Howden Ganley – only .62 of a second from tastinG tHe cHampaGne
As Allan Dick has recounted, a young Howden Ganley’s New Zealander racing career ended wrapped around a pole in Dunedin in 1962. While Dunedin was intended by the young man from Hamilton to be his local swansong before heading to the UK, ending in this manner did somewhat alter his circumstances.
Instead of selling the car (a deal had already been done, but the future new owner didn’t want a bent Lotus) and heading for Europe with some spare cash, by the time the unfortunate Lotus was repaired and Howden had repaid the £625 loan from his mother, when he got off the plane at Heathrow, he had the grand sum of £25 in his pocket but still with the avowed intention of being world champion. So much so that he told his family before he left that he would not be returning to New Zealand until he reached Formula One.
He was true to his word but it took some time. It was 1971 when he made his F1 debut in the Yardley BRM and was able to fulfil his promise and make a trip back to New Zealand.
Intending to run a Formula 5000 in the Tasman Series, for some reason which Howden is unsure of, Ron Frost had taken a dislike to the latest New Zealander to make it to Formula One and no amount of negotiation was ever going to see suitable terms being reached with the organisers, much to his disappointment.
It certainly wasn’t that he was in F1 just to make up the numbers. At the end of his debut season, in a car and a team which were on the downhill spiral to extinction, Howden was awarded the Wolfgang von Trips Memorial Trophy, for the best performance by a newcomer to Grand Prix racing.
When he left New Zealand, Ardmore was still the home of the Grand Prix so returning a decade later, this was the first time he had seen the track at Pukekohe. Any possible chances of getting into the good books of Ron Frost were firmly scuppered when he was asked by a local journalist what he thought of the track. “I told him it looked bloody dangerous.” This duly appeared in the New Zealand Herald the next day and the works BRM
Formula One driver was unpopular but to this day unrepentant.
He had travelled to the track with Mike Hailwood, who with 14 wins on two wheels at the Isle of Man TT is not a man to scare easily. Here to contest the Tasman Series in a Formula 5000 Surtees TS8A, Hailwood’s comment to Howden when first seeing the Pukekohe circuit was that if he had know that the track was that bad, he never would have agreed to do the race.
The ten years between arriving in London as an impecunious budding World Champion and finally getting a Formula One drive, would have had many others give up and slink back home, tail between legs and broke. around as an engineer for a road car so he and fellow Kiwi Johnny Muller departed to be mechanics for the Gemini Formula Junior team. Given a chance to drive the team’s second car at a Brands Hatch meeting, Howden did enough to impress team boss George Henrotte and he remained a mechanic/racer until Formula Three was introduced and Gemini withdrew from racing.
Again he was left out of work and a drive, and again, it was a New Zealander who rescued him from oblivion.
It was Eoin Young, secretary to Bruce McLaren. It seemed that Bruce was forming his own team, and would Howden be interested in joining them as a “gopher”?
Working for Bruce, racing had to take a back seat, but the opportunity to drive some of the cars during private test sessions did help keep him enthusiastic.
Working on the top secret project to make a lightweight version of the Ford GT40 as the American giant continued its quest to beat Ferrari at what was the Holy Grail for road-racing, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the result was a car 1000kg lighter than the original 7 litre GT40. This led to Howden being seconded by Ford to work on developing automatic transmissions at the Dearborn headquarters. Jim Hall’s Chaparrels were proving to be competitive with an auto. and one of the Ford men had recently arrived from GM and had knowledge of how the Chaparrel worked.
again he was left out of work & a drive, and again a new Zealander rescued him from oblivion. eoin Young, secretary to Bruce mclaren, said Bruce was forming his own team and would Howden be interested in joining them as a “gopher”?
Howden on the other hand was of sterner and more determined stuff. His first stop in London was the Steering Wheel Club where, like many before and after, he spent night after night nursing a single beer in the hope that someone, somewhere would be looking for a keen young man to drive their car.
His saviour came in the form of another New Zealander, journalist Bill Gavin who introduced him to Falcon sports car maker Mike Mosley. Howden was on the way, as a driver and also as an engineer (despite only limited mechanical know-how, but he learned fast).
After Falcon withdrew from racing, Howden had no intention sticking
Would he what! His first task was to go to Cooper to pick up some tube to make axle stands for the Zerex Special, currently sitting atop a wooden crate in the middle of the workshop. Returning with a Minivan load of tube, team mechanics Tyler Alexander and Wally Willmott had gone home for the day so he bent the tubes and set about making the axle stands.
The following morning when the team returned to work they asked who had made the stands. Discovering it was Howden, the response was, “You didn’t tell us you could weld.” The end result was instead of gopher, he was instantly promoted to fabricator and a new gopher was found.
At the conclusion of the Ford project (Ford were impressed, then promptly handed the car to Shelby who won the Sebring 12 Hour with it, no mention of the fact the car was in fact, a McLaren)
Howden, who had still not taken his eye off the aim of racing in Formula One, remained in the USA working as a mechanic for the 1966 Can-Am season on customer McLaren M1Bs for Peter Revson and Skip Scott. His time in North America meant he had enough money to buy a new Brabham BT21 and set off to live hand to mouth and race by race in the 1967 European Formula Three circus. Bruce McLaren was still taking a keen interest in his former employee and Howden would post him the Formula Three race reports from each week’s copy of Autosport.
McLaren allowed him to use their workshop to rebuild his Brabham at the end of the season. It was at the end of the 1969 season when it finally looked like all the years of work and keeping his name in front of the people who mattered finally looked to pay off for Howden. Bruce McLaren ran a Formula One test session at Goodwood. Both Howden and Swede Reine Wisell were tried out in a McLaren M7. At the end of the day Bruce took his fellow New Zealander to one side and confided that he was intending to retire from driving at the end of the 1970 season. Howden would get a works McLaren for the pre-season non championship Formula One races and Bruce wanted him to do the 1970 season in Formula 5000 and would find a backer to make it all happen. Howden
was to be Bruce’s protégé, groomed to make the final step to a full time Formula One drive. At this time, he had also been offered a works Lotus drive in Formula Three following a test at Snetterton, but the McLaren deal, Formula One and 5000 seemed to be the better route and that was the path he chose.
His M10B chassis was the sister car to the Sid Taylor run car (now owned by the engineer in Ganley had spotted an advantage in the BRM.
Chris Amon tells the tale of leading the 1970 Belgian Grand Prix at Spa in the works March, only to be passed in a straight line by a BRM driver, the BRM showing a most out of character turn of both speed and reliability. Even now, Chris is of the opinion that the BRM engine in the car which robbed him of
while he crossed the line a mere .61 of a second from the winner, he had dropped to fifth place in the closest grand Prix finish of all time
Poul Christie and featured in Issue 48 of Classic Driver) driven by American Peter Gethin who also happened to be McLaren team director Teddy Mayer’s protégé. Gethin won the championship from Ganley who had a great run of 16 finishes from 18 starts, but not quite enough to take the championship. Sadly, the loss of Bruce McLaren on 2 June 1970 was the end of Howden’s Formula One shot with McLaren, Meyer was now in charge and his man Gethin got the ride.
What saved him was a conversation Bruce had with BRM team boss “Big Lou” Louis Stanley at BRM. Howden found himself the no. 4 driver in the 1971 pre-season races and made enough of an impression to be elevated to no. 3 by the start of the season proper. While BRM were in decline by this stage, what looked to be that elusive first World Championship Grand Prix win was a 3.3 litre unit, larger than the 3 litres allowed.
Howden on the other hand is confident the engine was legitimate. Studying the cars at the beginning of the season, he discovered an important edge of the BRM chassis over other chassis, especially on high speed tracks like Spa or Monza. According to Howden’s calculations, the BRM frontal area was 20% less than that of the March or any other car on the grid and the 1971 Italian Grand Prix at Monza backs up his claim of aerodynamic superiority.
Chris Amon had the race sewn up in the V12 Matra, while behind him a desperate group of slipstreaming drivers were engaged in a desperate fight for second place.
Mario Andretti is quoted as saying about Amon, “If Chris took up undertaking, people will stop dying”.
This time Chris’s certain win disappeared when, with only 5 laps to go, he went to remove one of his visor tear-offs and instead the entire visor came away in his hand.
With a 200 mph wind in his eyes, again an almost certain victory disappeared as he drifted back through the pack to finish a devastated 5th.
Up front, things were getting tense. The pack of Ganley and Gethin (BRM), Peterson (March), Hailwood (Surtees) and Cevert (Tyrell) were swapping the lead five or six times per lap, each trying to work out where they needed to be in the final desperate lunge for the finish line.
In that last, frantic blast out of Parabolica, Ganley’s now tired V12 BRM engine got eaten on acceleration and while he crossed the line a mere .61 of a second from the winner, he had dropped to fifth place in the closest Grand Prix finish of all time.
This wasn’t his highest finish; that came at the USA Grand Prix at Watkins Glen when he came in fourth. Another season of Formula One with BRM was to follow. As well, he had signed with Matra for the 1972 sportscar championship and driving the melodious V12 with Francois Cevert, he came second in a Matra 1-2.
With Chris Amon as the sole Formula One Matra driver, Howden has
the occasional test of the F1 car, but at the end of the season they withdrew from Grand Prix racing and went for an all-French line up in sports cars, so again a new drive was needed.
The 1973 season saw him driving for Frank Williams in the Marlboro sponsored Iso.
At the same time, Howden was setting about building his own car, following through on a prediction Bruce McLaren had made in 1970. The car was completed, running the standard Cosworth DFV and Hewland gearbox. A transporter was purchased as well but the embryonic Ganley equipe didn’t have the funds to actually go racing.
The car seemed to have better future prospects than William’s Iso, and sponsors Marlboro were prepared to take over the Ganley car and handed the entire project to Williams as the 1974 Williams entry.
Possibly Frank Williams saw this as Howden trying to take over his team and he wanted nothing to do with it. The engine and transporter were sold and the Ganley F1 car never turned a wheel.
The Iso was not a great car by any stretch of the imagination and at the end of the season, Howden and Williams agreed to a parting of the ways. Howden was sure the Williams car was going to kill him and Frank couldn’t disagree so Howden left on good terms and was negotiating with March for a drive in the 1974 championship.
Sponsorship difficulties meant he only drove the first two Grands Prix of the season, an eighth place in Argentina and a retirement in Brazil were as good as it got, but while he was driving for March, he was receiving strange phone calls in a thick Japanese accent promising a team build around him. Initially dismissing them as hoax calls from his so-called mates, Aussie Tim Schenken or his former BRM team-mate Peter Gethin, he still played along, trying to identify the culprits.
With the March drive looking increasingly insecure, Howden took a punt and signed for the Maki team, fronted by Mr Tojo and Mr Yamamoto. His knowledge of Japanese WW2 military history not being as great as his engineering skills, he only learnt after signing that these were not their real names!
The initial promise soon turned to frustration and disappointment and the British Grand Prix in late July was the first time the Maki ran in anger. Even then, the car arrived a day late and losing a full day of practice meant they were playing catch-up and the end result was that the car failed to qualify for the race.
Two weeks later and the team arrived at the Nurburgring for the German Grand Prix. What was a disappointing outing at Brands Hatch was nothing compared to the disaster which struck early in practice.
Flat-out on one of the ‘ring’s straights, the right hand front suspension failed, pitching the Maki head-first into the barrier taking the front off the car and leaving the driver with massive injuries to feet, ankles and legs. Two days later he was joined in the local Krankenhaus by Mike Hailwood, with similar injuries from a crash in his Yardley-McLaren M23.
The German doctors told Howden he was going to be in the hospital for three months so he and fellow patient Hailwood were more than happy to see Louis Stanley walk in on the Monday after the race and ask if they wanted to go back to England.
While Howden regarded Stanley at the time “a serious knave” – and even more so now with the recent release of a “tell all” book by Stanley’s niece which confirmed many of the racing fraternity’s worst suspicions – he has nothing but praise for how the BRM
boss extracted him and Hailwood from the Krankenhaus, had them flown to England and installed at St Thomas’ Hospital in London.
Despite the Germans telling him he would be in hospital for three months, Howden was out two and a half weeks later, although recovery took quite some time. It was not until May 1975, ironically back at the Nurburgring that he returned to the track, sharing a Gulf-Mirage with Tim Schenken in the 1000km sports car race.
Howden’s Formula One racing career was over although he did testing for March in 1976.
“I did quite a lot of testing on the six wheeler (a twin rear axle, four wheel drive six wheel Grand Prix car). An interesting car which never raced and was never fit to race.
As Robin (March designer Robin Herd) says now, they made a lot of money out of the Scalexric model slotcar. Probably the most money they made out of anything! It’s a bit of a cult car now but it was way too heavy, just as the Williams was (also a twin rear axle car).
When I was talking to Patrick Head about their six-wheeler, he said it was an interesting exercise but it never could have raced. Both of them said they would have to re-design the whole thing. The concept was great but they were not practical race cars being 300lb too heavy.
If you look at Robin’s theory, you want to get the frontal area down. In those days you had small front wheels (and huge rears). Now on a Grand Prix car the wheels are about the same diameter front and rear. So if you used a front wheel at the rear you didn’t have enough rubber on the road. But if you put another one behind it, now you’ve doubled the contact patch and not with those enormous rear wheels.
The Tyrrell had those little dinky front wheels, which was a problem in itself, but with those great big rear ones, what did they achieve in the end? Would the four rear wheel concept eventually have been better? Someone like Patrick Head certainly thought so.
“The March had terrific traction in the rain. We went to Silverstone one day, it was absolutely bucketing down. Nobody else was running, it was too wet. Hanger Straight in those days used to have huge rivers across it and this thing would just go flat out through them. There is some mythology that it wasn’t running four wheel drive but that is just B.S.”
HIS LAST COMPETITIVE DRIVE
came at the Can-am race at Mid-Ohio.
“It was Alain de Cadenet’s Mirage GR7 sponsored by the British Post Office. I had a good time; it was a three litre against all the five litres. I won the three litre category by a country mile and finished fifth overall amongst the big V8s with a DFV.
“On the face of it, it was a good race; I got out of the car and thought, ‘no, I didn’t enjoy it that much’. By then I was seriously into the Tiga thing. I was really enjoying Tiga so I went home and said to Judy, ‘I think that’s probably it’ and it was! She was pretty happy.”
Tiga was a combination of Tim Schenken and Howden Gatnley, set up in 1976 initially to produce Formula Fords but the enterprise proved to be very successful, expanded to Group C, CanAm and Formula Atlantic.
The only difficult part of the Tiga was the pronunciation of the name as Howden explains.
“What we should have done in hindsight is take Y from Timothy instead of taking TI from Tim. We would have got Tiger TYGA then we wouldn’t have had all this Teega/Tiger stuff. I remember having an argument with an American guy once. Eventually he said, ‘Look, I know the guy that owns that company and he told me its teega.’ I said, ‘Well I own the company and it’s Tiger. Sod off!’ I even caught Tim (Shenken) calling it teega once!”
Breaking his own promise of not staying at Tiga “one day longer than 10 years”, Howden walked away at the end of 1987.
After a stint with Australian Vern Schuppan making carbon fibre chassis Le Mans Porsche 962 road cars, he became a director of the BRDC and the Silverstone circuit and still has business interests in motorsport including a company making fuel tanks for various series around the world, from Australian V8 supercars to IRL.
With bases in California and Britain, as well as frequent visits to family in New Zealand, he shows no signs of slowing down, although golf does take a greater priority now. His California home is on a golf course and one of his great passions is running a tournament annually in memory of his wife Judy who passed away from cancer in 2007.
One project remains, the manuscript for his autobiography sits on his desk in the USA and I for one can’t wait to see it on the bookshelf.