The Grande Premio de Angola drew top class entires. Here, in 1959, a Porsche and Ferrari head the grid.
At the end of each racing calendar year the Automavel e Touring Club de Angola staged an International Grand Prix for sport and racing cars in Luanda. 21 September 1958 was to be the Il Grande Premio de Angola. Mannie de Villiers tells his father’s tale of the event.
T
he R.A.R.C (Rhodesian Automobile Racing Club) was cordially invited by their Angolan counterparts to nominate and send a team of drivers and cars to compete in their Grande Premio. Their selection included the Club’s Vice-Chairman Jimmy Shields (super charged 2-litre ERA), Gordon MacPherson (Austin Healey 100S) and John Love of Bulawayo in a Riley Special. These cars were transported to Port Beira and from there shipped around Cape Agulhas to Luanda. The drivers and their entourage subsequently went by plane to Luanda. Once it became common knowledge in the Rhodesia motor racing circles that some of the top drivers and cars in the country had been excluded from the team, two ‘War Horses’, namely Jimmy de Villiers (ex-Lord Louth D-Type Jaguar)
and Eric Glasby (AC Bristol Sports Car), decided to make an independent appeal to the Angolan authorities to be accepted as private entries. After much negotiation, permission was given for both to compete but because of the late hour they would have to get their cars to the race overland and at their own peril and cost. This only made the pair even more determined to get there and show what they were made of. De Villiers bought a 1.5tonne Chev truck and over the weekend, night and day, with his mechanics Dick Eley, Pieter Blignaught, Dickie Dicksen, Steve van der Venter, Arthur Brookes and quite a few other helpers too numerous to mention, cut the chassis and lengthened the truck, and manufactured a flatbed body to hold the D-type with a raised sleeping compartment at the front end.
On the Monday with less than two weeks to go, Jimmy and his gardener Thomas set off through Northern Rhodesia, the Belgian Congo and then across into Angola to the west coast port of Luanda. One must bear in mind that besides the very difficult and in some cases unchartered terrain and on gravel roads most of the way, not knowing distances or where the next petrol station was, not to mention the political and ethnic uprising in these areas, Jimmy and Thomas pressed on. At one remote filling station, a single pump with two 1-gallon glass containers on each side with a ‘Kormena-Korwena’ pump handle, Jimmy stopped to get fuel and do a general check on the transporter. Once finished, he wanted to pay the attendant but the pump jockey didn’t want any money, all he wanted for payment was Thomas. Jimmy couldn’t www.cpca.co.za | August/September 2013 | 31