Legendary driver and entrepreneur with lifelong need for speed
JOHN Sprinzel, who has died aged 90, was a British international saloon, touring and rally car racing driver who won the British Rally Championship (BRC) in 1959 and went on to become a successful racing-car modifier, motor sports entrepreneur, author, rally organiser and even a world championship-level windsurfer.
Having set up a school teaching the fledgling sport of windsurfing in Corfu, he was part of the Greek team in the world championships of 1982 and 1983.
For most of his life, he was dedicated to making road cars go faster, from Austin A-35s and Morris Minors to Austin-healey Sprites, culminating in the highly successful Sebring Sprite, which he largely developed.
One of the first mechanics he hired for his own Speedwell racing team in Golders Green, London, was a 28-year-old called Graham Hill, who would go on to become double Formula One World Champion for BRM and Lotus and win both the Indy 500 and the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Sprinzel himself drove a Sprite and an Alfa Romeo Giulietta Ti to win the 1959 BRC, and another Sprite to finish 14th of the 186 finishers in the Monte Carlo rally the same year. In 1960, he came second in both the RAC rally in Britain and the Liege-rome-liege event, as well as fourth in the Safari Rally in a private-entry Mercedes 190.
As a road racer in an American seven-litre Ford Galaxie – “the first Galaxie to arrive in England,” he said – he started in pole position for the 1963 Brands Hatch Six Hours endurance race but, in horrendously wet conditions, was being well beaten by the Jaguar Mk2 3.8s when his bonnet came loose and he was disqualified.
He also drove in the 1960 12 Hours of Sebring sports car endurance race in Florida in his modified Austin-healey, the Sebring Sprite. The model became something of a legend in the sport, dicing with the mighty Ferraris and Porsches on the track, despite its much smaller engine.
When Australian advertising mogul Wylton Dickson and the Northern Irish rally driver, Paddy Hopkirk, came up with what they rightly called the “madcap idea” of a London-mexico rally in 1970 to coincide with England’s participation in the World Cup football finals there, they turned to Sprinzel to organise it.
He rounded up 96 entrants from 22 countries to start from Wembley Stadium, scene of England’s World Cup triumph four years earlier, on a 38-day, 16,000-mile odyssey through 19 countries that included a boat crossing from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro and ending up at Mexico City’s Azteca stadium where the 1970 final would be played.
The rally was won on May 27 by Finnish driver Hannu Mikola and his Swedish navigator Gunnar Palm in a works Ford Escort sponsored by the Daily Telegraph. To this day, given the challenging logistics of half a century ago, it is considered one of the greatest endurance rallies ever held, and one of the best-organised.
Hans Helmut Sprinzel was born in Berlin on October 25, 1930, but when Hitler came to power in 1933, initiating repression against Jews and the vandalising of Jewish businesses, his father Paul, a silkscreen printer in the fashion industry, knew that far worse would soon come. He moved the family to England and set up his own printing firm in Golder’s Green, London.
Young Hans became known as John and was granted British nationality in 1940. He was educated at Christ’s College secondary school in Finchley, north London, and at the Regent Street Polytechnic, in the centre of the capital, before starting as an apprentice printer in his father’s firm after the war and doing his compulsory two-year National Service in the RAF.
He then worked for another printing firm as production manager before he got the bug for motor sport and felt the need for speed.
In 1949, aged 18, Sprinzel began “grass tracking races” on his Ariel Red Hunter motorcycle. Graduating to four wheels in 1955, he entered the RAC Rally, saying he would be driving an Austin A30. So early did he enter that he was given Number One to stick on his bonnet and doors. The only snag was that he didn’t have an A30. So he called his mother and asked if he could borrow hers to go for a quiet sightseeing trip to Wales with a mate.
She was fine with that until BBC TV showed a clip of the RAC rally finishing in Blackpool, with an Austin A30 finishing fifth in its class.
“Later, I heard that mum had said to dad, ‘That looks like John! That looks like my car!’ … Mum was a good sport,” Sprinzel recalled. Having souped up an Austin A35 himself, he won his first road race at Goodwood on Whit Monday, 1957. Motor sports buffs were beginning to take note of the name Sprinzel.
“We agreed that we had to take advantage of this, as these people wanted conversions to their cars,” he recalled. “So we opened up a business [Speedwell], working part time, and it got so successful, so quickly. Then, a young man named Graham Hill walked in the door during my printing morning shift and said, ‘I hear you need some mechanics!’ In the end I sold out [the business] to Graham.”
Sprinzel then set up John Sprinzel Racing in London’s Lancaster
Mews, which attracted not only petrolheads but celebrity buyers and those who simply wanted to be seen. At the time, he was the biggest MG dealer in the world. He recalled Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones coming in with friends in a Cadillac. “He was a bit out of it,” Sprinzel recalled.
Sprinzel had his last motor sports outing in an MG Midget in the 1968 London-sydney rally. He was in the top 10 overall, and the leading private entrant, when the Midget suffered a broken stub axle. His at-the-wheel career was over.
After his rally organising and subsequent retirement, Sprinzel sought out a life first on the land, and thereafter by the ocean, one of his first loves as a child. Leaving a small farm in Northamptonshire, he sailed his yacht for a while with his wife Caryl, mostly around the Aegean, before setting up a windsurfing school in Corfu. That led him to help organise a Greek team, who asked him to participate with them in the fledgling World Championships of 1982 and 1983.
He and Caryl later “retired” – although both were still active in sport and local community work – to the small Hawaiian island of Molokai, a former leper colony.
For many years, he was chairman of the island’s planning council and he completed three volumes of memoirs. He also wrote motor sports columns for the specialist magazines and British national newspapers.
His wife Caryl said he died on Molokai during the last few days of May but she did not wish to specify the date or cause of his death. He had continued to windsurf into his 80s – “probably the oldest windsurfer in the world,” he said recently, adding that his wife was “a better windsurfer and driver than me!”
The London-mexico rally of 1970 is still considered one of the greatest endurance rallies ever held, and one of the best-organised