and afterwards he had the following words to say: “I don’t know of a more wonderful track than Charade.”

As you may have noticed while reading the paragraph above, only the greats won at Clermont-Ferrand, and that pattern was maintained when the F1 French Grand Prix was held there for the first time in 1965, for, in his old Lotus 25, Jim Clark scored the seventh of his record eight F1 grands chelems, taking the pole by half a second, driving a fastest lap nearly as rapid as his pole time, and winning by almost half a minute.

The perimeter was lined by shards of volcanic stones on both sides

The F1 French Grand Prix was next held at Charade in 1969, in which year Jochen Rindt, as fast and as brave as anyone who has ever sat in an F1 car, described the circuit as “like a rollercoaster” and complained of motion sickness, as a result of which on the Sunday he wore an open-face helmet just in case he might throw up during the race. That he did not do, but only because he retired his Lotus 49B after 22 laps of the 38-lap race because he was feeling so dizzy that he had begun to see double: not what you need when you are hurling an F1 car around a perilous mountain switchback. Jackie Stewart won that race easily, in a Tyrrell-run Matra MS80, from the pole, driving fastest lap en route, and finishing almost a minute ahead of his team-mate Jean-Pierre Beltoise in another Matra MS80.

The following year, 1970, Motor Sport’s famous continental correspondent Denis ‘Jenks’ Jenkinson attributed Rindt’s queasiness to “an incipient stomach ulcer complaint aggravated by insistent smoking”, which are not words that we ever read about today’s F1 aces. Again Rindt wore an open-face helmet, but that led to another problem, for, although the track surface itself was smooth, its perimeter was lined by shards of volcanic stones on both sides, and in a practice session he was cut on the cheek when one of them was flicked up into his face by the car ahead. Nonetheless, despite having qualified his Lotus 72 only sixth, he raced well the following day to a win that had seemed most unlikely just 24 hours before. As with Clark at Spa, a circuit that he loathed but drove beautifully, Rindt’s sheer class had prevailed on a great circuit, despite his antipathy to the place.

Only one more F1 French Grand Prix would be held at Clermont-Ferrand, in 1972, and it was won by Stewart in a Tyrrell 003. But JYS had not been the star of the show. No, without a scintilla of doubt, that accolade went to Chris Amon, who drove his works Matra MS120D superbly from the get-go, its magnificently sonorous V12 engine echoing off the mountainsides as he powered it to a fine pole position 0.8sec ahead of Denny Hulme’s second-placed McLaren M19C.

On race day Amon took the lead at the start, and at last it looked as though F1’s unluckiest man was finally going to enjoy his long-awaited first grand prix win. Precise, smooth, and flawlessly fast, he guided his Matra through the rugged terrain into a commanding lead. Then – disaster – he suffered a left-front tyre puncture, another victim of the volcanic debris all around, which earlier in the same race had been kicked up by either Ronnie Peterson’s March 721G or Emerson Fittipaldi’s Lotus 72D (reports vary) into the face of BRM driver Helmut Marko, blinding his left eye and ending his career from a driving point of view – but not from a racing point of view, for, now, 53 years later, he remains a major figure in F1, one of the most influential people within Red Bull’s F1 hierarchy, perhaps even the most influential.