Remembering one of F1's ugliest oddities

This being soporific August - with deals being done, but the engines stilled - it seemed like a good idea the other day to listen again to Peter Ustinov's sublime 'Grand Prix of Gibraltar': I may have known it word for word since childhood, but, as with 'Fawlty Towers' or 'Frasier', unfailingly it makes me laugh anew.

Recorded off the cuff - Ustinov had no script, preferring to 'wing it' - in a single afternoon in New York, it is an affectionately satirical take on grand prix racing, and if it were created 60 years ago, trust me, there remain echoes of it in the Formula 1 of today.

Ustinov, who loved racing all his life, had a genius for mimicry, and here he gives it full rein, gently mocking the team personnel in the paddock, amplifying the perceived characteristics of each nationality. The British are self-effacing, the French laidback, the Italians chaotic, the Germans meticulous, and like that.

At one point the Schnorcedes team manager, Herr Altbauer summons his driver: "Von Grips! It's time to blow your nose now!" He then explains to the American commentator that laboratory research has shown that the best time to blow the nose - to have it completely clear for the race - is seven and a half minutes before the start. "As we have no central pocket on our overalls, a handkerchief would have to be carried either in the left or right pocket - which would completely destroy the balance of our revolutionary car."

This snippet came into my mind last week as, thanks to a link sent by a friend, I watched a recording of the 1972 French Grand Prix. The race is remembered as one of Chris Amon's greatest drives, and watching it again - 45 years after witnessing it - had me wandering off down memory lane.

Clay Regazzoni having hurt himself playing football, Ferrari unfathomably chose to put an Italian journeyman, Nanni Galli, in with Jacky Ickx at Clermont Ferrand. Embarrassingly slow and untidy, Galli repeatedly showered the track with stones - one of them, who knows, perhaps causing the puncture that cost Amon the race.

"I never liked that car, but most of all I hated that mirror" Rolf Stommelen

Two rows in front of Galli on the grid, alongside Tyrrell debutant Patrick Depailler, was the Eifelland of Rolf Stommelen. This German company, a manufacturer of caravans, was founded by Gunther Hennerici, a racing fan keen to use the sport to publicise his company. He bought a March from Max Mosley, and hired Stommelen to drive it. So far, so good - but unfortunately he didn't leave it there. Aiming to make the car distinctive, and to enable him to call it an 'Eifelland', Hennerici employed one Luigi Colani to pen some bodywork for it.

Bad move. Although Colani had worked for car companies in the past, his focus by now was on furniture design. Patently an odd man, and one very pleased with himself, he glibly expressed contempt for the Formula 1 designers of the time, suggesting that they lacked his vision.

Perhaps that was just as well. It took just 100 hours for him to come up with revised bodywork for Hennerici's car, which merely showed, he said, that the other teams were uselessly wasting time. In Colani's world everything had to be round. Why? Well, because the earth was round.

So, too, therefore, was the bodywork of the Eifelland, and in no time at all, having caused acute overheating problems, it was discarded, so that the car reverted to being a March - save in one detail. Having an obsession with symmetry, Colani - who would presumably have empathised with the Schnorcedes designers' handkerchief problem - was not prepared to countenance the mundane notion of mirrors to the left and right of the cockpit, instead siting a single one on a long stalk smack in front of the driver.

Even after all the other Colani design features had been shed, this mirror remained, despite the entreaties of the driver. A couple of years later Graham Hill, for whom I was working at the time, hired Stommelen to lead his Formula 1 team, and I got to know him well.

Stommelen, who was killed in a Porsche 935 at Riverside in 1983, is remembered by one and all for being abnormally brave, and never more so than in the early stages of Le Mans in 1969: at the wheel of the 'early' Porsche 917, he left everyone behind.

"The 917 was simply indescribable, but at Le Mans Stommelen really got it going" Frank Gardner

This was the car given its debut, at the Nurburgring, by Frank Gardner and David Piper, after the factory drivers - even the fearless Jo Siffert - declined to race it.

"They gave me a big bundle of Deutschmarks," Gardner told me, "and offered even more for Le Mans, but I never wanted to be the bravest racing driver - I just wanted to be the oldest, and the 917 was going to interfere with that plan. It was simply indescribable, the motor car, but at Le Mans, where he had the whole of the Fatherland on his back, Stommelen really got it going..."

A thoroughly good guy, with a dry sense of humour, Stommelen described to me how the 917 had been down Mulsanne, in those days uncluttered by chicanes.

"It would steer left, and I would correct, and then it would steer right...it was like that all the way down the straight, and you just hoped it would be on the left when you got to the right-hand kink..."

Stommelen bridled when one day I mentioned the Eifelland - and, particularly, that mirror.

"I never liked the car," he said, "but most of all I hated that mirror! One day I actually broke it off, and told them I wanted normal mirrors - but when I got back in, for the next session, they'd put the fucking thing back again! It's completely unnatural for a driver to have something right in front of his eyes, and I never got used to it."

Somewhat doubt he'd have gone for the halo.