Horse power

HORSEPOWER FERRARI’S TOP 5 GOODWOOD MOMENTS

Words by Ben Oliver

Ferrari and the Goodwood Motor Circuit were born within a year of each other, in 1947 and 1948 respectively. The first Ferrari to come to the UK was immediately raced at Goodwood, and these two great names of motorsport grew together, their histories intertwined, until professional racing ceased at the circuit in 1966. Here, we tell the story of Ferrari at Goodwood through five key moments, each involving a beautiful setting, a tough contest, some of the most seductive racing machinery ever constructed, and many of the greatest, most glamorous and occasionally most tragic talents to take a wheel.

DUDLEY FOLLAND RACES HIS 166 SPYDER CORSA, THE FIRST FERRARI IN THE UK

1949

How must the nascent Goodwood Motor Circuit have looked in perfect spring weather to the crowd of 40,000 who packed it for the Easter Monday meeting in 1949? Britain was still deep in postwar austerity then. Life for most was gritty, and those who drove down from London would have used more than the 90 miles of fuel they were rationed to each month.

But what joys awaited them: seven races featuring the stars of British motorsport, among them a 19-year-old Stirling Moss, at a beautiful new circuit that had only hosted its first race the previous September. And in its still-grassy paddock were bright, beautiful, exotic Italian race cars from Maserati, Cisitalia and a new Modenese manufacturer named Ferrari.

Dudley Folland’s 166 Spyder Corsa was the first Ferrari in the country, and the first thing he did with the single-seat, open-cockpit, open-wheel racer – after painting it green and adding Welsh dragons to its nose – was to race it at Goodwood. The Ferrari came to the circuit via a circuitous route. It was originally a 125S, the first model Enzo Ferrari had built under his own name in 1947, but it had been crashed and rebuilt as a more powerful 166, with a tiny jewel of a 2.0-litre V12 engine.

It was bought (along with two others) in 1948 by Prince Igor Troubetzkoy, a French nobleman of Russian descent, probably with help from his new American wife, the troubled “poor little rich girl” Barbara Hutton, heiress to the Woolworths fortune. Unbeknownst to the prince, while the car was in for repair Ferrari loaned it to Tazio Nuvolari to use in the 1948 Mille Miglia, the gruelling thousand-mile road race through Italy, from which both car and driver retired exhausted. Folland, a wealthy Welsh amateur sportsman and racer, then bought it, avoiding the 66 per cent import duty on cars costing over £1,000 by handing more than £4,000 in a bag in a London hotel to a Ferrari mechanic called Boschi, who’d transported the 166 from Modena in a van.

With its “bonnetful of engine” the Ferrari was the star of the paddock, according to Motor Sport magazine. “Driving beautifully and with the car holding the road like a leech”, Folland won the first race, the five-lap Lavant Cup, watched by the 9th Duke of Richmond, future prime minister Anthony Eden and those 40,000 motorsport fans – plus an unrecorded number of others who’d broken down the fence, Glastonbury-style, and invaded the track, such was the draw of the spectacle. It was Ferrari’s first win in the UK, in the first car to arrive here, more than a decade before you could buy a road-going Ferrari from a dealer. And perhaps it was an omen: two years later Ferrari’s first-ever Grand Prix win would happen in the UK, at Silverstone.

MIKE HAWTHORN DRIVES THE NINE HOUR RACE LIKE A SPRINT IN HIS FERRARI 750 MONZA

While events like that Easter Monday meeting in 1949 were hugely popular with the crowds, with seven or eight races providing the excitement of seven or eight starts and finishes, those who really knew their motorsport craved a British answer to the great European long-distance races such as Le Mans. The spectacle of the sports-racing cars of the period thundering into the gathering gloom, headlamps glowing and exhausts flaming, was a tantalising prospect.

Goodwood’s response was the Nine Hour race, first run in 1952 and for which its hallmark pits were constructed. The circuit provided “a fairyland scene for the occasion”, according to Motor Sport magazine, with Ferrari providing arguably the race’s greatest performance. For the 1955 running it entered a works 750 Monza for Mike Hawthorn and Alfonso de Portago. The car was light, nimble, achingly pretty and so compact that it looked like a three-quarterscale model of itself. De Portago was even better-looking and more glamorous than his car – a Spanish/Irish nobleman, racing driver, jockey, pilot, bobsledder and playboy who seemed to excel at all he did.

But Hawthorn was the real star of the pairing, and soon to become Britain’s first Formula 1 World Champion. He took the first stint and scorched into a lead, driving the Ferrari so hard he was lifting an inside wheel through the chicane. On one lap he lost it there, crashing through a fence and narrowly avoiding a sign before careering down the pit road and rejoining the track.

His lead lasted half an hour before a gearbox problem forced a 12-minute pit stop. But even a deficit like that can be made up over nine hours, and Hawthorne drove harder than ever, setting a new lap record for his class on the car’s 176th lap. Conventional racing wisdom says this shouldn’t be possible in an endurance race, but in treating it like a sprint he and de Portago charged from 42nd to third before a rear axle failure forced them out.

Aston Martin won the race, as it did all three Nine Hour events. The cost of putting the races on meant the 1955 running was the last, but Hawthorn’s drive in that gorgeous Ferrari was arguably the high point of all of them.

1955

1958

HAWTHORN AGAIN, GIVING THE GOODWOOD CROWD A PREVIEW OF THE COMBINATION THAT WOULD WIN THE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP

Another Goodwood Easter Monday meeting, another Ferrari and another glittering performance from Mike Hawthorn. The Formula 1 season had already begun by the time the Easter meeting was held in icy weather on April 7. But there was a four-month gap between the Argentine Grand Prix in January, which was won by Stirling Moss, and the European season, which was due to commence in May with the Monaco Grand Prix. In advance of that, Goodwood’s Easter meeting included a race – the Glover Trophy – for Grand Prix cars, and, even though it wasn’t part of the World Championship, Ferrari sent its star driver in its latest Formula 1 car, the 246 Dino.

Hawthorn’s most likely rival was the pugnacious Jean Behra in the BRM Type 25, a driver whose combative style on track was visually reinforced by the ear he’d been missing since a crash in 1955. He was perhaps a little too combative this time, tearing into the lead, but tearing a wheel off, four laps later, on the chicane wall. In his less powerful Cooper-Climax, Moss went from last to third place after four laps, setting exactly the same new track record as Hawthorn in the Ferrari, but blew his engine. His team-mate Jack Brabham was quick, but couldn’t get anywhere near Hawthorn, who won by 36 seconds.

He would go on to win that year’s Formula 1 World Championship in the same car, and the Goodwood crowds saw them together first. But any recollection of that time in motor racing is invariably tinged by the dark toll that scythed through the sport. Hawthorn’s partner in the 1955 Nine Hour, Alfonso de Portago, had been killed the year before in an accident that claimed nine spectators’ lives and ended the Mille Miglia. Within a year Behra and Hawthorn were gone too, Behra while racing and Hawthorn, ironically, in a road accident. (Mentally scarred by the loss of so many friends, he had quit racing straight after becoming world champion.) Those moments at Goodwood in Ferraris are among his lasting monuments.

STIRLING MOSS WINS THE TOURIST TROPHY TWO YEARS IN A ROW AT GOODWOOD, DRIVING A 250 GT SWB

Stirling Moss was present at each of our three previous Goodwood Ferrari moments: either at the meeting or in the same race, but never in a Ferrari. He impressed Enzo early in his career, but they fell out in 1951 when Moss arrived in Italy to find that the Ferrari he’d been promised for the Bari Grand Prix had been given to another driver. He vowed never to drive for the Scuderia, but later relented, winning in Ferraris in the Bahamas and Cuba in the late 1950s.

By 1960 he was finally racing a Ferrari at Goodwood – and what a race, and what a Ferrari. The Tourist Trophy was Britain’s oldest and most prestigious motorsport event, run since 1905 at five circuits and already won five times by Moss. It was originally intended for road-going cars and the subtle, stunning, dark blue 250 GT SWB coupé that he raced for team owner Rob Walker was just that: an elegant grand tourer with a body designed by Pininfarina and made by coachbuilder Scaglietti, as capable of effortlessly crossing a continent as it was of winning a top-flight race.

Moss’s 1960 car did both. Driven from Modena directly to its first race at Silverstone, chassis number 2119 GT is now owned by former Ferrari F1 technical director Ross Brawn. Given its beauty and significance, it would be valued deep in the tens of millions of pounds were it offered for sale again.

No race victory against the fields the TT attracted was ever easy, but Moss and his Ferrari made it seem that way, twice. In 1960 he won by two laps, listening to the race commentary on his Ferrari’s radio. In 1961 his lead at the end was just a lap, but the race organisers were so confident of his seventh TT win that they had a cake waiting for him.

They would also have assumed that there would be more Moss victories at Goodwood, and more in cars from Modena – a deal had finally been done to supply him with Ferraris for both Formula 1 and sportscar races for 1962 – but it was not to be. A heavy crash in a Lotus at Goodwood early in 1962 forced his retirement and meant that Moss’s 1961 TT victory was his last at the circuit he saw as home.

1960/ 1961

1964

GRAHAM HILL SEALS FERRARI’S FIVE-RACE LOCKOUT IN THE TOURIST TROPHY AT GOODWOOD

Five Tourist Trophy races were held at Goodwood from 1960 to 1964, and Ferrari won all of them. What Stirling Moss had begun in 1960 and 1961, Innes Ireland continued in the 250 GTO in 1962, and Graham Hill finished with a 250 GTO in 1963 and the 330 P open sports-racing prototype in 1964. The three models used to win the five races defied the convention that all Ferraris ought to be red. Moss’s 250 GTs were blue, Ireland’s 250 GTO was a pistachio green and Hill’s cars sported the distinctive red and Cambridge blue of Colonel Ronnie Hoare, whose Maranello Concessionaires imported Ferraris to the UK and ran an impressive privateer racing team.

Ferrari was in its imperial phase, winning not only the TT five times in a row, but every Le Mans over the same period. Ferrari’s 1964 Le Mans one-two-three came in June, a few months before Hill lined up at Goodwood in the same car in which he’d placed second at Le Mans.

Sometimes in motorsport it’s just a privilege to witness a driver, car or team in their prime, the predictability of their victories outweighed by their combined significance. But it wasn’t quite like that at Goodwood that dry, cool August day. Jim Clark was on sparkling form in his lithe, light Lotus 30, using kerb and verge to carve out an impressive early lead that he lost only to mechanical failures and pit-stop errors. With his pencil moustache, Hill looked as if he was from an older generation than Clark, and he drove the same way, perhaps in part because he’d injured his neck and was racing in a collar composed of three inflatable rings. There were “no fireworks”, a contemporary race report noted, but instead he eased his Ferrari around with the maturity and restraint that makes a car last 24 hours, and won him this 130-lap classic when Clark’s front suspension failed.

What a way for Ferrari to bow out at Goodwood. The TT was held elsewhere the next year, and the year after that top-flight racing at the circuit ceased. But the relationship between these two great names reflected the rise of Ferrari from its infancy to its pomp and has been celebrated at Goodwood’s three historic motorsport events ever since.