When nothing stopped for snow

I have known some true racing fanatics in my time, but none more so than McLaren director of design and development Neil Oatley.

Regularly Oatley emails photographs from the past that take his fancy, and last week - in the midst of a largely wasted pre-season test session at Barcelona - he chose pictures of the 1933 Pau Grand Prix, complete with pithy comment: 'Just get on with it.'

Among the other recipients was David Coulthard, who emailed me thus: 'Interesting reminder from Neil Oatley of how we have gone soft in modern racing!'

The surprise factor common to Pau '33 and Barcelona last week was snow, but there have been other occasions, too, when it has unexpectedly figured in our sport.

The surprise factor common to Pau '33 and Barcelona last week was snow, but there have been other occasions, too, when it has unexpectedly figured in our sport

Soon after leaving school in April 1966, for example, I went to practice for the BARC 200, a Formula 2 race at Oulton Park, saw Jimmy Clark beat Jack Brabham to pole position, and keenly anticipated the following day's race.

Given that overnight it started snowing, common sense should have told me to stay at home, but I had little of it, and after a decidedly treacherous drive got to Oulton to find that - surprise! - the meeting had been called off.

Seven years later, at Silverstone's Daily Express International Trophy, snow again had a part to play, this time coming down after the race had started. I was spectating at Becketts that frigid day, and in front of me Ronnie Peterson spun, handing the lead - and the race - to Jackie Stewart.

There have been other times, too, when snow fell during a race.

One thinks of the Formula 2 Eifelrennen at the Nurburgring in 1967, won by Jochen Rindt from John Surtees - but all these events were run in April, when snow might reasonably not have been anticipated, and the same was true last week at Barcelona, where it had not fallen for 10 years.

In 1933, the inaugural Pau Grand Prix, though, was run on February 19, and if that sounds like pushing it, the place was known as a winter health resort, and the organisers had no concerns about the weather. Through the streets a 2.6-mile circuit was drawn up, incorporating parts still used today.

Prior to 1958, the Pau Grand Prix was always for grand prix cars, and this first one was run immediately before the start of the era dominated by Mercedes and Auto Union, so the entrants were virtually all privateers, most driving Bugattis.

Through the previous week the weather was fine, but Saturday turned wet and cold, and during the night it began to snow heavily, so that on race morning the track was completely covered.

Given that the city needed to be operational again on Monday, there was no question of postponement - and, anyway, as one of the leading drivers, Rene Dreyfus, pointed out, in those days races were never cancelled because of weather conditions.

In those days races were never cancelled because of weather conditions

Dreyfus, who would spend the second half of his life as a New York restauranteur, was a delightful man, whom I came to know well over many a dinner in Manhattan.

Dreyfus had amazing powers of recall, not least of Pau '33, which he also discussed in his book, My Two Lives. "Pau," he wrote, "is in the Pyrenees, where the weather is never anything but mild. When I arrived, it snowed."

"This took the organisers by surprise, not to mention the townspeople, many of whom had never seen snow before. There was the further complication of the circuit having recently been resurfaced, with the gravel and tar laid less than a week before. However, races were never cancelled because of weather conditions, and the Pau people were reluctant to call it off..."

Inclement weather or not, a sizeable crowd turned out for this new event in their town, and, after discussion with the organisers, the drivers agreed to race, at which point snow was cleared from the streets as much as possible, and the track salted!

Problem was, by the time of the start, it was still snowing hard. When they got going, Guy Moll - whom Enzo Ferrari included, with Tazio Nuvolari and Stirling Moss, in his top three of all time - took the lead, but the conditions, with icy slush flying high in the air from the open-wheel cars, were beyond dreadful.

"After a few laps," Dreyfus said, "the road was a thick soup of gravel mixed with tar mixed with snow mixed with salt. Tossed up by competitors immediately ahead, this godawful mixture pelted the small windscreens of the cars. Goggles were quickly encrusted, and useless, and we all took them off - the drivers who fared best were those who pushed their screens down, and stuck their heads into whatever might be coming their way.

"[Philippe] Etancelin could drive without goggles at 100mph, but my eyes were too sensitive, and I could not, so I was left to crouch behind the dirty screen, and peering out every once in a while to make sure I wasn't about to hit something. In the end I finished fourth, and afterwards all of us - even Etancelin - had to go to the clinic to have the debris removed from our eyes, and that night, at dinner, we all had to wear sunglasses."

In the course of the race Dreyfus had to make several stops for attention to his eyes, while Etancelin pitted to have snow removed from his Alfa's plug leads! Moll, too, needed to come in, and, after two hours and 54 minutes of purgatory, the three of them finished behind Marcel Lehoux, an underrated driver who three years later would die in the one-off Deauville Grand Prix, after being pushed off the road by Giuseppe Farina, later to become the sport's first world champion.

"If I remember it rightly," Dreyfus said to me, "Lehoux's average speed at Pau was just under 50mph. It doesn't sound much, I know, but if you had been there that day..."