FINISHING STRAIGHT
Memories from an illustrious 50 years
BOOK REVIEW 50 YEARS OF THE FORMULA FORD FESTIVAL Alan Bowles & Darren Banks
RRP £35
“It is what it is – you can’t explain it to people, and you have to experience it.”
Marc Goossens has enjoyed a relatively successful career in motorsport, which has included no fewer than 13 appearances at the Le Mans 24 Hours.
But the event he’s referring to is the Formula Ford Festival, a race to which he returned last weekend for the first time since he took victory in 1991. The Belgian’s fondness for the event and indeed the category of racing itself has never diminished, just as it hasn’t for many competitors young and old.
While the Festival may no longer be the training ground for future Formula 1 stars that it once was – such as Johnny Herbert, Damon Hill and Jenson Button – to many it is still a special meeting in the sphere of motorsport, with its 50th anniversary celebrated last year.
It seemed only a matter of time then until a book would appear recounting the past half a century, and sure enough at this year’s event such a labour of love appeared courtesy of ex-formula Ford racers
Alan Bowles and Darren Banks.
“A lot of people showed a lot of enthusiasm for the book,” says Bowles, who competed in four editions of the Festival. “They liked the idea of how we’ve presented the format and basically they felt the need that they had to have it because it’s Formula Ford. And Formula Ford is what everyone is here for this weekend.”
They built upon the work of ‘The Voice of Brands’, commentator Brian Jones, who before his death last year had begun putting together the project, with his research made available to both Bowles and Banks courtesy of Jones’s widow Ros.
The book recounts each of the 50 events in moderate detail, explaining how the protagonists made their way through the earlier stages and how the grand finals panned out. There’s also background and context on certain drivers and how they performed during the season itself.
Development of the cars is covered off, as are any sporting or technical grumblings, with engine parity unsurprisingly a talking point from the very first edition, proving nothing changes!
But while the book delves into each event, including the first four held at Snetterton, it’s certainly not a blow-by-blow account and neither is it a book filled with huge amounts of statistics. While there’s a list of winners from each year, there are no results for each race – although some do appear with the official timing sheets scanned into the book.
These, along with a wealth of pictures and other memorabilia (Michael Schumacher’s commentator information sheet from 1988 for example), really do serve to bring out the history of the event.
The book primarily though is a gateway into the memories of those who raced or
were involved with the event. There are personal anecdotes from a large swathe of high-profile competitors including Goossens, 1976 winner Derek Daly and
1980 victor Roberto Moreno among others. But it’s not just about those who reached the very top, as those who didn’t have quite such successful careers are also given space to tell some of the more interesting stories.
“That’s what the book’s about. It’s not about facts or figures, it’s about people’s memories of the Festival,” adds Bowles. “And so many people have contributed. I’ve been very blessed that people have helped. They all remember where they come from and where they started, and it’s always Formula Ford and it was always the Festival.”
This year’s Festival sadly was a low point with the much-anticipated final to be cut short. But Bowles’s and Banks’s book has served as a timely reminder of the great and the good times, as well as the history that has been made over the past 50 years at the renowned event.