Like all the teams, Ferrari had entered 1961 faced with entirely new regulations, the F1 engine spec reduced to 1.5 litres after several years of running 2.5-litre units. There had been mutterings that the new cars would be less impressive and less dramatic than the old ones, and that the drivers would consequently be required to be less adventurous and less heroic. In other words, F1, as generations of journalists and fans have regularly predicted ever since, was apparently on the brink of becoming dreadfully dull. It is comforting to observe that some traditions never change. In 1961 Ferrari simply built a brilliant car, paired it with an excellent driver line-up, and quietly got on with winning races. At Aintree, it all came together with almost effortless authority.
Von Trips was a fascinating figure, not least because he did not look or act like a race driver. Tall, aristocratic, and unfailingly courteous, he forswore his full title — Count Wolfgang Alexander Albert Eduard Maximilian Reichsgraf Berghe von Trips — and was happy for his team-mates to call him Taffy. Moreover, beneath his noble address lay an intensely committed competitor. Enzo Ferrari admired him greatly, because he was calm as well as quick.
The Ferrari 156’s twin nostrils looked startlingly modern in 1961 – and still do
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His victory at Aintree in 1961 was his second and last world championship-status F1 grand prix win. There is no need for me to labour over a description of the events that followed later that season at Monza, because we all know that he met his maker in a horrible accident with Jim Clark that Clark survived but which killed 15 spectators. Besides, this column is about Aintree, not Monza. Nonetheless, watching old footage from the 1961 British Grand Prix today, accompanied by the mellifluous commentary of the BBC’s incomparable Raymond Baxter, knowing what lay only weeks ahead, one cannot help noticing von Trips’ languid body language in the Ferrari’s cockpit on the grid, his easy grace, and what looked like a complete absence of foreboding. Mercifully, history does not announce itself in advance.
Phil Hill, by contrast, often seemed permanently engaged in conversation with his own conscience. Fiercely intelligent, and often introspective to the point of anxiety, he approached racing less as conquest than as craft. Cars fascinated him mechanically as much as they challenged him competitively. He could discuss valve timing with engineers one moment and Ernest Hemingway with journalists the next. There was an unmistakable dignity about Hill that occasionally disguised his formidable speed. He won because he understood, not because he dared. Later that year he would become the United States of America’s first F1 world champion, but he would for ever wear the crown with quiet humility rather than triumphant swagger. Many years later I met him often, I enjoyed talking with him enormously, and I grew to like him a lot.
Von Trips during what would prove to be his last F1 victory
Richie Ginther completed Ferrari’s magnificent clean sweep, and few drivers have been better liked in F1 pitlanes and paddocks. Californian by birth and manner, and engineer by instinct and background, Ginther possessed an extraordinary sensitivity to automotive machinery. Team managers revered his technical feedback, fellow drivers respected his straightforwardness, and journalists appreciated his lack of pretension. If others attracted bigger headlines — and they did — Ginther won something more enduring: widespread affection.
Behind von Trips, Hill, and Ginther unfolded a British Grand Prix narrative that was, in many ways, even more historically significant. Moss arrived at Aintree with a Rob Walker-entered Lotus 18/21, but he was immediately sniffing around Fairman’s Ferguson P99, a car that has always looked to my eyes improbably ponderous. Four-wheel-drive yet front-engined in a series that had long surrendered to rear-engined hegemony, it seemed simultaneously futuristic and anachronistic — but, when Moss drove it, he loved it. If ever there was a driver whose curiosity matched his courage, it was Stirling. He approached unusual machines with the enthusiasm of an explorer discovering unmapped territory. Think of him as a mixture of Tazio Nuvolari and Ernest Shackleton.
Denis ‘DJS’ Jenkinson’s 1961 British Grand Prix report ended with the following paragraph: “So the race ran to a close, the weather clearing up well but too late, and the three red Ferraris, with their ‘shark noses’ almost scraping the ground, toured around to clean up the British Grand Prix and take the fourth Ferrari victory in a row. It had been a race full of incident, and it brought to mind the 1955 British Grand Prix, also at Aintree, where Mercedes-Benz swept the board, but at the back of the field was a ray of hope for Britain when the Vanwall went very fast for a short time. Two years later, in 1957, the Vanwall won the British Grand Prix, again at Aintree, and the following year Vanwall won the F1 World Championship for Manufacturers, starting Britain’s supremacy in grand prix racing which Cooper carried on during 1959 and 1960. Dare one suggest that the ray of hope this year was the Ferguson?”
Moss samples the Ferguson P99, F1’s first four-wheel-drive car and its last front-engined one
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Jenks was wrong, for the Ferguson’s ray of hope turned out to be no augury. At Aintree in 1961 it ran well enough when Fairman was racing it, and notably better and faster once Moss had replaced him after his own Lotus had expired, although it was eventually disqualified for being push-started in the pitlane. But 15 weeks later Moss raced it to victory in the non-championship F1 International Gold Cup at Oulton Park, in the wet again, thereby recording the first and only F1 win for a four-wheel-drive car.
Going back to Aintree, another farewell was unfolding that July 1961 afternoon, and it was one that no-one was aware of at the time: the 1961 British Grand Prix would be Moss’s last world championship-status F1 grand prix appearance on home soil, for nine months later his awful accident at Goodwood would end one of the greatest motor sport careers of all time. Thus Aintree 1961 became, retrospectively, the final opportunity for British spectators to watch their finest driver of the 1950s and early 1960s competing at the very highest level.
Aintree itself provided an appropriately evocative setting for Moss’s last but muted hurrah. To my mind there has always been something delightfully eccentric about an F1 circuit sharing geography with one of the UK’s most famous racecourses – the home of the Grand National, no less. Somehow it reminds me of the old Wembley Stadium, which I visited once, in 1979, to see Arsenal beat Manchester United in a wonderfully dramatic FA Cup Final, and hundreds of times to watch and bet on greyhounds chasing a hare on a sand-and-cinders oval laid around the perimeter of the same famous turf. At Aintree, somewhere beyond the barriers, thoroughbreds often contested big races, but on July 15, 1961, horsepower of a rather more combustible variety monopolised Liverpudlians’ attention there.
The weather showed little interest in hospitality, however. A rainstorm transformed every braking area into a negotiation, every corner into a conversation, and every straight into a test of courage and restraint. Yet there is something peculiarly British about remembering one of the early 1960s’ most seminal races through a curtain of rain. Perhaps sunshine would have diminished it. The downpour added texture, uncertainty, and drama. It turned Ferrari’s domination into artistry rather than routine; it allowed the great drivers to separate themselves from the merely competent; and, in so doing, it enabled Moss to race a Lotus 18/21 as fast as a Ferrari 156, which should not have been possible.
