Formula One and Beyond

by Max Mosley

  Because it was my front wheel touching his back wheel, the bump had no effect on Schlesser and he was able to continue without difficulty. But tragically he died three weeks later driving a Honda in the French Grand Prix at Rouen. His car crashed on the second lap and caught fire. When the local fire brigade tried to extinguish it with water, it burned even more fiercely because the chassis was made of magnesium sheet.

  With some difficulty, my car was repaired for the next race at Monza. The chassis had been bent by the impact when it landed and, although Kurt Ahrens’s very big mechanic helped Jon Redgrave try to straighten it, a three-degree twist remained. That weekend, Piers was racing Formula One, so Jonathan Williams (no relation) drove Frank Williams’s other car. There were more than 40 cars for the 22 places on the grid. I just managed to qualify last on the grid, with several professional drivers failing – but only by gritting my teeth, getting a tow in someone’s slipstream and taking the Curva Grande flat with a very slight lift at close to 170 mph. When I later discussed with Rindt the consequences of going off there, saying it would mean a grizzly end in the trees, he said: ‘If you think like that, you shouldn’t be racing.’

  There was a major accident during the race involving the entire Ferrari works team and a number of other cars. One car was upside down and on fire, and its driver, Jean-Pierre Jaussaud (who later twice won the Le Mans 24-hour race), was prone on the track with a broken leg. In those days there was no thought of stopping the race, so the car burned for lap after lap until the fire engine arrived. I could feel the heat each time I drove past. An Italian newspaper had a whole page on the story, including a picture that happened to include my car going past the burning wreck. Again, thankfully, Jean never saw it. I finished eighth but was intrigued that some drivers slowed after the incident while others didn’t. I was one of those who didn’t – the danger had not increased just because there had been an accident.

  A few weeks earlier I had tried to follow Rindt in a Formula Two race at Zolder in Belgium. I was astonished to see him behind me after only a few laps because I knew he was quicker than me but couldn’t possibly be lapping me that soon. There had been an incident on the start line that I had luckily avoided. I was told later that someone hit Rindt from behind (he was on pole) and he’d ended up facing the wrong way. He had to wait until the entire field had gone past before he could start so, when he caught me, he wasn’t lapping me but coming up through the field.

  Two years later he told me that that was one of only two occasions in his career when he had driven at his absolute limit. The other, he said, was during the last laps of the 1970 Monaco Grand Prix, when he realised he was catching Jack Brabham and could win the race (which he did). In that Zolder race he overtook me round the outside on the first of the (then) very fast corners at the back of the circuit. Watching him do this from close up, it was clear there was a big gap between my driving and his. I began to suspect I didn’t have the talent to get to the very top.

  In September and back in the UK, I had one more outing in a club race. Jim Moore, a well-known club racer, was winning Formula Libre races all over the country, races in which you could compete with any kind of car. Moore had a very powerful single-seater with a 5.0 litre engine called a Kincraft, which was the forerunner of the Formula 5000 that emerged in the 1970s. A journalist friend suggested I take him on in my 1.6 litre Formula Two, so I did. The race was on the (then) Silverstone club circuit with two long straights plus shorter straights to Maggotts and then to Becketts, very suited to a car like the Kincraft which had much more power than mine with its smaller engine. But my car was more agile than his and I was confident I could get under the outright lap record for the club circuit. I felt I had a good chance of winning yet it turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined, and had been hyped up a bit like a Wild West gunfight. It was a close-run thing with positions being swapped, but in the end, to my relief, he spun. We shared a new outright lap record for the club circuit, a full two seconds under the old one, which lasted for some years.

  Meanwhile, the Bar was going well. The work was coming in and I was making the odd trip abroad. My clerk could always arrange things so I could be away on the Friday of a big race weekend. I had lunch each day in Gray’s Inn with the same small group of contemporaries, who were a bit mystified by the racing but always seemed intrigued. They were probably too polite to say what they really thought. They all ended up on the bench, including three in the Court of Appeal and one in the House of Lords (now the Supreme Court). I met most of them again recently after a gap of more than 40 years and, after talking to them, I sometimes feel slightly envious, thinking of the life I might have had at the Bar surrounded by clever people.

  But I didn’t really fit. I once spent ages on an opinion thinking that, as it was going to be read by top management, I should distil it carefully and not produce page upon page of important-sounding waffle. When it had been typed, the clerk appeared, pretending to weigh the few sheets in his hand and saying, ‘I can’t charge 200 guineas for this, Mr Mosley.’ Also around that time in 1968 I was walking up Middle Temple Lane one day when I saw a senior Queen’s Counsel coming the other way. If all goes well, that’s me in 30 years’ time, I thought. I didn’t like the idea and began to realise I was getting near the end.

  My Formula Two car was kept at Frank Williams’s garage in Slough. That team was the forerunner of his immensely successful Formula One team and nominally consisted of Piers Courage and me, but Frank was also preparing a car for Piers to drive in the winter Tasman Series in Australia and New Zealand. Doing a bit of moonlighting for Frank on the Tasman car was an Oxford contemporary, Robin Herd, who had been in the same first year as me, also doing physics. After that year (and a first in Mods) Robin changed to engineering and went on to get the top first in his year, one of the best ever.

  After Oxford, he had worked on Concorde at Farnborough as one of the youngest ever principal scientific officers. From there he went to McLaren and designed a succession of outstandingly successful cars, including the one Bruce drove in that Crystal Palace race back in 1967. Robin’s CanAm cars were hugely successful, with Bruce McLaren and Denny Hulme winning everything in North America, and he was now working at Cosworth on a revolutionary four-wheel drive Formula One car. When we met again by chance in Frank’s workshop, we hadn’t seen each other for nearly ten years but immediately hit it off. We had dinner in London and agreed we ought to get together and do something in motor sport.

  Apart from the Tasman Series, Frank wanted to enter Formula One with Piers. He was close to getting sponsorship from Reynolds Metals, a huge American aluminium company, who had invited him to visit their headquarters in Richmond, Virginia, with his designer. Frank asked Robin to go with him but he couldn’t because of his job at Cosworth. So Frank called me up in chambers and asked if I would pretend to be his designer. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘you’ve got a physics degree so you can do the technical talk. You won’t have to design anything.’ I couldn’t resist the temptation. I had never been to America and thought it would give me an insight into how motor racing finance worked at the top level. I said OK, if we can fly first class, I’m on. I took a few days off and travelled with Frank to Virginia.

  The meetings were interesting. Reynolds had a new technology for aluminium engine blocks that allowed the piston to run directly against the aluminium without the need for the usual steel liner. There was much talk of crystalline molecular structures and viewing different aspects through an electron microscope. They thought racing might usefully demonstrate this technology to the car industry. Frank had also invited Bruce McLaren to the meeting (unwisely as it turned out) and Bruce joined in the technical discussions, looking through the microscope and nodding knowingly about the crystalline structure. I was pretty sure he had no more idea than I did what this was really about, but he made a great impression. As the supposed designer I tried to do the same and it was all going rather well.

  The Reynolds bosses were
clearly impressed but there was an awkward moment at a reception they gave for us. Mr Reynolds introduced me to the company’s chief stress analyst and invited him to ‘ask Mr Mosley a few questions about stress analysis to test him out’. That was quite shrewd. Unlike a real racing car designer, I knew virtually nothing about stress analysis. I managed to distract the expert by asking him about his current work and he told me they were offering aluminium products to replace steel for oil drilling in Alaska. This was to save weight when transporting the equipment by air.

  He then launched into a long and interesting explanation about the stresses involved in drilling for oil and the problems with aluminium in this application. When Mr Reynolds joined us again, he hadn’t finished. He didn’t want to admit he’d done all the talking and hadn’t asked me anything, so he gave me an excellent report. Yet, unsurprisingly, it was Bruce who won the Reynolds sponsorship. His great CanAm reputation, gained with Robin’s cars, far outgunned the story Frank and I could tell.

  Back in the UK, Robin and I had a number of meetings and decided we could probably match the current Formula One establishment. That season some Formula One races had attracted only 13 cars, of which just eight or so were serious contenders. At some races, the back markers came solely to collect the start money. They would sit on the grid dripping oil, do a couple of laps and then stop or suffer an engine blow-up. It seemed ripe for a new team and we were full of confidence. Robin was genuinely successful and did not want to go on working for others, while I wanted more from life than the Bar, which for me was about being paid very well to fix other people’s problems but never ending up in charge.

  We decided to form a company to make racing cars. Robin recruited Alan Rees, a school friend of his and someone I knew as a successful Formula Two driver (the one who had passed underneath my airborne car at Hockenheim the previous year). He was also Jochen Rindt’s team manager in Formula Two. Alan in turn recruited Graham Coaker, a production engineer. At Robin’s suggestion, we decided to call the company March. The ‘a’ was because with the initials of our four surnames we needed a vowel to make it into a word.

  While all this was going on, I had bought a Lotus Formula Two car and intended to continue racing in 1969. It turned out to be a major mistake – it would have been much wiser to keep the Brabham that had been properly set up from the beginning and always worked well. But over the winter, I started thinking about how I could make up the difference between the top drivers and me. I discussed this with Robin and we hit on something novel: a vertical wing. Lots of racing car designers were beginning to fit wings but they were all horizontal, intended to push the car downwards towards the ground to make it grip better.

  This new idea was to use a wing with a symmetrical profile mounted vertically on the car, so sticking straight up and generating side force to help the car round corners. On the straight it would have no angle of attack and thus minimal drag, but as soon as you entered a corner, the slip angle of the tyres would mean the wing had an angle of attack and would generate lift. But because the wing was vertical, the lift would be a sideways force pointing inwards, so helping you get round the corner.

  Because the wing was symmetrical, the effect would be the same in both left- and right-handed corners, at least in still air. Another advantage was that up to a certain limit, and with the right profile, the force would increase if the car became more sideways, so it would help you if you made a mistake. With the wing producing a force inwards it would be like leaning on something in the corner. The maximum possible cornering speed would increase, possibly substantially. Better still, it would tend to unload the outer tyres, thus increasing their performance. Robin had a book from which we were able to select a suitable symmetrical profile.

  David Reeves fabricated a pair of wings that were very sophisticated and made of magnesium sheet with countersunk rivets. We also fitted a standard horizontal wing supported by the two vertical wings, so that no one would suspect the vertical ones were anything more than aerodynamically shaped supports for a normal wing. We hoped no one would understand how the system really worked. David fitted the whole thing to the Lotus and we went to Silverstone to try it. There were several top teams testing there that day, including a number with Formula One cars. I went out on the track and as soon as I entered a corner at a reasonable speed, I could feel the effect. It was startling. I went into the next corner faster and felt it even more strongly, but then the entire structure collapsed. David and I had underestimated the forces.

  Improbably (if you didn’t know how it worked), it had collapsed inwards, but among all the experts at Silverstone that day, the only one who seemed to notice the anomaly was John Surtees. He came up as we were packing it all away and asked why the structure had collapsed inwards. Why not outwards in the direction of the cornering force on the car, as you would expect? I think he’d got it. But no sooner had we made a much stronger version than there was a major accident at the 1969 Spanish Grand Prix when the wings on both Lotus Formula One cars collapsed. Graham Hill and Jochen Rindt were lucky to escape serious injury. The FIA immediately introduced a maximum wing height and other restrictions with which the vertical wing could never comply. It was the end of my hoped-for unfair advantage.

  The first big event was a Formula Two race at the Nürburgring on 27 April. The car was hopeless. It had the wrong springs and was bottoming. I could smell the fibreglass. Then came a suspension failure. It was a very high-speed accident and the car came to rest next to a camping ground, seriously damaged. I was surprised to be unhurt. As I was getting out of the car, a track marshal came up and offered me a small self-locking nut of a particular kind, asking if it was mine. I recognised it as coming from the suspension of my car. I suspected no one had tightened it at the factory before delivery and I no longer had Jon Redgrave as my mechanic (although he was with me again when we started the March Formula One team). Unusually, Jean was present in the pits for this race and had a long wait wondering what had happened. I think that finally did it for her with racing.

  Lotus repaired the car. I collected it from the factory and took it to test at nearby Snetterton, where I had another major component failure. This time, one of the front disc brakes sheared round the hub so the car veered suddenly to one side under braking. As I tried to get it under control I could see out of the corner of my eye people jumping off the bank they had been watching from, to get out of the way. That’s always a bad sign. By luck it ended without a crash.

  In those days Lotus had a poor reputation for reliability and were attempting to counter it with advertisements in motoring magazines showing five serious-looking men in white coats. The caption said they were the five inspectors who checked every Lotus component before it was fitted. I took the car back to the factory and, rather unkindly, asked if I could meet the five inspectors who had checked the failed component. At least they didn’t try to charge me for the repairs after the Nürburgring crash.

  By now I was beginning to focus on March. Alan Rees was running the same Lotus 59 model for Rindt and Hill, both of whom had been at the Nürburgring. I think these two and mine were the only Lotus 59s ever built. At Alan’s suggestion, I lent mine to his team for Ronnie Peterson, then a name in Formula Three, to drive at Albi, in France. On a wet track during practice he caused a sensation by keeping up with Jackie Stewart. Here was a real talent. The car still exists and is owned by someone in Germany. The Brabham ended up in Zimbabwe, I was told, and was destroyed in an accident. Only the battery survived and apparently still had my name on it.

  Having taken the big decision, I had lunch with my father and took the opportunity to tell him I had decided to give up the Bar and go into motor racing full time. I said I had so far achieved very little, yet by the time he was my age he had fought in the First World War, qualified as a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, been in parliament nearly eight years, was nationally known for having strongly opposed the government’s use of the Black and Tans in Ireland, resigned from the Conserv
atives and stood again successfully in his Conservative seat, this time as an independent, then crossed the floor to become a major figure in the Parliamentary Labour Party and, soon after, a minister in the 1929 Labour government. His response after I had been through that catalogue was: ‘Well, that just shows what a mistake it is to start too soon.’ I could see his point. He was by then 73 and had played no significant role in British politics since he was 34.

  5

  THE FIRST YEAR OF MARCH

  The original March was a Formula Three car designed by Robin Herd using components originally intended for other racing cars because there was no time to get long-lead items made. It was built in the summer of 1969, in Graham Coaker’s garden shed, by Bill Stone, an extraordinary New Zealand racing driver and engineer. He had been racing one of Robin’s McLaren Formula Two cars but had run out of money, so Robin offered him a job. He was our first employee and played a fundamental role in the early days of March. When Bill left us he went on to have an outstanding motor sport career, mainly with his own engineering business, and continued to compete, winning his last race – according to Autosport, a wet Formula Ford event in New Zealand in 2011 – at the age of 70.

  The March car’s first race was in September 1969 at Cadwell Park, a small English circuit, with Ronnie Peterson driving. He ran near the front, finishing third, but in the next race at Montlhéry near Paris he crashed and was injured. Bill Stone repaired the car but we had to find another driver. Our two leading contenders were Ian Ashley and James Hunt, a choice between ‘Crashley and Shunt’ as I (perhaps mischievously) described it to a journalist. James got the drive and the name stuck, but he didn’t seem to mind.