How a 10-year-old warhorse helped forge Mercedes' first British grand prix star

In a room above a Knightsbridge mews garage, three men were arguing long and loud about the coming season. One of them thought it was a good idea to take on all comers with a car that was basically 10 years old. The others told him he must have lost his mind. Voices were raised.

But since the lone voice was Giulio Ramponi, the weight of his arguments forced the others to give way. The Italian engineer had forgotten more about what made a racing car work than the other two - Dick Seaman and his photographer friend George Monkhouse - would ever know.

At 22, Seaman had just finished a 1935 season that began in disappointment but ended in glory. His parents' money had bought him one of the new ERAs, to be run in the 1.5 litre voiturette class with works support.

Late delivery and a series of mechanical problems had destroyed his faith in the team, exacerbated by the belated discovery that £1700 had bought him not the promised brand-new car but a new chassis with a reconditioned engine.

He had come from a wealthy background - his father was the director of several Scottish whisky distilleries - but he was no feckless playboy. He was ambitious, demanding, not always diplomatic and sharply aware of when he was being taken for a ride.

The decision to build a team of his own around the mechanical expertise of Ramponi - whom he had known when they were both part of the Whitney Straight team of Maseratis and MGs in 1934 - would unlock an immediate change of fortune.

The second half of the season featured wins at Pescara (pictured below), Berne and Brno, humiliating the works team and establishing Seaman in the world of continental road racing, which he much preferred to the garden-party atmosphere of Brooklands and Shelsley Walsh. But now it was October, and time to make plans for 1936.

Moving up to the grand prix category would mean taking on the Mercedes and Auto Union teams in something like a second-hand Maserati or Alfa, destined to be outclassed. Another year of confirming his qualities in the voiturette class seemed to be the only sensible option. But in what car?

Where everyone else saw the Delage as an obsolete machine, Giulio Ramponi glimpsed unexplored potential

It was Ramponi, with his experience alongside great engineers at Alfa Romeo in the 1920s, who came up with the unlikely solution. He had been observing the performance of a 1927 Delage in the hands of Earl Howe, the president of the British Racing Drivers' Club. Howe owned several other top-line cars, and the Delage was no longer in regular use. But where everyone else saw an obsolete machine, Ramponi glimpsed unexplored potential.

In its day, the car had been a world-beater. The 15-S-8 model had emerged from Louis Delage's factory at Courbevoie, outside Paris, in 1926 with a supercharged straight-eight 1.5-litre engine of advanced design and a low-slung single-seater body in which the driver was positioned slightly to the right, alongside the offset transmission rather than on top of it.

In 1927 Robert Benoist won four grands prix out of four - at Montlhery, San Sebastien, Monza and Brooklands (pictured below) - and the team was named world champion. Four examples of the 15-S-8 had been built, all of which eventually passed into private hands. In 1931 two of them were bought by Lord Howe: they were chassis number three, which Benoist had driven through the 1927 season, and number four, which had been driven to seventh place in the 1929 Indianapolis 500 by Louis Chiron.

After using the ex-Benoist car to win at Brooklands, Dieppe and Avus, Howe wrote it off at Monza. The bits were shipped home. He switched to the chassis number four but used it only sparingly.

After the discussions above the garage in Ennismore Gardens Mews, around the corner from Seaman's parents' London residence, had been settled in Ramponi's favour, Howe was approached. He was fond of the Delage, and financially he had no need to get rid of it.

He told Seaman that he wanted the equivalent of what a new car would cost, about £2000. Seaman had already sold the ERA for £1400, but the money had yet to arrive. He talked his mother into signing a cheque for £3000 and in November the blue Delage, with an ample quantity of spares, many of them scavenged from the Monza wreck, made the short journey from Howe's mews in Mayfair to Seaman's premises.

While Ramponi and his colleagues got to work, Seaman plunged into a blizzard of correspondence. Albert Lory, the car's original designer, helped find a five-speed gearbox, for which Seaman paid Delage 1000 francs. Hepworth & Grandage of Birmingham provided a set of their Hepolite pistons for free.

Now on the lookout for every available financial saving, Seaman sought free or discounted spark plugs from Bosch in Acton, carburettors from HM Hobson & Son in Wolverhampton, valves from Standard in Northampton, an electron bell-housing and a propshaft from ENV in north-west London, Hartford shock absorbers from TE Andre & Co of Putney, clutch and brake linings from Ferodo in Stockport, alloy oil and petrol tanks and chassis parts from Durener Metallwerk of Cologne, steering-box castings and front axle ends from Laystall of Southwark, ball and roller bearings from Hoffmann of Chelmsford, and a lightweight self-locking diff from ZF in Friedrichshafen.

Dunlop agreed to supply tyres, with win bonuses ranging from £25 for the Coppa Acerbo Junior to £75 for the French and Italian GPs. But with mechanics' wages to pay, the money was running short.

"Dick would come round from his garage while I was out," his mother Lilian Seaman remembered, "and place a pile of accounts on my desk, with a little note in his own handwriting on top, saying, 'Would you please sign cheques for these?' And there was no choice left to me but to do so."

There was considerable excitement in Ennismore Gardens on the day the rebuilt machine burst into life and Ramponi drove it out of the garage for the first time. When Seaman himself took the wheel, the excitement was even greater.

An item in Motor Sport reported that the car had been driven around the streets of Knightsbridge without the mudguards, lights, silencer and registration plates required by law: "Perhaps the police purposely averted their eyes, knowing the prestige of the car's young English driver on the continent."

Its weight now down to about 1500lb, almost as light as an ERA, the car had been scheduled for its debut in Seaman's hands in the Prince Rainier Cup at Monte Carlo on 11 April, but even after three months of solid work it was not ready. Ramponi believed that it needed a proper test before exposure to competition, so instead they went to the Nurburgring, where a week of running produced satisfactory results.

The engine was now producing a reliable 195bhp, which Ramponi believed to be a higher figure than any of their rivals, and the lightened chassis and new Lockheed hydraulic brakes gave Seaman cause for optimism as he thrashed around the Eifel mountains.

When it was unveiled to the world at Donington Park on 9 May (pictured above), onlookers noted that the car, now painted in Seaman's all-black livery, looked sleeker than during its years with Howe. But they were not impressed when Seaman's time in practice was five seconds slower than the mark set by Prince Bira's ERA. Had Seaman and Ramponi outsmarted themselves? Two wins in two races - a 10-lap handicap and a five-lap scratch race - provided the answer.

As Seaman received the trophy, Howe could only admire the use to which his old car had been put in the hands of its new master

It was with confidence that Seaman travelled to the Isle of Man for the car's first long-distance test: the RAC's International Light Car Race over 200 miles of public roads. As the grid formed up, the Delage faced no fewer than nine ERAs. By the end he was a minute and a quarter ahead of the best of them, driven by Bira.

Three weeks later at the Nurburgring, in front of a crowd of 300,000, Seaman led the 16-strong voiturette field from the start, but in heavy drizzle he left the road at speed halfway round the opening lap and was forced to retire. His luck did not improve in the Picardy GP, where he misjudged his braking at the end of a long straight, bounced over a sandbank and came to rest with bent steering.

Repairs were made in time to travel to Livorno for the Coppa Ciano, although there was frustration when the car was held up for three days at the frontier between France and Italy, arriving in time only for the final hour of practice. Nevertheless Seaman was able to lead the race for the first three laps until the fuel pump failed, requiring him to pump by hand while driving at racing speed and dropping him back to sixth.

Two weeks later he was on the other side of Italy, in Pescara, where the Delage showed its true colours in the Coppa Acerbo Junior. To avoid the midday heat, the motley grid was flagged away at eight o'clock in the morning and Seaman left the opposition so far behind that he could cruise to victory almost 40 seconds ahead of Count Trossi's works Maserati.

It was at this point that one British journalist described the car as "the Voronoff Delage" - an amusing reference to Serge Voronoff, a Franco-Russian surgeon who had made a fortune in the 1920s and '30s by grafting testicular tissue taken from monkeys onto men's testicles in order to enhance their sexual potency. Ramponi, it was implied, had become the automobile world's leading performance-enhancer.

Not everyone appreciated the joke. Seaman arrived in Switzerland on course for his third victory in the Prix de Berne to discover that Ernesto Maserati and ERA's Peter Berthon had protested his win in Pescara, claiming that the Delage must have been fitted with a two-litre engine.

Knowing there were only two races left and that time was short, Ramponi convinced the authorities to seal the engine until the end of the season and then examine it. Faced with six ERAs, Seaman finished a minute and a half ahead of all of them.

Six days later they were at Donington Park for the Junior Car Club's 200-mile scratch race for single-seaters. As he held station behind Howe's leading ERA, Ramponi put out a fuel churn and a set of wheels mounted with new tyres on the pit counter. When Howe came in, Seaman speeded up. And there would be no pitstop for the Delage; the Seaman team had sold their rival a dummy.

Immediately afterwards the seals affixed in Berne were removed from the engine, which was found to be completely legal. As Seaman received the trophy, Howe could only admire the use to which his old car had been put in the hands of its new master.

Of the nine races in which Seaman and the Delage had taken part that season, they had won six. Before Christmas he was on his way to the Nurburgring, summoned by Mercedes-Benz to a young drivers' test that would open the way to the last and most glorious chapter of his short life.

The old car had done its job.

A Race with Love and Death: The Story of Britain's First Great Grand Prix Driver by Richard Williams is published by Simon & Schuster (£20).