How do you run an old F1 car?
Rod Jolley tells Autosport about racing his 1959 Cooper
Preparing classic cars for clients to race has become big business as the popularity of historic motorsport has swelled. Rather than a season being truncated by the fragility of older cars, the likes of Hall and Hall, Classic Team Lotus and Martin Stretton Racing specialise in delivering to their customers turnkey levels of reliability and performance.
While some companies run a full-time operation with a team of mechanics and travel to races with articulated transporters, there are still some who prefer to go their own way. Rod Jolley is one driver who still works out of his own garage, believing he is better dialled-in to find problems with his grand prix cars and develop his own solutions. And with more than 360 trophies decorating his house, it’s clear that it’s still possible for a comparative minnow to go it alone.
The key to being a successful privateer is attention to detail, says Jolley, who races a 1959 Cooper-climax T45/51 Formula 1 car that he bought unseen from Australia in 1990. “When a car is together, it’s all about spending at least a day every time you come back from a race meeting taking all the body panels off, putting it up on the stands and cleaning everything,” he says. “And when you do that you find things, you notice cracks in the chassis or a little bit of play in the wheelbearing or you check the brake pads.
“You get to know your car, know the weaknesses, and you get to know what to look for. There are certain things I check; for instance, the rear driveshafts – they can break and when they do they can cause a lot of damage.”
The payoff for knowing the intricacies of a car that Jack Brabham
Jolley’s Cooper gets full workover after every race; he knows it inside-out
drove to F1 championship success in 1959, and was used by Bruce Mclaren at Sebring for his first grand prix win, is that Jolley doesn’t need a blank cheque in order to compete. And, as he found out at the first ever running of the Historic Grand Prix of Monaco in 1997, which he won, it also frees up time at the circuit.
“There are all these girls and boys there, flying in over the Swimming Pool in their helicopters, with their 250F Maseratis,” he says. “There were teams of mechanics having the wheels off and radiators off doing this and that.
“My little car is just sat there and a guy came along and said, ‘Well, aren’t you going to do anything to it?’ So I got a bucket of water and washed it! I went out and won the race. That proved to me that you don’t have to have pots of money to be successful. If you’re dedicated enough and have some talent, you can be successful without being a millionaire. It’s just the wife and me, no mechanics, but we did it and beat a lot of people that should have been quicker, on paper.”
Through countless hours spent in his garage, Jolley has built up a relationship with a 239bhp piece of history funded by the sale of his business that built bodies for, most notably, Ferrari 250 GTOS. It’s also a relationship that carries over into the cockpit.
“I think in many ways doing my own prep actually can give an edge because when I’m out there racing the car I can feel something through my backside. When you feel a vibration you can make a decision – ‘Yeah, I know what that is. That’s OK, I can carry on,’ or, ‘I don’t like that. I’d better pull in and check it out.’
“Whereas a guy who has his car prepared professionally, as soon as he feels something he probably feels as though he needs to get it checked out. Or completely the reverse – they’ll drive it until it breaks. We see that a lot and it’s criminal.
“The problem is that some of those guys have so much money that actually they know they’ve got a problem as the water temperature has gone off the clock and they’ve got two more laps to go. They know it’s going to cost them £30,000 or £40,000 to rebuild the engine, but they do it anyway.”
As historic racing garners more attention and draws in bigger names from touring cars and sportscars, some cars are developed to perform well above their period ability. Speculation over cars running enlarged engines and more power is rife. By contrast, Jolley is particularly proud of how original he has kept Brabham’s 2.5-litre winner, managing the balance of preservation versus development to stay competitive.
“Obviously there’s no point in building in original weaknesses if you can eliminate them,” he explains. “So we incorporate those changes but within the constraints of what you’re allowed to do. Another thing is that, when you think about it, Brabham and Mclaren, who drove that car, they only drove it four times maybe in a year. The next year they had another car. I’ve had 27 years out of that, so I’ve developed it – only suspension settings and so on – to be what I like it to be.
“If you can make the driveshaft from something slightly stronger, what’s the point in having the weaker one and letting it break?
We’re not developing the cars out of context though.”
That’s why the inside wheel of the Cooper still lifts under load, just like it did with Brabham and Mclaren at the wheel 60 years ago. The car never ran a rear anti-roll bar, so it raised a tyre off the ground through an apex. In turn, that puts more load through the rest of the car and increases the rate of wear. Eliminating it could be an easy fix, but that’s not in the spirit of racing a thoroughly original car. Instead, for Jolley, it’s a constant process of refining the front-suspension settings to compensate.
It’s also why he’s reprofiled the tyres on his other car. The second part to Jolley’s collection is a 3.8-litre Lister-jaguar raced by Jack Fairman in the 1958 Race of Two Worlds – where both F1 and Indycars competed on the banking at Monza.
The Ecurie Ecosse-built ‘Monzanapolis’, based around a Jaguar
D-type engine, is limited in its adjustability. So to hone it to
Jolley’s preference, he’s shaved the inside of the Dunlop rubber to artificially add camber and prevent the persistent problem of it overheating the inside of the tyre. It’s not only allowed within the rules of the Historic Grand Prix Cars Association with which
Jolley competes, but it’s a modification that doesn’t evolve the car away from its period history.
Although that sort of improvement is low-hanging fruit for someone so connected to his car, there are still inevitable
Jolley has REPROFILED HIS LISTER-JAGUAR’S TYRES TO PREVENT THE RUBBER OVERHEATING
Sliding style (right) may not be the quickest way, but it’s the most fun, reckons Jolley
trade-offs for Jolley doing the work by himself and not having a team of professional mechanics.
“The shock absorbers on the Cooper
I put on at least 15 years ago,” he says.
“I only just realised that you’re meant to service them every year. So the guy that took them away said the right rear was completely destroyed internally and had just been bottoming out and nothing was working at all. All the rest of them had oil in such a disgusting state that he couldn’t imagine they were working at all. So we should have some shock absorbers and wheels pointing in the right direction. It might be better this year.”
If even someone as familiar with his own car as Jolley can miss such issues, it’s little surprise that he thinks both the one-man bands and the professionally-prepared entries have a place on the grid.
“They’re needed,” he says of the bigger teams. “There’s an awful lot of people out there that have got the money, but no mechanical ability. If we didn’t have teams like that, then we wouldn’t have those people racing with us or that quality of cars. You need the experts and the poor guys like us. Without both, then there won’t be enough racing. It’s a mix – there’s room for everybody.”
Room for both means entry-list numbers are strong – the
HGPCA race at the 2017 Silverstone Classic topped 50 starters.
The professional car-preparation squads allow more drivers and spectators to relive a chapter from motorsport’s past. But going it alone and accumulating enormous success is still entirely possible. Both help keep racing cars doing what they should.
“Museums are like a morgue to me,” concludes Jolley. “These cars need to be raced. In a museum they’re dead.”