Motorsport memory: F1 at Mallory Park

A seven-year-old sees Surtees outshine Clark, Hill and Brabham

Current grand prix cars racing at Mallory Park? Impossible. Well, it was true and I was there for the June 1962 2000 Guineas race, even though the occasion meant more to me in later years than it did as a seven-year-old.

My father and brother had been regular spectators at car and motorcycle meetings for a number of years, but it was a first for me.

The star names were Jim Clark, Graham Hill and Jack Brabham, but it was John Surtees who stole the show, winning the race in his Bowmaker Lola. As we stood and watched in an old grandstand on the inside of the Esses, my brother timed Surtees doing 55-second laps. An onlooker said that was impossible. Surtees’s fastest lap was a 50.8s. Now, F3 Dallaras can lap in 44s.

There were only 13 starters, but the noise of Coventry Climax engines and the Porsches of Jo Bonnier and Carel

Godin de Beaufort was awesome.

Although Hill went on to win the world championship that year in a BRM, for this race he was driving a Rob Walkerentered Lotus. He was third behind Surtees and Brabham, who was in his own Lotus.

Mike Parkes also made his Formula 1 debut in the race, driving a Cooper, before taking a win in the Equipe Endeavour Ferrari GTO in the supporting GT race. When Parkes’s GT car arrived in a plain black van with Ferrari badges, word went around that it was an F1 Ferrari. Reigning world champion Phil Hill was entered, but unfortunately failed to show.

Mini ace John Rhodes raced in the saloons, and the F1 race with a Bob Gerard-entered Cooper, but it was the larger-than-life Dutch Count de Beaufort who gave everyone a laugh, trying to go out for qualifying in his Porsche wearing a Tyrolean hat instead of his helmet.

As we left the circuit we spotted Surtees leaving in his Jaguar E-type, heading for Bowmaker team boss Reg Parnell’s farm near Derby. My father took up pursuit in our Austin A35 van, but we were forced to abandon the chase when I became travel sick after falling off my seat, a Davenports beer crate. I had to abandon my job of leaning out of the window to push the trafficators in too. But the seeds were sown, even though my next F1 race wasn’t for five more years, seeing Jim Clark win his last British Grand Prix.

“WE SPOTTED SURTEES LEAVING IN HIS JAGUAR ETYPE, SO WE TOOK UP PURSUIT IN OUR AUSTIN A35 VAN”