38 replies to this topic

[Joe Fan]

Ok, here is a good question: When was the last time two drivers shared the same car in a Formula One Grand Prix?

I know that at the 1961 US Grand Prix, Masten Gregory took over Olivier Gendebien car's when Masten's car retired due to gearbox failure. Was this the last time this happened in a World Championship Grand Prix?

[Ray Bell]

I opened this ready to put in Fairman/Moss at the British GP that year...

But yours is subsequent to that... and it was also against the rules.

I know of nothing since, I think you will be safe, but you never know... maybe at the back of the field somewhere?

[scheivlak]

During the 1964 USA GP Jim Clark swapped seats with Mike Spence.

See http://www.forix.com...&l=0&i=3575&c=6 :
"On lap 40, Clark's Lotus began to misfire as a result of a fuel injection problem. Surtees, then Hill and Gurney, went by before he entered the pits on lap 44. The crew spent two laps adjusting the injection system, and he rejoined in next to last spot, but stopped again after only six laps. Chapman called teammate Spence in from fourth place and replaced him with Clark, trying to gain some much-needed points for his lead driver. Spence continued in Clark's car, but retired it after five more laps.
(....)
Clark was now in third, gaining on Hill by a second per lap and nearly matching his qualifying time, until the second Lotus also began sputtering, this time unable to pick up its last few gallons of fuel. He retired, having completed 102 laps, and was eventually classified seventh, out of the points."

Out of the points - but I guess he never should 've got those points?

[Joe Fan]

Originally posted by scheivlak
During the 1964 USA GP Jim Clark swept seats with Mike Spence.

See http://www.forix.com...&l=0&i=3575&c=6 :
"On lap 40, Clark's Lotus began to misfire as a result of a fuel injection problem. Surtees, then Hill and Gurney, went by before he entered the pits on lap 44. The crew spent two laps adjusting the injection system, and he rejoined in next to last spot, but stopped again after only six laps. Chapman called teammate Spence in from fourth place and replaced him with Clark, trying to gain some much-needed points for his lead driver. Spence continued in Clark's car, but retired it after five more laps.
(....)
Clark was now in third, gaining on Hill by a second per lap and nearly matching his qualifying time, until the second Lotus also began sputtering, this time unable to pick up its last few gallons of fuel. He retired, having completed 102 laps, and was eventually classified seventh, out of the points."

Out of the points - but I guess he never should 've got those points?

Thanks! I do seem to remember that one now that you brought it up.

[Roger Clark]

Clark wouldn't have got points, but by finishing high up, Chapman hoped to prevent his rivals scoring.

[Ray Bell]

I'm surprised that he was classified... I thought the rule introduced in 1961 precluded swapping cars at all...

Wasn't Moss excluded from the 1961 British race?

[oldtimer]

That account does not sound like Clark racing for points - it sounds more like Clark being Clark.

As for the 1961 Aintree race, we were told that there was much arm waving and handwringing on account of other drivers trying to take on Moss thinking Fairman was in the Ferguson. Untrue, I understand, it was all about rules. But my, Moss was pedalling the Ferguson around the track pretty quickly, and using quite different racing lines from those in the Lotus.

[wingsbgone]

F1 sages-

Is it within current F1 rules for one teammate to use his teammate's car after a red flag (more likely after two red flag starts, wherein the "T" car has been damaged during a start)?

Realize this is the Nostalga forum, but sorta fits the thread. Plus, this is where the knowledge resides

Thanks,

Wingsbgone!

[Don Capps]

Here is what happened at Aintree those many Summers ago....

Fairman had struggled with the Ferguson and after a stop on Railway to investigate why the engine was not working, received a push start (from a bevy of photographers on hand for the antics as the cars tried to negotiate Melling Crossing) which under the new regulations now expressly forbidden. Fairman pitted the engine was attended to and it set aside for the moment. After he retired, in popped Moss, and off went Moss. And quite rapidly as well. In the rain, he was easily faster than anyone else and providing great entertainment to one and all. However, Charles Cooper pointed out the officials that the Ferguson had been disqualified and should it not be in the pits and not on the track? Alas, the Ferguson was ordered into its pit and told to cease and desist forthwith. Moss was quite put out at this since he was enjoying himself immensely. When told that Father Charles had been the culprit, Moss took a moment to chat with the Elder Cooper about his thoughts on the subject. Father Charles did not approve of Ferguson using the race as a test and development session. Moss walked away in amazement muttering about how things do change.

At Watkins Glen, it was simply Clark being Clark.

As to the question about today's rules: my educated guess is that once assigned a car, you are stuck with it. Therefore, if Kissy (Kissimmanee) Crunchcog in the #66 Pampers Team RC Cola & A Moon Pie Cyclops 2002f1 Powered by the Black Flag Death to Cockroaches V-10 chasssis CiA0 wishes to take over the similar #67 car of teammate Trevor Meshingearkanin (or is it Trevor Crunchcog and Kissy Meshingearkanin?) after the world's best drivers twin fail miserably at getting 100 meters past the starting point -- no can do. Well, that's my story and I am sticking to it -- until something better comes along at least....

[dmj]

Originally posted by Don Capps
As to the question about today's rules: my educated guess is that once assigned a car, you are stuck with it. Therefore, if Kissy (Kissimmanee) Crunchcog in the #66 Pampers Team RC Cola & A Moon Pie Cyclops 2002f1 Powered by the Black Flag Death to Cockroaches V-10 chasssis CiA0 wishes to take over the similar #67 car of teammate Trevor Meshingearkanin (or is it Trevor Crunchcog and Kissy Meshingearkanin?) after the world's best drivers twin fail miserably at getting 100 meters past the starting point -- no can do. Well, that's my story and I am sticking to it -- until something better comes along at least....

Well, that database will surely be a challenge to create if we will have to include details about such prominent motorsport entities like these two drivers and their team ...

[Roger Clark]

After he retired, in popped Moss, and off went Moss. And quite rapidly as well. In the rain, he was easily faster than anyone else and providing great entertainment to one and all.

I'm not sure whether this is wholly true. By the time Moss took over the Ferguson, the rain had stopped and the track must have been on the way to being dry. His initial laps were in the region of 2min 4sec, which was about 10 seconds faster than the Ferraris were doing in the early stages of the race. Moss eventually got down to 2min 00.8, which is about what he Ferraris were doing at the time. It's difficult to be sure bacause the Ferguson ws several laps behind the Ferraris.

[Ray Bell]

Wasn't it Trebor Crunchcog and Keith (?) Meshingear?

Now where did they come from? Car & Driver, mid sixties? Which writer?

How I miss those days...

[Don Capps]

The wonderful Stan Mott in R&T -- I had to update the names a tad for today's grid....

[oldtimer]

Don, you omitted the chassis numbers of those cars. What do your sources say?

[Don Capps]

Originally posted by oldtimer
Don, you omitted the chassis numbers of those cars. What do your sources say?

Which chassis numbers? Those for the Pampers Team RC Cola & A Moon Pie Cyclops 2002f1 Powered by the Black Flag Death to Cockroaches V-10?

[oldtimer]

Sorry Don, I failed to notice the 'chasssis' was lettered CiAo rather than numbered. BTW, does the extra 's' in chassis imply the use of the well-known Cooper idea of curved tubes in a space-frame?;)

[uechtel]

In a preview to the 1938 Tripolis GP in Automobil Revue I found note, that shared drives were explicitely forbidden for that race. So it seems to have been open for organisers to decide how to handle this in "their" event. Was this still the case after the World Championship had been introduced, or was there a general ruling now allowing to share cars at least in the races counting for the championship?

 

At least from 1958 onward for a while the exclusion of shared drives seems to have been only for the championship classification. Shared drives were not forbidden, only the drivers involved could not score points. But could they still take away positions and points from other drivers?

 

To find some answers I browsed through my records of the GP/GE ("Grande Epreuves") history. The first occasion of a shared drive I found right at the beginning in the 1906 French GP, where Jenatzy handed over to Burton for the second day, but this seems to have been rather exception than normailty. For the 1912 I found one further example, Anford and Pilain in the Rolland-Pilain. The next occasion then was the Italian GP of 1924, where Pastore took over the Alfa Romeo from Campari. And in 1925 the Delage team performed two driver changes at the French GP with Benoist/Divo and Wagner/Torchy.

 

Delage were also the first to have "regular" changes when the exhaust of their 1926 model caused burn injuries to their driver´s arms, so that they could not stand a whole race long. They solved the problem for 1927 so the number of driver changes decreased again until finally in 1931, with the new 10-hour-rule it became more or less inevitable, that the cars were entered for two drivers.

 

This seams to have broken a barrier for during the thirties itobviously became a tactical trick by the factory teams to always enter some "back-up-cars" driven by newcomers, which could be taken over by their top-drivers in case their own cars got technical problems. Maybe, like modern-day team orders, this was now recognised for the first time as a "problem", or why else would the organisers of the Tripolis GP would have explicitely forbidden driver changes during the race?

 

The interesting thing is also, that for 1939 I did not find a single occasion of a shared drive in the four GE events of the season. Was this only incidential, was there a general rule by the AIACR or was there only a sort of common agreement among the organisers?

 

After the war GP racing started over again with shared drives. In Britain it seems to have been quite normal for private drivers to even buy shares of a car and to agree on planned share-drives with thir partners. The climax then came in the 1956 where driver changes seem to have been almost more regular than single drivers per car plus of course also many other means of driver support for their team leaders (like Piotti´s pushing action for Moss at the Italian GP (and Piotti wasn´t even officially "team partner", but driving under his own entry instead!).

 

Such behaviour must have been the final cause for debates, as the number of shared drives became already dramatically reduced in 1957 and then with the exclusion from championship points came almost to a halt in 1958. The last occasions from then onward I found were Lewis-Evans/Brooks (Vanwall), French GP 1958, Gregory/Shelby (Centro Sud-Maserati), Italian GP 1958 and then the already mentioned Fairman/Moss (Walker-Ferguson), British GP 1961, Gendbien/Gregory (BRP), US GP 1961 and finally Spnce/Clark (and vice versa) for Lotus, US GP 1964.

[Ray Bell]

You must have enjoyed the 1955 Argentine GP...

Didn't one car have about five drivers?

[Tim Murray]

There was also the 1960 Argentine GP, where Moss took over Trintignant's Walker Cooper to finish third. Neither driver scored championship points, of course.

[JtP2]

There is one after the 64 US GP, but not sure if it counts.  At the 65 British GP, Gurney drove the warmup lap in his 32 v Brabham and dropped a valve head, well he actually dropped it down the opposite cylinder. So Brabham gave him his car on the grid. So does swapping cars on the grid count?

[uechtel]

There was also the 1960 Argentine GP, where Moss took over Trintignant's Walker Cooper to finish third. Neither driver scored championship points, of course.

 

But did the following finishers get their points for 4th and 5th place or for 3rd and 4th?

[Michael Ferner]

I seem to recall discussions about car sharing during the 1994 Australian GP, when Damon Hill had been taken out by a wayward German driver who then tried to look contrite for a moment or two before commencing to celebrate his "championship". An apparently switched-on commentator then suggested calling in Nigel Mansell to let Hill take over the second Williams, which was running far enough ahead at the time to make it feasible to virtually rebuild the car around the smaller frame of the number one driver, and still place amongst the top five. It was eventually concluded that, although not against the rules, Hill wouldn't score points in such a shared drive, so the idea was dropped.

I don't see why shared drives should be ruled out, anyway. Drivers are a bit of an overrated commodity, after all it's auto racing, not marathon!

[Tim Murray]

But did the following finishers get their points for 4th and 5th place or for 3rd and 4th?

I've never seen anything to suggest that Menditeguy, von Trips and Ireland received anything other than 4th, 5th and 6th place points respectively. My understanding is that the Trintignant/Moss Cooper officially finished third in the race and (presumably) earned the third-place prize money. I'm guessing also that if it had been the highest-placed Cooper-Climax in the race it would have scored the appropriate points in the Constructors' Championship. It was only the drivers who lost their points because of the shared drive.

[Peter Morley]

Aren't they all shared these days, the guys on the pit wall seem to be rather heavily involved!!

[rateus]

You must have enjoyed the 1955 Argentine GP...

Didn't one car have about five drivers?

The second-place Ferrari had 3 drivers but both Gonzalez and Farina did 2 separate stints so that might count...

 

For five different drivers in one car in a World Championship race there's the previous year's Indianapolis 500, where the combined skills of Art Cross, Johnnie Parsons, Sam Hanks, Andy Linden and Jimmy Davies were required to bring the Bardahl Special home in 11th place.

[uechtel]

I seem to recall discussions about car sharing during the 1994 Australian GP, when Damon Hill had been taken out by a wayward German driver who then tried to look contrite for a moment or two before commencing to celebrate his "championship". An apparently switched-on commentator then suggested calling in Nigel Mansell to let Hill take over the second Williams, which was running far enough ahead at the time to make it feasible to virtually rebuild the car around the smaller frame of the number one driver, and still place amongst the top five. It was eventually concluded that, although not against the rules, Hill wouldn't score points in such a shared drive, so the idea was dropped.

I don't see why shared drives should be ruled out, anyway. Drivers are a bit of an overrated commodity, after all it's auto racing, not marathon!

 I don´t think it is legal today, as one is obviously not allowed to use more than one car during a race. Senna got disqualified for changing chassis after the warm-up lap in Brasil 1988 I think. And not to forget Hunt at the British GP 1976. If that is illegal, then the more a change of cars during the race.

[Michael Ferner]

Not Senna was disqualified, but McLaren entry #12 - there's a fine difference!

Changing chassis during a GP weekend is allowed since 1974, but at some point you have to make a decision which car to run, and in Brazil 1988 that window of opportunity had already closed. OT really, but quite typically the team blamed race control for taking their sweet time to inform them of the disqualification, and journalists were quick to point out the "farce" of having Senna race half a GP distance for nought, but in reality it's the team's responsibility to know the rules, and officials can hardly be blamed for conducting a thorough investigation before making such a decision.

I can't really speak for the last fifteen years or so, but I'm quite convinced that there was nothing in the rules in the nineties that would have precluded a shared drive - sans points, of course!

[rateus]

At least Senna only did half the race - in 1983 Elio de Angelis did the whole race only to be disqualified for having switched from the Renault-powered Lotus (which had expired on the warm-up lap) to the spare Cosworth-powered car at the last minute.  iirc, switching cars, even at that late stage, was considered OK but switching car types wasn't.

 

By the way the most recent shared drive in a major single-seater race was 2004, at Indianapolis again.  Robby Gordon was committed to doing the Indy/Charlotte double, but when an early red flag for rain meant the 500 wouldn't finish in time he jetted off to Charlotte and his car took the restart with Jaques Lazier aboard.

[JtP2]

Re swapping Williams drivers at the Australian GP 94. That should be no problem as the Williams team reckoned you just plugged them in like light bulbs.

[Lee Nicolle]

Swapping cars was common until the rules banned spare cars.That was what 10 years ago.

Was driver changes ever legal for F1?

[uechtel]

Define "legal" and define "F1". Until 1981 Formula 1 was only a technical format to which further regulations could be added by the FIA for the whole championship or even individually by the race organisers for their particular event. Therefore driver changes could be allowed in a race (as they were obviously at least until around 1960, but how long exactly is just one of the questions we want to find out by this thread), but were excluded from the championship score. Until 1957 they were perfectly normal and officially allowed in the championship regulations.

[uechtel]

In a preview to the 1938 Tripolis GP in Automobil Revue I found note, that shared drives were explicitely forbidden for that race. So it seems to have been open for organisers to decide how to handle this in "their" event. Was this still the case after the World Championship had been introduced, or was there a general ruling now allowing to share cars at least in the races counting for the championship?

 

At least from 1958 onward for a while the exclusion of shared drives seems to have been only for the championship classification. Shared drives were not forbidden, only the drivers involved could not score points. But could they still take away positions and points from other drivers?

 

To find some answers I browsed through my records of the GP/GE ("Grande Epreuves") history. The first occasion of a shared drive I found right at the beginning in the 1906 French GP, where Jenatzy handed over to Burton for the second day, but this seems to have been rather exception than normailty. For the 1912 I found one further example, Anford and Pilain in the Rolland-Pilain. The next occasion then was the Italian GP of 1924, where Pastore took over the Alfa Romeo from Campari. And in 1925 the Delage team performed two driver changes at the French GP with Benoist/Divo and Wagner/Torchy.

 

Delage were also the first to have "regular" changes when the exhaust of their 1926 model caused burn injuries to their driver´s arms, so that they could not stand a whole race long. They solved the problem for 1927 so the number of driver changes decreased again until finally in 1931, with the new 10-hour-rule it became more or less inevitable, that the cars were entered for two drivers.

 

This seams to have broken a barrier for during the thirties itobviously became a tactical trick by the factory teams to always enter some "back-up-cars" driven by newcomers, which could be taken over by their top-drivers in case their own cars got technical problems. Maybe, like modern-day team orders, this was now recognised for the first time as a "problem", or why else would the organisers of the Tripolis GP would have explicitely forbidden driver changes during the race?

 

The interesting thing is also, that for 1939 I did not find a single occasion of a shared drive in the four GE events of the season. Was this only incidential, was there a general rule by the AIACR or was there only a sort of common agreement among the organisers?

 

After the war GP racing started over again with shared drives. In Britain it seems to have been quite normal for private drivers to even buy shares of a car and to agree on planned share-drives with thir partners. The climax then came in the 1956 where driver changes seem to have been almost more regular than single drivers per car plus of course also many other means of driver support for their team leaders (like Piotti´s pushing action for Moss at the Italian GP (and Piotti wasn´t even officially "team partner", but driving under his own entry instead!).

 

Such behaviour must have been the final cause for debates, as the number of shared drives became already dramatically reduced in 1957 and then with the exclusion from championship points came almost to a halt in 1958. The last occasions from then onward I found were Lewis-Evans/Brooks (Vanwall), French GP 1958, Gregory/Shelby (Centro Sud-Maserati), Italian GP 1958 and then the already mentioned Fairman/Moss (Walker-Ferguson), British GP 1961, Gendbien/Gregory (BRP), US GP 1961 and finally Spnce/Clark (and vice versa) for Lotus, US GP 1964.

I did not find a more suitable thread for this, so at least in the wider context of this discussion I found it interesting to read the following passage in "Automobil Revue" from 11th October 1950, page 3, reporting about the decisions of the annual FIA meeting from Paris concerning the Automobile World Championship:

 

"[...]Das Reglement erfuhr eine Ergänzung in dem Sinne, dass dort, wo sich am Steuer eines Wagens zwei oder mehr Fahrer ablösen, die dem Rang entsprechenden Weltmeisterschaftspunkte auf die einzelnen Fahrer verteilt werden."

 

Translation attempt:

 

"[...]The regulations received an addition in the way, that when two or more drivers relieve each other from steering one car, the world championship points corresponding to their final ranking in the race will get split up among them."

 

So does this mean, that points were splitted only from 1951 onward? And how was it handled in 1950, or to ask more precisely, how many points scored Ascari and Serafini for their common 2nd place at the Italian Grand Prix?

[Vitesse2]

I must have missed your previous post, uechtel. The Tripoli regulation would have been specifically in conjunction with the lottery which formed part of the promotion for the event - thirty ticket holders were drawn, each matched with a driver. So any mid-race driver changes could have affected the allocation of lottery prizes.

 

ETA: There are no driver changes in any of the Tripoli races between 1933 and 1940.

 

Although there's no documentary evidence, from back-calculating published scoring tables, I'm sure there was a typically complicated defined method of allocating European Championship points under the minimum point method. And Langlois' draft regulations do address this directly.

[Tim Murray]

The interesting thing is also, that for 1939 I did not find a single occasion of a shared drive in the four GE events of the season. Was this only incidential, was there a general rule by the AIACR or was there only a sort of common agreement among the organisers?

I have read that at the 1939 German GP, after Lang had retired early, Neubauer signalled Brendel to pit so that Lang could take over his car. Brendel missed the signal and then crashed, thus greatly annoying his team manager. Presumably, therefore, shared drives were still legal in 1939.

[Vitesse2]

I have read that at the 1939 German GP, after Lang had retired early, Neubauer signalled Brendel to pit so that Lang could take over his car. Brendel missed the signal and then crashed, thus greatly annoying his team manager. Presumably, therefore, shared drives were still legal in 1939.

Correct, Tim. Although my calculations indicate that under the minimum points system there was virtually no advantage to either the substitute or the substituted driver. However, under Langlois' draft proposals - which were already known by the time of the 1939 German GP - the substitute driver could gain 75% of the points for his finishing place if he took over another driver's car before one-quarter distance. I'm pretty certain Mercedes were attempting to game the new system by calling Brendel in.

[uechtel]

I must have missed your previous post, uechtel. The Tripoli regulation would have been specifically in conjunction with the lottery which formed part of the promotion for the event - thirty ticket holders were drawn, each matched with a driver. So any mid-race driver changes could have affected the allocation of lottery prizes.

 

ETA: There are no driver changes in any of the Tripoli races between 1933 and 1940.

 

Thank you. Indeed, for Tripolis, this explanation makes absolutely sense.

 

 

 

I have read that at the 1939 German GP, after Lang had retired early, Neubauer signalled Brendel to pit so that Lang could take over his car. Brendel missed the signal and then crashed, thus greatly annoying his team manager. Presumably, therefore, shared drives were still legal in 1939.

 

Sounds also logical. I looked through the 1939 results again. It is quite evident to me now that in 1939 in particular Mercedes did hardly enter their 'junior' drivers, while in the years before this had been very common to them. So when one of their star drivers ran into trouble there was no car available as replacement, because of course you couldn´t for example call in Caracciola to hand his car over to Lang...

 

 

Correct, Tim. Although my calculations indicate that under the minimum points system there was virtually no advantage to either the substitute or the substituted driver. However, under Langlois' draft proposals - which were already known by the time of the 1939 German GP - the substitute driver could gain 75% of the points for his finishing place if he took over another driver's car before one-quarter distance. I'm pretty certain Mercedes were attempting to game the new system by calling Brendel in.

 

Help me again, please. I remember that Langlois was proposing a 'plus' points scoring system like it was used in the French Championship, but how was the idea to handle shared drives?

 

 

 

 

[uechtel]

 

So does this mean, that points were splitted only from 1951 onward? And how was it handled in 1950, or to ask more precisely, how many points scored Ascari and Serafini for their common 2nd place at the Italian Grand Prix?

 

Are there perhaps any published contemporary sources with complete championship points standings?

[Vitesse2]

Langlois' 1939 proposal: "In a case where, during the course of a race and for whatever reason, an entitled driver moves to another car or cars of other drivers in the same team, he will only receive: Either ¾ of the points, ½ the points or a ¼ of the points corresponding to his final classification in the race, depending on whether he covered ¾, ½ or ¼ of the race distance in the car he took the start with."

 

An 'entitled driver' is one who took the start. So by implication, anybody who hadn't been on the grid couldn't take over a car during the race.

 

So if Lang had taken over Brendel's car before the end of lap 5 he would have been eligible for ¾ of the points from his finishing position.

 

My guess would be that the question only arose at the end of the 1950 season because it could have affected Ascari's final position in the championship. Maybe Enzo still had a copy of those proposals? As boss of Alfa Corse in 1939 he must have been privy to them, even if they were of purely academic interest to the team.

 

[uechtel]

Well, in 1950 I don´t think Ascari could gain too much. Whether 5th or 6th in the championship did probably not matter too much. So I think it´s rather a case of giving the star driver the chance for a whole race or maybe even to challenge the Alfas for a win.

 

Anyway I am simply interested in how the rule was handled that year.