DaviD Young & HowDen ganleY Reminisce
At lunch, Timaru’s David Young and Howden began reminiscing over some of their time as struggling Formula Three drivers far from home. Here is some of the conversation as David comes to grips with a strange-handling car. David is in the UK, it is early 1961 and he has paid a visit to fellow Kiwi Cooper driver Bruce McLaren to discuss the struggle with his new Cooper. ( TH=Tony Haycock)
DY “What happened then was Bruce got a bit serious and asked me what I thought of the car. He asked me what time I was doing around there (Brands Hatch). I told him.
“Oh,” he said “that’s good!” We said “No it’s not!”
“Oh yes,” he said “if you’re doing that time you’ll be right up there. You’ll be fine!”
I said “No Bruce umm, I won’t be because I can’t actually do it if I am sharing the track with someone else! The car was all over the place. It wouldn’t even go down the straight. It would dart from one side of the track to the other. Through Paddock Bend you never knew what it was going to do. It doesn’t do the same things turning right as it does turning left.”
He said, “You gave it a wheel alignment?” “Oh yes.” I told him what we put on it. He said “Yes” and kept asking me questions.
I came up with the answers as best I could.
He said, “Of course you put a string around it before you started, didn’t you?” I said, “What?” “You put a string around it – you made sure it was square? You measured between the axles on each side?”
“No. That’s all done with the chassis.” I thought I was buying a car bloody readymade you know.
“Oh hell” he said, “You’ve got to do that.”
So when we did, the car was just on two inches longer on one side than the other! The back wheels had the toe-in they were supposed to have but they toed-in over one way and the front the other. We ended up cutting lugs off and filing holes. The next time out was in Europe. We drove all night and got to a place called Teramo. Teramo was something else. A dangerous bloody circuit! I hit a wall. TH “Where in Italy is that?” HG “I’ve never heard of it.” DY “On the Adriatic coast. So I smacked it into the wall there, it came out of that pretty second-hand! Then we went to Casserta. You (HG) were at Casserta. We’d fixed it up, it was alright but it was losing power and it wouldn’t pull the revs it should. We discovered before the race that the distributor had never been tightened up. When it was on the dyno it was being moved around but it wasn’t locked down at the finish, so it was slowly retarding itself. We could remember what a 105E (Anglia) was set to. Three degrees advance.” HG “Who did the engine?” DY “Ted Martin. Did you ever meet him?” HG “Yes.” DY “Quite a character wasn’t he?” HG “He did that lovely little V8.” DY “Was it a lovely little V8?” HG “Well, it was a little V8.” DY “Yeah, but was it a lovely little V8?” HG “I don’t think it was too bad. But I remember going to his dyno room when I was driving for Gemini. We went up there and ran a Gemini engine on the dyno. It was a stone building and he had poked a hole in the wall for the exhaust to poke out.” DY “Was that the in the country, in a paddock?” HG “It was on an old airfield, this was in the bomb shelter at the airfield.” DY “It was a cowshed.” HG “I thought it was a bomb shelter.” DY “Well, he might have shifted. Ted was always running out of money.” HG “So he had to keep moving on did he? So you found the problem?” DY “Well, the car wasn’t quite right, but yes. It was ok. I could have fun in it.
The other thing was because it was a Ford engine in a Cooper chassis and the bell-housing on the gearbox was made for a BMC, it had an adaptor plate. Denny and I both got the adaptor plates from the same firm. Denny’s was the original and then they copied all the plates from that.
Some of the copies (like mine) must have been made by the apprentice; they weren’t right. The shaft used to jam in the spigot bearing in the back of the flywheel because nothing lined up. We used to pull the centre out of the clutch regularly. HG “A familiar story!” DY “So you’d be sitting on the start line revving it up. You’d see the guy lift the flag up so you’d pull the revs up and your car would jump forward.
I got away at Casserta late because of that. I duffed the start and I was hell-
bent on picking everybody up. There was a long, long straight which was very bumpy at the end. There were trees growing on either side of the road and the roots had grown under the surface which got the car chattering. But the Cooper could stop! It had great brakes – they were drums, a great set of brakes. So I was charging past all these Fiat engined things. They had their brakes on, I still had my foot on the accelerator. It was bloody great, I was whizzing down the inside of them when this Italian just lost control. The back of his car chattered out in front of me. I must have been doing 40mph more than him. It demolished both cars, we spun off the road and went down through the trees and never hit a thing! He didn’t hit anything, I didn’t hit anything.
That put things a bit skew-whiff for a bit. We had to miss a race after this. We were supposed to go down to Sicily and didn’t, we had to fix the car and went to Monza. We fixed it on the side of the road. We stopped at a country garage. The guy couldn’t speak any English but he welded and patched everything up and put his dies on to cut new threads. He’d clean up a nut and say, “Italiano!” then he’d hold up an axle or something and say, “Inglese!” TH “So this time you ran your piece of string around it?” DY “Yeah, we did that. I didn’t think that when you bought a car from a factory you would have to do that. I thought it would come out like a Vauxhall or a Ford.” HG “Well they weren’t square either! I’m surprised Denny (Hulme) didn’t give you the right steer on all of that?” DY “I don’t think Denny told me all he knew!” HG “Just enough? That sounds about right.” DY “Denny knew more than he let on...”
As David had just discovered, while the experienced Kiwis like Hulme and McLaren were happy to help out their fellow countrymen trying to make their way up in the sport, this would only go so far. After that you were on your own.
Talking about this later in the day with Howden, the attitude (quite fairly) was that as they had to work out the last 20% of how to make it in the hand-to-mouth existence of the lower formulae of European racing, they weren’t going to give up everything to the next newcomer off the boat, just in case they turned up at the next meeting and beat you! All part of the learning experience for any budding future world champion.
Howden had gone to Europe with the single intention of Formula One and the World Championship. David on the other hand was doing it for fun and the adventure of it all. After a season of following the Formula Three circus around the Continent, he decided to return to New Zealand.