It seems that a lot of people who regularly post on this forum were at Brands on that tragic day. I was too, my father and I having, unusually, decided to take a walk out into the country to watch the racing at the back end of the circuit. Normally we stayed in our seats, but the weather was good and we decided to get a more varied perspective, despite the excellent view of the first and last parts of the lap we were getting from the startline grandstand. We got to Hawthorns immediately after the terrible crash, when the BRM was fully ablaze and marshals were fighting vainly to control the fire. I'm afraid that the evident distress of one of the marshals, wearing the full shiny asbestos suit, who had waded into the blaze to try to get the driver out, will forever stick in my mind; as will the sheer number of people making their way towards Hawthorns as we walked away. It felt, at the very least, wrong and disrespectful to stay on the scene of what was obviously a fatal accident, yet many people were deliberately heading there to see what was going on. Seppi had featured strongly in my early motor racing experiences, having seen him try to demolish the chicane at Goodwood in 1965, then that fabulous win for Rob Walker at the first British Grand Prix I ever attended, in 1968, winning the BOAC 1000 in 1969 in the Porsche 908 and seeing him in the 917 in the 1970 and 1971 runnings of that event.
I just wish dad and I had stayed in our grandstand seats as we would normally have done, as seeing what we saw close up was very, very sad.
