The first 'British' Ferrari

Pat Fry and James Allison may be at the top of the Ferrari technical tree today, but they aren't the first Brits to whom the Scuderia has turned for engineering expertise.

Even before John Barnard and his Surrey skunkworks in the late 1980s and Harvey Postlethwaite at the start of that decade, the Italians had swallowed their pride and looked north.

Forty years ago, they sought manufacturing rather than design capability, which is why the monocoques of Ferrari's 1973 Formula 1 challenger should have been stamped with 'Made in Britain'.

Exactly why Ferrari turned to the British racing car industry for the manufacture of the tubs for its 312B3 remains shrouded in mystery. The official line is that waves of industrial action in Italy prevented the team producing the chassis itself.

Yet it is fact that the B3 was the first Ferrari monocoque design. That supports the theory that the team lacked the expertise to produce a tub, and knew it.

Ferrari was finally going high-tech at the urging of tyre supplier Firestone, more than 10 years after Colin Chapman's Lotus 25. High-tech it may have been, but there was nothing high-end about the company that produced the run of three B3 tubs. It ended up having them built by a two-man operation working in what its boss describes today as "a bit of a shithole". And two of the tubs were even delivered to Italy via the roof rack of a Ford Cortina!

John Thompson with the monocoque - image courtesy of Thompson

John Thompson, who'd founded TCP Prototypes with £100 in the bank after leaving March in 1970, couldn't believe his ears when he received a phone call in October 1972 from Sandro Colombo, a Fiat appointee who was now in sole technical charge of the F1 project after Mauro Forghieri had been marginalised and then sent on one of his periodic sabbaticals.

"Colombo was in London for the Motor Show at Earls Court and asked if he could come and visit us at 11 o'clock the following morning," remembers Thompson, who wasn't convinced the request for a meeting was genuine. "We were sitting there at our morning tea break, when I said, 'Do you think we ought to have a sweep up?'"

Thompson and his one-man crew swept up and Colombo swept in, "all the immaculate Italian", and laid out a set of drawings.

"They were beautiful things and so accurate," recalls Thompson. "We were used to building the first chassis for someone and them doing the drawings from that."

What TCP wasn't used to was working in metric. When Colombo asked if that was a problem, Thompson replied to the contrary. The reality was that he had only previously worked in feet and inches, and reckons he spent as much on new equipment as he made from the deal.

TCP quoted £400 a chassis. He was told later that Ferrari had approached some rival F1 teams - believed to be Surtees and McLaren - to do the same job, and they were asking £20,000.

"He asked us how long the first chassis would take, and we said six weeks, and six weeks to the day it was ready," continues Thompson. "We had to build a kind of crate out of old pallets at the airport because Alitalia wouldn't take it unless it was boxed."

The first chassis had been taken from TCP's workshops in Earls Barton near Wellingborough to Heathrow on the roof rack of the Thompson family Ford. The next two went, on separate trips, all the way to Modena in the same manner.

TCP built the tubs in six weeks, and transported them via roofracks to Modena © LAT

"We didn't really make any money on those tubs, but I thought it would be a chance to have a bit of a holiday in Italy and have a look around Ferrari," says Thompson. "We threw the kids in the car, and off we went. I'm not sure we even had a map."

The Thompson family adventure included a run-in with Italian customs, icicles forming on the tub as the 'Dagenham Dustbin' went over the Alps, and a first experience of the croissant. And the fun didn't end when the Cortina arrived in Modena...

"Ferrari were a bit upset because I'd just parked out front of the hotel they'd booked us into with the chassis on top of the car," remembers Thompson. "When I got to the factory the next morning, they knew all about it and were unhappy that I had left it outside in full view of everyone without any kind of cover."

Shortly after the tub was taken into the factory, there was a mass walk-out by the staff. "We thought it was because of us, but we were told that it was usual for that time of year," he explains. "There's a walk-out so that everyone gets more money."

But Thompson doesn't buy the industrial relations theory as to why Ferrari turned to him. "I think that was just an excuse," he says. "The truth is that they had never done a monocoque and didn't know how to."

After the political sands shifted again in the late summer of 1973 and Forghieri was brought back, Ferrari reverted to its previous practice of using panelled spaceframes or semi-monocoques. Every car from a second run of B3s for '74 to the '81 126CK had a chassis of that construction.

It would take another eight years for Ferrari to build its second monocoque F1 chassis.

That resulted from British intervention again. The design of the 1982 126C2 was led by Postlethwaite. This time, however, the tubs were most definitely built in Italy.

FERRARI'S 1973 PLIGHT

Ferrari, not for the first or last time, hit the self-destruct button as the 1972 season drew to a close.

The 312B3 didn't race until the fourth round of the season, the Spanish Grand Prix © LAT

Enzo Ferrari was ill with diabetes and Sandro Colombo, the man placed at the Formula 1 team by new owner Fiat, had come out best in a game of political machinations with an increasingly tired Mauro Forghieri.

The design credit for the 1973 312B3, which didn't race until the Spanish Grand Prix at Montjuich Park in April, is generally given to Forghieri and veteran Franco Rocchi, and its aerodynamic treatment clearly owes something to the former's unraced spazzaneve - or snowplough - of 1972.

The increasingly outdated B2 picked up a smattering of points before the arrival of the B3. The new car wasn't a success and lead driver Jacky Ickx quit the team mid-season in frustration to go freelance (he would return
for a further race, the Italian Grand Prix, in September).

Forghieri, who had been banished elsewhere in the factory, was brought back to the race team shortly after the middle of the year by a young Luca di Montezemolo, who had become Enzo Ferrari's assistant at the urging of Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli.

Forghieri reworked the B3, and reworked it again for 1974. With di Montezemolo installed as team manager, and old hand Clay Regazzoni and young charger Niki Lauda recruited from BRM, the Scuderia's fortunes would turn for the better.