BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS
Half a century on, Surtees was matter-of-fact about the achievement. “It was very satisfying,” he says. “It would have been nice to win the race, but I was happy for Dan, because I rated him very highly. He had his ups and downs, in life as well as racing, but he was a damn good driver.”
Surtees would go on to take more wins, but just one would come with the team he’d taken to victory in one of the sport’s tightest championship finales. Within two years his relationship with Ferrari had soured: a lifethreatening accident midway through 1965 led to a long lay-off and when he returned, political machinations saw Surtees quit in dramatic style following a controversial 1966 Le Mans outing.
“A little clique had developed in my absence; there was a bit of jockeying for position and certain people wanted to make the most of my being out the way,” Surtees recalled, not without bitterness. “It was deeply upsetting. I had come back from my accident, I had moved to Italy. Enzo had said, ‘I want you here more; here’s a flat for you.’ I started to move in, but there was also this situation going and it wasn’t helped by my fellow countryman, Mike Parkes.”
It came to a head at Le Mans. Team manager Eugenio Dragoni left Surtees off the roster for the two cars entered, handing Ludovico Scarfiotti, nephew of Fiat chief Gianni Agnelli, the lead of one car alongside Parkes, and put Jean Guichet and Lorenzo Bandini in the second. As legend has it, Dragoni’s excuse was that Surtees’ injuries made him unfit for an endurance race. Incensed, Surtees walked out.
“For a long time I felt real anger about the way it ended with Ferrari,” Surtees recalled. “Not with the Old Man, because I thought he had been manipulated, but the situation and about what we’d lost, because we had potentially two or three titles there, but we chucked them away.”
Later, Surtees and Ferrari repaired the rift but despite the rapprochement, the pain of missed opportunity still appeared to hurt Surtees almost half a century later. “The Old Man put things right when he said to me shortly before he died: ‘John, we must remember the good times and not the mistakes.’” Surtees said. “We talked about a lot of situations. But rather like that decision back with Chapman, I was perhaps a bit hasty in looking at things in such a black and white way. Perhaps I shouldn’t have… but I was leading the championship.”
Surtees finished the ’66 season at the wheel of a Cooper-maserati, winning the season’s final race, and then in 1967 a new challenge arrived, with the fledgling Honda team, though the project was not without its difficulties.
“We were carrying 400lb! It was ridiculous. I had tested the Lola Indianapolis car that had been built for 1966. But I had to concentrate entirely on Ferrari. So I suggested they put Graham Hill in the car and he won Indy with it. I said: ‘Why don’t you team up with Lola because I think that if you put your heads together we can come up with an interim car.’ I spoke to [Lola designer] Eric Broadley and he said yes. That became the ‘Hondola’. We finished it just before Monza and in a fairly eventful race it won.”
The next season was far from satisfying, culminating in the death of Jo Schlesser at the French GP after Surtees refused to drive a car he believed was flawed. Honda’s first F1 adventure ended, but building up their racing programme opened another avenue for Surtees.