LUNCH WITH … HOWDEN GANLEY — F1 MECHANIC TO DRIVER
MICHAEL STOPS TO CHAT WITH HOWDEN GANLEY — SECOND-PLACE-GETTER AT LE MANS, COMPETITOR IN 35 FORMULA 1 GRANDS PRIX, AND FORMER TEAM OWNER — THE ‘NOT SO WELL KNOWN’ NEW ZEALANDER WHO MADE HIS PROFESSIONAL LIFE IN THE STRATOSPHERIC AND HIGH-OCTANE WORLD OF FORMULA 1
Amutual friend describes Howden Ganley as “an absolute racing junkie” and it’s an apt description. He’s just as interested in studying the rear-suspension geometry on a New Zealand homebuilt special at Teretonga in February as he is in analysing the pedigree of a pre-war Grand Prix (GP) car at Goodwood in September. Quite simply, he loves it.
When Howden became besotted with motor racing while attending the 1955 GP at Ardmore, he completely immersed himself in the sport with a need to understand every aspect of it. With a formidable memory, his recall of the day that changed his life is crystal clear: “My younger brother Denis was going to Ardmore with Father, and they suggested I might like to join them. I had no interest initially, but, the day before, I decided I’d go. Father had been the previous year so knew we needed to be down at the Cloverleaf corner for the best viewing position. I had no idea what to expect, and, because it was a hot, still day, it didn’t take me long to be wishing I was back in Hamilton on my yacht. The first race of the day was a heat for the Grand Prix, and, for the first time in my life, I saw a current Formula 1 car. I can remember it like it was yesterday; in a flash, any thoughts of a life in the Navy vanished — from that moment, all I wanted to do was be a Grand Prix driver.”
Waikato and beyond
It was a long road, but, in March 1971, Howden made his Formula 1 debut in the South African GP, driving a British Racing Motors (BRM) car and, in doing so, became the first — and only — man in history to race in Formula 1 (F1) who had also worked as a mechanic in the same. As we sit down for brunch in early August in the Blackhawk Country Club restaurant, in California, I mention that part one of this story will feature in the October issue of New Zealand Classic Car, and this will be 50 years on from when he became the first driver to lap Brands Hatch at over 100mph in a Formula 3 (F3) car.
“That was a pretty significant day. It brought me very much to the attention of Bruce [Mclaren], and from that came the Formula 5000 drive in 1970,” he says.
After a solid season, where he finished runner-up in the championship, the invitation came to join BRM, followed by Williams for 1973, and then March briefly at the start of 1974, before the ill-fated Maki was ready.
None of that, or the life he now has living in an exclusive gated community with two golf courses (Howden’s house backs directly onto a fairway) a short drive from San Francisco, would ever have happened without Bruce Mclaren.
“I had two dedications in my autobiography. The first was for Judy, and the other for Bruce — my mentor —
“Bruce asked some questions about my mechanical knowledge and seemed satisfied with my answers. I was to start the following Monday at the workshop occupied by Eoin, Wally Willmott, and Tyler Alexander”
without whom there would have been no story,” he tells me.
It was Bruce’s widow, Patty, who introduced Howden to her Californian friend, Judy — herself a former racing driver of some note — and it is impossible not to comprehend the deep love they enjoyed when reading his brilliantly titled autobiography The Road to Monaco. Judy died in 2007 after 32 years of marriage.
“We were married on Judy’s birthday.
She figured that way I’d never forget our anniversary. It was the greatest day of my life,” he recalls.
Journalist, mechanic, driver, dishwasher, concreter, pump attendant
Howden’s road to Monaco started when he was 18, initially in a Prefect, followed by an Anglia, and then his mother’s Morris Minor.
“These were grass-track events at Raglan and Waharoa, but I soon decided I needed a proper racing car, preferably a sports car, so that I could do as many sports car races as possible, as well as ‘Libre’ events with single-seaters. Wear and tear did not come into my calculations at the time,” he says.
After sampling his father’s Buckler, Howden set his sights on a Lotus Eleven: “I was friends with Jim Palmer, and he’d raced an Eleven prior to getting a Lotus Fifteen. I was familiar with both cars, having travelled to some of the races with the Palmers and written features for both Sports Car and Lotus Owner.”
In mid 1960, the ex-palmer Eleven was on the market.
“I’d read about Stirling Moss selling everything he owned to buy his first racing car and, because I just had to have it, everything apart from clothes and books was sold,” he tells me. “I was still short so convinced my grandmother to give me all my birthday and Christmas presents for the next few years, including my 21st, in advance and in cash. I wasn’t earning much as a cadet reporter for the Waikato Times so started washing dishes at night at Lenny Gilbert’s restaurant.
“By then, my parents had begun to realize that my dream wasn’t just a passing fancy and things got very tense when they initially told me they wouldn’t grant the parental consent necessary for anyone under 21 to get a racing licence. The arguments raged for two weeks, but I eventually managed to convince them that I was serious and they dropped their opposition.
“The licence was signed and, even better, Mother agreed to loan me the balance I needed to buy the Lotus. Then Father agreed to loan me his road car as a tow vehicle, and Jim’s dad, George, lent me their trailer, so Denis and I were off to collect it.”
Ex-journalist
Howden recalls that the reaction at home to the news that he had quit his ‘professional’ job at the Waikato Times “went down like a lead balloon, but they refused me leave to enter the two support races at the 1961 Grand Prix meeting, so I arranged a job on a contracting gang”.
That Lotus, which Howden now owns again, was a stepping stone that served him well through the summers of 1960–’61 and 1961–’62, until disaster struck in the Dunedin road race in early 1962.
He recollects: “Near the top of Cemetery Hill, a power pole seemed to reach out and grab me. Luckily, it hit on the passenger side. Here I was with no tow car, a bent racing car, virtually no money, and needing to get back to Hamilton.”
There was no point in feeling sorry for himself; Howden was on a mission, and the next stage meant getting to the centre of the motor racing universe: England.
“I had a concreting job during the day and then pumped gas when I wasn’t washing dishes, so I repaid my debts and got a little travelling money together,” he states.
Looking for work
“I arrived in London on a wet and foggy afternoon, the week before Easter in 1962,” Howden begins. “Strangely, I felt immediately at home. The immediate goal was to find a job.
I started off by preparing all the cars for the start of a teaching season for a racing driver school.”
This involved rebuilding engines, differentials, a gearbox, and some welding: “Jimmy [Palmer] and I had done a welding course at night school and it stood me in good stead.”
Some sports car drives were arranged, but, of course, an aspiring GP driver wants to be in an open-wheeler. Working as a mechanic at Gemini led to a test session in Gemini’s Formula Junior at Brands Hatch.
“I was delighted and did a series of 10-lap runs, making sure I didn’t crash. My good friend John Muller, who was also a mechanic at Gemini, indicated that I’d done some good times, but I was over the moon when I got told I was now the number-two driver,” he says. My first Junior race was at Goodwood in September 1963. I was assigned the lead car, meaning that I’d gone from mechanic to number-one driver in a couple of weeks — beyond my wildest dreams.”
Unemployed
Sadly for Howden, Gemini’s days were numbered, and, after its demise, it was necessary to look for alternative employment.
“For the first time in my life, I was unemployed; even worse, I had no drive.”
I ask whether at any point, in the middle of a British winter, he considered jacking it all in and returning to sunshine and sailing in New Zealand. “Never,” he replies, “even when I ended up working in a rubbish tip for a few weeks. You always hoped something would be just around the corner.”
And so it was: “Eoin Young phoned and said, ‘Bruce is here and would like to talk to you’. Bruce came on the line and said he wanted to expand his team and [asked] would I like a job? He asked some questions about my mechanical knowledge and seemed satisfied with my answers. I was to start the following Monday at the workshop occupied by Eoin, Wally Willmott, and Tyler Alexander. So I became the next employee and mechanic number three — although as far as Wal and Tyler were concerned, I was no more than a gopher.”
The early days of the Mclaren team revolved around sports racing cars, the predecessors to the Can-am machines. For 1965, Chris Amon was enlisted, leading to a lifelong friendship between him and Howden. Given that Chris was some 18 months his junior, did Howden ever think that being mechanic to a younger driver meant that his chances of making it had gone? “No, because I think I realized Chris not only had a special talent but was also so extraordinarily young when he started. I would look at Denny, because he was over a year older than Bruce, and he’d been plugging away for years and was now looking like he was on the cusp of a Grand Prix drive with Brabham.”
In addition to the Mclaren sports cars, there was the Ford Group 7 car, ‘Big Ed’, and the first Mclaren F1 car for the small team to busy itself with. The F1 debut for Mclaren was at the 1966 Monaco GP, which was Howden’s only GP as a mechanic.
He remembers: “John [Muller] and I were designated to take it down. Mclaren didn’t have a transporter at that time, so we set off for the south of France in a Ford Fairlane station wagon towing a trailer. Robin Herd [the car’s designer] joined us. There was virtually no motorway network in France, and we gave local motorists a bit of bother because the back of the Fairlane was full of toolboxes and spares and, with the weight of the trailer, the nose of the Fairlane was well up in the air. This meant our headlights were full in the eyes of oncoming traffic, even on low beam. We got to Monaco, found a little garage that Bruce had organized, and started to get set up. I’d never been there before, but it all looked so familiar from all the photographs I’d seen in books and magazines.”
The early days of the Mclaren team revolved around sports racing cars, the predecessors to the Can-am machines. For 1965, Chris Amon was enlisted, leading to a lifelong friendship between him and Howden
Resigns
Mclaren’s F1 debut had been a forgettable experience, with the central issue being the weight / lack of horsepower from the converted Ford Indy 500 engine. In Monaco, there had already been plans discussed for an Oldsmobile-based engine, but, when they arrived at the factory on the Wednesday after the long drive back through France, a new plan was announced: “‘Don’t unload the car. You’re going to Modena with it. Tonight.’”
When there was no answer to Howden’s question, “We’ve just come from that direction; why didn’t you stop us en route?”, he handed in his notice. The dream of racing himself was still alive but had to be deferred while he took a job as a mechanic on a two-car team of private Mclarens in the new Can-am championship for 1966. He was assigned to the car of future Mclaren F1 driver Peter Revson, who, Howden recalls, “always regarded me as his mechanic and was a little bit startled when I joined him and Denny on the podium at Riverside after a Can-am race in 1971. It was like, ‘Why is my mechanic standing up here?’.”
This was followed by a job back in England building Mclaren Can-am cars at Trojan to provide with the funds for his goal of racing in F3 in 1967. Once armed with his brand-new Brabham BT21, resplendent in New Zealand’s official racing colours of dark green with a silver stripe, Howden was ready to put working on other people’s racing cars behind him. There was good starting money to be made in Europe, Scandinavia especially. Through 1967 and 1968, the results with the Brabham could be best described as solid rather than spectacular, but that all changed when Howden discovered the queue for a new Brabham in 1969 to be very long: “The car was late going into production, and it was looking like being well into the season before my car would be ready. This turned out to be a lucky break for me, because there was a much earlier delivery position on Chevron’s new B15. So, I took the option, and it turned out be the turning point for me. Once I got the latest down-draught engine, my results really improved, and included a pole and that first 100mph lap at Brands.”
Climbing the ladder
Chris Amon once described Howden as “a quiet worker” — as in, ‘he’s invariably always got something on the go but keeps it all low profile and below the radar, in typical Kiwi fashion’. Funding for the Chevron came from an enterprise that Howden started: servicing Hewland gearboxes.
“This was an off-season way of generating some income but it grew,” he explains. “By the middle of 1968, I was struggling to keep up with the gearbox work and go racing, so I got an employee. Eventually, I had six guys working for me, mostly on F3 boxes, but a number of F2 [Formula 2] teams and some F1, as well as doing some new builds for Hewland when they got overloaded.”
Howden continued making regular visits to Mclaren and noticed an F2 M4A monocoque that had been crashed by Piers Courage.
“All the salvageable bits were built onto a new chassis, and the bent one was put to one side for ‘when we have time’. It lay about for ages, and, one day, I asked Bruce if there were any plans for it. He asked if I wanted it. I certainly did, and then he remembered a big box of spare suspension bits they had for the Brmpowered M4B F1 car that had been burnt out at Goodwood and was never going to be usable now that there was no car. I hired Jimmy Stone to help me, and we repaired the tub. I then thought about the body and suggested to Bruce that it would be nice to make a miniature version of the 1968 F1 M7A.
“Typical Bruce, he was immediately enthusiastic and personally supervised a new body using M7A moulds. I bought an engine from Frank Williams and had a lovely little F2 car for 1970. By then, however, other things were happening, so I never got a chance to race the car that Bruce and I agreed should be designated ‘M4C-1’.”
Those ‘other things’ would involve a semiworks Mclaren in the 1970 European F5000 championship, but, before then, Howden would make his Formula 1 debut, which is where part two of this story will start next issue.
Chris Amon once described Howden as “a quiet worker”