I thought though that I'd entertain you with a story from the 1968 race from Ron Dennis ,that appeared on Autosport.com today. Sorry if you've seen it already!
At the Belgian Grand Prix this weekend, McLaren was celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the team's first victory - at the Belgian Grand Prix in 1968. Ron has plenty to say in the way of comparisons over the years and they are interesting - hit the link if you like F1 information.
For this blog, I just want to include the splendid anecdote which is very indicative of how much has changed in the past forty years. Here it is:
"This was a difficult race for us because we had two different types of engine in the cars and in Jack's car we had the latest Repco engine. In practice, one of the valve seats dropped out of the cylinder head and this was the only engine we had - the second one was locked in customs.
"We never worked at the circuit, we used to take the cars to a garage - there were all these local garages around and you would write to them saying 'Can we use your facilities?' during the weekend and they used to clear an area out.
"This was a difficult race for us because we had two different types of engine in the cars and in Jack's car we had the latest Repco engine. In practice, one of the valve seats dropped out of the cylinder head and this was the only engine we had - the second one was locked in customs.
"We never worked at the circuit, we used to take the cars to a garage - there were all these local garages around and you would write to them saying 'Can we use your facilities?' during the weekend and they used to clear an area out.
"As you know, there's a small airfield down the road, so the only solution was to take the cylinder heads off and Jack took them in his plane back to the factory, the engine shop in Guildford. They machined new valve inserts and literally took the cylinder heads home and put them in the oven.
"We were so tired when we got back to finish that night; we'd prepared all the engine - the engine was in the car to take the cylinder heads, and the next morning we got back to the circuit after working all night. And the Brabham trailer had a door that used to open from the bottom to the top and we arrived at the circuit, opened the door and one of the cars was missing.
"It had come loose, opened the door and it was about two miles down the road parked in the corner of a road completely undamaged with a whole crowd of people around it! So Jack arrives with the cylinder heads and he never knew the car had dropped out the back of the truck. It was very embarrassing! Needless to say, it didn't finish, but not because of that reason."
Picture source: The Sun
No comments:
Post a Comment