MOTOR SPORT FLASHBACK

Brabham to Begg and Moss to myths

Less than two months after becoming the youngest driver to win a round of the Formula 1 world championship, Bruce Mclaren also became the second youngest ever winner, by winning another round. He also became the youngest man to lead the world championship.

Twenty-two year old Bruce Mclaren started the 1960 world championship exactly as he finished 1959 — winning in a works Cooper-climax. On the second to last weekend of January he’d driven the Lycoming to fourth at Wigram but then he was South America bound for the opening round of the new decade. His teammate, Jack Brabham, was the newly crowned world champion — the first to achieve it in a car with the engine behind the driver.

Ferrari continued to resist giving into this movement and arrived in Argentina with three Dino 246s, with their engines where Enzo believed they belonged.

Ferrari’s lead driver of 1959, Tony Brooks, had departed and the cars were

handled by northern Englishman Cliff Allison, Californian Phil Hill, and the aristocratic German Wolfgang von Trips. The works Cooper team comprised Jack Brabham and Bruce Mclaren, while Stirling Moss conducted Rob Walker’s private entry. BRM also stuck to the front-engined layout and had Graham Hill and Jo Bonnier as its drivers.

Lotus had made the switch to the midengined layout but the ship carrying the new car and the Coopers was delayed and only arrived the evening before the event. Practice was extended specially to allow drivers some track time but Lotus was soon giving the field something to think about. Moss was quick and nabbed pole but Scotsman Innes Ireland, in the new Lotus 18, surprised everyone by qualifying second, while the BRMS completed the front row of the 4-3-4 grid.

The Buenos Aires circuit had a reputation for destroying tyres. Mclaren had looked after his well and calmly took the lead with a dozen laps to run. After 2 hours 17 minutes and 49.5 seconds his Cooper, bearing the number 16, crossed the finish line first. Allison’s Ferrari was second while Moss was third after taking over the car Maurice Trintignant had started in. Carlos Menditeguy — the multitalented sportsman reputed to have been one of the world’s top six polo players — was fourth, his Cooper

Maserati powered.

Ireland’s debut had been nothing short of sensational, and if that was apparent to most of the opposition, it was probably most noticeable to the reigning world champions. Arguably, no driver pairing in the history of motor racing had more engineering smarts than the two at Cooper. The car to have from only a few months earlier was now a lucky winner. John Cooper, Jack Brabham, and Bruce Mclaren all knew it. John’s penny-pinching father Charles wouldn’t be convinced as easily but his son dealt with him while he and his drivers set about sketching out the layout of the car that they knew was needed to deal with the Lotus.

THE SECOND ROUND

By the time the teams assembled in Monaco for the second round of the 1960 world championship, much had happened. Cooper’s response to the Lotus 18 was the Cooper T53 — more commonly known as ‘the lowline’. Whereas the T51 was upright in comparison, and the Lotus boxlike, the T53 was a work of art. Not that aesthetics were of much concern to pragmatists like Cooper, Brabham, and Mclaren. Ferrari secretly bought a Cooper to study and Rob Walker

bought a Lotus for his star driver, Moss, reckoning that would give him a better chance at the championship. He won Monaco but Mclaren gave the new Cooper a decent debut with a third ahead of the now dinosaur-like Ferrari of Phil Hill. The T53 was just getting into gear. Brabham won five GPS in succession and sewed up this second championship with his young teammate finishing runner up — Bruce Mclaren’s star was continuing to rise.

DRIVERS TO EUROPE

Bruce Mclaren was the inaugural recipient of the ‘Driver to Europe’ scheme in 1958. After no driver was selected to follow in his large footsteps in 1959, two drivers were given a chance in 1960. Sixty years ago the announcement was made that Denis Hulme from Te Puke and George Lawton from Whangarei would be heading to Europe to compete in both Formula 2 and the relatively new Formula Junior.

As we know, the youngster from Te Puke went onto become world champion but the even younger Lawton’s campaign ended in tragedy when he failed to survive an accident in Denmark.

Our final ‘Driver to Europe’ was Graham Mcrae, who headed away soon after his 29th birthday in the early months of 1969. His return home coincided with the introduction of Formula 5000 to this part of the world. The timing was perfect for the gifted Wellingtonian. Mcrae and the stock block engine open-wheelers were a match made for one another and he won the first F5000 Gold Star championship with one of these ground-shaking crowd-pleasers.

The early rounds of the 1969–70 Gold Star championship gave no indication that Mcrae would emerge as champion. Dennis Marwood had become the first Kiwi to win a race for these new machines in the leviathan-like Eisert at Pukekohe, and then Graeme Lawrence starred in his newly acquired ex-chris Amon Ferrari that had won the 1969 Tasman championship.

Mcrae started off in the ‘so new it was still unpainted’ Begg FM2 but became a contender for the championship once

armed with a Mclaren M10A. George Begg had been building racing cars as a hobby in deepest Southland since the early ’60s — small open-wheelers initially before the jump to a Can-am– like sports racer. More single-seaters followed but for 1968 George hatched a plan that would see him working at Mclaren while his wife could be based on the Isle of Man with their growing family. They had met on the island when George was competing there in his days as a daredevil bike racer.

George honed his racing car building skills at Mclaren and, as with Mcrae, Formula 5000 gave him an opportunity to shine that might not otherwise have existed. George was disappointed with the FM2. Its replacement, FM4, was a marked improvement and, in the highly capable hands of David Oxton, it secured the talented Aucklander the first of his five Gold Stars. The first three of those won in a Begg, but he wasn’t the first to do it.

Teretonga marked the end of the New Zealand phase of the 1970 Tasman championship, won incidentally by Mcrae’s Mclaren — his first big win — and the cars were sent off to Australia for the three rounds there. The week after Teretonga the penultimate round of the Gold Star was to be run at Levels and George offered Mcrae another chance in the FM2. Despite starting on the third row of the grid, Mcrae took the lead just past the halfway mark of the 50-lapper. Battling serious overheating, the future three-time Tasman champion held on to win the biggest race for a Begg up until that point. They must have been hugely encouraged but George and Fred Mclean could not have known it would be the first of many.

BEGGS BACK AT TERETONGA

The cars and life of George Begg are being celebrated at Teretonga between 13 and 16 February. I meet numerous enthusiasts who’ve never been to Teretonga but inevitably add “… must get there one day”. There would never be a better time for that ‘one day’ than February 2020 — just on half a century from the day Graham Mcrae used a Begg to secure his Gold Star title.

Invercargill is now well on the way to its goal of being New Zealand’s petrolhead heaven. In addition to the classic racing at Teretonga, there is the extraordinary Bill Richardson Transport World to savour, Motorcycle Mecca, and the grand opening of the new racing car museum featuring, of course, Southland’s own George Begg. The last time George and his Beggs were celebrated was at Teretonga in February 2007. For the organizers there were some anxious moments in the lead-up as it was known that the star of the show was fading, and indeed he passed away only a couple of months later. Donald ‘the voice of Teretonga’ and I were the MCS for the event and the day after the dinner, at which George had entertained the 400 or so guests with his dry Southland wit and homespun common sense, he was being paraded around the circuit sitting on the back of a Chev convertible, accompanied by his grandson and Graham Mcrae. He called me over before setting off on another parade lap.

“That went pretty well last night,” he said, to which I responded, “George, you were on fire.”

He looked off into the distance for a spell then said, “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

It is a wonderful thing that New Zealand will have a museum dedicated to racing cars, and better still that cars built by our best-known, and most successful, local constructor are featured. Only appropriate then that it’s in Southland — another reason to get onto the Air New Zealand website and find a flight to the deep south. Or, if two wheels are in your armoury, ride down for the Bert Munro and stay on for the George Begg Classic Speedfest.

BIRTHDAY HONOURS

We tend to celebrate especially the anniversaries that end in a zero; indeed for the past 18 years this column has been built around events from that month 20, 50, and so on years ago. An icon of motor racing in New Zealand has a birthday ending in a zero on 4 February, and such is significance to the sport in this country that the fact that he writes for another publication isn’t enough of a reason not to publicly extend salutations.

I started reading the words of Allan Dick in the late 1960s when Auto News was the alternative to Donn Anderson’s Motorman magazine. They are two very different characters and their publications reflected their personalities. Like Donn, Allan is still writing and so, on behalf of all of us who have enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, his unique style: happy birthday, old chum.

MYTHS AND LEGENDS

My wife enjoys ferreting through second-hand bookshops even more than I do and recently she presented me with All Blacks: Myths and Legends by Ron Palenski, an author she knows is one of my favourites. Its arrival coincided with two events: a film ‘based on a true story’ that borrows facts from the 1966 24 Heures du Mans, and a letter to the editor challenging the accuracy of a fact in a recent column, my ‘Brunch with Howden Ganley’. I say fact; the author of the letter wasn’t convinced, claiming Graham Hill was also a mechanic turned driver. While Hill was undoubtedly an accomplished driver, those who knew him considered him an amateur whose enthusiasm exceeded his skills with a spanner, not a real mechanic.

It occurred to me that myths and legends in motor racing could be an interesting study, and over the course of 2020 I intend dropping the odd one into this column. I well remember as a boy being absorbed by the story of the great Tazio Nuvolari chasing down his arch-rival Archille Varzi during the 1930 Mille Miglia by driving the mountain passes flat out without the aid of headlights so as not alert his nemesis to his approach.

The great Nuvolari’s plan, so the story goes, was to shock Varzi by overtaking him on the run into the finish at Brescia. The tale is now part of motor-sport legend, but did it really happen? The surrounding facts don’t offer much support. For a start, the Mille Miglia was a time trial, not a race as such. Varzi had already suffered two punctures so, in fact, he was behind Nuvolari on the road. What’s more, the end of the race occurred in the morning, and in clear weather, thereby negating the need for headlights. Also, if you’ve ever driven those passes, even the skill of Nuvolari is unlikely to have been enough to ‘jump’ Varzi, himself no slouch, let alone close him down in the dark, without lights ...

Romancing the past can come about if a bit of varnish is applied to part of the truth. Hollywood has specialized in it and Ford vs Ferrari proves just how little truth there needs to be to qualify for ‘based on a true story’.