F1's 70 greatest influencers: the 1960s

The last champion of the 1950s also became the first of the new decade, his success symbolising a radical change in the design of racing cars. Jack Brabham was a former flight mechanic with the Royal Australian Air Force and a national champion in midget cars before he moved into road racing.

On arriving in England in 1955 he went to the Cooper works in Surbiton, bought one of its cars, and spent so much time hanging around the garage and making himself useful that by 1957 he had become a member of its grand prix team. Brabham's practical experience was vital to the development of the little Cooper-Climaxes as they evolved into full-blown F1 machines capable of winning the world championship, as they did in 1959 and 1960, capturing not just the drivers' title but the constructors' championship, the first rear-engined cars to do so.

PLUS: The inside story of Brabham's dramatic first title win

In the days before kerbs and painted lines, Brabham's brusque tail-out driving style, developed on dirt tracks, often resulted in stones and earth being thrown into the faces of his pursuers; 
this rustic approach did not please all his rivals. There were no loose verges at Indianapolis, however, where in 1961 he finished ninth in the 500 in one of John Cooper's cars, heralding the eclipse of the classic front-engined roadster.

A year later Brabham left Cooper to drive the machines he and the late chassis designer Ron Tauranac had started building. Having failed to win a single grand prix in the five years of the 1.5-litre formula, in 1966 Jack persuaded Repco, an Australian company, to build him a V8 engine for the new three-litre regulations; it made him the first man to win the world championship in a car bearing his own name.

PLUS: How pragmatic principles made Tauranac a design legend

In 1970 he took the last of his 14 grand prix wins, at Kyalami, before ending his driving career and returning home at the end of the season, having sold the team to Tauranac.

Unlike Brabham, Stirling Moss took easily to the 1.5-litre F1 cars. By the time the new regulations came into force in 1961, he had established a partnership with Rob Walker (above), who now entered his cars in grands prix, F2 and GT races, painted in the dark blue of Scotland with a white band around the nose.

Walker had inherited a fortune from the Johnnie Walker whisky business, and in 1939 he and a university friend co-drove his Delahaye to eighth place at Le Mans. A wartime Navy pilot, Walker briefly resumed his racing career after being demobbed but then decided to enjoy the sport as an entrant rather than a driver.

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Gradually the team, based at his garage in Dorking, worked its way up to F1, and in 1958 his little Cooper-Climaxes won both the Argentinian GP, with Moss at the wheel (on loan from Vanwall), and the Monaco GP, with Maurice Trintignant. After Vanwall's withdrawal at the end of 1958, Moss joined Walker full-time.

It was Chiti who eventually persuaded Enzo Ferrari to abandon his long-held disdain for the idea of putting the engine behind the driver

Their most famous victories came in 1961, when Moss outran the Ferraris in his outdated Lotus, first at Monaco and then at the Nurburgring. The driver had just made a deal with Enzo Ferrari to run factory-prepared F1, sports and GT cars in Walker's colours when he had his career-ending shunt at Goodwood on Easter Monday, 1962.

PLUS: Sir Stirling Moss' 10 greatest drives

The most successful private entrant in Formula 1 history, Walker carried on and won his last GP with Jo Siffert at Brands Hatch in 1968. He retired in 1975 to cover the grand prix scene for an American magazine, remaining a much-loved presence in the paddock. He died in 2002.

The F1 Ferraris that Moss beat twice in 1961 were the work of Carlo Chiti, a designer whose ample silhouette stood in obvious contrast to the sleekness of his most famous creation. Designated the Dino 156, the first rear-engined Ferrari grand prix car became better known as the Sharknose, due to its aggressive-looking twin nostrils; its powerful V6 enabled it to make a meal of the English Coopers and Lotuses, with their puny four-cylinder Climax engines.

In the hands of Phil Hill, Wolfgang von Trips and the novice Giancarlo Baghetti, the Sharknoses won five of the 1961 season's eight races, with Hill (pictured above at Reims) taking the title - the first American to do so.

PLUS: The story behind Ferrari's dominant 'shark'

Chiti, born in Tuscany, joined Alfa Romeo's racing department on graduating in aeronautical engineering from the University of Pisa. Recruited by Ferrari, he worked with the veteran designer Vittorio Jano on the title-winning Dino 246 in 1958. It was Chiti who eventually persuaded Enzo Ferrari to abandon his long-held disdain for the idea of putting the engine behind the driver.

At the end of the glorious 1961 season, however, he and a group of senior executives walked out, allegedly fed up with the constant interference of Laura Ferrari, Enzo's wife; they went off to build the ATS F1 car, which proved a disaster. Chiti quickly resurrected his career with Alfa, designing its sports and F1 cars between 1963 and 1984, then founded Motori Moderni, making F1 engines for Minardi in the mid-1980s.

An immediate beneficiary of the infighting that preceded the collapse of Ferrari's fortunes in 1962 was Graham Hill, who became Britain's second world champion that year at the wheel of a BRM. Born in 1929, the Londoner rose from his beginnings as a mechanic to become one of the most charismatic figures in the sport.

Two years with Lotus - where he endured 12 retirements in 16 races - preceded his move to BRM, where his first two seasons produced exactly the same statistics. It all came right in 1962, however, with wins in the V8-engined P57 at Zandvoort, the Nurburgring, Monza and East London (South Africa) on the way to the title.

PLUS: Graham Hill's 10 greatest races

Runner-up in each of the next three seasons, Hill returned to Lotus as Jim Clark's team mate for 1967, taking his second title the following season. Hill's win at Monaco in 1969 was the last of his 14 grand prix victories, although he continued with Walker's Lotuses and the works Brabhams before running Shadows and Lolas with his own team until retiring in 1975, his 18th season in F1.


The moustache, the slicked-back hair and the air of wide-boy naughtiness caught the public's imagination but camouflaged Hill's talent. The real truth was in the results. Nobody wins the Monaco GP five times, as well as Le Mans, the Indy 500 and two world championships, without being one of the greats.

Hill's first world title had been won with a team reorganised by Louis Stanley, whose second wife, Jean, was the sister of BRM's owner, Sir Alfred Owen. Stanley was a larger-than-life figure with no background in motor racing: he studied theology at Cambridge before working as a journalist for a glossy magazine and as a manager at the Dorchester Hotel. On a visit with Jean to the 1959 Monaco Grand Prix, Stanley encountered a world in which he felt he could wield a degree of influence.

BRM was slowly emerging from a decade of abject failure, and Stanley accelerated the process of change by putting the designer Tony Rudd in charge. In 1962 BRM was rewarded with the drivers' and constructors' championships.
 From that peak, a long period of decline ended in 1975 with a dreadful final season after which the team, competing under the name Stanley-BRM, faded into extinction.

Autosport 70: The shambles, success and demise of Britain's first big F1 team

Safety and the name of Colin Chapman were often linked in the 1960s, and not always in terms flattering to the English designer whose cars won world championships but in which several grand prix drivers lost their lives

Stanley's lasting importance to F1 lay in his response to the accident suffered in one of his cars by Jackie Stewart at Spa in 1966, when the driver lay in his wrecked car, bones broken and soaked in petrol, for half an hour before effective help arrived. The creation of the International Grand Prix Medical Service, with its mobile medical unit, was instigated and funded by Stanley in 1967, the first serious effort to make life safer for F1 drivers.

Safety and the name of Colin Chapman were often linked in the 1960s, and not always in terms flattering to the English designer whose cars won world championships but in which several grand prix drivers lost their lives. Those deaths were not always caused by a breakage on the car, but enough accidents to Lotuses involved wheels falling off at high speed to make some drivers wary of Chapman's urge to increase performance by minimizing the weight of key components. Lotuses were usually fast but sometimes fragile.

Born in London in 1928, Chapman studied structural engineering and at 21 he built his first racing car, a modified Austin 7. He raced it, and its successors, with some success, but it was with the Lotus 7, a bare-bones two-seater sold to the public in kit form, thus avoiding tax, that he made his reputation.

PLUS: Formula 1's great Lotus landmarks - Lotus 25

By 1958 he was in F1 with a front-engined car, but within two years he had followed the example set by John Cooper and put the engine of the Lotus 18 behind the driver. Clark was Chapman's first world champion, winning the title in 1963 with the Lotus 25 - the first car to be built around an aluminium monocoque - and in 1965 with the Lotus 33, two cars that, in the hands of the Scottish maestro, were utterly dominant.

With the Lotus 49 in 1967 Chapman pioneered the use of the engine as an integrated and fully stressed part of the car, and with the 78 and 79 "ground-effect" cars he explored the use of aerodynamics to create low-pressure areas under the car. Renaming the team Gold Leaf Team Lotus in 1968, Chapman also became the first man to allow a sponsor to cover the bodywork in the livery of a cigarette packet; others would enthusiastically follow suit.

Chapman's partnership with Jim Clark, formed in 1960 and lasting until the driver's death in 1968, became legendary, producing 25 grand prix wins from 72 starts. Until Clark perished in an unexplained crash during an F2 race at Hockenheim in 1968, it had seemed the perfect combination. The driver, born in Fifeshire in 1936, was a farmer from the Scottish borders who took up motor racing for fun, competing in trials, rallies, autocross and hillclimbs before taking to circuit racing.

Invited to join the Border Reivers team, he began winning with its sports cars: a Jaguar D-Type, a Lister-Jaguar, an Aston Martin DBR1 and a Lotus Elite. When he beat established drivers in the Elite, Chapman took notice and it was in his new Lotus 18 that, in 1960, Clark became a professional racing driver.

PLUS: The best drives of a lost F1 great

After several promising early performances, his first wins came in 1962, at Spa, Aintree and Watkins Glen. Already it was generally recognised that, following the retirement of Moss, here was the sport's new presiding genius: a shy man, famously indecisive out of the cockpit, to whom the clean sweep of pole position, a flag-to-flag victory and lap record seemed the most natural way to spend a grand prix weekend. The titles of 1963 and 1965 would surely have been followed by more but for the tragedy at Hockenheim, where Clark's death at the age of 32 snuffed out a sublime talent.

One of Clark's five British GP wins came at Silverstone in 1965, but anyone in possession of a paddock pass for that meeting would also have been gripped by the sight of a white car with a red roundel on its nose emerging from a transporter whose inner panels were covered with mechanics' notes written in Japanese ideograms. In a sport whose soul had always been European, this represented a intriguingly alien experience.

The Honda RA272 was a step further from the previous year's RA271, Japan's first F1 car, which had made three tentative and unpromising appearances with its development driver, Ronnie Bucknum, in the cockpit; Honda's latest F1 car was in the hands of a more experienced and gifted American, Richie Ginther.

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The man in charge of the car's design and construction was Yoshio Nakamura, a native of Osaka and graduate of the University of Tokyo who had spent the Second World War designing military aircraft. The neat little car's most striking feature was its engine, a 1.5-litre V12 designed by Tadashi Kume. With 14,000rpm available to the drivers, it resembled the high-revving multi-cylinder engines with which Honda had dominated motorcycle racing, and its 230bhp made it the most powerful engine in the F1 field.

Starting the project from scratch in 1962, with no real experience of four-wheeled racing, Honda needed to acquire knowledge fast. Under Nakamura's guidance, and with Ginther's shrewd input, it progressed so quickly that in the last race of the 1965 season, in Mexico City, Honda achieved what had seemed unthinkable and won a world championship grand prix. Honda would be in and out of F1 over the next 55 years, but Nakamura-San had laid the foundation.

Ginther was one of a platoon of American drivers whose presence gave F1 a different flavour. Of them all, Dan Gurney was the most gifted, said to be the only one of his contemporaries feared by Clark.

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The son of an opera singer, Gurney grew up as a California hot-rodder, served in the Korean War as an artillery mechanic, and arrived in Europe in 1958 with a ride in one of Luigi Chinetti's Ferraris at Le Mans. A year later came a place in the Scuderia's grand prix squad, followed by an unsatisfactory year with BRM and two seasons with Porsche, with whom Gurney took his first grand prix win at Rouen in 1962.

Three years with Brabham produced only two wins before Gurney launched his own team, Anglo American Racers, in 1966, with the beautiful Eagle chassis. The arrival of the bespoke Weslake V12 engine in 1967 gave him an historic victory at Spa, the first for an American driver in a car of his own construction, but unreliability led him to close the F1 operation at the end of 1968.
 He returned to America, where his cars won the Indy 500 three times.

As the decade came to a close, the DFV powered the winners of all 11 rounds of the 1969 world championship, in four different makes of chassis

A tall, handsome and hugely popular figure, Gurney became the first driver to spray champagne from the podium while celebrating victory with AJ Foyt at Le Mans in 1967. Dan introduced the full-face helmet to F1, and popularised the Gurney flap, a metal strip attached to the trailing edge of a wing to improve performance.

At a time when finding a powerful and reliable three-litre engine was the main problem facing British F1 teams, Keith Duckworth and his partner, Mike Costin, came up with the Cosworth DFV, a V8 which won on its debut in 1967 and took the last of its 155 grand prix victories in 1983. It was Chapman, their former employer, who asked Duckworth to design an engine that could be used as a stressed part of the chassis - a revolutionary idea that eventually became universally adopted.

PLUS: The greatest engine in Formula 1 history

Ford funded the project, in exchange for branding, and after Clark's initial victory with the Lotus-Ford 49 at Zandvoort the engine became almost ubiquitous: light, compact, reliable, producing something north of 400bhp, and a bargain at £7,500 a pop. As the decade came to a close, it powered the winners of all 11 rounds of the 1969 world championship, in four different makes of chassis. Duckworth's engines had provided the soundtrack to Formula 1 in one of its most compelling eras.