Chance of a lifetime: Townsend Bell
When an Indycar exile tried his luck in Formula 1
An unlikely sequence of events led Townsend Bell to sample a Jaguar Formula 1 car at Valencia in November 2003.
Bell had won the 2001 Indy Lights title, and made his CART Indycar debut before the end of that year. He seemed destined for a long career at the top level of US open-wheelers, but after a scrappy half-season in 2002 with Patrick Racing he found himself on the sidelines facing a career crossroads.
At the age of 27, Bell moved to Oxford and signed a two-year deal with the Arden team in the International Formula 3000 championship. With no circuit knowledge, he was always going to be up against it – “I didn’t have a spectacular rookie season,” he admits – and, with money for a second year tight, he set his sights on a thirddriver role at an F1 team for 2004.
“I knew it would be unrealistic to go straight into a race seat,” says Bell. “But given the amount of testing that factorybacked teams were doing, they needed either a full-time test driver or, in the case of BAR, a second full-time tester.”
Bell had impressed BAR in straight-line aero testing and had a full test lined up with the Ford-owned Jaguar squad after his marketing guru father-in-law, the late Rod Campbell, made some introductions. “I leaned in really heavily with ‘I’m the only American that is even remotely poised to be in a Formula 1 team on some level’,” Bell says, “and I managed to convince the Ford people to give me a chance.”
Bell describes the test as “a baptism by fire”, not helped when an engine failure delayed his running until after lunch. He soon realised he was “frankly unprepared for the demands on my neck”.
“It just felt like you were in a feather with 1000 horsepower,” he says. “The g-force was a great magnitude higher than what I experienced in Indycar and F3000. It was a completely different world.”
Bell admits he “started to black out in one of the corners” on a low-fuel run in the late afternoon and, as his field of vision decreased, the inevitable happened: “I went off and got stuck in the gravel. They hauled me out, but at that point I was done.”
He feels his times were reasonable for a rookie, but he had to bring money to
“IT FELT LIKE YOU WERE IN A FEATHER WITH
1000 HORSEPOWER”
Jaguar for a third-driver role and was gazumped by F3000 team-mate Bjorn Wirdheim. His F1 hopes were finally dashed when a boardroom change at BAR owner British American Tobacco meant Brazilian Enrique Bernoldi was preferred.
His European adventure at an end,
Bell returned to US open-wheel racing, taking fourth in the 2009 Indy 500. He went on to forge a successful GT career that has to date yielded class wins at the Le Mans and Daytona 24 Hours, plus an IMSA class title.