July 2016

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Nigel Roebuck

ALL OUR YESTERDAYS

ALL IMAGES LAT

Jean Behra leads Stirling Moss’s Cooper during the 1959 Monaco Grand Prix, before engine failure sidelined the Frenchman’s Ferrari. This month, Nigel Roebuck reflects on the different circumstances in which both men raced.

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F 1 F R O with NTLINE

>> EXCLUSIVE ALONSO INTERVIEW >> MERC F1 CLASH UNRAVELLED

Mark Hughes

MAX POWER

LAT

In the Spanish Grand Prix, his first race for Red Bull’s senior team, Max Verstappen capitalised on a favourable tyre strategy (and astute defence) to become the youngest race winner – at just 18 years and 228 days – in Formula 1 world championship history.

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F1 FRONTLINE with

Mark Hughes

ALL IMAGES LAT

“Karting is

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But this doesn’t mean Fernando Alonso no longer enjoys his sport. The Spaniard feels he has more still to offer at racing’s top table, before he heads off to tackle fresh projects. Such as the Indy 500, or Le Mans 24 Hours…

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pure driving. get that in F1 any more�

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Turmoil British GP 1976

Almost all

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of were

B R A N D S H ATC H , J U LY 1 8 , 1 9 76 The story is familiar and has been retold many times, but we don’t think it has ever previously been related in the following manner. That summer’s British Grand Prix threw up the latest of many twists in a compelling world championship tussle between Niki Lauda and James Hunt – and July was a particularly effervescent month. Hunt won in France, recovered nine points he thought he’d lost following his reinstatement as winner of the Spanish GP and was then knocked off at the first corner in his home race. He returned to the pits to have his car repaired, only to learn that a regulatory technicality might make him ineligible for the restart. When news of the home favourite’s potential predicament filtered through to the stands, fans let their feelings be known in a manner rarely – if ever – seen at any circuit. Faced with a brewing riot, stewards let Hunt take his place on the reformed grid and the McLaren driver eventually picked off Lauda’s leading Ferrari to take a popular victory. Ferrari appealed, but it would be another two months before the FIA finally ruled in the Italian team’s favour. Not much the crowd could do by then, but this is how Motor Sport’s readers recall a tumultuous day as F1 began its metamorphosis from an enthusiasts’ pastime to a constant source of global news headlines…

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SUTTON

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Freddie Hunt Driving Dad’s McLaren

HERE COMES THE

SON Freddie Hunt does not share the Formula 1 dream that inspired his father James, but he would like to race at Le Mans. First, though, there’s the small matter of a quick run in his dad’s McLaren M23 writer ROB WIDDOWS photographer JAYSON FONG

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{ LUNCH WITH }

HURLEY H AY W O O D He’d never raced abroad before, but he won first time at Le Mans. Now considered the US’s top endurance driver, he says it’s all due to Porsche writer

S

SIMON TAYLOR | photographer JENSEN HANDE

TATISTICS ARE NEVER THE whole story. But they are often a good place to start, so here’s a man who won the Le Mans 24 Hours at his first attempt and went on to be victorious there in three different decades. He also won the Daytona 24 Hours five times, and the Sebring 12 Hours twice. During a racing career lasting a remarkable 43 years – the majority of it in Porsches – he scored more than 40 wins in major sports car races. In his homeland, Hurley Haywood is renowned as the greatest endurance racer America has ever produced. Elsewhere this quiet, self-contained man is less well known. So when we both found ourselves as judges at the recent Amelia Island concours d’élégance, that was an excellent opportunity for me to fly out to Florida a day early and persuade him to sit down to lunch. We meet at the Jacksonville Porsche dealership that has been central to his entire working life on and off the track, and repair to a sun-warmed table outside JJ’s Bistro, along the Atlantic shoreline on Ponte Vedra Beach. A

spare, fit 68, Hurley chooses gazpacho, a chicken salad croissant and iced tea, unsweetened. He hails originally from Chicago. “I spent most of my vacations on my grandmother’s farm west of the city. When you’re a kid with a lot of land to roam in you learn how to drive very young, in any car that happens to be lying around. By the time I was 12 I knew all about understeer – not the terminology, perhaps, but I’d learned that if you go into a corner too fast you’re not going to get around it. “I came to college down here, and I had a Corvette I used to race in local autocrosses.” In the USA autocross means not racing on grass, as it does in the UK, but slalom sprinting. “I was pretty much unbeatable, but one day I did an event laid out in a supermarket parking lot and the guy who owned Brumos, the Jacksonville Porsche dealership, turned up. He was a well-established endurance racer with 904s and Carrera Sixes, and he’d brought an immaculately prepared 911 and a whole race team to support him. “Well, we tied for FTD, so there was a run-off, and I beat him. He came up to me afterwards and said, ‘You must be pretty WWW.MOTORSPORTMAGAZINE.COM 93

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Track test Dakar Mini

WORLD

HEAVY

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WC H AEMI PGI OHN T On paper its competitive credentials aren’t obvious, but the Mini All4 Dakar Racing is perfectly tailored to the world’s toughest endurance rallies – and has a track record to prove it writer

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ANDREW FRANKEL

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Interview Jamie Green

AUDI

“I suspect I was never destined to be an F driver…”

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He spent two seasons competing against Lewis Hamilton in cars and beat him both times, yet he hasn’t raced a singleseater since the end of 2004. But Jamie Green harbours no regrets about the hand he’s been dealt. He’s a professional racing driver – and that alone would once have seemed fanciful

F writer

SIMON ARRON

ORMULA 1 WAS OFTEN discussed in the Green family household, but not in the way you might imagine. “My dad raced stock cars and my brother still does,” Jamie says. “That’s what F1 meant in our world…” It was on short ovals that the young Green cut his teeth, winning the BriSCA Ministox title as a 10-year-old before switching to karts in 1996 and finishing as runner-up in the Junior TKM series at his first attempt. This early turn of speed attracted the attention of the Fletcher family – owner of the PF International kart circuit, near Newark – and they agreed to support his fledgling career as he competed against Lewis Hamilton, Robert Kubica and others of similar calibre. “Racing in Italy for the first time was a bit of an eye-opener,” he says. “It was just so competitive and many of the guys had been there for years. I was used to Long Eaton and places like that. I didn’t race abroad until I was 15 and quite a few of the quick guys had been there for a year or two, learning the language, the culture and the different driving style – it’s warmer than Britain, so there was more rubber on the track and you had to adapt to that. It wasn’t quite like Shenington... It was at a different level and I had to learn from scratch.” WWW.MOTORSPORTMAGAZINE.COM 129

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Surtees is keen to develop Buckmore Park and the circuit facilities have improved significantly since he became involved

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Insight Buckmore Park

“S

EE THE SIGN OVER there?” says John Surtees as we walk around Buckmore Park to survey the upgrade that’s progressing apace and search for suitable spots best to photograph the kart circuit’s famous owner. “Might that work?” The great man is pointing to a hoarding on the outside of Turn 2, at the far end of the tree-dappled track. On it there’s a familiar outline, of a white helmet with a blue stripe, a large ‘H’ to its right and in the middle the words ‘Henry’s Bend’. Ah yes. That’ll work, John. In fact, it couldn’t be more fitting. John Surtees, 82 years old and our cherished world champion of both two wheels and four, springs with a noticeably boyish step as he guides us around his latest project. He perches on one of the new and comfortably pliant safety barriers, feet dangling in a manner again more redolent of youth, and beams his wonderfully wide smile. Behind him, the sign reminds us precisely why he is here.

outstrip a man half his age (and I should know). But patently it’s still not enough. This kart circuit will allow him to do more – or to be precise, give more back, in his quest to find something positive from the horror he has lived through. But why Buckmore Park?

❖ NESTLED IN WOODLAND BESIDE A scout camp and the M2 motorway in Kent, Buckmore is long established as a much-loved breeding ground for racing talent, most famously from Johnny Herbert to the likes of Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton. It’s not the longest kart circuit in the UK and, until now, others have been better equipped. But under Bill Sisley’s guiding hand, Buckmore found its place at the heart of both the kart racing community and the associated business of turn-up-and-drive. “It’s a little like Brands Hatch,” says Surtees. “It’s got a lot of character, with gradient and a challenge where you perhaps learn a little more. And it’s where Henry had his first sit in a kart.” It was longtime friend Derek Redfern rather than Dad who gave Henry his first taste of motor sport. “When he came back,” says John,

“he said, ‘Daddy, that’s what I want to do!’ So I became a karting father. I had my first acquaintance with Buckmore, when it was all Nissen huts, a little later. Of course, karting was something totally removed from my career.” His first business involvement at the track began in 2003 when Sisley called on his help. “I got involved in creating the clubhouse we are sitting in now, which relative to a karting circuit is of a quality rather unusual.” That’s no boast; it’s an addition certain UK long circuits would covet, never mind kart tracks. “I did it on the understanding of one day buying the circuit,” he says. “For various reasons, the people who owned it ignored that until they got into trouble – not the kart circuit, but the overall company – and it fell into the hands of receivers. Fortunately I was able to safeguard the circuit and make sure it wasn’t lost by buying the freehold.” That was about three years ago. Then last April Surtees sprang a surprise by taking over from Sisley as the man running the place. At the launch, he unveiled an impressive fleet of new Sodi RT8 390cc karts, all presented in Team Surtees yellow and blue.

“I AM STILL ON HENRY’S ADVENTURE”

Inspired by the memory of his late son, 82-year-old John Surtees has bought a kart circuit. He tells us about his ambitious plans for Buckmore Park writer

DAMIEN SMITH | photographer MATTHEW HOWELL

When his beloved son was killed in a freak Formula 2 accident at Brands Hatch in 2009, we might have been forgiven the assumption that John’s lifetime of motor racing graft had come to the most tragic of all conclusions. Instead, Surtees channelled that unimaginable grief into the founding of a charity created in Henry’s honour and began using his great sporting legacy to raise funds to help those who have suffered serious injuries in accidents. Barely a month goes by without the launch of a new initiative from the Henry Surtees Foundation. Combined with his continuing business interests, John shows the zest to J U LY 2 0 1 6

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The “incentive”, while tied into the memory of his son, is to make a difference to other young people. “Having established the Foundation, I thought that it would be nice to establish a facility here to get youngsters in the community on a career path. Not necessarily to make racing drivers – I must stress that. If you look at the history of karting, it has also produced an awful lot of engineers and technicians, too. “The important thing in life is if you can get someone enthused about a subject, it can be a driving factor in their life. Racing activities and the racing environment can be something WWW.MOTORSPORTMAGAZINE.COM 135

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