FIRST PLACE AT SEBRING

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31344, 14 April 1967, Page 11

FIRST PLACE AT SEBRING

TT is 10 years ago exactly A since Phil Kerr and I talked in New Zealand about taking my old bob-tailed Cooper 1500 sports car to Sebring for the 12-hour race. Sebring was in its hey-day then, and we thought we had a chance of winning. It has taken me 10 years to get the job done. The car that Mario Andretti and I drove at Sebring was not the Ford “J” car—now it’s called the Mark IV. It has the same “J” car chassis with strengthened wheels, a geometry change on the rear end to make it stick a little better, and a different steering ratio. The 7-litre V 8 has a new intake manifold and cylinder heads giving more power, and we had a full 500 b.h.p. at the rear wheels. The brakes were improved with thick ventilated discs. These were relatively minor changes since the car ran for the first time at the Le Mans trials this time last year.

The big external change is the body shape. I think it's a much prettier car now that Ford have gone back to the conventional streamlined rounded shape more akin to a high-speed automobile than the somewhat blunt, high tails of our “big banger” sportsracing cars. As it happened, the old body shape would probably have been just as fast at Sebring because we were only reaching 150 m.p.h. and handling was the important thing.

NO FERRARIS Sebring isn’t really too important in the eyes of Ford. Le Mans is and always will be the main target, and I guess Ferrari thought that way too because he didn’t send any cars to Sebring. This was a shame because we could have had a pretty good race, but as it was we had our hands full with the Chaparral. In practice, Mike Spence and Jim Hall in the Chaparral seemed to be in some sort of trouble, but they were still whittling back their times. Shelby was getting worried that they might sneak pole position away from us, so with just a few minutes of practice left I went out and tried fairly hard to get down around 10 seconds faster than last year’s lap record.

TWO CARS Ford had entered only two cars, the Mark IV run by Shelby American, and a Mark II run by Holman and Moody for A. J. Foyt and Lloyd Ruby. Ford didn’t want to look too conspicuous as the “big manufacturer” after the Daytona debacle, but John Holman still managed to

bring along four big semitrailers complete with machine shop and mobile grandstand, and then he rented a hangar beside the airfield circuit big enough to house a couple of Boeing 7075.

After the panic at Daytona, Sebring was a complete and pleasant reversal. I checked at the garage around 8 the night before the race and there wasn’t a soul about. The cars were sitting there completely finished and polished, ready to race. This is the

By

BRUCE McLAREN

sort of situation I like, because when the machinery is ready to go the night before a race, we always seem to do well.

I was amazed at the time it took me to get into the circuit that Friday night. The race didn’t start until 11 the next morning, but there were hundreds of cars queueing to get in.

BAD START Mario and I tossed a coin to see who would start and as usual I lost, so I lined up opposite the line of cars with Mike Spence beside me. The Chaparral was the only car we were worried about, so I asked Mike if he was going to do up his safety harness before he started. He said he was, so that eased the starting rush a little. The full harness in the Mark IV comprises shoulder straps, a seat belt, and a further strap between your legs which prevents you sliding out from underneath the other belt in the event of a severe frontal shunt. As you can imagine, all this takes a bit of buckling. By the time I got around to the ignition switch half the field seemed to have gone, and then I stalled it which didn’t improve matters.

As I charged off there were Sprites, Alfas, Chevvys, Dodge Darts, and Cortinas going everywhere, and I had to be careful weaving through them. I got past the slower machinery and started looking for the faster cars. But as I went past the pits I was shown a board that said “Place 1, Plus 15”—and all I’d done was pass the slower cars

I felt sure there must be some mistake because David Piper’s Ferrari, the Chaparral and the other Ford GT must have been at least a couple of miles ahead, so I charged on for a couple of laps just in case. The pits kept showing me the P. 1 board which meant I must have been leading.

Apparently Mike had made a bad start in the Chaparral (even worse than mine) and A. J. Foyt had hooked his leg through the steering wheel which rather hampered his getaway in the Mark II Ford!

LEAD LOST Mario and I had decided to change places with each fuel stop, and when I came in after an hour and a half, we had about a minute lead on the Chaparral. We lost most of that lead in the pits, but when Mario drove back into the race he was just a few seconds down on the Chaparral. For the next seven hours it was like a lot of 200-mile sprint races interrupted by pit stops.

We had to go just as hard as we could. This was no pace for an endurance race, but Fords wanted us to stay ahead of the Chaparral and that’s what we wanted to do too. I had a dice with Mike that lasted an hour. We were nose to tail, flat out, passing and re-passing each other. It was nearly as torrid as Formula two. CHAPARRAL OUT

I was up on top of John Holman’s mobile grandstand as the seventh hour ticked up and the Chaparral started to smoke. It was then about 20 yards behind Mario, and for the last 20 laps they had been like that

The Chaparral had apparently boiled the fluid in its automatic transmission, and it popped out a big cloud of smoke down the back straight. You could almost feel the sighs of relief, and immediately Mario was shown the “Easy” sign. When 1 went out again, it was back to routine long-dis-tance racing, concentrating on keeping the car going, staying out of trouble, going easy on the brakes and gearbox and keeping the revs under 6000 instead of under 7000.

Our only worry was the heat in the cockpit, and we were very glad we had decided on hour-and-a-half spells. I collected a piece of newspaper across the radiator in one of the afternoon runs, and the first I knew of it was when the water temperature went up from 190 to 220. A Porsche had thrown a hay bale in front of me earlier and filled the air duct into the cockpit with straw

and blocking it off, so that with the engine temperature rising as well, it was like being in a 150 m.p.h. Turkish bath!

At 10.30 p.m., with half an hour to go, the Mark II Ford went into the pits with some sort of engine trouble that was not readily traceable, so they decided to leave it there as they were more than half an hour ahead of the third-placed Porsche. I realised then that if they had second place sewn up, we had first place sewn up, and at 10.30 p.m., we could have parked our car and still won, even though the chequered flag was not due out for another half an hour!

Incidentally, one of my excuses for letting this column lag is that I have been receiving trans-Atlantic phone calls every 10 days or so from Ford asking me to come back and try the car again. I have spent more time at Daytona recently than I have at my factory in Coinbrook. I have got to the stage where I know Daytona forwards, backwards, sideways—in fact backwards at 180 m.p.h. in one incident probably best left undescribed.