BRABHAM GRAND PRIX

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31124, 29 July 1966, Page 11

BRABHAM GRAND PRIX

Bu

BRUCE McLAREN

TT looks as If the 1966 British Grand Prix will have to be rechristened the Brabham Grand Prix! Jack first, Denny Hulme second and Chris Irwin seventh—that's not too bad at all. In fact if you throw in the French Grand Prix and all those formula two races, Brabham must be about the “winningest” bloke around at the moment!

On Saturday, at Brands Hatch, 1 was delighted to be placed sixth! If you have to work for something it means so much more. This year we have had to work for everv result, so that just to finish encouraged us out of all proportion to my sixth placing. Actually it does give us a much better chance in the

future. The Serenissima engine ha s proved that it will keep running, and while we are trying to find power from the Ford we can at least continue development on the chassis. I felt the handling was below par in the race, but this can only be expected on a circuit like Brands Hatch with a car that hasn't done much running. A racing car chassis is like a fiddle. Without tuning it just won’t play well and it takes time to tune it. We have only just started to learn with our sports cars that development is every bit as important as design—perhaps even more important. The people who work the two together sensibly do well almost every time. BUSY WEEK

We had a busy week. The previous Sunday I’d been back in Canada to yet another sports car race at Montreal. This time we used a 5.4-litre Chevrolet in the McLaren Elva in place of the Oldsmobile. It didn't take us long to get the handling acceptable with the increased weight in the rear, and the increase of 100 horsepower over the Oldsmobile certainly made it feel a very different car on the straight Why didn't we use it before? I guess we were wrong to stick to the Oldsmobile for so long. In the early stages of sports car racing, develop ment of tyres and transmissions wasn’t up to the stage where 500 horsepower could be used reliably. Now 1 think it is.

Most of our opposition that week-end came from a Californian, Lothar Motschenbacher, in a McLaren Elva with a five-litre Oldsmobile, a car identical to the one w* had been running. Jerry Grant was also there with the All American Racers Lola Chevvy. While this is our last season of Group 7 “Big Bar ger” racing in England, this form of racing is definitely gaining ground in North America.

This year most of our opposition in Canada has gen-

erally managed to blow itself up (as we have done in past years) and once again we we able to have a reasonably comfortable win before the cai was air-freighted back to England. AMON’S RACE It arrived back at the works in Coinbrook on Thursday and we decided that as we didn’t have a Formula One car for Chris Amon to drive

we would enter him in the sports car for the race before the G.P.

We barely had time to blow the dust off it before final practice started! It had been going fairly well on the smooth surfaces in Canada but it didn’t seem to like the bumps and humps of Brands Hatch too much, although Chris equalled Richard Attwood's pole position time in a six-litre Lola. The race turned out to be a scorcher. Attwood jumped into the lead with Chris right on his exhausts as the flag fell, but before they had completed half a lap Attwood spun. Chris did his best to

avoid him and folded the [nose of our favourite car in against the left front wheel. Both cars came to a smoking halt and the field streamed by. Then followed a chase that made the race, with Chris working his way up from last to battle with Hugh Dibley for the lead with two laps to go. But for a slight entanglement with Dibley’s Lola in one of the tight corners which - ended up with Chris on the grass, he might have made it through to the lead. He lost just enough time to let Skip Scott’s McLaren Elva Ford up into second place and Chris had to settle for third. The bodywork had been rubbing on the tyre for nearly the whole race and every time he applied the brakes, the car, tried its hardest to turn sharp left, so to cope with that and still catch the leaders was quite a feat MAIN RACE It looked as if it would rain for the G.P. and a storm before the start made a few of us change to our wetweather tyres. I put rain tyres on my car and hoped that it would rain and keep on raining because that way I felt we had a chance. I don’t normally pray for rain before a race, 1 can assure you, but at Brands Hatch our Serenissima engine was delivering about 260 horsepower, and as the car is designed to handle a 400 horsepower engine, a wet race might have hampered the more powerful cars and therefore aided iis. It didn’t rain—in fact the circuit dried in the first 10 laps. I made a good start and it really felt great for a couple of laps to be up with the first five or six.

But I was losing my slight advantage as the track dried and 1 had to content myself with trying to finish and stay ahead of young Chris Irwin, driving his first Grand Prix in the third Brabham.