Sifting through the AP Archive the other day I came across this collection of gems – Honda-made footage from 1967-68 featuring John Surtees at Monza, Suzuka and Rouen. It was all mute, so I hope you don’t mind that I’ve added a few thoughts and a bit of music; and it was originally edited all over the shop – ie, ’67 had been mixed with ’68, Suzuka with Monza, etc, etc. So here is the finished edit. I hope it does some justice to John’s staggering achievement at Monza in ’67…because it’s not every day that a driver convinces a manufacturer that he can produce a new car in 30 days…and then wins, first time out with it. Equally, we should never forget the race John drove at Rouen the following June: against John’s advice, Jo Schlesser started the French GP in the difficult Honda A302 – and was then fatally injured in a fiery accident.Through the rain, and the fire and the smoke and debris, John nonetheless battled on to finish second (despite having to stop in the pits for a new pair of goggles). The footage from Suzuka is in my view equally amazing. I’d never seen any colour action images from Suzuka prior to the 1980s – and it’s amazing to see that the track has changed very little over time. Anyway, enough of the words: here’s the vid:
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I’m delighted to hear that John Surtees has finalised a date for his excellent Team Challenge karting event in aid of the Henry Surtees Foundation.
Slotting neatly in between the Goodwood Festival of Speed and the British Grand Prix, this relaxed but extremely worthwhile event will be held on July 4, 2012, (fittingly) on the stunning Mercedes-Benz World Test Circuit at Brooklands, in Surrey, England. Format: a two-hour endurance race for teams of four or five persons, with karts supplied by Daytona. The cost of the event per team will be £1,000 and, with John confirming that a certain B. Ecclestone has already reserved two teams, I hope we’ll see plenty of other key motor racing people taking up the challenge – either as drivers or as bystanders. It’ll also be interesting to see who Mr Ecclestone has signed up!
Full details of this event (and other fund-racers for the Foundation, including the end-of-year All-Comers kart event at Buckmore Park and the Beaujolais Run) can be found at http://henrysurteesfoundation.com and/or http://daytona.co.uk. Aside from direct costs, 100 per cent of funds raised by the Surtees Team Challenge will go to charity.
The recent loss of a number of friends – Williams’ Sheridan Thynne, Warwick Farm’s John Stranger and the 1971 Italian GP winner, Peter Gethin – has reminded me with a start that acclaim, if it is due, should never be neglected. Something worth saying, in other words, should always be said in the here and now and not when the moment has gone.
Let me reiterate, then, my steadfast belief that there is no-one in British motor sport more deserving of a knighthood than John Surtees. The only man ever – and ever likely – to win World Championships on motor-cycles and in cars, Surtees in addition won non-championship F1 races plus F2 and F5000 titles with cars of his own design. He was an integral part of the British motor racing boom. And, astonishingly, he also remains one of the few drivers ever to win Grands Prix with two different teams in the same season. Such was his versatility and engineering prowess.
After seven motor-cycling World Championships and then front-running drives for Team Lotus and Lola in F1, Surtees led Ferrari to the 1964 World Championship. Surtees scored a masterful win in the wet at Spa with the new 3-litre Ferrari in 1966 and that year would certainly have won the title again – or at least pushed Jack Brabham right to the line – but for a squabble in Maranello. Strong-willed and true to his principles, Surtees walked away from Ferrari after Spa.
Walked into the Surrey offices of the Cooper Car Company, to be precise – which in today’s parlance would be a bit like Lewis Hamilton suddenly leaving McLaren and choosing to drive for Toro Rosso.
It didn’t stop there. Surtees put the unwieldy Cooper-Maserati on the front row for the next race (the French GP) and thereafter matched or exceeded the pace of his highly-rated team-mate at Cooper, the brilliant Austrian, Jochen Rindt. Surtees was always mighty at the Nurburgring – and so it proved in 1966, when he qualified and finished second.
Then came the Mexican Grand Prix, the last round of the ’66 Championship. Surtees won for Cooper, setting up a double-header for the Surbiton-based team that would be completed by Pedro Rodriguez in South Africa early the following year.
Surtees had by then started a new project with Honda. The latest Honda for 1967 turned out to be a bit of an early Cooper-Maser, so John quickly persuaded the Japanese to allow him to build an adapted Lola around the V12 engine. John gave the “Hondola” its first race at Monza, in September – and won.
Honda pulled out the following year and so John switched to BRM for one season; in the background, though, he was designing and building his own F5000 and F1 cars. Team Surtees became a fully-fledged manufacturer, building cars for customers and racing as a factory team at the front.
John won two Oulton Park Gold Cups with his own F1 car; and Mike Hailwood all-but-won the 1972 South African Grand Prix in the works Surtees. Mike and John – ex-motor-cyclists both – also ran consistently at the front of the ultra-competitive 1972 European F2 Championship with the gorgeous, Matchbox-sponsored Surtees TS10-Harts; Mike went on to win the F2 Championship that year.
I could go on, too. John brilliantly driver-engineered the Ferrari Prototypes of the mid-1960s and was instrumental in the evolution of the Ford GT40 (based as it was on the Lola GT developed by Surtees). With Eric Broadley, he also created and honed one of the most prodigiously successful cars in British motor racing history – the Lola T70.
I was stunned, like the rest of the motor racing world, when John’s young son, Henry, lost his life in an innocuous-looking accident in a one-make F2 race at Brands Hatch in July, 2009. It was an unspeakable tragedy.
And yet John has emerged from the cloud with dignity and fortitude. He campaigns actively to raise money for “Henrycopters” – for quick-extraction helicopters to assist at serious accident scenes; he still loves the engineering side of motor racing; and he shuns the glitzyness of F1 glamour. If used correctly, I think he could play a far bigger ambassadorial role for our sport – particularly at school and college level – than any of us could imagine.
It was with some trepidation that I visited him in the summer to talk specifically about his epic drive at Spa, in 1966. I didn’t know what to expect. I knew John well in the 1970s and 80s but I hadn’t seen him for a while…
He was courteous, razor-sharp, full of life and every bit the John Surtees who moved, and is still moving, mountains. And so I include here the brief interview we recorded that day. I hope it gives at least a feel for John’s endless enthusiasm and sense of responsibility.
As I say, it will in my view be a travesty if one day we look back at the career of John Surtees and think: “Well, of course, he should have been awarded a knighthood….”
When I found this footage in the APArchive I couldn’t help re-living the titanic 1964 Italian GP at Monza, for this was the race when John Surtees and Lorenzo Bandini finished one-three for Ferrari. Coming off wins in Germany and Austria, Ferrari were under massive pressure to complete the hat-trick in Italy – and they didn’t disappoint. Surtees endlessly swapped the lead with Brabham’s Dan Gurney but it was Bruce McLaren (Cooper) who eventually finished second after Gurney struck engine trouble late in the race. Bandini won a ferocious battle for P3 with BRM’s Richie Ginther, crossing the line only a few inches ahead. This video is an excerpt from my weekly live show, The Racer’s Edge, which airs every Thursday at 18:00 UK, but please enjoy it as a stand-alone.
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I’ve given up waiting for John Surtees to be awarded a knighthood so I’m just going to go ahead and call him “Sir John” from here on in. Anyone who can drive and engineer F1 cars as well as he did – and win World Championships on both two wheels and four – deserves to be a Lord in my book, let alone a Knight. Accentuating the theme, I came across this photo in the files the other day: it’s of me wearing Sir John’s 1964 Championship-winning Everoak helmet, taken in the house of Gert Kramer in 1984. Gert is a friend who used to work for Daimler Benz; and, as you can see from the other photo, he has/had one of the best F1 driver helmet collections in the world. Senna? Prost? Reutemann? No problem. And, yes: that is Nigel and Rosanne Mansell there with Stefan Johansson.
All bets were off by the time they arrived at The Glen in ’66. Jack Brabham and his fabulous Brabham-Repcos had secured the world championship; John Surtees had switched mid-season from Ferrari to Cooper-Maserati, thus ending Maranello’s realistic title challenge (despite producing a car that could have won it). Dan Gurney had debuted his gorgeous Eagle, albeit still with 2.7 litre Climax engines. BRM had tried unsuccessfully to make their big 3-litre H16-engined cars serious runners. And Lotus, in the wake of that BRM disaster, vacillated between the 2-litre Climax-engined Lotus 33 and the Lotus 43-H16. As the field prepared for F1’s richest race to date, the US GP at Watkins Glen, Lotus’ Colin Chapman was unsure of whether to follow his head (race the 33) or his heart (delight the fans with the temperamental but throaty-sounding Lotus 43-H16). Aware of the recent success of big sports car racing in North America, he chose the latter course. And the rest is history.
This video includes little-seen footage of the 1966 USGP and a start-up, in more recent times, of the winning car.
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