21 replies to this topic

[Ray Bell]

My magazines are gone, but I'm reminded again of the Denis Jenkinson article headed as above. Why - from BRG's post in 'Disclaimer' comes the story:

Anyway, later that day the Morgan suffered a major mechanical failure whilst passing the pits when the flywheel came off. It sliced through the chassis, hit the road and bounced over the pit lane, lodging in the roof of a mobile home. A flying flywheel (with starter ring teeth) resembles a heavy circular saw blade so the possibly fatal consequences can easily be imagined. Luckily, no-one was injured (not even the driver) but the mobile home owner was unimpressed.

That's exactly what the Jenks story was about.. please somebody find it and post it, it was in MS after Emerson Fittipaldi fried his clutch at the start of a non-title race at Goodwood in a 72.

[BRG]

Errrr, Emerson Fittipaldi in 72 during a non-championship race at Goodwood?? That I would have liked to see!

But I think it was not Goodwood, Ray, as there was no proper racing there from the late 60s until the wonderful historic-only revival in 1998. Or was this at one of the Goodwood Festivals of Speed, held at the nearby Goodwood House? I don't remember such an incident though. Can anyone cast more light - I'm interested to know more...

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BRG

[Ray Bell]

The mind says Silverstone, the fingers wrote Goodwood. Sorry, it was Silverstone.
The story is on a left page, taking up about half a page at the bottom.

[BRG]

If it was Silverstone, it must have been the International Trophy on 26 April 1971. Emmo was 3rd in Heat 2, but does not feature on the results of the Final - so perhaps the incident was at the start of the final?

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BRG

[Racer.Demon]

Ray/BRG: it's pretty sure it was the 1971 International Trophy, since Emmo won the 1972 edition!

BRG: AFAIK the 1971 race was held on May 8 instead of April 26. Unfortunately I don't have a story of the race at hand, so there's some work left to do for others following up on this thread!

Cheers,
R.D


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[Ray Bell]

It's not the story of the race that's relavent, but the Jenks story of the excuses people gave and how thinking about them proved them all to be the garbage they were.
Please, oh please, Eric or somebody post this story!

[Ray Bell]

Anybody, please?

[Eric McLoughlin]

Ray

I'm on the case. I have already gone through my 1970,1971 and 1972 Motor Sports and still haven't come up with the article yet. I'll keep looking.

[Eric McLoughlin]

I've found it. The article is in the May 1973 edition. The Fittipaldi incident happened at the start of the 1973 International Trophy race at Siverstone on 8th April 1973. Jenkins' follow up aricle was actually titalled "Pause for Thought" and it goes like this:

'The poor fellows who have to write out reports for the weekly motoring comics that we used to call the technical press have a hard enough time falling over themselves, and each other, in order to gather up information and get their story written by Sunday or Monday without having deliberate confusion thrown in their path by the PR world or well meaning team managers. Immediately after a race, especially if a favourite has had trouble, they dash around saying "What happened, what happened?". They note down the official statements from the team spokesman and dash off to the next one. Few of them seem to pause and say to themselves, "Wait a minute, that doesn't ring true". There is such an artificial urgency to beat the rival paper that they don't seem to have time to be inquisitive, they take people's words as gospel and never do any cross checking, either by thinking or looking.
At the GKN - Daily Express meeting at Silverstone everbody's favourite goofed and was left on the starting line in pole position. The Team Lotus 72 of Fittipaldi was pulling a particularly high first gear, which he wasn't used to, so on his warming up lap he did some practice starts, which were spectacular to watch, but gave the clutch a bit of a caning. When the flag dropped, Fittipladi crept away with a burned out clutch, going slowly through the first corner with the revs rising and falling ineffectually as he blipped the throttles. He came to rest on the far side of the circuit. After the race the Lotus team manager said, "Oh dear, don't blame the poor old clutch, Borg and Beck will get all the blame. Say the flywheel came loose or something". This story spread and the results that appeared in print the next week were a riot of fun and imagination, ranging from the flywheel coming off to the flywheel breaking through bolts breaking and coming loose. The important thing was that to anyone who saw the start, none of these stories would hold water.
When you do a racing start with a Cosworth V8, you have 8,000 or 9,000 rpm on the engine, with the flywheel and clutch assembly whizzing around at this speed at the end of the crankshaft. If, as one writer said, the flywheel "fell off", it would have sailed right over the top of the grandstand, taking the clutch housing, most of the gearbox and some of the suspension with it! If the flywheel had "broken", as another writer suggested, there would have been a terrific mess of broken clutch housing, clutch and its mechanism, all over the track. If the flywheel bolts had sheared, and there are eight of them, the crankshaft would have revolved in the spigot, then there would have been no drive to the gearbox and the engine would have run in a very peculiar fashion. If one flywheel bolt had broken there would have been drive through the clutch, the probable sympton being a terrible roughness that would have got worse as the overloaded remaining bolts broke, but there would always have been sufficient drive through the clutch to get away with the rest of the competitors. The classic statement among the comics was that the Lotus failed at the start and then "coasted" as far as Club Corner. Including the uphill bit from Copse to Maggots, one is tempted to ask?
It is all too easy to rush around the paddock after a race, like a blue-bottle, saying "What happened, what happened?"
and wriying down everything you are told. To pause for thought would appear to be difficult, even for 30 seconds, and what has happened to the inquisitive mind? With the influx of commercialism with motor racing and the army of PR men, whose job is to protect their customers, the inquisitive mind is not very popular, you are supposed to believe what you are told.
At a sports car meeting, a Matra stopped out on the circuit and a man from Matra-Simca said it was an old engine and now had a big hole in the side suggesting a connecting rod had broken. This would have resulted in a lot of mess around the engine and probably a lot of oil as well. When the car was towed back to the pits, the engine was completely dry! It had been an electrical fault. Few people in motor racing have ever told the truth, and as Sturt Turner of Ford once said, "It's not that they are dishonest, but they jusy don't know how to be straight". For the race reporter, the only antidote to this is to "Pause for Thought", and be inquisitive. - DSJ



[This message has been edited by Eric McLoughlin (edited 02-16-2000).]

[Eric McLoughlin]

Phew, I'm not doing another post like that for a while.

Jenks' Matra story reminds me of one related by Nigel Roebuck. During the early 80's when Alfa Romeo were in Formula One, their turbo-charged engines were notoriosly unreliable. After another failure, a car was brought back to the paddock and a tarpaulin thrown over it to hide the embarrasment. Roebuck went up to the team manager (Carlo Chitti?) and asked what the problem was. "Oh, an oil leak" was the reply. Roebuck obviously did'nt look too convinced so the tarpaulin was lifted up and the manager said "Look, you can see the hole where the oil leaked from" pointing to a large aperture in the engine cover which had been punched out by a departing con-rod.

As a British poltician once said, it wasn't so much a lie as being "economical with the truth".

[Ray Bell]

My apologies for the incorrect title, but it has been perhaps 20 years since I sighted the article.

But, I ask one and all, wasn't it a GREAT little article?

And who else would have done it? (Well, I might have, but not so well! I once reported a race with a different result to everyone else - a big race, too - because I believed my lap chart)

[Fast One]

Thanks Eric and Ray. I truly enjoyed the article. If I weren't such a horrid typist, I think it would be fun and interesting to pass along favorite articles, or excerpts from articles from our old mags. Since print was the main medium for motorsports then, I think it attracted much, much better writers than seem to be around now. Some of that stuff should not be lost. Thanks again guys.

[Falcadore]

Certainly something to remember and consider. I remember reporting of a Formula Ford race, and seeing it on TV a week later and realising I'd reported the shunt that stopped the race I'd put on the wrong corner... or half way through another Formula Ford race I realised the the lead cars seemed to have changed colour from race 1 to race 2 or I'd gotten it wrong, or in a V8 race when one driver was punted by another into the wall and writing down the excuse the punter gave me. That time though I thought about it, realised the excuse was lame and called it as I saw it off the TV.

[Ray Bell]

Mark -
It was for this very reason that I never asked Allan Moffat anything. I asked others, I took the evidence of my eyes, but his lame excuses or other garbage never finished up in my reports.

[BRG]

Hey, Ray, so Eric found it in the end! Well done!

It was worth the wait and a salutary reminder that deceit and obfuscation are nothing new in F1. I certainly remember Eric’s story about Alfa’s oil-leak - a literal but completely misleading version of the truth. It is an example I often use when trying to persuade people not to believe everything (or even anything!) that F1 teams tell you.

I used to have a standing joke with one of my motor racing friends about never ever believing anything in F1 until Bernie Ecclestone denied it. Always remember that the PR men and spin-doctors are physically unable to tell the truth - it’s how they get their jobs in the first place. It has affected almost everyone in F1, except (so far) Eddie Irvine. No-one is able or has the balls to admit to making a mistake anymore.


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BRG

"all the time, maximum attack"

[1969BOAC500]

Hopefully I can be indulged for reviving a very old thread.....

 

I'm currently reading Pete Lyons' Lotus 72 book which jogged my memory ( faintly ) about the article referred to above. I was at Club Corner for the '73 International Trophy and rmember being confused by the immediate reports of Fittipaldi 'failing on the line' and then reading Jenks' article later with amusement.

 

I'd struggled to recall which race it actually was, and which issue of Motor Sport....once again, the 'search' function on this Forum has provided the answer.......

[Ray Bell]

Thank you for reviving it...

 

Just over a month after the twentieth anniversary of it having begun, too.

 

I thought of this story just the other day and wasn't in a position to go hunting it down.

 

Another thought... I really miss some of the people who were here at the dawn of TNF, Eric being one of them and Fast One another.

 

 

 

 

.

Edited by Ray Bell, 11 March 2020 - 15:56.

[1969BOAC500]

Yes - delving back into Forum threads can be rather bittersweet, I'm afraid.

 

But it's good to be able to access them.......this spurred me to buy an old copy of the May '73 MS via Fleabay. It arrived yesterday and plunged me down memory lane. I clearly remembered buying it back then  ( 15p !    ) and there's the pic of Stewart passing Fittipaldi's abandoned 72 between Stowe and Club.

 

It was a memorable meeting but best of all is my clear recollection of Ronnie in the untimed morning warmup. He seemed to be taking Woodcote unbelievably fast , and many years later I was pleased to read Pete Lyons' description in Fast Lines : '..shooting into the ultra-fast old Woodcote corner...pitching the little black wedge into oversteer and holding it there, holding opposite lock and full throttle all the way through...'

 

A good memory to have....and maybe there's not too much wrong with nostalgia at a time like this.

[john winfield]

Great thread! And if you had asked me why Emerson retired early in the 1973 International Trophy I would have said flywheel! That comes, I suppose, from being a Motoring News reader at the time. DSJ prided himself on his research, didn't he? And he wasn't afraid of rubbing it in for those working on the 'comics'......

 

Like Mr. BOAC500, I was at Club that day, and have to admit to feeling quite pleased at the sight of Fittipaldi's black and gold 72 trickling down towards us. He had won so often in Britain the previous year, (Race of Champions, International Trophy, Grand Prix, Rothmans 50,000) plus the World Championship of course, that the prospect of something different was appealing. And, as far as I recall, we had a good battle thereafter, between Ronnie in his Lotus and Jackie Stewart in the chunkier Tyrrell, resolved when young Ronald was caught out by the snow. It was flipping cold that day.

 

As an aside, all four of the Silverstone International Trophy events from 1972 to 1975 were exciting. Fittipaldi and Mike Hailwood (Surtees) in 1972, Peterson and Stewart in 1973, James Hunt (Hesketh) chasing down Ronnie's Lotus 76 in 1974, and the three-way battle between Hunt (Hesketh), Lauda (Ferrari) and Fittipaldi (McLaren) in 1975.  The 1976 race, on the other hand, was deadly dull. 

Edited by john winfield, 13 March 2020 - 10:33.

[Sterzo]

I was at Beckett's, where the first flurry of snow greeted a typically sideways Ronnie and... inevitable really. It's why we loved him. Stewart went through with no drama at all. Must ask my wife whether she's thawed out yet.

[john winfield]

I was at Beckett's, where the first flurry of snow greeted a typically sideways Ronnie and... inevitable really. It's why we loved him. Stewart went through with no drama at all. Must ask my wife whether she's thawed out yet.

 

Encouraging that you use the term 'my wife' rather than 'my ex-wife'!

[1969BOAC500]

....

 

......, I was at Club that day, and have to admit to feeling quite pleased at the sight of Fittipaldi's black and gold 72 trickling down towards us.

So I wasn't the only one, then !   Although I confess to being a bit ashamed of that now......