Club column: Marcus Pye

The Oulton Park Gold Cup is one of the biggest historic events on the calendar, but its origins were as a Formula 1 race that was usually won by Stirling Moss

“MOSS’S MASTERY WAS SUCH THAT HE WON THE FIRST FIVE F1BASED GOLD CUPS”

Established in 1954 as a non-championship Formula 1 race, Oulton Park’s International Gold Cup event brought top-class motor racing to enthusiasts in the North West.

Aintree, 35 miles distant in Liverpool’s suburbs, would not host its first British Grand Prix until the following season, when the victor was the same man, rising star Stirling Moss in a factory Mercedes-benz W196 as opposed to his Oulton-winning Maserati 250F‘2506’.

Moss’s mastery was such that he won the first five F1-based Gold Cups [the 1956-58 events featured a non-f1 theme], each time in a different car, all in entrant Rob Walker’s colours.

Jack Brabham, Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart, John Surtees and Denny Hulme – with 10 F1 world titles between them – all won the Gold Cup, as did sportscar superstar Jacky Ickx in 1969. Surtees scored his first Gold Cup win in an F2 Lola in ’65, but after F1 victories in eponymous TS7 and TS8 models, his fourth, in a Maserati 250F in ’81, revisited the event’s origins as a‘one-off’historic showcase.

It was during the Gold Cup’s F5000 era that Mancunian Derek Bennett’s Chevron marque was first inscribed on its roll of honour. Having put the F1 hierarchy’s noses out of joint by beating the three-litre cars in Brands Hatch’s 1973 Race of Champions at Brands Hatch, Peter Gethin drove a sister B24-chevrolet to victory at Oulton. David Purley also triumphed with the one-off Ford GAA V6-engined B30 in ’75.

Oulton was a spiritual home to Bennett’s boys, a place where the intuitive designer, taken too soon at 44 following a hanggliding accident in 1978, could hop into any of his creations on a test day and lap as quickly as works aces Brian Redman or Gethin – an extraordinary skill set that furthered Derek’s reputation for developing cars that flattered amateurs and rewarded professionals equally.

The first Chevrons were B1s, built for the new Clubmans class in 1965, but within a year beautiful little GT cars started rolling out of the factory. Oulton was always a happy hunting ground, indeed the Lotus-ford twin-cam powered B3 prototype won there on its debut with Digby Martland, on July 23 ’66. Redman mirrored the feat in the one-off BRM V8-engined B5 in ’67.

Countless successes saw seven production B6 models manufactured in 1967 and 44 B8s emerge from the former cotton mill in Bolton – Chevron’s home – a year later. Generic‘chevron Gt’production thus passed 50 examples, earning FIA Group 4 homologation. Fifty years on, the universally revered B8’s golden jubilee will be celebrated with a special race at this weekend’s

Gold Cup, original drivers including Martland, John Burton,

Brian Classic, Dr Tony Goodwin, Roger Heavens, Peter Lawson, Ian‘mo’skailes and Pete‘ rhubarb’ smith among them.

Apart from a deep-rooted love of Chevron cars since childhood, I have many happy memories of the Gold Cup, from long before international motorsport’s landscape changed and the meeting became a hugely popular cornerstone of the Historic Sports Car Club’s calendar. The HSCC’S CEO Grahame White is equally passionate about the marque, having been sales director in the 1970s during a break from event organising.

In the spring of 1977, in my pre-autosport days, old pal Robert Synge persuaded Derek Bell to give us a lift to Oulton Park, where he was testing Paul Michaels’s Penske PC3. Derek won Good Friday’s Gold Cup race and later recalled how he was stopped by Hampshire police en route home. They were surprised to find a large trophy in his Jaguar XJS’S boot, more so that he’d won it in the north of England earlier that day!

In the British F1 Championship era I reported the 1979 and ’80 Gold Cup races, and later, in its Thundersports phase, I lucked into finishing second to the Group C2 TIGA-DFL of Tim Leedavey/neil Crang in the ’85 edition, driving Chester Wedgwood’s two-litre Chevron B36. It was without fourth gear and on mismatched rear tyres following an early puncture.

In the event’s Historic epoch, the Hart 420R engine drive belt in the ex-k ekeRos berg 1977 En na F 2- winning B 40 I co-owned with Simon Hadfield caused heartache in 2003. But a superb run in Vin Malkie’ sB 1 and third in the unique ex-get hinF5000B 37– after a battle with hero Red ma nina B 42– more than atoned. From a Formula Junior Lotus 18 to F5000 Mclaren M10B, I enjoyed plenty of Gold Cup track action before taking up the Knickerbrook commentator’s position, working with lifelong Oulton devotee Ian Titchmarsh, as I will this weekend.

A very special Chevron memory, however, comes from an HSCC Snetterton enduro in 1982. Sharing the ex-knight brothers Targa Florio class-winning B8 with preparer Roger Andreason – and WDK Motorsport’s MD Ian Cox on spanners – we finished second to its owner Tony Gordon and Stirling Moss in a B 19. Almost 30 years after his maiden Gold Cup victory, the great man was still winning in style…