FORMULA 1’S SEVENTY GREATEST INFLUENCERS
MORE TRAGEDIES ON TRACK GAVE FRESH IMPETUS TO CALLS FOR BETTER SAFETY – BUT THIS WASN’T ALL THAT CHANGED DURING “THE DECADE THAT TASTE FORGOT”. OUR TRIBUTE TO FORMULA 1’S PIONEERING GREATS REACHES THE 1970s…
For Formula 1, the 1970s started with the posthumous crowning of a world champion. The fatal accident to Jochen Rindt at Monza not only robbed motorsport of a gifted driver but cost Jackie Stewart one of his closest friends, fuelling the Scot’s long campaign to make the sport less lethal for its participants. The last world champion of the 1960s, Stewart went into the new decade as Formula 1’s leading figure: not just as the quickest in the field, destined to win further titles in 1971 and 1973, but as a pioneer in both paddock style and on-track safety.
This son of a Dumbarton car dealer went out of his way to make himself a highly marketable figure, thanks to the long hair, the tartan band around his white helmet and the silver-framed sunglasses with holes drilled in the arms to resemble components from a racing car. Plastic replicas of the sunglasses were soon available on special offer at your local filling station, an early sign that Stewart understood not just how to drive fast but how to monetise his fame.
His work on safety made him a controversial figure with traditionalists, to whom the presence of mortal danger was intrinsic to Formula 1. But he and his wife Helen had attended too many funerals to be deterred. And his critics could be reminded that of his 27 wins from 99 starts, the greatest had come in the 1968 German Grand Prix, when he conquered the Nürburgring’s fearsome 14-mile
Nordschleife to finish four minutes ahead of the field in a race run in rain and mist, an epic drive that called on raw courage as well as sublime skill. It was deeply ironic that his own campaign should consign such deeds to history.
Having started his F1 career with three seasons at BRM, Stewart won all his world titles with the team run by Ken Tyrrell, who had raced in the old 500cc Formula 3 and spent a year in Formula 2 before deciding that his involvement in motor racing should take a different form. Running his own team from a timber yard in Surrey, Ken moved into Formula 1 in 1968 in partnership with Matra, the French automobile and aerospace firm, using the Ford-cosworth DFV engine. After winning the drivers’ and constructors’ titles with Stewart in 1969, Tyrrell decided to build his own Dfv-engined cars, designed by Derek Gardner.
Their first car, the Tyrrell 001, started its debut grand prix from pole position (having been withdrawn after practice at its first world championship appearance) in 1970. Its successors took Stewart to another title in 1971, and to his third championship two years later. In 1976 Gardner’s revolutionary Tyrrell P34 became the only six-wheeled car to win a grand prix, Jody Scheckter and Patrick Depailler finishing first and second in Sweden. When Tyrrell retired in 1998 after selling the team to the founders
of British American Racing, cars run or constructed by Tyrrell had won 33 grands prix from 463 starts. BAR eventually became Honda, which became Brawn, which became Mercedes, ensuring that a trace of Ken Tyrrell’s old-school racing DNA remains in F1.
The 1970s were only six months old when Bruce Mclaren was killed during a test session at Goodwood at the age of 32, but his name would ring ever louder as the years went by. Born in Auckland, the son of a garage owner, he was hillclimbing at 14 in an old Austin 7 modified by his father and racing at 16. In 1958 his speed in the New Zealand GP at the wheel of an F2 Cooper previously raced by Jack Brabham drew international attention. By the start of the following season he was alongside Brabham in the works Cooper F1 team full time, finishing runner-up to his team-mate in the title standings, Bruce’s victory at Sebring making him, at 22, the youngest winner of a world championship grand prix to that date.
After six more seasons with Cooper and two more wins, he left at the end of 1965 to race cars of his own design. Painted in a distinctive shade of orange, the Mclarens enjoyed their initial success in the Canam sports car series, the first F1 victory coming at Spa-francorchamps in 1968, with Mclaren at the wheel. After his death in 1970 the team continued, run first by Teddy Mayer and then bought by Ron Dennis, eventually achieving eight constructors’ championships and 12 drivers’ titles. After carrying the liveries of various sponsors, the cars are now back in a similar shade to Bruce Mclaren’s original ‘papaya’ orange.
Emerson Fittipaldi, the first Mclaren champion in 1974, had come into F1 at the start of the decade. Promoted from the Lotus F2
“LAUDA WAS BACK IN THE COCKPIT AT MONZA WITHIN SEVEN WEEKS OF THE ACCIDENT, HIS HEAD WOUNDS STILL BLEEDING THROUGH HIS BALACLAVA”
team by Colin Chapman, the 23-year old from São Paulo, whose mother and father had both been racers, soon established himself as a frontrunner. The natural choice as team leader after Rindt’s death, Emerson won at Watkins Glen in Lotus’s next race a month later. Reliability problems with the Lotus 72, coupled with the aftermath of a road accident, made 1971 a washout, but the following year Fittipaldi won five of the series’ 11 rounds in the black and gold JPS colours to become, at 25, then the youngest champion in Formula 1’s history.
Three wins in 1973 were not enough to prevent Stewart from winning the title, and at the end of the year Fittipaldi accepted an offer from Mclaren, and the M23 carried him to three more wins and his second title. Two wins the following season made him runner-up to Niki Lauda, but Emerson and older brother, Wilson, had already launched the project to build and run Brazil’s first F1 car, known – after its sponsor, a sugar company – as the Copersucar.
The team survived for eight seasons in F1 but could achieve only three podium finishes from 103 starts. Emerson retired at the end of 1980, aged 33, but returned in 1984 to race in the CART series, winning the championship and the Indianapolis 500 in 1989 and pipping his team-mate Nigel Mansell to win a second Indy in 1993. A year later Fittipaldi was one of the pallbearers at the funeral of Ayrton Senna, his fellow Paulista and Brazil’s second F1 champion. In 1996 an injury during a CART race in Michigan ended Emerson’s driving career, six months short of his 50th birthday.
Scuderia Ferrari had endured a decade of failure in F1 when
Luca Cordero di Montezemolo was hired to take charge in 1974. A 26-year-old law graduate from an aristocratic family, he relieved designer Mauro Forghieri of the additional burden of team management and built a positive relationship with Ferrari’s new recruit, the 23-year-old Austrian driver Niki Lauda. In 1975 the combination swept all before it. Forghieri’s 312T gave Lauda five victories on his way to becoming Ferrari’s first champion since John Surtees in 1964. A year later, having thoroughly restored the team’s morale, the charismatic Luca – as he had become known throughout F1 – was promoted up the Fiat hierarchy.
His spectacular progress through the Italian business world included a spell heading the Italia 90 World Cup organising committee. But in 1991, with Ferrari again in the doldrums three years after the founder’s death, Luca returned as president. As it had done in 1973, his panache, energy and intuition helped the team to re-emerge. This time the revival was more gradual, but within five years he had assembled a team ready not just to win titles but to eventually crush all opposition.
Niki Lauda came from a wealthy background, but he had needed guile and persistence to make his way into F1 in the face of his family’s disapproval. A slight young man whose prominent front teeth earned him the unenviable nickname of ‘The Rat’, he did not look, at first glance, like hero material. But he was quick, and he was brave. At Maranello he earned immediate respect by telling Enzo Ferrari exactly what was wrong with his car. He was battling to defend his title in 1976 against a challenge from James Hunt when he crashed at the Nürburgring, suffering severe facial burns and inhaling toxic smoke from the blaze. Read the last rites by a priest, Lauda battled to recover, knowing that Ferrari would be taking steps to replace him. Niki was back in the cockpit at Monza within seven weeks of the accident, his head wounds still bleeding through his balaclava, and finished fourth in an epic show of defiance. But his decision to withdraw soon after the start of a rain-drenched Japanese GP, the season finale, allowed Hunt to take the title and drove a wedge between Lauda and Ferrari.
He stayed for one more season, winning a second title before accepting the sport’s first $2m contract to drive for Bernie Ecclestone’s Brabham team. Lauda won the 1978 Swedish GP in the short-lived BT46B ‘fan car’, and won again at Monza in a regular BT46, but dramatically called it a day during practice at Montréal at the end of 1979 and went off to start an airline. When that proved to be a bumpy ride, Lauda accepted Ron Dennis’s offer to sign with Mclaren for 1982. A regime designed by his old physio, Willy Dungl, got him back into shape, but it would be a while before he hit his full stride, taking his third world title in 1984 by half a point from
team-mate, Alain Prost. After one win – his 25th – in his final season, at Zandvoort in 1985, Lauda stepped out of the cockpit for good.
A consultancy role at Ferrari was followed by an unsuccessful spell as Jaguar’s team principal, but in 2012 he became non-executive chairman of the Mercedes F1 team, persuading Lewis Hamilton to join it the following season. Lung and kidney problems associated with Niki’s Nürburgring crash began a decline that ended with his death in May 2019, aged 70, removing a unique and cherished figure who had taken it to the limit and beyond, and lived to tell the bullshit-free tale.
The astonishing Brabham fan-car had been created under the supervision of Gordon Murray, a designer who led the way in finding radical solutions and identifying loopholes in F1’s complex technical regulations. Born in Durban to Scottish parents, he studied mechanical engineering and raced his own single-seater in South Africa before coming to Britain in 1969, aged 22. Ron Tauranac offered him a job at Brabham, where he was promoted to chief designer in 1973, shortly after Ecclestone’s purchase of the team.
The Dfv-engined BT44 brought three wins for Carlos Reutemann in 1974 and one each (in B-spec) for Reutemann and Carlos Pace the following season. A deal to use Alfa Romeo engines was a backwards step, producing only two wins in four seasons, but a return to Cosworths and later the acquisition of BMW engines unlocked the potential of Murray’s designs, leading to world titles for Nelson Piquet. In 1987 Murray joined Mclaren, for whom he designed the F1 supercar, before leaving in 2007 to found his own consultancy.
Lauda’s most colourful rival during his Ferrari years was
James Hunt, the public schoolboy who had taken Fittipaldi’s place at Mclaren. Lauda and Hunt had raced against each other in the junior formulae, and despite the contrasting public personae which made their duels such a box-office attraction – the ascetic Austrian versus the long-haired, flipflop-wearing Hunt the Shunt – they were good friends. Hunt had already made an impact while driving for the team of Lord Alexander Hesketh, notorious for bringing the hedonism of the rock and roll backstage area to the grand prix paddock; in those dope-scented days Hunt’s overalls carried a badge reading “Sex: breakfast of champions”.
But he was a serious talent, as he proved by winning the 1975 Dutch GP in Hesketh’s own car, and the move to Mclaren for 1976 gave Hunt a firmer platform. In the second race of the season, at Kyalami, Lauda edged him into second. Two races later, at Jarama, the positions were reversed (Hunt’s car was disqualified for being too wide but re-instated on appeal). Lauda won at Zolder and Monte Carlo, Hunt at Paul Ricard and a rowdy Brands Hatch (from which he was later disqualified). Then came the Austrian’s near-fatal crash in
Germany (where Hunt won). Hunt also won at Zandvoort, Mosport Park and Watkins Glen, sealing the title when Lauda stopped at Fuji.
Three wins in 1977 would be Hunt’s last. At the end of the following year he moved to Wolf, where crashes caused by breakages led him to retire mid-season. In 1979 he began working for the BBC as Murray Walker’s co-commentator, always saying exactly what he thought. A more settled period of Hunt’s once turbulent personal life prefaced his sudden death in 1993, aged 45, from a heart attack. His modus vivendi hadn’t pleased everyone, but he brought a raffish glamour and unbuttoned spontaneity to a sometimes stuffy paddock.
Fittipaldi, Lauda and Hunt were among those who benefitted from the patronage and friendship of John Hogan, an Australian advertising executive who joined Philip Morris Inc in 1973 and spent the next 30 years funneling the tobacco company’s huge promotional budget towards F1 teams, notably Mclaren and Ferrari. Thanks to him, cars painted in the colours of Marlboro cigarette packets became a fixture at the front end of the grid.
In 1980 Hogan worked with Ron Dennis to rebuild Mclaren, leading to world championships for Lauda, Prost and Senna. With Ferrari, Hogan began by paying the drivers’ salaries, and in 1996 the entire budget was shifted away from Mclaren and into the Italian team, which continues to benefit from the arrangement. Hogan left Philip Morris in 2002, briefly running Jaguar’s F1 team before becoming a consultant. A member of the Formula One Commission from its inception in 1982, he was the definition of an insider, unknown to the public but hugely influential.
When Renault, a company which had competed in the very first grand prix in 1906, crept back into top line motorsport at Silverstone in 1977, many scoffed at the yellow car with a 1.5-litre turbocharged engine as it spluttered around in the wake of the grown-up threelitre machines, finally expiring when the turbo itself packed up. Few envied its driver, Jean-pierre Jabouille, the reigning European F2 champion. But the 34-year-old Parisian was a key member of a team committed to the long haul of developing the new technology until it could better the performance of its naturally aspirated rivals. He had helped André de Cortanze with the design of the first car, the RS01, and struggled through the remaining races of 1977 and most of 1978 until a chink of light opened with a fourth place at Watkins Glen.
The following year, with a new car, the RS10 (designed by François Castaing, Michel Tétu and Marcel Hubert), the jour de gloire arrived. At Dijon on 1 July, 1979 a French driver in a French car running on French tyres and French petrol won the French GP. Jabouille would win only one more grand prix but he had proved his point. The next generation’s future would be turbocharged.