When Southport was headquarters to F1
to discuss our proposal.
“The proposal being, with 13 games to go until the end of the season we would inject a considerable five-figure sum to give the club a playing budget which we believed would give them a fighting chance of surviving relegation from the Northern Premier League.
“In return there would be a restructuring of the board and a new management structure would take over the running of the team.”
United eventually made the drop into the HSL Premier Division.
“I want a lot of people for us to do well because there’s not a lot of people who want us to do well for some reason,” he said.
“There’s been a lot of politics I don’t know about. I’m not from Skelmersdale and I don’t know what’s been going on. I’ve found out halfway through the season [about the cash-injection] and thought if everyone wants what is good for the club they will hold their egos in check but that doesn’t always happen. But that isn’t for me as a manager to worry about”.
WORLD CHAMPION Lewis Hamilton is targetting a record sixth British Grand Prix win at Silverstone on Sunday.
Hamilton aims to overtake the five GB GP victories already achieved by himself and two other world champion legends, the late Jim Clark, who started his winning run back at Aintree on Merseyside in 1962, and Frenchman Alain Prost, with three victories in the 1980s and two in the 1990s.
And as the five times world champion driver attempts to set another record in his Mercedes AMG Petronas Motorsport F1 W10 this weekend it’s hard to believe that 64 years ago a small garage in Sefton Street, Southport (pictured), was being used as the temporary headquarters for the legendary MercedesBenz team in the lead up to the 1955 British Grand Prix.
And on Saturday, July 16, 1955 the Southport Visiter reported that the Lewis Hamilton of the day, Stirling Moss, driving for Mercedes, made history by becoming the first British driver to win a current World Championship British Grand Prix.
Just as it is today the Mercedes team, which has already won eight out of the nine races so far this season in the hands of Hamilton (six wins) and Valtteri Bottas (two), was the team to
beat.
The “Silver Arrows” were invincible and Moss, led home a Mercedes-Benz one-twothree-four with a dominance that is unlikely to to be repeated.
In front of a record crowd of 150,00 spectators Moss won the 270 mile (90 laps) race by the narrowest of margins, just 0.2 seconds, from Mercedes’ team leader five-times World Champion Juan-Manuel Fangio from Argentina.
And completing the Mercedes clean sweep came Karl Kling from Germany and Piero Taruffi from Italy in third and fourth places.
The Mercedes quartet had shattered the opposition including the might of Ferrari, the only other team still competing in Formula One
And today in 2019 Scuderia Ferrari is battling to end Mercedes’ present supremacy with its line up of four times world champion Sebastien Vettel and a possible champion of the future - 21-yearold Charles Leclerc who narrowly missed out on a maiden F1 win in Austria, after a dramatic battle with the eventual victor Max Verstappen in his Red Bull-Honda, only last week.
Meanwhile it took another 59 years before Hamilton matched Moss’ feat and won a British Grand Prix in a Mercedes-Benz. That was in 2014.
But it was not Hamilton’s first British Grand Prix triumph.
That came in July 2008 when he was driving for McLaren, where the head of race engineering and race operations was former Formby and Merchant Taylors, Crosby schoolboy, Steve Hallam, with a master class drive in the wet at Silverstone.
He added another three British Grand Prix victories - all with Mercedes - in successive years 2015-2017 and narrowly missed out of making it five in a row last year after delivering a “Hammertime” drive from last to second, beaten by just three seconds by Vettel in his Ferrari.
The annual celebration of the British Grand Prix (its future at Silverstone is being negotiated this week) while a city race in London is also being discussed, brings about a timely reminder that Southport played its part in a period when five World Championship British GPs were staged at Aintree during the 1950s and early 1960s, on the site of the famous Grand National Racecourse.
And as they say every picture tells a story and the one with this article depicting the legendary Mercedes W196s in the Sefton Street works of Thomson Doxey Ltd well know motor engineers in Southport in 1955, together with some of the 24 Stuttgart-based mechanics and possibly members of a group of signwriters from J.Rigby and Son (Tulketh Street) who gave valuable assistance during race week.
The group included the boss J.Rigby, Tom Thomas, John Jackson, John Pollitt and Terry Meadows who in a letter in 1995 said: “We had all trooped down to Sefton Street after last practice on Friday to put the numbers on the cars (There were no graphics in those days).”
Terry had recalled sitting in what went on to become Moss’s racing winning No 12 W196 and carrying the whole body shell around the workshop “it was that light.”
After Mercedes’ triumph at Aintree in 1955 there was high praise for Thompson Doxey from legendary team manager Alfred Neubauer at a private reception held in Southport.
He declared: “I think the works organisation and fine engineering facilities made available to our team were all that could be desired and our success was helped by these fine engineers.”
This weekend the present day Mercedes AMG Petronas Motorsport team will be looking to another British driver to continue their impressive record.
Lewis Carl Davidson Hamilton (MBE), already with 79 wins to his name in 238 F1 starts, will be more determined than ever to register that record sixth British Grand Prix victory and another chance to “crowd surf ” with what is likely to be another record breaking race at Silverstone this weekend.