A feature from today's Autosport magazine which I thought people would appreciate, which talks about how the new teams for the 1973 season got their start in F1...
Quote:
The new F1 teams of 1973
Four outfits emerged during the 1973 season, with varying degrees of success. Gary Watkins and Edd Straw recall how it all happened with some of the key players
By Edd Straw and Gary Watkins
SHADOW
It's doubtful many people at Brands Hatch in July 1972 recognised the lanky, bearded American darting around the paddock. Don Nichols was there on a reconnoitre mission, and before the year was out, he would announce plans for his Shadow team to enter Formula 1 after two seasons of Can-Am in North America.
The trip was made at the suggestion of one of his drivers, Jackie Oliver. Tony Southgate, who would go on to design the first Shadow F1 car and every subsequent chassis up to the 1978 DN8, reckons that Oliver was the catalyst for the American team's expansion.
"Jackie was out of F1 and wanted to get back," explains then-BRM man Southgate, who worked with Oliver there in 1969 and '70. "He chatted up Don and told him he could put a team together."
Nichols, now 89, doesn't dispute the theory. "I do remember Jackie urging me to go to England," he says. "But I also remember coming back and thinking that was what I wanted to do. F1 was the top of the tree."
Nichols, in turn, had little problem persuading his US sponsor, Universal Oil Products, which was promoting its lead-free petrol around the world, that F1 was the place to be. Nor getting Southgate to leave the fading BRM squad to become his designer.
Southgate started on what would become the Shadow DN1 in October '72, working out of his garage at home in Lincolnshire near his former employer's factory. He drew the car on his own, until the arrival of Andy Smallman, who joined him in his makeshift design office.
The team's factory was initially temporary too. "UOP had a division that made suspended truck seats [UOP Bostrom] and they had a scruffy old factory with wooden benches in Northampton that they no longer required," recalls Southgate. "We worked out there until the new unit, 200 yards down the road, was ready."
Time was short, but as Nichols points out, Southgate "was a very quick designer". The car was never going to be ready for the South American leg of the world championship, but two cars were up and running in time for Oliver and American George Follmer, who'd dominated the previous year's Can-Am series with the Penske Porsche squad, to race at the South African GP in March.
Follmer finished in the points on his F1 debut at Kyalami and followed it up with a podium second time out at Montjuich in Spain. It was an impressive start for a brand new team put together in a hurry.
There wouldn't be any more points, however, until Oliver got on the podium at the penultimate race of the season at Mosport.
The DN1 was a largely conventional DFV-engined affair, at least underneath its fully enclosed bodywork. But it was "better than its results indicate", reckons Southgate.
The problem was that Shadow's resources were spread too thin. "UOP wanted a new Can-Am car [the DN2] and I had to design that as well," he explains. "It was a pity because it detracted from any development on the F1 side.
"And Don couldn't resist selling a car to Graham Hill, which meant we were further overstretched. We were a little team, working out of a makeshift factory. And if there was a massive budget, we didn't see it."
There was also a question of tyres. Shadow wasn't one of Goodyear's favoured teams, and not just because it was a newcomer. Nichols, you see, had imported Firestone racing tyres into Japan in the 1960s.
Surtees driver Carlos Pace, who'd undertaken a handful of Can-Am races with Shadow the previous year, tested the DN1 on what Southgate calls a "decent set of tyres" at Silverstone after the British Grand Prix. The designer remembers the Brazilian going significantly quicker than Follmer and Oliver, who'd respectively qualified 25th and 26th for the GP, setting a time that would have put him fifth on the grid.
Two podiums looked like a decent haul of the F1 debutants, but it might have been much better.
ENSIGN
The M5 motorway has a place in Formula 1 history, believe it or not. It was on the gateway to south-west England that the decision was made for fledgling racing car constructor Ensign to make the giant leap from Formula 3 to grand prix racing. And the plan was hatched inside a Rolls-Royce!
Ensign founder Mo Nunn well remembers the day that driver Rikky von Opel, great-grandson of the founder of the German motor manufacturer, had the idea.
"Rikki had just won a race at Oulton Park," he explains. "We were going down to Thruxton for the August Bank Holiday race the following day. I was driving his Rolls and he was sitting in the back. He leant forward and asked what we were going to do the following year.
"I said, 'What do you want to do, Formula 2?'. His reply was: 'No, not really, how about F1?' I almost jumped out of my seat, but when he asked me if I could build an F1 car, I replied that I could if I had the money."
The agreement was that Walsall-based Ensign would stop the manufacture of F3 cars so that it could focus fully on the F1 programme. Interestingly, there was a clause in the contract between Nunn and Lichtenstein national von Opel that would have resulted in Ensign being funded to restart the production side of the business in the event of anything untoward happening to the driver.
Nunn, who had built his first car for F3 in 1970, set to work on the chassis. When completed, it was sent to Specialised Moulding, which designed and built the bodywork that resulted in the 'batmobile' monicker given to the N173.
The car wasn't ready to run until June '73, sometime after its original scheduled appearance at the South African Grand Prix three months earlier.
Nunn isn't sure that there was ever a plan in place to race as early as the Kyalami event. "That would have been way too soon," he recalls.
"FOCA [the Formula 1 Constructors' Association] came into it somehow, as I remember. We were trying to get into FOCA, so I think I'd told Bernie [Ecclestone] that we would be ready nearer the beginning of the year."
Team Ensign's maiden season of F1 wasn't stellar. Von Opel finished his first two grands prix in the teens, though arguably his best performance came at Zandvoort.
He qualified 14th, but would non-start after a broken rear suspension pick-up point was found after qualifying.
Von Opel took his money to Brabham after a couple of races of 1974, but Nunn was where he wanted to be.
"I didn't want to do another year in F3, which is why I stopped driving in 1970," he explains. "I thought that if I couldn't drive my way to the top, I would try to get there another way. That's why I started building F3 cars."
HESKETH
There was no more fitting a place than Monte Carlo for the Hesketh Racing dilettantes to gatecrash the grand prix party in 1973. Yet the team was only there courtesy of its fortunes on another street circuit one month earlier.
The events of the Pau Formula 2 meeting propelled Hesketh and its crash-prone driver to the pinnacle of the sport.
Hesketh and James Hunt had already made their Formula 1 debuts at the Brands Hatch Race of Champions non-championship race with a rented Surtees TS9B. The idea then was to fit in some more F1 races with a later TS14 around the team's attack on the European F2 Championship.
That plan came apart along with the team's F2 Surtees-Ford TS15 against Pau's unyielding guardrails during practice.
"That accident was actually quite fortuitous," remembers Hesketh team manager Anthony 'Bubbles' Horsley. "We'd chosen the wrong car: we should have gone with a March and a BMW engine. Buying an F1 wasn't that much more expensive than an F2, so we thought we'd give up and go and do F1 full-time. And when we made a bop of that we could get on with the rest of our lives."
A plan was hatched over what Horsley remembers as "a rather fabulous dinner with Max Mosley" that weekend in Pau. The idea of running a TS14 on occasion was scrapped (resulting in an out-of-court settlement with Surtees, which claimed there was a verbal agreement with Hesketh) and a new March 731 leased for a more or less full-time F1 campaign.
"We rented the car and gearbox for seven or eight GPs and bought three Cosworth DFVs for seven grand each. We had the old Formula 3 truck, and suddenly we were an F1 team," recalls Horsley.
"But we didn't just leave Bicester with the car — we left with Harvey Postlethwaite and Nigel Stroud. That was the key thing we managed to do, persuading them to come with the car."
Horsley suggests that engineer Postlethwaite "got another 10 per cent" out of the March. There were a series of mods - aerodynamic and otherwise - undertaken by the young and ambitious engineer, including what the team dubbed the 'silly nose'.
"Attention to detail was the key," reckons Stroud, who was the senior of the two mechanics on the March.
"Harvey was always messing about with stuff, but I don't think there was a night-and-day difference between our cars and the other Marches. The difference was that the works effort was fairly diluted whereas we had one car with the full focus on one driver."
That driver came alive in F1. 'Hunt the Shunt' suddenly emerged as a real prospect.
"It was the perfect theatre for him with all the glam," says Stroud. "He revelled in it, but he was also so nervous and hyper before he got in the car that his reaction times would have been beyond anyone else's. And those cars were so twitchy."
Hunt's ninth-place finish in Monaco and a point for sixth second time out at Paul Ricard from 14th on the grid astounded the F1 establishment. And that was before he made it onto the podium at Zandvoort and Watkins Glen.
"It was a case of 'shock, horror!' - these idiots are competitive," recalls Horsley. "We were surprised, but we knew James would be quick after our first test with the March at Goodwood.
"He came in after his first run, saying it had far less power than he would have thought. We knew that he wasn't frightened of the car."
EMBASSY HILL
When a tyre failed on his Lotus 49B during the 1969 United States Grand Prix, pitching the car into a roll, Graham Hill's career as a top-line F1 driver was effectively over.
His enormous determination and enthusiasm allowed him to come back from serious leg injuries that it was initially feared would prevent him walking again. But while he was still able to win the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1972 and taste victory in F2, Hill was largely a spent force.
After spending '71 and '72 with an in-transition Brabham team, Hill was running out of options. Nobody was interested in paying him to race in F1. There were possibilities with minor teams, such as the BS Fabrications-run Space Racing squad that ran Mike Beuttler's March, but they required Hill – a two-time world champion – to bring sponsorship.
Rather than taking money elsewhere, Hill opted to start his own team, claiming the inspiration had come from Henri Treu, the head of the Grand Prix International organisation, as late as December '72.
Originally set to compete in the Jaegermeister colours he carried in F2 the previous year, Hill's team was launched amid much fanfare with a three-year sponsorship deal from the Embassy tobacco brand.
After initial discussions with March, Hill struck a deal with the new Shadow squad for chassis supply. A third car was built up and Hill and his four mechanics had it ready in time for the '73 Spanish GP.
Hill's Shadow DN1 was not quite to the latest specification, lacking the long-nose and improved radiators used by the works team, although it was upgraded for the following race in Belgium.
Blighted by oil leaks and cooling problems, Hill qualified last and managed only 27 laps in the race.
It proved to be that kind of season, with a best grid position of 17th and a highest finish of ninth at Zolder.
Running his own team was a culture shock, but Hill learned quickly. He opted to go to Lola for chassis for the following season, which formed the basis of the first Hill – the GH1, designed by Andy Smallman – for 1975.
That season, the team showed signs of progress, particularly with the highly rated Tony Brise, only for it all to come to a tragic end.
On November 29, '75, returning from testing at Paul Ricard with the GH2 that would race the following year, Hill's plane crashed on Arkley Golf Course in North London in fog, costing the lives of Hill, who had announced his retirement as a driver in July, Brise, Smallman, team manager Ray Brimble and mechanics Terry Richards and Tony Alcock.
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