April 2015 issue of Motor Sport Magazine

NIGEL ROEBUCK THE ART & CRAFT OF ALAIN PROST

design ace who created McLAREN’S UNSUNG HERO TheEmmo and Hunt’s ’70s classic www.motorsportmagazine.com

• NEW COLUMNIST

OLIVER JARVIS Audi Le Mans star joins our ranks!

•

F1’s fastest woman

How Lella Lombardi made her (half) point

Most important Jaguar in years Andrew Frankel’s verdict on the all-new XE

PLUS Winning interviews Carlos Sainz & Bobby Rahal

THE BIG QUESTIONS OF

FORMULA 1 2015 PREVIEW SPECIAL! Cover Hamilton 1.indd 1

Can anyone stop Hamilton & Mercedes?

Are Vettel & Ferrari ready to win again?

Will Alonso & McLaren last this time?

Mark Hughes gives his answers

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£4.99 04

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THE MOTOR SPORT MONTH

IN PICTURES

F E B R UA RY 2 2 , 2 0 1 5

NASCAR Sprint Cup DAYTONA, USA

LAT

Joey Logano relishes post-race celebrations after taking his Penske Ford to victory in the Daytona 500, opening round – as ever – of NASCAR’s premier series. Logano was in contention throughout, but cemented victory only after a late restart following a short red flag interruption. Defending champion Kevin Harvick (SHR Chevrolet) finished second, 1.006sec adrift.

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F1 PREVIEW 2015

F1 FRONTLINE with

Mark Hughes

THE BIG QUESTIONS Questions, questions and no definitive answers; that’s what makes this time of year so car a little faster than before – faster, each team hopes, by a bigger amount than those as different programmes and agendas play out, no one quite sure what the other is doing. from a distinguished selection of former racers – as step-off points for discussion and

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OF FORMULA 1 2015 intriguing. Months of toil by thousands of exceptionally clever brains just to create a it’s competing against. Then the subterfuge of testing, the muddying of the waters We’ve framed a few of the more obvious pre-season questions and included some to give a feel for how F1 is poised on the eve of the world championship’s 66th season

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ROAD TESTS www.motorsportmagazine.com/author/andrew-frankel

JAGUAR XE

A crucial newcomer – and for several reasons | BY ANDREW FRANKEL

W

HAT IS THE PROBLEM with Jaguar? Why last year did it sell just over 80,000 cars, while BMW managed 1.8 million, not including Mini? And if you think that’s just because BMW has cars in almost every market niche, consider this: Porsche shifts as many Cayennes as Jaguar does cars in total. That’s the whole XF, XJ, F-type and recently defunct XK ranges combined. Are Jaguars rubbish, or is there something else going on?

There are several issues here, happily none of them an inability to build decent cars, at least these days. But not that long ago, Jaguars really weren’t up to the mark. Remember the X-type? It seems staggering now that anyone at Jaguar thought a car that ugly and based on a Ford Mondeo platform could be good enough to be called a Jaguar (likewise the S-type). While the XJ of the same era was a radical and

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advanced car with its all-aluminium construction, it looked like something that would only be truly at home outside the golf club. Fact is that those who dreamt up Jaguar’s last attempt at expansion – there were plans for it to build 500,000 cars per year – massively underestimated the size of the job. And Jaguar is still trying to recover from the damage done to its reputation.

But even when Jaguar resumed building good cars, it had an uncanny knack for producing exactly the right car at precisely the wrong time. It had big diesels when Europe was crying out for little ones and large petrol-powered cars that China taxed out of existence.

It had saloons while customers clamoured for estates, and rear-wheeldrive cars that customers in American snow states could not even contemplate.

And, of course, not a sniff of the one breed of car its rivals were churning out by the hundred thousand and selling with their eyes shut. Jaguar had no SUV. In recent years, Jaguar has tried to

FACTFILE £34,775

ENGINE 2.0 litres, 4 cylinders, turbo diesel POWER 177bhp@4000rpm TORQUE 317lbft@1750 rpm TRANSMISSION eight-speed automatic, rear-wheel drive 0-62MPH 7.8sec TOP SPEED 140mph ECONOMY 67.3mpg CO2 111g/km

address all these issues – it bought in small diesels from Ford, designed estate bodywork for the XF and equipped it with four-wheel drive for the US. The Chinese even have their small petrol engines. So keen is Jaguar to fill every gap in its existing model line-up, it’s now even designed both four-wheeldrive and manual transmission versions of the F-type. But what it lacks is a staple model – an affordable standard offering to attract younger clients to the brand in vast numbers and then trust the other, more expensive models in the range to keep them there. And, of course, that SUV. Which is where this XE, the most important new Jaguar in a generation, comes in. As a simple but vital rival to the BMW 3-series and Mercedes C-class, its role would be critical. But so too will it lend its platform, engine and suspension to the new F-Pace SUV. And there can be no doubt that, together, they have the potential to transform Jaguar’s future.

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But can it be realised? I cannot speak for the unlaunched F-Pace, but I have spent a day driving prototype XEs and believe that, on balance, there are reasons to be cheerful.

You don’t need to drive the XE to understand its single most impressive attribute. These days there is hardly ever any such thing as a truly new car, because almost all use the platform, powertrain or suspension from something else in the range. Not the XE – everything from its structure to its home-grown Ingenium 2-litre diesel engine is not only genuinely fresh, but is built in brand-new facilities too.

It’s a good-looking car, thus fulfilling

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XE cabin has a certain elegance, but fails in some ways to match BMW/Audi standards. Test prototype had flaws, but showed great potential

the first duty of any Jaguar, but its interior is passable for the class and not much more. The cabin is fluently styled and very clearly a Jaguar design, but its information presentation lags far behind the point BMW and Audi reached some years ago, while that sense of scaleddown limousine, achieved by the latest Mercedes C-class, is also missing.

But that, save some dodgy panel fit and quality issues that you’d expect on prototypes of this age, really is the worst criticism you can throw at it.

Crucially, Jaguar’s contention that this is the driver’s car in the segment is entirely credible.

In fact Jaguar has done a splendid job with the XE’s chassis. Its decision to make the only predominately aluminium monocoque in the class saves enough weight to make the most frugal version of the XE the only car in the category with double-digit emissions. Crucially, it also meant Jaguar could add a little weight, particularly into designing a suspension system of a complexity you’d usually only encounter in a class (or two) above. The result is a structure that feels uncommonly stiff for any fourdoor saloon and suspension that provides a blend of ride comfort, precision and poise I don’t recall from any other similar car. I drove it on abysmal Portuguese roads, yet far from exposing weaknesses in the XE’s

capabilities they allowed its talents to shine. It bodes very well for its potential performance when UK deliveries start in May. The XE is also the first Jaguar to be fitted with electric power steering. As recently as two years ago Jaguar was very sniffy about EPAS, saying true steering feel could only be achieved with hydraulic assistance, but now it claims the technology has moved to a point where it’s actually better than the old system. That’s clearly nonsense, for while the XE steers well for a car with EPAS, I wonder if owners will deem the sacrifice in feel worthy of the tiny additional gains in fuel consumption.

I’m not yet entirely convinced by the new engine, either. Its power, torque and associated performance figures are class-competitive and its economy and emissions at or near the best of all, but the Ingenium I drove was rattly at idle, and audible even at a gentle cruise.

Jaguar insists this is only because I was driving an inexactly constructed prototype with far less attention paid to noise, vibration and harshness than will be lavished on customer cars and I feel inclined to believe it.

But I’ll need to drive another more representative XE before I hail this engine as a world-beater.

I did also drive an XE powered by a 3-litre V6 supercharged petrol engine.

It was pleasant enough and impressively responsive, but was nothing like as smooth or enjoyable to listen to as BMW’s equivalent turbocharged straight six. I believe the Jaguar V6 is a cut down version of its V8 – and its 90deg angle would support that – and the result is fit for purpose but not much more. By contrast its optional adaptive suspension was superb and, for me, well worth the £800 outlay.

As is so often the case with prototype drives, my time in the XE actually posed as many questions as it answered, chiefly whether Jaguar will be able to get on top of the quality and engine refinement before sales start. I expect it will and, if it does, the XE will be good enough to do the job required. I think it is better in its class than any current Jaguar product and, if the final version is as good as Jaguar says it will be, it could yet be the best car in its class.

If the F-Pace SUV can match this excellence, Jaguar’s future will look brighter than at any time I can recall.

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Profile Gordon Coppuck

Quick on the draw

Gordon Coppuck is rarely mentioned when motor racing’s most influential designers are discussed, but his low profile masks a catalogue of great achievements

“A SUTTON

writer

ROB WIDDOWS

H, YES, OF COURSE, A proper bloke, very capable, first man I thought of when

I knew I needed some help.

So I phoned him and offered him the job.”

McLaren’s first chief designer Robin Herd is talking about Gordon Coppuck.

Fifty years ago a young draughtsman at the National Gas Turbine Establishment was sitting happily at his drawing board on weekdays and riding his trial bikes at weekends. Then, in the autumn of 1965, he took the telephone call that would change his life forever.

Gordon Coppuck and Herd had worked together at the NGTE, Gordon as a draughtsman and Robin as a scientific officer. Their paths would cross many times in the decades that followed, as we shall discover.

In this 50th anniversary year of his time at McLaren, where do we begin, what do we leave out? This is a dilemma made more difficult by the modesty of the only man to design the winner of the Indy 500 and the Formula 1 world championship in the same year twice, in 1974 and 1976. Here we delve into the decades, beginning half a century ago.

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Interview Carlos Sainz

The

real

King Carlos Monarchs come and go, but Carlos Sainz will always rule the rally stages for many.

His intensity hasn’t dimmed with age writer

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ANTHONY PEACOCK

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RED BULL

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{ LUNCH WITH }

BOBBY RAHAL

Indy winner, team owner and F1 team principal who reversed convention by tackling Europe before coming home to clean up in the USA writer

I

SIMON TAYLOR | photographer MATTHEW GILSON

N PAST LUNCHES WITH… I’ve talked to several British and European racers, from Dario Franchitti to Kenny Bräck, who strived to make it in Formula 1 but never got as far as they’d hoped.

So they switched their attention to the alien culture of Indycar racing, and went on to great success. Sitting down to lunch with Bobby Rahal is rather different, because he followed a similar route – but he is himself very much an American.

Bobby started out with no ambition to race on the ovals. He loved the heritage of Grand Prix racing, and cut his teeth racing sports cars on American road circuits. Then he moved to Europe to scale the single-seater ladder over here. He had been racing for 12 seasons – with a very brief skirmish in F1 – before he came home to Indycar. Then he went on to be a three-time CART champion, and won the Indianapolis 500 both as a driver and as a team owner.

Yet Bobby’s roots in European-style racing remained deep, and he even spent a brief time as a team principal in F1 before politics ended

it. There aren’t many Indycar champions whose all-time hero is Jim Clark, but Bobby is steeped in motor-racing history. He raced against Gilles Villeneuve, Keke Rosberg and James Hunt, and when Ferrari embarked on their abortive project to run an Indycar programme, it was Bobby who was summoned to Maranello to discuss it with Enzo himself.

Bobby is a Chicagoan, and for our lunch he chooses his favourite restaurant in the city, Gibsons on Rush Street. Our meal is healthy in both senses of the word: we avoid the immense Black Angus steaks and have crabmeat avocado and a local speciality called Garbage Salad, which has just about everything in it. Bobby warns me to go for the small size, but even that is massive, and excellent.

His father was a weekend racer, and from when Bobby was seven years old he would plead to go too. “Dad was running his own business, and racing was his passion but not his priority. Living in Chicago there were several circuits within easy reach: Elkhart Lake of course, and Meadowdale. My summers were spent going racing with my dad, and I grew up in the culture of sports car racing.

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3000 Retrospective Formula 3000

More than just a

writer

SIMON ARRON

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number…

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N ISOLATION THE STATISTICS LOOK BLEAK. BETWEEN THEM, Formula 3000’s 20 international champions went on to win only nine Grands Prix, Juan Pablo Montoya taking seven of those while Jean Alesi and Olivier Panis collected one apiece. Other alumni would achieve great things, of course, from the world titles of Damon Hill and Fernando Alonso to Sébastien Bourdais’ utter domination of Champ Car racing between 2004 and 2007. While it was conceived as a finishing school, however, it was also a community of like-minded souls.

F3000 replaced European Formula 2, in which interest dwindled as rival teams struggled to match the potent works Honda engines supplied exclusively to Ralt. From the 40-plus entries of the late 1970s, fields had reduced by more than half in 1984, the category’s final season. F3000 would cater for F2-style cars powered by 3-litre V8s – and there was a ready supply of Cosworth DFVs, a proven force that F1 had recently cast aside. And electronically limited to 9000rpm, they would be all but bombproof.

The field was still relatively slender when F3000 began at a drizzly Silverstone on March 23/24, 1985 – 17 drivers, a blend of F2-type chassis and converted F1 cars sold on by Williams and Tyrrell – but had more than doubled within a year. At Pau in 1986, there were 41 cars scrabbling for just 22 places on the grid.

It was intense, but simultaneously friendly.

ALL IMAGES LAT & SUTTON

Ferociously competitive and rich in camaraderie, the FIA Formula 3000 Championship was born 30 years ago as Grand Prix racing’s official ante-chamber. It lasted 20 seasons and is fondly remembered for a variety of reasons, not all of them obvious

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Slapped wrist

redmist It is 45 years since Pedro Rodriguez put in one of racing’s great drives, fuelled by fury after a lecture. We spoke to the official who ‘inspired’ him

writer

IAN WAGSTAFF

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1970 BOAC 1000 That Rodriguez drive...

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PORSCHE PORSCHE

SUTTON

Man on a mission, ‘jumbo’ ad hoarding and, bottom, Pedro Rodriguez becalmed after stunning victory

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LERK OF THE COURSE Nick Syrett was “very annoyed”. Already RAC steward Basil Tye had suggested that the race, the 1970 BOAC 1000Kms, be cancelled and now Pedro Rodriguez seemed to be doing his best to run him over.

What happened then has become legendary in the annals of endurance racing.

An area of low pressure had moved over south-eastern England that April weekend. The rain had been falling steadily for some time and Brands Hatch was awash. However, Nick saw no reason to disappoint the 20,000 fans huddling under their umbrellas. “Basil, don’t be ridiculous,” he told Tye. “At Sebring they were going past the pits in 18 inches of water.”

With wet Goodyears in short supply, Barrie Smith was forced to start his Sid Taylor-entered Lola T70 with hand-cut slicks at the rear.

“On the grid I told Sid that it was undriveable,” Barrie recalls. “Sid replied, ‘Just do a couple of laps and come in’.”

Smith’s resulting first-lap crash brought out the yellow flags. “I rushed down from race control because the marshal on the startline was doing a pathetic job, limply waving his flag,” Nick says. “I thought he wasn’t going to slow anyone down, so I grabbed it and marched up towards Clearways really giving it a wave.

Everybody acknowledged it apart from Rodriguez. He went past me about 18 inches away, which really frightened me. Then he did much the same thing again. So I gave him the black flag, which he went past twice.”

Alan Hearn was mechanic on Rodriguez’s JW Automotive-entered Gulf Porsche 917. “Pedro and Leo [Kinnunen] were only seventh-fastest after practice, so it wasn’t looking too good for our car at the start,” he says.

Although in the best place to observe what now happened, Alan had not met Syrett until fairly recently, when the pair had lunch to talk over the incident. “Pedro didn’t come in straightaway,” Alan says, “and Nick arrived at our pit furious that he had not stopped. We had put an ‘in’ sign on the pit board as well. Pedro eventually came in, tearing down the pit road.

I was assigned to open the driver’s door when he stopped. Nick was hovering right behind me.

As soon as I opened the door I could see by his blazing eyes that Pedro was not happy.”

Syrett: “I couldn’t understand what Rodriguez was doing that day. I hit him three times on the shoulder shouting, ‘Don’t… do it… again’. I knew that being strapped in, he could not retaliate! I was very, very angry.”

Alan adds: “Nick dived in the cockpit with his head well down and proceeded to have a right go at him for dangerous driving, a real tongue-lashing. Pedro just kept staring straight

ahead, not looking at him until he was finished, which took about 20 to 30 seconds. I could see he was fuming. All this time the engine was running. As Nick stepped away from the car I quickly shut the door. Pedro revved like mad, spun the rear wheels and shot off down the pit road at a very rapid rate. We were lucky we didn’t get our toes taken off. Pedro was now right at the back of the field.”

Richard Attwood, who finished third that day, rates what followed as one of the greatest drives of all time. Alan concurs: “We settled back to watch an amazing performance as, with controlled fury, Pedro started to climb back through the field, passing car after car in the pouring rain.” He remembers team crew running from the front to the back of the pits to make sure that he had safely negotiated the section of the track from Paddock to Bottom Bend, as it was then known.

❖ EVENTUALLY RODRIGUEZ CAUGHT leader Vic Elford, another hero that day. Like Pedro, he was driving a 917K, his being the one that would win at Le Mans in June. Side by side the pair raced towards Paddock, twitching through the puddles, the Gulf car on the inside.

Elford was unable to hold back the Mexican, who splashed by to take a lead he retained at the end, having handed over to team-mate Kinnunen for the absolute minimum of time.

“It was a tremendous feat by Rodriguez,” Nick says. “I obviously didn’t hold him up long enough!” Had Pedro stayed out for one more lap under the black flag, he would have been disqualified. “I think Pedro was almost in awe of himself,” says Glenda Foreman, Rodriguez’s girlfriend. She, like Attwood, believes Syrett’s lecture caused him to drive beyond even his own undoubted ability. In a post-race photo, Pedro’s eyes are in a fixed, almost blank stare while a seemingly fresh Leo looks on.

Wyer was later to say, “On that day and in those conditions, Rodriguez was completely unbeatable. It is no good expecting drivers like him to behave like members of the second eleven.” However, Nick remembers Wyer calling him over later in the race to say in his patrician tone, “You were quite right, Nicholas.”

Nick was still giving Rodriguez a lecture as he drove him around on the victory lap. In Pedro’s defence, though, Attwood reckons conditions were such that, “There was no way he would have seen the flags.” Pedro was certainly incensed about being made to stop. He was later to complain to Glenda that Nick had been too far out on the track. “He was so cross that steam was coming off him like you wouldn’t believe. Pedro said Syrett just did not get out of the way quickly enough. Later Syrett complained to Pedro about what he had done to his new Burberry raincoat!”

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Knocking on the

factory door to ride around cones or whatever and he ended up doing this at Darley Moor, where this chap was based. Bradley did his bit and this guy, who had been watching, turned to his father and said, ‘Yeah, your son’s okay, but I have to say, as long as he’s got a hole in his bum he ain’t gonna go road racing. He should stay in motocross’.”

The ACU instructor should have known better – a huge number of riders on the MotoGP grid started in dirt racing. “It’s great training for feeling the bike’s throttle control, dealing with a bike that’s constantly moving and sliding around underneath you,” says Smith who arrived on the MotoGP grid in 2013 after nine years battling in the lower categories.

“The first time I actually sat down and watched MotoGP was in 2004, when Valentino won on the Yamaha in South Africa. To finally be on the track with him when he returned to Yamaha in 2013 was crazy, but when you grow up in that environment – I was in the world championship for seven years before I stood on a MotoGP grid – you get used to those guys being around. There is that respect level there, but you do realise that you can ride as fast as them on certain days, on certain laps. You need to get that into your head pretty quickly and, if you want to keep your job, you’ll need to beat them at some point.”

British MotoGP rider Bradley Smith is hunting a works seat – and this is the year he must grab it writer

ED FOSTER

TECH3

S

TRANGELY FOR SOMEONE at the top of their sport, MotoGP rider Bradley Smith never actually wanted to get there – his early years were all about motocross and getting to the top of that discipline, the AMA Motocross Championship, instead of racing on Tarmac.

His father Allan competed in motocross rather than circuit racing and, handily, there was a motocross track on the farm where he lived. “I guess it’s still my dream now to be a part of that scene,” he admits when we catch up with him at the final round of the 2014 MotoGP season in Valencia. “I was on an okay route, but then I had three injuries in 12 months [2002/03] and my dad fell out of love with it.”

Allan Smith didn’t want his son to stop racing a bike completely and, after a few friends suggested circuit racing, Bradley went to get the necessary licence.

“There used to be a guy at the ACU [Auto-cycle Union] who was a real know-itall,” says Ian Newton, the boss of the entrylevel Aprilia Superteen series that brought on the likes of Casey Stoner, Cal Crutchlow and Smith. “Bradley went to get his CBT [Compulsory Basic Training] where you have

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Interview Bradley Smith

A step back in time: Oulton Park, 2005, Aprilia Superteens – Bradley Smith’s first motorcycle race victory @ THE MOTOR SPORT DIGITAL EDITION

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Profile Lella Lombardi

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SHE M A D E H ER

POIN T …or at least half of one. Lella Lombardi remains the only woman on F1’s score sheet, but her passion brought impressive racing achievements elsewhere, too

F

writer

LAT

Montjuïch 1975: Lella Lombardi hustles her March to sixth place and the only GP point for a woman – albeit halved by the shortened race

PAUL FEARNLEY

ORMULA 1 WAS AT ITS most macho: James Hunt was having sex for breakfast; the ‘Monza Gorilla’ was muscling a works March; and, on a hill overlooking Barcelona, officials, team bosses and drivers were at each others’ throats.

Though officials erected barricades and bosses manned the barriers because the drivers were rightly unamused by Montjuïch’s laughable Acme Inc Armco, the latter would eventually kowtow and race with a collective madness – bar world champion Emerson Fittipaldi, who stayed true to his word and refused to start.

The joyless Spanish Grand Prix of April 1975 ended in tragedy when the rear wing of Rolf Stommelen’s leading Hill failed with catastrophic result: dead bodies pinned beneath its wreck. Even Jochen Mass, declared the precipitate winner after 29 laps, scrambled from his McLaren with a face like thunder and

threatened violence to smug officials.

Hardly man’s finest hour.

Newcomer Lella Lombardi, at just 5ft 2in, had wisely kept her head down – unlike her hairy-chested March team-mate.

Vittorio Brambilla was one of only two to set a time on Friday afternoon. He eventually qualified fifth, from where he triggered a first-corner pile-up. Pitting on lap seven because of flat spots, he would, amid the chaos, recover to finish a lapped fifth. One place and one lap behind him was Lombardi: the first – and to date – only woman to score a point in a world championship GP, but in a half-points race.

“But the Nürburgring was her best drive,” says March co-founder/designer Robin Herd.

Lombardi finished seventh in August’s German GP, despite a puncture. “That’s the one I remember. Quietly impressive, it was much better than her Montjuïch performance.

“She wasn’t one of those tossers that arrive in F1 from time to time. She wasn’t there to make up the numbers. We knew what she’d done beforehand and clearly she was very capable.”

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Interview Kevin Wheatcroft

We need to

talk about

Living in the shadow of his late, great father Tom can’t have been easy. But as saviour of Donington Park, it’s high time Kevin Wheatcroft received his dues writer

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DAMIEN SMITH photographer JEFF BLOXHAM

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E

NTER THE FIRST HALL of the crankshaft-shaped building and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve opened the wrong door. This is the world’s most renowned museum dedicated to Grand Prix cars, right? Yes, but first there’s something completely different: a weird and wonderful assortment of WWII-era military vehicles, and mostly salvaged from ‘the other side’.

This is Kevin Wheatcroft’s first love and increasingly it shows. The tanks, half-track vehicles and wartime motorcycles have crept further round the first part of the Donington Collection since our last visit, but finally the khaki and camouflage turns into familiar British Racing Green and the garish primary colours of 1970s-era Formula 1.

Our host loves the racing cars – how much becomes obvious during the course of our conversation – but loves the military stuff more.

And he makes no apology for that.

“As much as I cherish the Grand Prix cars, I’m not what I’d call an overly capable driver,” says Wheatcroft, owner of Donington Park, its famous museum and son of the much-missed Tom, who revived the pre-war British Grand Prix venue in the 1970s. “I can run demonstrations in some of them, but sadly can’t fit in others! To me the military vehicles are practical things that have the same level of history – just wearing a different coat.”

❖ WE PAUSE FOR PHOTOS BY THE motorcycles. Kevin cocks his leg over a pristine black one with sidecar attached and tells its story: “It’s a 1937 Zundapp 600 combination, which had been ordered new by a guy in Denmark. In May 1940 the Germans invaded, there was a knock on his door and the bike was confiscated by the German military. It was used by a military policeman, but always kept in its original black livery and the guy who owned it never thought he’d see it again. Then on May 8, 1945, there’s a knock on the door and it’s the policeman with the bike. ‘It’s all serviced, full of fuel’, he says. ‘The war’s over, I’m going back to Germany. Here’s your bike’. I bought it off him about 20 years ago, so I’m the second owner but the third operator…”

If you’ve read Tom’s wonderful autobiography Thunder in the Park you’ll know exactly why Kevin has such an affinity with WWII artefacts, in particular those of APRIL 2015

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Roger Williamson’s Monza-winning March 732 and, below, Zundapp sidecar

German origin. He offers the abridged version: “My dad was a tank driver in WWII, finished the war in Germany and met a young lady, a German teenager [Lenchen was a nurse in the hospital where injured Tom was recuperating].

They got together and married in 1946, then came back to England where he created his business. At every family get-together stories would be told harping back to the war years.

I was getting them from my mother as a civilian and my dad as a soldier. And growing up in the 1960s, every kid’s comic was about the Germans and there were all the classic war films such as Kelly’s Heroes and The Dirty Dozen. I watched them to death and by the age of five I was hooked. I remember dad asking me what I wanted for my fifth birthday, and I said, ‘a German helmet’. He often looked a bit puzzled why I should show an interest, but as a collection started to grow he could see the direction I was going in. It wasn’t the competition stuff he was interested in, but it was the same gene.”

His passion for restoration and recreation has clear parallels to the old car world. “If I can find something in original condition that has

been preserved but not restored, I love that,” he says. “But that’s getting harder to find. And I love a project where someone says, ‘nah, that’s only for scrap’.

“We’re big into re-engineering parts now.

The majority of the tracked and semi-tracked vehicles ran Maybach engines, six or 12 cylinders. To find old stock parts is now virtually impossible, so we remake valves, pistons, main bearings, cranks, cylinder heads where necessary, clutches, bellhousings… It’s not restoration, it’s recreation, but without it you’re never going to see these things running again. It’s done in a way to make them live again, otherwise they’re gone. So much of this stuff went to the bottom of the sea, got blown up or buried somewhere across Europe. If you’re looking for something now it’s most likely below ground.”

He enthuses about a painstaking 30-year Tiger tank restoration that is nearing completion. But then he talks about the racing cars, and you’re reminded it’s not just the military stuff that matters to him. “I’ve bought the Roger Williamson F1 March [purported to be the 731 in which he raced at Silverstone in 1973] which I want to do. It’s unfinished business. I was very close to Roger, as we all were, Tom especially. It might not go on show, but it’s something I have to do to close a book.

“Then we have another V16 BRM on the build at Hall & Hall and I want to finish that.

I’ve thrown myself into finishing the W125 Mercedes, which my dad started. We built a streamliner too, which will be the next car to go together. To me they are not replicas, they are tool-room copies that enable people to see, smell and hear what some of these things were like.

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20/02/2015 15:43