My First Grand Prix
This is very topical, coming as it does just before the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing and also as this years British Grand Prix is almost upon us. The link between two seemingly unrelated events will become clear as you read on.
For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by Grand Prix Racing, or just F1 as it seems to be called in these dumbed down days.
In my early childhood and teens there was no internet, no social media, no wall to wall instantaneous coverage of everything on the planet. Instead, as radio and TV had practically no coverage of Grand Prix racing at all, I had to rely on newspaper motor racing coverage that was often days out of date and results tended to just include the first three places. I had to wait until Thursday when Motoring News (as it was then) and Autosport came out to discover any more detail about the previous weekends races. In the meantime my imagination had to try and fill in the blanks.
Once I was in my teens, it was easier and cheaper to go to WHSmiths on a Saturday and stand and read the GP report in Autosport over and over, until I had remembered it. In those days I bought just five editions of that ridiculously expensive magazine each year; those that covered the Monaco GP, British GP, Italian GP, the annual GP Season Review and Le Mans. The big draw for me were the pictures of cars and their drivers. The weekly broadsheet style Motoring News was very much more statistical and word orientated, but was ideal for me to find out more about obscure races in far flung places, such as the annual Tasman Series of races in Australia and New Zealand for Grand Prix style cars, but with smaller capacity engines. I used to read those reports trying to imagine what it must be like in those places that I would never be able to afford to visit. Pukekohe, Teretonga, Warwick Farm, it all sounded so glamorous.
At this time BBC TV started to have the occasional GP on live and in one of the earliest, I can clearly remember seeing John Surtees win the Italian GP in 1967, driving a British built Honda. That's the sort of thing I wanted to see and feel part of.
As the school holidays of the Summer of 1969 began, my father managed to get hold of a pair of tickets for the British Grand Prix at Silverstone on Saturday, 19th July, which a local Ford dealership had been given by Ford. It would mean a ridiculously early start from out home in Cornwall, but who cared, I would actually get to see GP cars racing!
Just to put this particular British GP into context, the entire world was preoccupied with Apollo 11, which had launched from Cape Canaveral on Wednesday, July 16th 1969 and was on it's way to the Moon. The day after the race, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to land on the Moon. It is just impossible to over-estimate how important and exciting this event was and how it dominated every item of news completely, utterly. And yet other things continued to happen, including the British Grand Prix. For me, the race was far more important.
On the morning of the race, we got up at 3am, leaving home at 3.30am and stopping once for breakfast somewhere along the A303 (No motorways in those days!), we eventually joined the queue outside the locked gates of Silverstone some time after 7am.
The weather had been dry and sunny for several days and it was a lovely July morning. Standing by the car, waiting for the gates to open, there was a strong smell of bacon, which although we had already had breakfast, just somehow seemed to make it seem more exciting.
The gates opened and after parking the car we had to find our way to the infield, as our Ford tickets gave us access to the Paddock and over the pits walkway. For the race we had standing tickets for the enclosure on the inside of Woodcote, which was a flat out corner in those days.
As it was early in the morning, we spent ages walking up and down, watching the preparations for the race and staring at (and smelling!) the cars. I couldn't get over the fact that you could get right up to the cars and spent some time standing within touching distance of the Mexican driver, Pedro Rodriguez's Ferrari. The Italian mechanics were unsuccessfully trying to start the engine, which included squirting fuel directly into the air intakes. Standing next to me, through all of this was one of Ken Tyrell's English mechanics, saying nothing. Eventually the Ferrari mechanics realised that a rival team's mechanic was watching them, at which point he simply said to the Italians "Nothing trivial I trust" and sauntered off. Very English. Very 1960's. Top trolling.
The contrast to the conditions the current F1 mechanics work in is almost unbelievable. Now the mechanics work in almost sterile conditions, nearer to an operating theatre than anything else. Back then they had to work in the open, behind the garages on a gravel surface. The cars were lifted (manually) onto spare wheels on their sides, to give the mechanics room to work underneath. Worlds apart.
We then moved onto the walkway above the garages to watch the morning warm-up. We stood above the McLaren pits, watching team leader and 1967 World Champion Denny Hulme, who had qualified third fastest, having a very long conversation with his mechanics and team manager about the aluminium strip on his rear wings trailing edge. I don't know who won the discussion, but it was eventually just pulled off and a smaller strip was taped on, which meant that there was less downforce to hold the car down, but the car would be faster in a straight line, crucial at one of the fastest tracks in the world.
After a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich from a rather unhygienic looking caravan in the paddock area, we went to stake our claim in the area just inside Woodcote Corner. We watched one of the preliminary races and realised that we were almost within touching distance of the cars as they went past absolutely flat out. We didn’t see them for very long each lap, but my god, we couldn’t have got any closer to them!
Eventually the cars came out for the warm up lap and assembled on the starting grid, with the last three rows being level with us. For anyone who has seen F1 recently and the lack of noise produced by todays machinery, I really cannot stress enough how mind-bendingly loud those engines were, particularly the 12 cylinder Ferrari’s and BRM’s. Even though I had been expecting it to be loud, the start was something else. The engine revs rose in seventeen cars and the noise reached a crescendo, the race began and the ground was vibrating, my ears stopped hearing and even my teeth hurt. Wow! That is what it is all about then.
As for the race itself, it very quickly settled down to a battle between Jochen Rindt in the Gold Leaf Team Lotus 49B and Jackie Stewart in the Ken Tyrell entered Matra MS80. For lap after lap they came past us, seemingly tied together with a piece of string and very rapidly pulling away from all the others. As the cars were strung out all around the track, sound levels returned to the just about bearable. Sometimes, when there was a bit of a gap, you could actually talk to each other.
It was about this time that an eagle eyed bloke near us noticed that Rindt’s rear wing had an endplate that was becoming detached and was almost touching the tyre. It was getting nearer and nearer the tyre with each passing lap and eventually he had to pit to have it removed. That was the end of the contest for the lead, as Stewart was so far in front. The interest then switched to what Rindt could do after his pitstop. As it turned out, not much, as both Rindt and his team-mate, Graham Hill were suffering from signs of fuel starvation. In short they were running out of fuel. Both had to make late stops for more fuel.
It was at this point that my father (bless him) announced that we were leaving, even though the main race hadn’t finished and we would miss the last race, but time has dimmed the memory and I have no recollection of what class of machine the last race was for. I wasn’t going to argue, as it was a hell of a drive back to Cornwall, on less than ideal roads, so we drove out of the circuit, with me having wound down the car window to listen to the wail of the engines for just a few more seconds. I think that was the root of my dislike of leaving any event before the end. Even today, I get irritated at St.Mary's by those people who leave before the final whistle.
Still, that was one hell of an experience for a young lad. And the very next day Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon.
For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by Grand Prix Racing, or just F1 as it seems to be called in these dumbed down days.
In my early childhood and teens there was no internet, no social media, no wall to wall instantaneous coverage of everything on the planet. Instead, as radio and TV had practically no coverage of Grand Prix racing at all, I had to rely on newspaper motor racing coverage that was often days out of date and results tended to just include the first three places. I had to wait until Thursday when Motoring News (as it was then) and Autosport came out to discover any more detail about the previous weekends races. In the meantime my imagination had to try and fill in the blanks.
Once I was in my teens, it was easier and cheaper to go to WHSmiths on a Saturday and stand and read the GP report in Autosport over and over, until I had remembered it. In those days I bought just five editions of that ridiculously expensive magazine each year; those that covered the Monaco GP, British GP, Italian GP, the annual GP Season Review and Le Mans. The big draw for me were the pictures of cars and their drivers. The weekly broadsheet style Motoring News was very much more statistical and word orientated, but was ideal for me to find out more about obscure races in far flung places, such as the annual Tasman Series of races in Australia and New Zealand for Grand Prix style cars, but with smaller capacity engines. I used to read those reports trying to imagine what it must be like in those places that I would never be able to afford to visit. Pukekohe, Teretonga, Warwick Farm, it all sounded so glamorous.
At this time BBC TV started to have the occasional GP on live and in one of the earliest, I can clearly remember seeing John Surtees win the Italian GP in 1967, driving a British built Honda. That's the sort of thing I wanted to see and feel part of.
As the school holidays of the Summer of 1969 began, my father managed to get hold of a pair of tickets for the British Grand Prix at Silverstone on Saturday, 19th July, which a local Ford dealership had been given by Ford. It would mean a ridiculously early start from out home in Cornwall, but who cared, I would actually get to see GP cars racing!
Just to put this particular British GP into context, the entire world was preoccupied with Apollo 11, which had launched from Cape Canaveral on Wednesday, July 16th 1969 and was on it's way to the Moon. The day after the race, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to land on the Moon. It is just impossible to over-estimate how important and exciting this event was and how it dominated every item of news completely, utterly. And yet other things continued to happen, including the British Grand Prix. For me, the race was far more important.
On the morning of the race, we got up at 3am, leaving home at 3.30am and stopping once for breakfast somewhere along the A303 (No motorways in those days!), we eventually joined the queue outside the locked gates of Silverstone some time after 7am.
The weather had been dry and sunny for several days and it was a lovely July morning. Standing by the car, waiting for the gates to open, there was a strong smell of bacon, which although we had already had breakfast, just somehow seemed to make it seem more exciting.
The gates opened and after parking the car we had to find our way to the infield, as our Ford tickets gave us access to the Paddock and over the pits walkway. For the race we had standing tickets for the enclosure on the inside of Woodcote, which was a flat out corner in those days.
As it was early in the morning, we spent ages walking up and down, watching the preparations for the race and staring at (and smelling!) the cars. I couldn't get over the fact that you could get right up to the cars and spent some time standing within touching distance of the Mexican driver, Pedro Rodriguez's Ferrari. The Italian mechanics were unsuccessfully trying to start the engine, which included squirting fuel directly into the air intakes. Standing next to me, through all of this was one of Ken Tyrell's English mechanics, saying nothing. Eventually the Ferrari mechanics realised that a rival team's mechanic was watching them, at which point he simply said to the Italians "Nothing trivial I trust" and sauntered off. Very English. Very 1960's. Top trolling.
The contrast to the conditions the current F1 mechanics work in is almost unbelievable. Now the mechanics work in almost sterile conditions, nearer to an operating theatre than anything else. Back then they had to work in the open, behind the garages on a gravel surface. The cars were lifted (manually) onto spare wheels on their sides, to give the mechanics room to work underneath. Worlds apart.
We then moved onto the walkway above the garages to watch the morning warm-up. We stood above the McLaren pits, watching team leader and 1967 World Champion Denny Hulme, who had qualified third fastest, having a very long conversation with his mechanics and team manager about the aluminium strip on his rear wings trailing edge. I don't know who won the discussion, but it was eventually just pulled off and a smaller strip was taped on, which meant that there was less downforce to hold the car down, but the car would be faster in a straight line, crucial at one of the fastest tracks in the world.
After a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich from a rather unhygienic looking caravan in the paddock area, we went to stake our claim in the area just inside Woodcote Corner. We watched one of the preliminary races and realised that we were almost within touching distance of the cars as they went past absolutely flat out. We didn’t see them for very long each lap, but my god, we couldn’t have got any closer to them!
Eventually the cars came out for the warm up lap and assembled on the starting grid, with the last three rows being level with us. For anyone who has seen F1 recently and the lack of noise produced by todays machinery, I really cannot stress enough how mind-bendingly loud those engines were, particularly the 12 cylinder Ferrari’s and BRM’s. Even though I had been expecting it to be loud, the start was something else. The engine revs rose in seventeen cars and the noise reached a crescendo, the race began and the ground was vibrating, my ears stopped hearing and even my teeth hurt. Wow! That is what it is all about then.
As for the race itself, it very quickly settled down to a battle between Jochen Rindt in the Gold Leaf Team Lotus 49B and Jackie Stewart in the Ken Tyrell entered Matra MS80. For lap after lap they came past us, seemingly tied together with a piece of string and very rapidly pulling away from all the others. As the cars were strung out all around the track, sound levels returned to the just about bearable. Sometimes, when there was a bit of a gap, you could actually talk to each other.
It was about this time that an eagle eyed bloke near us noticed that Rindt’s rear wing had an endplate that was becoming detached and was almost touching the tyre. It was getting nearer and nearer the tyre with each passing lap and eventually he had to pit to have it removed. That was the end of the contest for the lead, as Stewart was so far in front. The interest then switched to what Rindt could do after his pitstop. As it turned out, not much, as both Rindt and his team-mate, Graham Hill were suffering from signs of fuel starvation. In short they were running out of fuel. Both had to make late stops for more fuel.
It was at this point that my father (bless him) announced that we were leaving, even though the main race hadn’t finished and we would miss the last race, but time has dimmed the memory and I have no recollection of what class of machine the last race was for. I wasn’t going to argue, as it was a hell of a drive back to Cornwall, on less than ideal roads, so we drove out of the circuit, with me having wound down the car window to listen to the wail of the engines for just a few more seconds. I think that was the root of my dislike of leaving any event before the end. Even today, I get irritated at St.Mary's by those people who leave before the final whistle.
Still, that was one hell of an experience for a young lad. And the very next day Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon.