A ONE-YEAR SPELL IN F3000
After Mauricio Gugelmin had become WSR’S third British F3 champion, in 1985, the team snapped up FF2000 king Bertrand Fabi and FF1600 battler Damon Hill for the following season. “It was 21 February and Bertrand got killed down at Goodwood,” reflects Bennetts. “I was about to close down. We’d never had a serious accident before, no injuries at all, and to have a fatal one… I’d taken a big gamble on Damon, but we couldn’t then do anything, so I got Murray Taylor to run Damon.
“Then Mauricio called me and said, ‘I’ve heard what’s happened, I want you to run me in 3000’. I said, ‘We’ve never done 3000’, and he said, ‘I don’t care, what you did for me in 1985 is enough to convince me’. We got a March 86B late and it had pullrod front suspension – very complicated and we’d never run it before – so it wasn’t the best year. But a beautiful-looking car in black.
“And then of course we had the major drama at Pau when he wrote it off in qualifying. We’d made big changes from the previous session, and he was so quick up the hill before the bridge that with the downforce, the car bottomed out when he hit the brakes, and he just went straight on into the concrete parapet. The worst ever time it could happen because we were racing at Spa the next weekend. We were going to have a gentle cruise up through France, but it was a panic back to England, put a new tub on it, back out for Spa. Not the most enjoyable year.”
Bennetts learned a lesson then: don’t get involved in stuff you haven’t had time to prepare for: “We knew we could do a good job, but if you’re not prepared and don’t know how the car works… Even though we knew what we were doing, and Mauricio was very good, it was embarrassing for him and for us. It was very tight schedules, and not much money to test with.
But we did it again in 1996 with the Ford Mondeo!”