A SPECTATOR AT SPA

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31094, 24 June 1966, Page 9

A SPECTATOR AT SPA

(By

BRUCE MCLAREN)

A FEW Mondays ago I wasj v at Indianapolis, as a watcher rather than a racer, but I must say I felt quite comfortable and familiar with the announcer rattling on about Graham Hill, Jackie Stewart and Jimmy Clark/ Indy really is a spectacle, and i I thought “our” boys went extremely well. There was some talk about offering a prize for the first American home next year. . . . But things haven’t been i going quite a way I would have liked. I won the sports -car races at Ste Jovite and Mosport in Canada and had |a holiday trip to Indy for a look, but I didn’t intend to be looking on at Spa—even though the pits were probably the safest place as it turned out.

We knew Formula One racing wasn’t going to be a piece of cake, but we didn’t expect it to be quite as hard as it is. We ran into bearing troubles with our Indy Ford engines and development and testing to try to cope with this has gobbled up time in a ridiculous fashion. After Monaco we decided that we would have to have a different sort of iron in the fire, and the result was the Italian V 8 3-litre Serenissima engine. We knew it wasn’t going to give any more power than the Ford but the features were lighter weight and a better power range.

ENGINE FAILS It was like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. We never did a satisfactory

practice lap at Spa and when it did decide to run on all eight cylinders it only kept up the good work for half a lap before the oil pressure zeroed and it was all over. So there we were without a car for the Grand Prix. This was a great pity because we had all worked hard on the project, both in England and in Italy. I watched the start from; the pits for the first time ini 10 years. It's amazing when I ■ think that l’v e been around G.P. racing for a time and ‘yet have never seen a grid start before. Surtees almost I set the Ferrari tyres alight : leaving the line in great haste, and Jackie Stewart seemed to be doing his start as much sideways as straight ahead.

But what happened after everyone had gone roaring up the hill and out of sight was the sort of thing that you wouldn’t believe if you read it The Spa circuit is 8.76 miles round so that the weather can change from one side to the other, and a thunder storm had completely drowned the straight while the pits were just getting the first signs of rain. So the boys were in for quite a shock when they went streaming out through Burneville to hit what they described as a wall of water. Surtees, Rindt and a few of the B.R.M.’s made it through the first wet corners all right, but Jo Bonnier’s Cooper Maserati was on dry tyres and he took off as soon as he hit the water. Apparently his car went every way and there wasn’t much he

could do about IL while people were ducking off the road and hitting each other trying to dodge him. Jo’s car finally came to rest minus most of its wheels, balanced across a stone wall with a sharpish drop below. Jo did not have a scratch from all that bashing and crashing, but he had to climb out ever so gently so that he and what was left of the Cooper did not fall off the wall. Denny Hume, Jo Siffert and Mike Spence all had incidents of varying proportions, but amazingly nobody was hurt. Further down the road the action had speeded up. According to Graham Hill there was a small river across the tricky “S” in the middle of the straight which we take as near to flat out at 170 as we dare in the dry. Surtees made it through pointing the right way, but Rindt’s Cooper Maserati came out of the kink spinning, and while he was gyrating he watched Bondurant’s B.R.M. whistle out backwards, and tip over!

STEWART HURT Jackie Stewart had already gone off through the bales and was pinned in his shunted car behind the bales where he could not be seen, and it was extremely lucky that Graham Hill’s B.R.M. spun into the bales at the same spot. When Graham hopped out to survey the situation he saw Jackie on the other side of the bales! Bondurant had only bruises and the odd scratch from his spectacular crash, so the pair of them

helped Jackie out of his car and looked after him until the ambulance arrived.

Jimmy Clark’s Lotus had expired not far from the start and we consoled each other with the fact that the race we were missing was not very pleasant anyway. Phil Hill had done a lap at the tail of the field with his McLaren-Ford camera car that M.G.M. are using for track shots, and he rolled into the pits after that hectic opener, shaken more than somewhat by the mechanical carnage that he had seen. He reckoned it was just like a repeat of the Indianapolis opening lap shunt, with cars flying in all directions. And I should know about that I was standing on the first corner at Indy with Chris Amon when a car arrived with no front wheels on!

I was going to turn to Chris and say, “That's a funny way to start a motor race,” but Chris had disappeared. He had seen all the wheels flying, and was putting as much of the brickyard between himself and the accident as he could! What a shunt that was. You have never seen so many wrecked cars and angry drivers and yet nobody was hurt, although I fancy Dan Gurney was in the sort of mood that he would have taken a poke at someone if sufficiently provoked. He had gone to a fantastic amount of effort to prepare his team of Eagles and to have his own car knocked out in the first few hundred yards must have been rather annoying.

SPORTS CARS In Canada we were having a great time in the sports car races, and Chris and I should have had a couple of onetwo’s. At Ste Jovite we had the race in the bag and were running nose to tail when Chris’s engine blew 10 laps from the flag. At Mosport I was in front while Chris was working hard with a pair of our quicker customers —C. Hayes and L. Motschenbacher in McLaren-Elvas —but it looked as though we could pull the double, when a Porsche spun into the side of Chris's car, knocking out a tyre valve. The result of the second heat at Mosport was a great advertisement for our cars—they filled the first five places.