NIGEL ROEBUCK’S HEROES
Frank Gardner, a jobbing racer with the skill for a good F1 career
STRICTLY, I’M AWARE THAT FRANK GARDNER...
...doesn’t belong in a series called ‘Formula 1 Heroes’, as he would have been the first to acknowledge. As far as Formula 1 is concerned, his résumé runs to only eight grands prix starts, plus a handful of non-championship races, all of them – save the 1967 Oulton Park Gold Cup, when he drove a factory Brabham – in uncompetitive cars.
Undoubtedly, he had the talent for an F1 career, but perhaps more than any other racing driver I have known, Gardner was a down-to-earth realist. “I liked the idea of F1 as much as anyone – but not at any price. In something competitive, yes please, but I never could see the sense in driving a third-rate car, starting near the back, just so you could tell the world you were an F1 driver – and nowadays half these blokes seem to be paying for the privilege! I mean, what’s the point?”
Good question, it seemed to me at the time, and one that still might reasonably be put to all but a handful of the 20 drivers now.
“I suppose I preferred to be a big fish in a smaller pond,” Gardner went on, “in the sense that I always needed to think, going into a race, that I could win it.” And – F1 apart – winning was something he did a lot. In show business they talk about ‘jobbing actors’, and it might be said that Frank was a jobbing driver, albeit a superior one, who could turn his hand to anything.
He won the European Formula 5000 title in 1971, and three times the British Saloon Car Championship; in 1967 he was runner-up in the European F2 Championship, in the heyday of the Tasman Series was a frontrunner, drove for Ford at Le Mans, even briefly tried his hand at NASCAR. Gardner drove everything, and with conspicuous success.
As well as that, thanks to his wonderfully laconic sense of humour, he was a journalist’s dream. In my very early days, on a dank November afternoon in 1972, I trailed to Snetterton, where he was testing his Camaro. It was getting dark by the time he parked for the day, and in the drizzle we repaired to the paddock café – no Café Royal – for a chat.
The environment could hardly have been less conducive to levity, yet I laughed more than in any other interview I have ever done. You were allowed to do that back in the day, and I quoted Frank verbatim, leaving nothing out. His remarks didn’t raise a blip at the time,
but in today’s woke world some, I fear, would provoke apoplexy.
In what was an infinitely more perilous period of racing than now, Gardner was, above all, a survivor. He was at his best, I found, when reminiscing about really bad cars, and when I think of him now, what instantly comes to mind is the original Porsche 917. In time, of course, it became an iconic racing masterpiece, but in early 1969 was so lethal that none of the contracted Porsche drivers wanted to go near it.
“Very early on,” Brian Redman remembered, “I got a call to come and test the 917, and I thought, ‘Hmm, they’ve got 10 drivers in the team – why do they want me?’ So I said I had some very important business, but I’d see if I could put it off, and I’d call them back in an hour. I rang Siffert: ‘Seppi, have you tested the 917 yet?’ ‘No, no, Brian – not me. We let the others find out what breaks first!’”
Thus it was that, as the Nürburgring 1000kms approached, Gardner got a call. “The money they were offering was certainly good enough to cross a strip of water and get in the thing. I shared the car with David Piper, and after one lap in practice he was all for going back to England, but I pleaded with him to stay because the money was right.”
The early 917 had an alloy space-frame chassis, which was gas-filled, and in the cockpit was a large gauge which measured the pressure. “If it zeroed, they said, that meant that the chassis was broken, and I should drive mit [with] care back to the pits. I decided that if it zeroed I wasn’t going to drive it care anywhere – I was going to park the bastard there and then, pick up my Deutschmarks and get home to Mum.
“Then there was the engine – you had about 300 horsepower at 5000 revs, and then between 5000 and 6000 you picked up another 300! So it was a bit of delight, really, and it was on narrow nine-inch rims all round. The computer had said they would make the car very quick in a straight line – but the computer wasn’t strapped in the cockpit up in the Eifel mountains, where you tend to get the odd corner...”
Nor was that the end of it. “You sat between these pannier tanks, which bulged when they put the 40-odd gallons of fuel in. On top of all that, even with ear plugs, the engine was loud to the point of being disturbing. Literally, it was bloody hard to think – you were horrified by all the activity, your brain numbed by the vibration, the power and the wheelspin. The chassis flexed so much that the actual position of the gearchange would change – you’d reach for where the lever had been last time you used it, and it wasn’t there!
“It was simply indescribable, the motor car, and the weather did its best to help, as well. Snow and rain all the way. But we got it through to the end, seventh or somewhere – and in addition to paying me, they tried to take up a collection for an Iron Cross, which they reckoned I’d earned...”
There followed an invitation to drive the 917 at Le Mans in June, but Gardner decided against. “The money was great, but I’d learned my lesson. Rolf Stommelen went like hell with the thing, but he had the whole of the Fatherland on his back, and had to rise to the occasion. Like I always said, I never wanted to be the quickest bloke in motor racing, just the oldest – and that car was certainly going to interfere with those plans. You don’t make any money in hospital...”
A trip to Australia every year for the grand prix, used unfailingly to include a catch-up with Frank Gardner, one of those racing people you truly miss. At 78, he died in Sydney in 2009.
I NEVER WANTED TO BE THE QUICKEST BLOKE IN MOTOR RACING, JUST THE OLDEST