September issue of Motor Sport magazine

NIGEL ROEBUCK ‘THANK THE LORD FOR NIKI LAUDA’

and back in ‘BLOWER’ BENTLEY TO LE MANS There Birkin’s legendary beast www.motorsportmagazine.com

90TH ANNIVERSARY YEAR

| M AR C 88

EXCLUSIVE

Perry McCarthy, “the mutt of the pitlane”.

But he was never, ever dull…

By Simon Taylor

WILLIAMS FW14 1 | | W I

BULL RB5 | R D E ED | R BU 3 -1

7 |

H

LL

RB

LUNCH WITH AN F1 ‘FAILURE’

ADRIAN NEWEY MY TOP 6 F1 CARS LL

PLUS Why this era’s greatest designer is quitting •

IA

MS

| McLAR FW18 E N MP

4

AMAZING – BMW i8 HYBRID SUPERCAR “This was my Lamborghini Miura moment”

By Andrew Frankel

DONALD CAMPBELL’S FINEST HOUR 50 years on: how Bluebird set a land speed record – on a lake CoverNewey.indd 1

SEPTEMBER 2014

£4.99

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THE MOTOR SPORT MONTH

IN PICTURES

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A feast of endurance LE MANS, FRANCE

JEFF BLOXHAM

An old-style running start – just for show, to pacify the health & safety police – formed part of the latest Le Mans Classic meeting.

The racing might be a little less earnest than that at its modern counterpart, but the strength and depth of the grids proved to be uniformly sumptuous.

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F1 FRONTLINE with

Mark Hughes

Adrian Newey

My top six Formula 1 cars

F

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RED BULL

ORMULA 1’S FINEST TECHNICAL brain of its generation – arguably of all time – is retiring from the sport in a few weeks. Adrian Newey, frustrated at the ever-greater restrictions imposed by the technical regulations, is seeking to challenge himself in other areas. Having spurned the opportunity of a megabucks move to Ferrari, he will retain a position at Red Bull, his home for the last eight years, from where his next move will be launched. But it will not be F1-related. So the quarter-century Newey era of F1 draws to a close. An appropriate time, then, for him to pick out what he feels are his six stand-out designs from a career spanning March, Williams, McLaren and Red Bull.

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F1 FRONTLINE with

Mark Hughes GRAND PRIX NOTEBOOK

G R E AT B R I TA I N & GERMANY Rd 8 SI LV E R STON E , J U LY 6 20 1 4

F A S T E S T L A P LEWIS HAMILTON Mercedes W05 1min 37.176sec R A C E D I S T A N C E 52 laps, 190.262 miles P O L E P O S I T I O N NICO ROSBERG Mercedes W05 1min 35.766sec

GREAT BRITAIN THIS EVENT IS HISTORICALLY SO RELIANT UPON THE weather gods. It can be either glorious summer garden party in the English countryside or mud bath from hell – like Glastonbury with wheels (and lower volume). This year the gods played a teasing but ultimately canny game; it was largely warm and lovely, but what rain there was came at a perfect time to mix up the grid, creating an element of uncertainty. How that got to play out on race day was a heavy Kimi Räikkönen lap-one crash, which red-flagged the race for an hour, and then the opening salvos in what was shaping up to be a truly fascinating all-Mercedes contest. Ultimately we didn’t get to see the full Nico Rosberg vs Lewis Hamilton battle, as the probability waves finally caught up with the German to give him the mechanical retirement equivalent to Hamilton’s in the first race. With Rosberg’s broken gearbox taking him out of the reckoning, Hamilton was left to take the year’s most dominant victory yet – with a half-minute margin over the second-placed Williams-Mercedes of Valtteri Bottas, who in turn was comfortably clear of the Red Bull of perma-grinning and perma-competitive Daniel Ricciardo.

Williams and Ferrari probably thought they were being shrewd in Q1. But their strategy backfired: after waiting until the very last moment to make their final runs, to take advantage of a drying track, it rained again. Fernando Alonso, Räikkönen, Bottas and Felipe Massa were all stranded near the back of the grid.

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1 NICO ROSBERG 2 VALTTERI BOTTAS 3 LEWIS HAMILTON

2hr 26min 52.094sec 2hr 27min 22.229sec 2hr 27min 38.589sec

JAKOB EBREY

1 LEWIS HAMILTON Mercedes W05 2 VALTTERI BOTTAS Williams FW36 3 DANIEL RICCIARDO Red Bull RB10

Rd 9 H O C KEN H EIM , JU LY 2 0 2 01 4 Mercedes W05 Williams FW36 Mercedes W05

1hr 27min 54.976sec 1hr 34min 03.703sec 1hr 34min 05.094sec

F A S T E S T L A P LEWIS HAMILTON Mercedes W05 1min 19.908sec R A C E D I S T A N C E 67 laps, 190.424 miles P O L E P O S I T I O N NICO ROSBERG Mercedes W05 1min 16.540sec

the absence of Williams, and McLaren being flattered with three/four normally faster cars sidelined among the also-rans. Hamilton looked to have the edge in pace on Rosberg and had set a faster time on their first Q3 runs. But that had been with heavy rain falling in the last sector.

Everyone’s times through there were about 4sec down on those of their best in the dry. With the rain continuing to fall in the pitlane as the clock counted down, several were contemplating not even making second runs. This included Hamilton. It was his turn to have first call on the timing of the runs this weekend and he’d elected to go first. But if he didn’t really want to make a second run? Rosberg also felt it unlikely anyone was going to improve, but thought ‘what the hell, let’s give it a go’. So as his crew began removing the tyre blankets, Hamilton felt obliged to go out, too – and he left the garage first, the pair trailing at the back, marginal on whether they’d get over the line in time to begin their laps before the chequer fell.

“Tell Lewis to hurry up,” demanded Rosberg over the radio, anxious that Lewis might make it while he might not. Also – the rain had stopped in that final sector. It was all still to play for. There was potentially 4sec of lap time up for grabs.

In the heat of the moment Rosberg – who crossed the line with less than a second to spare – grasped this, Hamilton did not. Lewis locked up into turn three, losing perhaps half a second. So he unnecessarily abandoned the lap – and allowed Rosberg through. The final sector was indeed 4sec faster than before and Nico took pole by the margin of 1.3sec over Sebastian Vettel’s Red Bull. Having not completed a lap when the track was at its driest, Hamilton was back in sixth – and distraught. All he’d needed was to have finished his lap ahead of Rosberg. Ricciardo hadn’t even bothered doing a second run, so SEPTEMBER 2014

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LAT

Rosberg dominated at Hockenheim to win the German Grand Prix for the first time in his career

23/07/2014 11:41

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

BMW i8

A concept that became reality | BY ANDREW FRANKEL

W

E LANDED AT Inverness Airport and they’d positioned the i8s on the Tarmac, just across the apron from the aircraft.

Parked under artificial light at numerous motor shows, BMW’s new supercar had always seemed more concept than reality; but seeing seven of them lined up at a windswept airfield in the north of Scotland, with right-hand drive and number plates, some small fragment of the future seemed to have broken loose.

It was a Miura moment. My age at the time of the seminal Lamborghini’s launch was best measured in months, but you don’t need much imagination to guess how the show-going public greeted that car. It looked otherworldly, and quite brilliant too.

The return of such futuristic design would be cause on its own to celebrate the arrival of the i8, because I think we’ve seen a few too many traditional

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coupés in recent times, but the i8’s looks are more than matched by the technology beneath its skin.

The construction method is faintly reminiscent of a Porsche 904 insofar as both have a base platform onto which a structurally enhancing body is fitted, but where Porsche used steel and glass fibre, BMW now favours aluminium and carbon fibre. More unusually still, most of its power comes from a British-built, three cylinder 1.5-litre petrol engine based on that found in the latest Mini. It is the smallest engine to drive the wheels of any production BMW and surely the smallest ever to be appended to anything within a shout of the title of ‘supercar’.

With a tiny turbo, it directs 228bhp to the rear wheels while a further 129bhp flows through the front courtesy of a nose-mounted electric motor. In addition there’s an additional 20bhp electric motor in the back that triple-tasks as a starter, alternator and filler of holes in the petrol engine’s torque curve. Make no mistake: this is clever stuff.

But in essence what you’re looking at

FACTFILE £99,845

ENGINE 1.5 litres, three cylinders, turbocharged plus 129bhp electric motor POWER 357bhp @ 5800 rpm TORQUE 420lb ft @ 3700 rpm TRANSMISSION six-speed automatic 0-62MPH 4.4sec TOP SPEED 155mph ECONOMY 134.5mpg CO2 49g/km

is a 357bhp four-wheel-drive supercar, capable of 0-62mph in 4.4sec.

The dihedral doors flip up. BMW insists they’re built this way to save weight rather than provide additional Gotham-appeal. What it doesn’t mention is they make the i8 needlessly difficult to enter and rather inelegant to exit. And middle-aged Americans – perhaps some distance from their sporting peak – must make up a sizeable constituency of this car’s intended clientele. I fear they’re not going to like this aspect of the car’s character.

Once inside, you’ll find a brilliantly airy and spacious cabin. Write off the rear seats as anything other than additional storage space and focus instead on the large glasshouse giving spectacular all-round visibility for a mid-engined car. And the controls are simple enough for anyone who’s driven a recent BMW to operate immediately.

Amid all this post-modernity it’s important that the car makes you feel at home, and it does. The electronic dash is a disappointment, however. Normal SEPTEMBER 2014

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analogue clocks would look as absurd in here as digital dials in an Isetta, but their first duty is to be easy to read, and they’re not.

The i8 has four different drive modes (including all electric, which will accelerate the car quite smartly up to 75mph), and a sport setting that runs the petrol engine all the time, but the comfort default is fine for most journeys. Even here it’s powered by electricity most of the time and will genuinely run for about 20 gentle miles before the petrol engine kicks in. If you choose to charge the car from the mains (and I bet most will not, unless they’ve got friends visiting), you’ll fill 80 per cent of the battery in three hours from a wall socket, or two if you buy BMW’s fast-charge station.

At first this revolutionary new BMW feels, well, a touch odd. The ride on its unfashionably skinny low rolling resistance tyres is a little stiff at low speeds, the steering accurate but entirely artificial in its lack of feel. It’s also very quiet unless you’re on a coarse surface, where the lack of competing noise sources can make the tyres sound unreasonably intrusive.

But if you raise the effort level a little, the i8 starts to come alive. The suspension becomes much more supple when given only a little additional work, and you’ll start to feel the character of its performance (which is pretty much the reverse of what you might imagine, having read its specification sheet). You do not expect a tiny, three-cylinder turbo to respond like a large-capacity normally aspirated V8. But, with the seamless aid of all its electrical assistance, that is precisely how the i8 feels. Power delivery is instantaneous, even from idling speed: it just goes and goes hard. The petrol motor has an entirely split personality, too: almost inaudible at a high-speed cruise but sounding like a finely tuned V6 when asked to deliver its best. More than once it made me think of the Honda NSX. And the six-speed gearbox is a smooth, self-blipping triumph.

The i8 is, of course, nothing like the paragon of environmental saintliness its absurd official figures (134.5mpg and 49g/km) suggest, but you can’t blame BMW for exploiting the insane way in which it is allowed to make these calculations. I drove it hard and fast for a few hours around the Highlands and

got 29mpg, so I expect you’d achieve nearer 40mpg in normal driving.

By Porsche 911, Aston Martin Vantage or Jaguar F-type V8 standards, that is still exceptional.

What it won’t do is indulge your inner frustrated racing driver like these more conventional cars, but if you drive sensibly, and comfortably briskly, the i8 is genuinely excellent.

Does it matter that this veil of composure slips if you decide to push it as hard as it will go? I doubt it will trouble the majority for a second. Even so I’d not be doing my job if I didn’t point out that grip levels are modest by

Frankel found the i8’s digital instrumentation hard to read, but its stance and distinctive profile are easy to love

the standards you might expect of a modern, mid-engined supercar. When they are exhausted, you get 50 shades of understeer, none conducive to having a good time. It shows little desire to re-orientate itself when you snap the throttle shut, either: it just understeers a little less. I regret that the i8 is not better balanced, but acknowledge that this is hardly the most important priority for such a car.

And this is the key to understanding the i8. It is so different, so complex and so good at letting you leap to the wrong conclusions: only time at its wheel will reveal its true character.

This is a sporting car, but not a sports car. Nor is it a Grand Tourer in the Mercedes SL tradition, for it is much too sharp for that. It combines elements of both and does so very well, but adds a third component of its own, a 21st century savvy that no current rival can match. It is the odd one out, but only because it is so demonstrably far ahead of its time.

It has the field to itself and its every success will be deserved.

SEPTEMBER 2014

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Go with the Blow In 1930 Sir Henry ‘Tim’ Birkin defied Bentley by supercharging its beloved 4½. Eighty-four years on, we take an unforgettable ride as the Blower blasts back to the track where its legend was written writer

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ROB WIDDOWS

23/07/2014 13:05

Road trip Le Mans Classic

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Interview Brett Lunger

GETTY

Lunger chatting with Formula 5000 team-mate David Hobbs ahead of a race at Brainerd, 1972

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RELUCTANT

HERO He pulled Niki Lauda from the wreckage of his blazing Ferrari, fought in Vietnam and now pilots humanitarian flights for seriously ill children, but Brett Lunger plays down his many achievements… writer

B

ANDREW MARRIOTT

RETT LUNGER HAS always been understated, self-analytical, supremely fit and serious. That was his manner back in the 1970s when I handled his public relations in Europe and now, as we talk 40 years later at the Thermal Executive Airport near Palm Desert, California, little has changed. He has lightened up to a degree, but otherwise the so-called American ‘rich kid’ remains just as he was.

Lunger’s Formula 1 career is always linked to the Lauda accident rather than his race performances, so let’s get that out of the way.

It was Lunger who stood on the cockpit of the burning Ferrari and yanked Lauda out of the wreckage by his shoulder straps, flames licking around his legs. But then his courage should have been a given: after all, he had military medals in his collection – an American Purple Heart, or DFM (he describes it laughingly as the “Dumb F***ers Medal – you receive one if you are injured in combat”).

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F4

GP3

F3

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GP2 Motor racing’s nursery floor has been horribly cluttered in recent seasons, but steps are being taken to tidy things up.

We take a look at what’s gone wrong, what makes sense and what’s being done… writer

SIMON ARRON

Growing up the hard way

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HERE WAS ONCE AN ELEGANT SIMPLICITY. Forty years ago many British race meetings would commence with a couple of Formula Ford heats, sometimes three, to whittle the field down to 30-odd cars for the final. And you knew that, in future years, you’d be able to track the front-runners as they rose towards their goal: F3, perhaps a brief fling with Formula Atlantic, then F2 and maybe, just maybe…

But that was then.

In the mid-1970s Formula Ford 2000 was introduced as an intermediary step between FF1600 and F3, but there was sufficient interest, custom (and money) for it to thrive. That hit the buffers in the late 1980s, with the arrival of Formula Vauxhall Lotus and its significant manufacturer support… and the UK also by now had Formula First (a stepping stone to other stepping stones). It would soon receive Formula Vauxhall Junior and Formula Renault, too. Somehow they all co-existed (Formula Palmer Audi and Formula BMW were still a few years from invention), but it was hard to assess the various champions’ respective worth, given that they rarely met. A season of British F3 ought to answer a few questions, of course, but was that still a reliable barometer?

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grass r Track test 750 Motor Club trio

Where the

are greener

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s roots V

The 750 Motor Club, founded by our own Bill Boddy, celebrates its 75th anniversary this year.

It continues to thrive thanks to low-cost rules, diversity and – as we found out – good, clean fun ED FOSTER photographer MITCH PASHAVAIR writer

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ARIETY IS, ACCORDING TO THE DICTIONARY, “the quality or state of being different or diverse; the absence of uniformity or monotony”. There should really be a note under that, which would read, “see the 750 Motor Club”, the much-loved grass-roots organisation that celebrates its 75th anniversary this year.

It would be easier to list cars that can’t compete under the multi-coloured 750 umbrella, such is the diversity of classes.

Mazda MX-5s, Toyota MR2s, Honda Civics, sports specials, BMW Compacts, road sports, stock hatches… the list seems endless.

So how do you sample a range of 750MC cars? Unless you had time to organise a 20-car test then the best way to go about it is to get a flavour. Enter an Austin 7 Special, a 750 Formula Centaur and a Spire GT3 – two of which you might struggle to picture, were it not for the images surrounding these words. But that’s one of the attractions of the 750 Motor Club – no two cars are the same and many of them might be wholly unfamiliar.

We do recognise the first one we set eyes on as we enter the Mallory Park paddock – it’s an Austin 7 Special, a car which formed the basis of the 750 Motor Club when it was founded by our late former editor Bill Boddy (see p104). It seems an appropriate place to start, given that it is by far the earliest car of the three here today.

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{ LUNCH WITH }

PERRY Mc C A R T H Y Formula Ford champion, F3 front-runner, Grand Prix non-qualifier, pioneering Stig, works Audi driver and perennial optimist...

writer

SIMON TAYLOR | photographer JAMES MITCHELL

T

HE ROAD TO FORMULA 1 is steep and stony. For every rookie who takes his place on a Grand Prix grid there’s a long queue of hopefuls who never get there. Among the ones who come closest, talent – pure talent – may not be the deciding factor. Contacts, luck and above all money will probably play a larger part.

Of those who do make it into F1, some go onto greatness, to podiums, to victories, even to championship titles. As for the others, they may have plenty of ability, but perhaps they’re never in the right team, never get the breaks, are never quite in the right place at the right time.

They may score the odd championship point, but after a season or two they move on. They may subsequently enjoy a lucrative career in sports car racing or in a well-funded series like DTM; but in F1 terms they are consigned to the anoraks’ lists of forgotten also-rans.

And then there’s Perry McCarthy. Rather than merely being buried in the history books he is still, 22 years after his fleeting involvement with the top level of motor sport, remembered

as maybe the most unsuccessful Formula 1 driver of all time. It’s not a title one would wish on one’s worst enemy, but in an ironic way he is almost proud of it. “There’s success. And, unfortunately, there’s failure. What I can’t accept is mediocrity.”

Even though it did end in failure, the story of Perry McCarthy’s unsinkable determination to get to F1, his single-mindedness, his passion, his unshakeable self-belief, is exhilarating. He just knew, with every fibre of his being, that he had what it took to make it in F1, even though he had no money to do it and no contacts to help him. So he worked on North Sea oil rigs to build up enough funds to get himself through the lower formulae, and then he risked everything, running up debts (at 1990s values) of over £300,000 and even losing his house, to realise his dream.

He did get there, to the extent of having a seat in an amateurish, underfunded team for just eight Grands Prix, until the team owner was arrested in the paddock on fraud charges and the whole outfit disappeared overnight. But he didn’t start a single race. At one his licence was deemed inadequate. At another the WWW.MOTORSPORTMAGAZINE.COM 107

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A record

I

T IS 50 YEARS SINCE DONALD Campbell broke the world land speed record on Lake Eyre in South Australia with his gas-turbine car Bluebird. On July 17 1964 he recorded the incredible speed of 403.100mph in a wheel-driven car, before the age of jet and rocket propulsion took over. But the bald facts do not do Campbell’s achievement justice, as I found out when I went to visit Lake Eyre to discover what it would have been like all those years ago.

It seems strange that the LSR should be set on a lake, but this is one of the largest lakes in the world. The Lake Eyre Basin covers 1.2 million square miles, one sixth of the total of

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the vast continent of Australia. Yet because it is such a dry, arid country the lake is rarely full, and for much of the time it is dry. This enormous parched level area of salt was seen for the first time by a European, Edward John Eyre, in 1840. Here at the lowest point in Australia, 15m below sea level, water covers the lake only every seven or eight years, and it has only been at capacity three times since Eyre first stumbled upon it. Even today in a modern 4WD vehicle it’s an adventure to access the very heart of Terra Australis, the great Southern Land.

Starting from Adelaide we headed north toward Muloorina, the homestead where Campbell and his entourage put up half a century ago. Turning off the single lane Sturt Highway and crossing the South Flinders

Ranges, we emerged onto the flat plain below, where a few emu, sheep, cattle and wild horses are the only life among the abandoned houses.

It had been raining since we left Adelaide and, as we reached the end of the sealed road, some 600km further north, it was still raining. The unsealed road, made up of the ochre desert earth, was wet and slippery as we slithered another 48 miles to Marree. Ahead, however, the 31-mile track to Muloorina was closed due to the rains. We turned back to stay at the Marree Hotel, built in 1883 when the narrowgauge railway reached the town. Here we learnt that the road behind us had also been closed. It was the 21st Century and we were stranded – no way in or out, no mobile phone connection, in a place where you can only drink bottled SEPTEMBER 2014

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Bluebird 50 years on

worth its salt Fifty years ago Donald Campbell’s outdated Bluebird defied the jet age by setting a new Land Speed Record. The scene remains one of the most inhospitable places in the world writer

water. Luckily they also had some beer…

Next day it continued to rain and the ‘roads’ remained closed. This was what Campbell and his team experienced on their first visit – plans ruined by steady rain in one of the driest places on earth. The hotel was quite crowded with other travellers stuck in this ‘town’ at the crossroads of three desert tracks, once an important staging point for livestock transport but now sidelined. Just 60 people live here, one third Australian, one third Aboriginal and one third Afghan, descendants of the cameleers who provided transport in the early days.

The main street was a deluge of mud sucking at our boots as we explored the derelict trains, the derelict mosque (Australia’s oldest) and the cemetery, the town’s dead SEPTEMBER 2014

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population split like the living into three groups. We discovered the Lake Eyre Yacht Club, one eccentric man’s folly for sailing on the lake when it held some water.

It had water now, no doubt – but no means of accessing it by land.

If not by land then we could charter a plane.

But the nearest was at William Creek, 200km away, and we would have to wait until it had dropped supplies to those cut off by floods. In this dreary outback town, with a monotonous blanket of cloud overhead, it was an existence of frustration, boredom and flies. The flies were everywhere, though of Campbell and Bluebird little evidence, even though Marree was an important town for the project, where the men would drink or collect supplies and Campbell’s

wife – the singer Tonia Bern – even gave a charity concert. A small picture of the car in the very top corner of a mural at the hotel and a fly-blown copy of John Pearson’s Bluebird and the Dead Lake (an account of the events of 1964, which I found at the general store) were the sum total.

And yet through my frustration of not being able to reach Muloorina, there came to me the realisation that I was experiencing exactly what Donald Campbell and the rest of the Bluebird team had endured. Campbell had first flown over the Lake in 1961, scouting for a new record venue after a disastrous 1960 attempt on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah which had nearly killed him. At Lake Eyre he had found mile upon mile of flat salt with no one else WWW.MOTORSPORTMAGAZINE.COM 117

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The Record A moment in time

{ BRITISH F3 • CRYSTAL PALACE, 1970 }

SECONDS OUT

It was the penultimate round of the Motor Sport/Shell F3 series and Dave Walker’s win should have been headline news. Should, but wasn’t… writer

T

SIMON ARRON illustrator GUY ALLEN

HE END WAS NIGH FOR Formula 3’s 1-litre era – and this was a fitting reminder of just how good the racing could be. Aussie Dave Walker (Lotus 59) was tussling with Tony Trimmer (Brabham BT28) for the Motor Sport/Shell championship title – and had a reasonably straightforward run to victory in the season’s penultimate race, through the Crystal Palace parkland.

His escape was abetted by a wonderfully vigorous, five-car scrap for second place, featuring Trimmer, Mike Beuttler (Brabham BT28), James Hunt (Lotus 59), Dave Morgan (March 703) and Gerry Birrell (Brabham BT28).

By reputation Crystal Palace was a difficult circuit at which to overtake, but that’s not how it looked on this occasion. As Walker edged away, the destiny of second place appeared ever more uncertain.

As the race entered its final phase, Beuttler

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moved to the head of the chasing pack, while Morgan tried to annex third by moving to Hunt’s outside at South Tower, the final corner.

After the ensuing collision, Hunt’s car bounced into the centre of the circuit, minus two wheels, while Morgan’s came to rest against the sleepers. Trimmer picked his way through the debris to take third – and would eventually lift the title.

In the November 1970 edition of Motor Sport, reporter Mike Doodson described the aftermath as follows: “A stewards’ enquiry was convened, but by then Hunt had regrettably resorted to fisticuffs to settle his differences.

This is very much against the spirit of camaraderie that exists in motor racing and was greatly deplored.”

The authorities ultimately pointed the finger of blame at Morgan, but a debate about driving standards continued in the correspondence pages of specialist magazines, contributors including the understandably defensive mothers of Messrs Morgan and Beuttler…

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Winner Giuseppe Campari tracks Leonico Garnier’s Bugatti in Lyon. The Alfa P2 driver (right) finished more than a minute clear of Albert Divo’s Delage

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Retrospective 1924 French Grand Prix

Continuing a trilogy that chronicles key moments in the sport’s technical evolution, we look back at a race featuring the very best from France, Britain, Italy and America writer

PAUL FEARNLEY

PART 2

OFFSIDE

LAT

It’s a year of key anniversaries for the ‘original’ Grand Prix.

Next month, Reims 1954

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