Simon Taylor Full throttle
‘When my article hit the newsstands, some voiced the view that March stood for “Much Advertised Racing Car Hoax”’
Most of Max Mosley’s obituaries have focused on his career in the government of F1 and, inevitably, his successful privacy battle with the News of the World. There has been surprisingly little about his launch of March, the motor-racing marque that burst upon the world in 1969. Max ran the company with designer Robin Herd for only eight years, but it went on to success in virtually every class of racing.
I got to know Max in 1968 when he was a Formula Two privateer. After the death of his teammate Chris Lambert at Zandvoort and his own crash at the Nürburgring he decided he would never be World Champion, and turned his fierce intellect and unshakeable selfconfidence in a different direction.
March – the name came from the initials of the four men involved: Mosley, Alan Rees, (Graham) Coaker and Herd – began quietly in the summer of 1969 when an F3 car, hastily sketched out by Herd, was put together in a shed in the garden of Coaker’s house in Reading. There were no premises, which is why Mike Lawrence called his excellent book on March Four guys and a telephone.
The car was ready to race in September, and I reported on the young Ronnie Peterson’s third place at Cadwell Park. A few days later Max, at his most charming, called me: could I drop in to his house in Chelsea for lunch? He wanted to give me a world scoop.
I could hardly believe what he told me, but his smooth persuasion won me over. At the opening round of the 1970 F1 World Championship at Kyalami in South Africa, five short months away, there would be a two-car March team on the grid. The cars were already under construction (they weren’t). A team of qualified experts in design, management, sales and finance had been assembled (it hadn’t). There would be a works F2 team as well, and F2, F3 and Formula Ford cars for privateers, whose design would make “extensive use of a computer”. I didn’t know what that meant, but few people did then: it was more than half a century ago, and computers were huge whirring things that belonged to rocket science and James Bond movies.
Where, I asked Max, was the money coming from? Of course he’d clinched a huge sponsorship deal with a major consumer company (he hadn’t). Our meal had reached the coffee stage, and when I pressed him for a hint, he looked at my cup and grinned secretively. Surely not a team of brown-and-gold cars in the colours of Nescafé? Lawrence’s book says: “You have to feel sorry for the hapless hack [me] whose pen raced across his pad in mounting excitement.” When my article hit the newsstands, some voiced the view that March stood for ‘Much Advertised Racing Car Hoax’.
Except… at Kyalami there weren’t two Marches on the grid. There were five. As well as the works duo, Max had sold two to Ken Tyrrell and one to STP boss Andy Granatelli. The drivers included reigning World Champion Jackie Stewart, Chris Amon (whom Max had persuaded to leave Ferrari) and Indy 500 winner Mario Andretti. In qualifying Stewart and Amon were joint fastest. Stewart led the race until his tyres went off, but still finished third. In round two, in Spain, Stewart’s March won. Max had pulled off the impossible.
He left March in 1977 for higher things, but it continued in F1 under different guises for 17 seasons. It also went on to massive success in Indycar racing, and became a prolific and highly profitable race-car manufacturer. For years after, Max teased me that my breathless article in Autosport had done March no harm at all in those first touch-and-go days. And on the flyleaf of my copy of Mike Lawrence’s book he wrote: ‘It wasn’t all lies, honest.’