Motor Sport Magazine » Zandvoort

A highly charged season

Rob Widdows — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:53:48 +0000

I wonder if, like me, you are partial to the music of Frank Zappa? In one of his more philosophical moments, Zappa opined that the mind is like a parachute. It only works if it is opened. In August 1970 I travelled to the Isle of Wight Festival with Zappa, assigned to this task by the local newspaper. This ‘happening’ came between the Grands Prix in Austria and Italy.

Leaving aside the fun and frolics of the Isle of Wight, it’s interesting to look back on what was a highly charged season, brutally fractured by the death of Jochen Rindt at Monza in September. Already we’d lost Piers Courage at Zandvoort and Bruce McLaren in a test session at Goodwood. It seemed it couldn’t get any worse, but it did. The 1970 season is an example, too, of why we should keep an open mind. And this applies as much today as it has done over the decades.

If you recall, the mesmeric Rindt dominated proceedings, winning five races through the summer, from Monaco to the Hockenheimring. The only glitch came at Spa when the Cosworth in his Lotus 49C let go after 10 laps. Two weeks later Rindt, now in Chapman’s innovative 72, won the first of four on the trot. The championship, we thought, was surely his and deservedly so. But motor racing, as we have seen again this year, is full of surprises. Some happy, some sad.

All in all, a momentous year. Jacky Ickx was back at Ferrari after a year away at Brabham and by mid-summer the glorious 312B was coming on song, Ickx winning in Austria, Canada and Mexico. But it was not enough. Despite the tragedy of Monza, the mercurial Rindt could not be caught and he remains the sport’s only posthumous World Champion.

Intriguingly, if Ickx had won the penultimate round at Watkins Glen in October he would have beaten Rindt to the title. But it wasn’t to be. In a dramatic race that typified the season Ickx duly started from pole but this day the Ferrari was no match for the other man on the front row, Jackie Stewart in the new Tyrrell 001. Stewart led easily while Ickx pitted just after half-distance with a broken fuel line, returning in 12th place and storming back to a superb fourth by the flag. Meanwhile, a minute in the lead, Stewart retired, the Cosworth leaking oil. Who came through to win and wreck any hopes of a world title for Ickx? A young Brazilian called Emerson Fittipaldi in a Lotus, in only his fourth Grand Prix.

You needed a very open mind to keep up with the scriptwriter in 1970, and a strong stomach. It was both thrilling and awful, the sport at its best and worst. And it wasn’t over yet. Ickx won a chaotic final race in Mexico where spectators climbed the guardrails, stood trackside, and the maddest ran across the circuit itself. Eventually a dog escaped and ran into the path of Stewart’s Tyrrell, damaging the suspension and forcing the Scot to retire. Ickx came through to win and the 1971 Mexican Grand Prix was removed from the calendar.

Triple World Champion Jack Brabham hung up his helmet, having started his final season with a win in South Africa. Clay Regazzoni scored his first Grand Prix victory in a Ferrari at Monza. March arrived in Formula 1. Tyrrell built its first Grand Prix car, Stewart putting it on pole first time out in Canada. And Goodyear introduced slick tyres to the sport. What a year.

Making peace with Patrese

Nigel Roebuck — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:24:59 +0000

Dear Nigel,
Thank you for your frank opinions on all that interests us, but don’t those opinions sometimes cause you trouble? How many times have you been snubbed by those you’ve panned?
Pat O’Brien

Dear Pat,
Odd that you ask this question at just this moment – recently Martin Brundle and I discussed the very same thing, and I have written about it in my next column in the magazine. Having been a Grand Prix driver, Brundle could see things from both sides of the fence, but he admitted that he – like I, like any journalist – sometimes found it a difficult juggling act to say what he thought, tell the truth as he saw it, and yet maintain a workable relationship with the person or team he had seen fit to criticise.

Over the years I’ve had my difficulties and spats with people in F1, but the great majority have blown over relatively quickly. On more than one occasion, for example, I was on the wrong end of one of Ken Tyrrell’s ‘froth jobs’ (as they were widely known), but neither of us ever bore a grudge – Ken liked to say his piece if he thought you’d got something wrong, but that was the end of it, and he would then invariably invite you to have a cuppa with him at the motorhome, and talk about cricket.

Looking back, the silliest spat I ever got into was with Riccardo Patrese – it lasted for years, and how absurd that seems now. It arose after a brief… conversation we had at Zandvoort in 1979. He had crashed (brake failure) at the end of the pit straight in what Jackie Stewart would call “a fairly important way”, and when I later asked him what had happened, he gave me advice which was not only anatomically impossible, but also, I thought, somewhat rude. That being so, I made a similar suggestion to him and stalked off, siding with those who thought him a brat.

Thus, we had one of those ridiculous ‘situations’, and it persisted until Patrese joined Williams in the late ’80s. Ann Bradshaw, the team’s peerless PR, dragged us together one day, like two schoolboys. “Look,” she said, “I love you both, and it’s stupid you don’t talk to each other…” And so Riccardo and I shook hands, exchanged apologies, and have been good friends ever since…

The truth about Andretti and Peterson

Nigel Roebuck — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:33:27 +0000

Hi Nigel,
On a Formula 1 thread I participate in one of the regulars made this statement: “Andretti spent his entire championship year screaming at Chapman to make Peterson slow down. This does not come from me, but from sources who were there, like Murray Walker and Nigel Roebuck.” I find it hard to believe that Mario behaved like that. Can you tell me if it is true, and if so, can you provide some insight into the circumstances?
Kenny DesPortes

Dear Kenny,
I’d love to know where this ‘thread’ imagined he had read that, but I certainly never wrote anything of the kind, and I’m pretty confident Murray Walker never said anything like it, either. It simply wasn’t true.

It’s a fact that in 1978 Ronnie Peterson – with the young Gilles Villeneuve coming up on the rails – was almost certainly the out-and-out fastest driver in F1, and I don’t think Andretti himself would take issue with that. It’s true, too, that when Colin Chapman told Mario that Ronnie would be his team-mate in ’78, he was less than thrilled: “Tell me where it’s written we need two stars in this team…”

Reasonably enough, Andretti felt that he had put in all the hard work, dragged Lotus back from the brink, and now someone else was probably going to benefit from all his efforts.

Before signing Peterson, Chapman made it very clear to him that 1978 was to be Andretti’s year, that he had earned it, and Ronnie accepted that without problem, for he well knew that his career was in the doldrums and needed resurrection. And being a completely honourable man, he stuck by his agreement. There had never been any personal animosity between the two drivers, and once they started working together they became the firmest of friends.

In the first half of the season, it’s fair to say, Andretti usually had much the upper hand, for he was brilliant at setting up a racing car, where Peterson, by general consent, was pretty clueless in that respect. In the second half of the year, however, things were very much closer, and at places like Brands Hatch, the Osterreichring and Zandvoort, Ronnie was the quicker of the two.

It would never have been necessary, however, for Mario to “scream at Chapman to make Peterson slow down”, because Colin would have done it himself, quite unbidden! As it was, Ronnie stuck absolutely by the terms of his contract, and no one ever doubted that he would. Even though he had signed a McLaren contract for 1979, he dismissed suggestions that now he could forget about his commitment to Chapman: “I gave my word,” he said simply.

At Monza Andretti became World Champion, and in that same race Peterson was killed. No one was more heartbroken than Mario. I think your ‘thread’ has got his wires crossed somewhere…

Growing up trackside

Rob Widdows — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:50:32 +0000

John Hugenholtz called me last week. The name will ring bells if you’ve been to the Zandvoort circuit in Holland. His father, also John, was circuit director at Zandvoort from 1949 to 1974. The track actually opened in 1948, the same year as Freddie March established the Goodwood circuit. It was quite a year – both places having a special place in the hearts of motor racing people, and both places still open for business.

(Hugenholtz’s father competed in only one car race which was in the first post-war race in Leeuwarden (Holland) at an airfield where he raced his Riley Brooklands (called “Casque” and baptised by Sammy Davis) but dnf due to a broken piston)

(He bought the Riley Brooklands from Dries van der Lof, who later raced an HWM in a Dutch GP, in 1942)

In case you’re wondering, Hugenholtz father and son were both named Hans at birth but are better known in racing circles as John. JH Jr still races his GT40. Got it?

Anyway, there had already been a street race at Zandvoort in 1939 and the local Burgomaster convinced the Germans that they would need a parade ground to celebrate their certain victory… And they fell for it, the circuit’s foundations being laid for free by the Wehrmacht. The place we know today was designed by Sammy Davis, who used the natural contours of the sand dunes at what is now a holiday resort on the North Sea coast.

Hugenholtz Sr studied to be a lawyer and became a journalist by profession. But his passion was cars, in particular racing cars. And there are other parallels with Goodwood.

In 1936 Hugenholtz, a keen amateur bike racer, founded the Nederlands Auto Race Club in the same year as Freddie March held a hillclimb event for the Lancia Car Club in Goodwood Park, the first ever motor sport competition there. He won it of course, in his own Lancia Aprilia.

Hugenholtz Jr was born in 1950 and grew up at the home of the Dutch Grand Prix, allowing him access to all the secret testing that went on behind the dunes at Zandvoort. He also took lots of photographs – a boy with a camera didn’t bother anyone too much – and that’s the reason he called me last week. Having read my Mechanics’ Tale with Ray ‘Tex’ Rowe in Motor Sport (March issue), he dug out his photos of the day that Bruce tested the first McLaren Grand Prix car. Look out for them in the months to come.

(Hugenholtz racing a Dodge Viper at Le Mans in 1999 where he finished thrid in the GT1 class)

My correspondence with John Hugenholtz reminded me of my own boyhood at Goodwood. My father, too, was a lawyer, and his passion was for cars and motor racing. We lived just about a mile from the circuit and my earliest memories are of sitting in the Chicane grandstand with my parents. In fact I was there for the first meeting in September 1948 as this, apparently, was when my mother discovered that she was pregnant… which is about right as I joined the world in the summer of 1949.

As soon as I could totter around on my own, a third seat was booked in the grandstand, and right through until 1966 there we sat, always in the same seats at the Woodcote end of that old Chicane stand. Just as today, a smart enamel badge got us into the paddock. Later, as a teenager, I don’t think I was too impressed at having to wear a jacket and tie…

Like John Hugenholtz, I spent every moment of my spare time – and probably lots of exam revision time – watching testing at Goodwood. And taking photographs of secret new McLarens, Brabhams, Coopers, Hondas and the Ford GT which became the GT40. Perhaps my best ever day was when I finally plucked up the courage to ask if I could have a ride in the Can-Am McLaren. To my joy and amazement I found myself sitting alongside Denny Hulme for what are still the best laps of my life. No seat, no belts and 160mph down the Lavant Straight. A mile away my mother was blissfully unaware.

(Hugenholtz at Zandvoort in his own GT40)

Great car, great man and great memories. Mr Hugenholtz of Zandvoort and I shared this privilege – boys with access to a motor circuit. Couldn’t happen now, I guess. There’s all this ‘elf and safety’ for one thing.
Ah well, on we go into 2009. It’s still the most exciting, intoxicating sport in the world.