MAN WITH A PLAN
Ron Gaudion came to the UK looking for work – and found himself pit crewing at Le Mans in 1955, ’56 and ’57
‘AFTER LE MANS IN 1955 we felt good, but we didn’t celebrate because of the accident. In ’56 we had a few beers, having beaten Moss and Collins in the Aston Martin into second place. But in ’57, when we came first and second, David Murray was so pleased that he laid on a wonderful dinner in one of the hotels in Le Mans. It was fantastic.’
In his soft Aussie drawl, Ron Gaudion is recalling his time as a pit mechanic at Le Mans with, firstly, Jaguar in 1955, and then with the Ecurie Ecosse team in 1956 and ’57. Ron who? Chances are you will never have heard of him, but this dyed-in-the-wool Australian was the first employee taken on by Jaguar to build the production D-types, and he looked after them during their competition heyday of 1955-57.
Ron moved back to Australia in 1958 to take up a job with BP and has been under the radar ever since. But now he’s making a rare visit to the UK and catching up with old mates such as Norman Dewis, with whom he worked on the D-type programme.
‘I landed in England in January 1954 and got a job for ten months in Manchester,’ he recalls. ‘But I’d come over to further my knowledge of the automotive industry, so in January 1955 I drove to Birmingham and went round Norton, Triumph and Beezer [BSA]. No-one was hiring. My last visit was to Jaguar on a Monday morning. No luck there, either.’
Fortunately for Ron, it turned out that, while the personnel manager at Jaguar had completely forgotten about the new sports-racing car project that was about to begin, the labour exchange in Coventry hadn’t. Two days later, he officially started work at Jaguar as the first employee drafted in to help translate Malcolm Sayer’s D-type sketches and blueprints into metal.
‘At eight o’clock on Wednesday I walked between the lines of MkVIIs and XK140s and into the Experimental Department. The superintendent, Phil Weaver, told me about this completely new concept of the “monocoque” and got me making patterns in eighth-inch steel plate for the front subframe.’
Initially Ron was employed as a toolmaker but, as the deadline for Le Mans drew nearer, he was asked to help assemble a couple of works racing cars in the Competition Department. Then, because he already had a passport – a rarity for most Brits – he was invited to accompany the Jaguar team to Le Mans…
It turned out to be a mixed blessing. Ron was standing on the pit wall when Lance Macklin’s ’Healey and the Mercedes 300 SLR of Pierre Levegh collided, sending the Mercedes cartwheeling into the crowd. More than 80 people died and up to 200 were injured. Ron himself has terrible memories of the crash.
‘There were two guys standing just below me, a gendarme and a who was there to check the lead seals on the cars, and they were literally cut in half by the ’Healey. Next day, we were having breakfast behind the pits, and someone noticed something lying in the paddock. It was the hair and half the face of a lady who’d been killed by the radiator of the Healey, which had been thrown right over the pits.’
Fortunately, 1956’s Le Mans was a much happier time for Ron. He had recently joined David Murray’s Ecurie Ecosse team, which was entering a solitary D-type for the 24 Hours. It won the race, without drama of any kind. ‘We were lucky to win against all that opposition,’ he says simply.
For 1957’s event, Ron was chosen to deliver a 3.8-litre fuel-injected D-type to Le Mans. ‘I was tailend Charlie in a convoy of four D-types, and as we were driving down to Brighton I got separated from the car in front by a frustrated farmer who shot out of a gateway in his tractor. When he turned off, I had to catch up because I didn’t know where the airfield was for the Silver City Freighter that was taking the cars to France! The road was a little bit damp so I was getting wheelspin in top gear – and I later calculated from the revcounter that I’d been pulling 151-152mph. It was the fastest I’d ever been in a D-type.’
Life during the race itself was very full-on. ‘We’d be up for about 36 hours, from 8am on Saturday, and by the time we’d packed up after the race and had a few gargles it would be near enough Monday morning.
‘After the 1957 event we loaded the transporters and drove the cars straight to Monza, where we were racing against the Indianapolis cars. Being an oval, Monza suited them and they were running bigger wheels, but we were limited to 160mph to avoid throwing tyre treads. The Yanks were rebuilding their suspensions and changing gearboxes in the breaks between the three heats, but our cars had just come straight from Le Mans and we didn’t touch them other than for doing the usual checks on brakes and for overrevving, which would mean taking a cylinder head off.
‘We finished fourth, fifth and sixth behind the Americans, but if there hadn’t been three heats over the 500 miles, if it had just been a case of going the full distance, I think we would have tossed them. The engines were very reliable. We rarely had to do much more than top up with oil during driver changes – and sometimes we didn’t even have to do that.’