40 replies to this topic

[ForeverF1]

I will start the ball rolling insomuch that my earliest memories of what is now known as Formula One, is being dragged kicking and screaming away from Silverstone in 1950. I was only five years old at the time but I remember it well. (I wanted to look at the cars (I think))

Some, to their credit, store facts and figures, I was never in that category. I just enjoyed the racing and seeing who had pushed the limits of technological excellence in race cars.

What is your first recollections of motor sport and what made it your choice of sports to follow?

[Matt Somers]

My first recollections of F1 are the Senna/Mansell battles and that era, I would have been young so it was about the racing. The older I have got the more I appreciate the advancements in F1 and this is more of a pull for me now. You can't beat seeing a good overtake though

[MWM]

Tony Pond racing in some series or another taking every corner banzai.

[PNSD]

Earliest well know memory was when I was 6, one that I can replay in my head over and over is the 1995 Spa battle between Hill and Shumacher. It was the run down to Les Combs and Hill on the inside. Other than that is the constant name hearing of "BERGER!!" from none other than M.Walker ! My most treasured and favourite memory of F1 is whilst at a Kart meeting, not wanting to miss the GP we had bought along the smallest TV I had ever seen, and whilst I was in the searing heat, Damon Hill crossed the line to win for Jordan in the pouring rain. Fantastic race.

[HDonaldCapps]

Lakewood Speedway in Atlanta, about 1948 or 1949....

[Chiara]

This is my earliest memory of F1...



I remember being 4 or 5 and a poster of various F1 cars adorning the walls of our house, for some reason this car always stuck in my mind out of all them.

[ForeverF1]

not wanting to miss the GP we had bought along the smallest TV I had ever seen.

I can remember thoughts of that, I bought a Casio portable TV that would fit into the steering wheel of my SAAB ....god, I must have been a real danger on the roads.....Confessions.......

[Hippo]

My first motor sport memory is a speed-boat event on the river Elbe. I was only 4 or 5 years old but I still remember the smell of it. It was great.

First time I ever saw something F1 was mid-eighties. Visiting my grand parents I could watch Western German TV and they showed some F1 stuff. I think it was Imola GP. I was still quite young but I can remember seeing the Ferraris and I instantly loved to see them.

Edited by Hippo, 18 May 2009 - 11:32.

[gerry nassar]

A few early memories...

- One of the early Adelaide Grands Prix on tv
- Ayrton Senna Scaletrix car set tv commercial
- Two kids at school arguing over who's fault it was - Senna or Prost (must have been 1989/6th grade)

[lustigson]

My earliest Formula One memory is footage of a Ferrari with number one on it. I reckon it was on the Dutch TV news, about the crash between Senna and Prost deciding that year's WDC, so that would have been some time late in 1990.

[RSNS]

I can't recall whether it was racing in tv or the small cars I played with. I remember the 61 Ferrari very well, in fact I used to draw it when I was very small. My first upsetting experience was Bandini's death: I was watching the monaco gp with a friend (I had no tv back then, my parents hated it). The first full season I witnessed was the 71 championship. Then a lot of drivers died and I only came back with Villeneuve; another death and then I followed Alain Prost's achievements, Lauda's 3rd championship, Senna's incredible qualifying laps. I was losing interest when Senna died (in fact I did not watch that race). I came back when Schumacher was at Ferrari.

The first race I attended in person was Montes Claros, when I was about 10 (a brother of mine took me with him) and I was impressed with the Porsche 908 even if I found the Carrera 6 much more beautiful; after that I went to Estoril often. The first 'racing' experience was a shy one, in Brasilia. Later I drove through the old spa (open roads). Later I raced GT's and fast karts, but always in a non professional and even non competitive level: I would just try to be as fast as I could in my brother's car or kart. I never competed to win, only because I liked to drive at the limit (even if I won, that was never the thing for me: I even qualified the kart in the first row and then did not race).

I have always loved fast cars sliding through corners: the trajectory of a fast car through a fast corner, especially if there are elevation changes is actually very beautiful to me.

[Tony Mandara]

1976. Mini-me was sitting at my grandparent's house watching TV, entralled as race-cars came jumping over a crest (Brands' I think but was very young so I'm not totally sure!). Grandmother walks in and switches channels on TV. Mini-me screams and doesn't stop until she turns it back!

And that's where it all started!

Tony.

[Henri Greuter]

Early June 1970, Dutch TV had the habit (at that time that is...) to follow the last half hour of the Le Mans 24 Hours.

Seeing a 917 blast through Le Esses at about twice the speed of a 911 (a car I vagely knew) was unforgettable.
No wonder the movie "Le mans"became a favvorite of me once I knew it existed...

First F1 experience: 1970: Dutch TV sportsprogram telling that Jochen Rindt was killed.


Henri

[turin]

sadly, zolder 1982

[Gilles4Ever]

sadly, zolder 1982

Kyalami 77

[flyboy]

Late 1950's, looking at pictures of Phil Hill drifting a front engine Ferrari across railroad tracks in Oporto. Only barriers in sight were some bales of hay.

[Broadway]

It was a TV clip similar to this:

Or maybe it was like this:


There was a brutality, combined with beauty and a feeling of weightlessness in the way those cars was built and driven. In my opinion, modern F1 cars compares to them as a this


compares to this:


But you cant turn back the time.

[Tenmantaylor]

My first recollections of F1 are the Senna/Mansell battles and that era, I would have been young so it was about the racing. The older I have got the more I appreciate the advancements in F1 and this is more of a pull for me now. You can't beat seeing a good overtake though

Same here. Its all about the drivers and the technical challenge. I remember vividly the Monaco battle in 92, I was 10 and been hooked ever since. The refuse to lose attitude from both drivers was magnificent and the cars were amazing. If anything the pre 98 cars were less suited with the wide track than the cars now.

[Bartus Garoulaitis]

My earliest memory goes back to the year 2017, when Max Verstappen made his debut in F1 for the Great Wall Motor-Zhongxing team, that dominated the sport in those days, just shortly after Ferrari, BMW and Mercedes sold out to them. I recall his teamboss Jacky Chan being delighted with his first pole-position in the Chinese GP city GP at the Tiananmen Square and the enthousiatic crowds when he doubled the field shortly before the first pitstops...

Bartus(who has always been far ahead of his own times)

[BootLace]

I really can't remember what my first exposure to motor sport was. We certainly went to watch stock car racing when I was still in single digits, and I've always loved racing games. Certainly have fond memories of the JPS Lotus and Elf emblazoned Tyrell (may even still have the Scalextric ones somewhere), but I guess my first strong memories have to be Mansell seemingly always on some kind of charge following some kind of incident involving punctures, missing wheels or brake testing gone awry.

[Crazy Ninja]

My very first memory of motorsport is the 94 Monaco Grand Prix. I cant remember anything about it though.
I very clearly recall watching the German German Grqand Prix that year though. I can remember everything.
The Ferrari's on the front row, the engine cover coming off in qualy (i think), the pile up at the start,
Alesi slowing on the first striaght with an electrical fault i think, Schumacher trying to kee4p up with the V12 in Berger's Ferrari,
subsequently blowing his engine and leaving Gerhard to win the race

[Garagiste]

Other than my brother's poster of JYS in our old bedroom, probably James Hunt on Morcambe and Wise

[JSDSKI]

Cuban GP - 1958

[FonzCam]

I was all of 3 years old watching the 1986 Australian Grand Prix. Memory is a bit vague but I remember my dad's reaction to Mansell's tyre failure (and how he had lost the championship because of it).

[AlanR]

And did you Dad yell out "LOOK AT THAT!!!"?;)

For me the first thing I recall is the fire in Keke Rosberg's cockpit at the 1983 Brazilian GP, and his storming drive back to second place only to be disqualified. My father used to record all the BBC highlights programmes and I still have the tapes to this day. I would often spend Saturday mornings when I was a kid watching Formula One or the 500cc bikes with King Kenny and Fast Freddie.

[Murl]

What is your first recollections of motor sport and what made it your choice of sports to follow?

A picture book about Fangio in the 1957 Nurburgring, that really caught my attention

Then I remember seeing on the news, Hunt being DQed after winning in Spain, the drama of that season must have bootstrapped the original interest.

I spent days at go-kart tracks and road circuits, the smells and sounds cemented it I guess.

Then followed a few WRC rallies, as good in a different way.

Why do I (still) follow it? The mix of (hu)man and machine brings an extra dimension, double the chance of fragility coming into play, with the prospect of rain as the great leveler. I love to see the surprise victor, like Jones in Austria.

This era of clinical pace and reliability is a bit of a turn-off to me, I still crave the heroics of that Fangio picture book

Edited by Murl, 19 May 2009 - 10:44.

[HP]

Brands Hatch 1971

http://www.dailymoti...atal-crash_auto

[kal-el]

My earliest memory was of watching a bit of a race when I was around 12-13 and wondering why would anyone bother watching such boring stuff of cars going round and round.. 3 years later I became addicted and a Schumacher/Ferrari fanatic

[Bouncing Pink Ball]

I was home sick from school and all I could find to watch on television was a NASCAR race. I was a girl who loved her toy cars growing up and here were the real life versions on a real track. I was hooked. From then on, I made a point of looking for any and all motor racing I could find.

That's right, I started out as a NASCAR fan.

While there were folks interested in and involved with racing in my wider family, for the longest time I was the only race fan in my household (my mother later came over to the sport). I paid for my first F1 race – the Montréal event – myself once I was college age and even attended alone. F1 fandom was my dirty secret.

[ForeverF1]

I was home sick from school and all I could find to watch on television was a NASCAR race. I was a girl who loved her toy cars growing up and here were the real life versions on a real track. I was hooked. From then on, I made a point of looking for any and all motor racing I could find.

That's right, I started out as a NASCAR fan.

While there were folks interested in and involved with racing in my wider family, for the longest time I was the only race fan in my household (my mother later came over to the sport). I paid for my first F1 race – the Montréal event – myself once I was college age and even attended alone. F1 fandom was my dirty secret.

I wish there was more coverage of the NASCAR series in the UK, I find it quite interesting (what little we do have) and would like to see it more and, I admit, understand it more too.

[Buford]

I once wrote a series of articles about growing up in the racing world titled "When Your Role Models Are All Crazy, What Chance Have You Got" This was one of the episodes...

One of my earliest recollections was I think 1953. They were going to have a "New Car" stock car race, meaning showroom cars right out of the dealer. My family's racing team got a new Hudson Hornet. Beautiful red with big white 22 number painted on the side. It was so new it needed to be broken in so my mother put me in the seat and my younger brother between us, and drove it over to the Mississippi River, about a 4 hour drive each way from Chicago and it was the first time I ever crossed a big bridge and saw a river. I was scared. They put big pieces of paper over the numbers for driving on the highway. So came the big season ending race weekend and the hillbillies my dad had running the car got into a family fight. One faction owned the engine and one owned the car. We were the sponsors so we didn't actually own anything. Well our driver was in the losing faction of the family fight and we got to the track and found out our pretty good hillbilly driver (when he wasn't drunk) had been replaced with some other hillbilly in "our car". So my dad came back from the pits having demanded the company name be removed from the car. You can see it in the photo - Braley Electric Service. But it wasn't removed and it was a big hassle.

The cars came out on the track and were lining up and stopping on the main straight for the introductions. At that point my mother grabbed me by the hand and charged down the steps, my little legs missing about half of them, being suspended in space and drug along. She started going up to the fence and yelling at the drivers in their cars that were lined up. She was waving a $100 bill (big money in those days) and yelling "$100 to wreck the 22 car." I remember she went up to a young Tom Bigelow (years later an Indy 500 driver) waving the money. He looked at her like she was from the moon and said, "Isn't the 22 car your car?" "She yelled back, "Not anymore, $100 to wreck it."

So anyway the big 100 lapper went off and nobody wrecked the car but the driver sucked and finished way back. So afterward off we went to the pits. This is where my recollection is a bit fuzzy but some woman smacked a guy up side the head with her purse and a big riot broke out. I'm pretty sure it was my mom who started it. Anyway, there were about 100 people, men and women alike all fighting and scuffling and I was about knee high to all of them and couldn't help but notice nobody was taking care of me and it seemed kind of dangerous with all these adults fighting all around me. So I decided to bail and ran a zig zag course through the fighting adults and bodies rolling around on the ground until I reached the perimeter of the riot.

So I stood there in amazement for awhile watching this and more and more people were pouring down from the stands and joining in and now there were 200 or 300 people fighting all over the place. It was like a scene out of a John Wayne movie, barroom brawl but I of course had never seen such a thing. I was rather impressed by this up close view of adult behavior though. It was exciting and funny. Never occurred to me anybody, like my mom, were actually getting hurt in this massive brawl. So at that point I saw a kid about my age who had also been abandoned standing over to the side. So I went over there and sucker punched him and he started crying. I was about 6 years old and was already a racer!

[rjk]

Real Oldies here

My interest unfortunately started in the ill-fated San Marino GP'94. Senna After seeing his videos later, I really wished I started following F1 lot earlier.

Always in awe of the Ferrari name and naturally gravitated to that Team. Still a fan after nearly 15 years

[Zoony]

My very first recollection of something called Formula 1 was when I was too young to realise what it was about.

I recall that there was a children's programme on TV. I think it was on the BBC, sometime around 5.00pm on a weekday in the mid-60s. It was a sort of quasi-science programme, and one of the presenters, (possibly Michael Rodd or William Woollard?), did a piece to camera whenever there had been a GP the previous weekend. He had a board upon which he moved placards with the names of the drivers up and down a grid to show their relative positions in the driver's championship. I was so young that I couldn't handle the 'funny names' (and peculiar pronunciations) of the foreign drivers, so my eyes glazed over whenever he came on with his board.

The next time I was conscious of F1 was with the advent of the John Player Special in 1972, and I was dumbfounded that a fag company could make a car that could win a Grand Prix... I think I thought that F1 couldn't be up to much really, if the competition was so weak they could manage it. (I obviously wasn't aware they were really Lotuses at the time; I discovered that when I bought the 1/12th scale Tamiya plastic kit later on.)

And then I really became interested in F1 in 1976, when James looked like he was going to clinch the title and he was all over the front of the papers following his Brands shunt. I attended my first British GP at Silverstone the following year, and then never missed one until 1984.

Edited by Zoony, 22 May 2009 - 11:08.

[HDonaldCapps]

Having met and spent time with Buford's parents, bless 'em, that story is simply one of many....

[rjk]

I once wrote a series of articles about growing up in the racing world titled "When Your Role Models Are All Crazy, What Chance Have You Got" This was one of the episodes...

One of my earliest recollections was I think 1953. They were going to have a "New Car" stock car race, meaning showroom cars right out of the dealer. My family's racing team got a new Hudson Hornet. Beautiful red with big white 22 number painted on the side. It was so new it needed to be broken in so my mother put me in the seat and my younger brother between us, and drove it over to the Mississippi River, about a 4 hour drive each way from Chicago and it was the first time I ever crossed a big bridge and saw a river. I was scared. They put big pieces of paper over the numbers for driving on the highway. So came the big season ending race weekend and the hillbillies my dad had running the car got into a family fight. One faction owned the engine and one owned the car. We were the sponsors so we didn't actually own anything. Well our driver was in the losing faction of the family fight and we got to the track and found out our pretty good hillbilly driver (when he wasn't drunk) had been replaced with some other hillbilly in "our car". So my dad came back from the pits having demanded the company name be removed from the car. You can see it in the photo - Braley Electric Service. But it wasn't removed and it was a big hassle.

The cars came out on the track and were lining up and stopping on the main straight for the introductions. At that point my mother grabbed me by the hand and charged down the steps, my little legs missing about half of them, being suspended in space and drug along. She started going up to the fence and yelling at the drivers in their cars that were lined up. She was waving a $100 bill (big money in those days) and yelling "$100 to wreck the 22 car." I remember she went up to a young Tom Bigelow (years later an Indy 500 driver) waving the money. He looked at her like she was from the moon and said, "Isn't the 22 car your car?" "She yelled back, "Not anymore, $100 to wreck it."

So anyway the big 100 lapper went off and nobody wrecked the car but the driver sucked and finished way back. So afterward off we went to the pits. This is where my recollection is a bit fuzzy but some woman smacked a guy up side the head with her purse and a big riot broke out. I'm pretty sure it was my mom who started it. Anyway, there were about 100 people, men and women alike all fighting and scuffling and I was about knee high to all of them and couldn't help but notice nobody was taking care of me and it seemed kind of dangerous with all these adults fighting all around me. So I decided to bail and ran a zig zag course through the fighting adults and bodies rolling around on the ground until I reached the perimeter of the riot.

So I stood there in amazement for awhile watching this and more and more people were pouring down from the stands and joining in and now there were 200 or 300 people fighting all over the place. It was like a scene out of a John Wayne movie, barroom brawl but I of course had never seen such a thing. I was rather impressed by this up close view of adult behavior though. It was exciting and funny. Never occurred to me anybody, like my mom, were actually getting hurt in this massive brawl. So at that point I saw a kid about my age who had also been abandoned standing over to the side. So I went over there and sucker punched him and he started crying. I was about 6 years old and was already a racer!

Wow!!! That was a great read. What a Riot!! Would loved to have been there

[cheapracer]

My earliest memory goes back to the year 2017, when Max Verstappen made his debut in F1 for the Great Wall Motor-Zhongxing team, that dominated the sport in those days, just shortly after Ferrari, BMW and Mercedes sold out to them. I recall his teamboss Jacky Chan being delighted with his first pole-position in the Chinese GP city GP at the Tiananmen Square and the enthousiatic crowds when he doubled the field shortly before the first pitstops...

Bartus(who has always been far ahead of his own times)

...and some will mock you...

[cheapracer]

Mine is simple, Dad was a works rally driver during the 60's and had subsciptions to Motorsport (UK) and Car & Driver (USA) which had great F1 reports and lots of good pictures. Watched GP movies at home and car club meetings that Dad took me to and watched on Oz TV from '77 on news reports then later full coverage as Alan Jones started to get somewhere.

Of course the downside of being a race engineer was I always said yes to any team who needed me before I actually asked how much but I've had a blessed life and now I wake up in the morning and go to work building my cars and chasing Chinese woman, could be a lot worse!

[wewantourdarbyback]

1991 German Grand Prix, an onboard shot from Mansell's car. I was 3 at the time and it's probably my earliest memory. My mother had always watched F1 with me dad before he died and continued afterwards so I have watched since before I could comprehend what the TV was.

[Buford]

Having met and spent time with Buford's parents, bless 'em, that story is simply one of many....

Wow!!! That was a great read. What a Riot!! Would loved to have been there

Thanks guys...

[wewantourdarbyback]

1991 German Grand Prix, an onboard shot from Mansell's car. I was 3 at the time and it's probably my earliest memory. My mother had always watched F1 with me dad before he died and continued afterwards so I have watched since before I could comprehend what the TV was.

along the lines of this actually

http://www.youtube.c...feature=related

[ray b]

being parked on a haybale at pit out on a airport track somewhere south of tampa FL
and told donot get off or run around at age 7
while my older brother raced a porsche 356 in a local SCCA meeting
still remember the hay prints on my legs

F-1 from the months late reports in R&T in the late 50-early 60's
first tv was wide world of sports MC race in 63
sneaking a tranzister radio in to school to listen to indy on a week day