Denny Hulme

It's very difficult for me to pick my favourite race. Driving CanAm cars was tremendous fun and I had lots of hard, hot races. They were never easy to win, although we won most of them.

I loved winning at the old Nurburgring as well. The great thing at the 'Ring in those days was to get over the jumps and see who could go the furthest in the air! It was fascinating.

Despite all this I suppose it was the Swedish Grand Prix of 1973 which was the most unusual race for me. I remember it a bit better than most.

I particularly remember Sweden because of the fact that we decided we were going to take a week off from doing nothing - to do even less!

We got on a boat the week before the race with a lovely Rolls Royce - I think that only the King of Sweden had a Rolls in the country at the time - and the guy who owned the Rolls, Mike Hailwood, Phil Kerr and I drove to Anderstorp, doing all the nice stops on the way.

I was President of the Grand Prix Drivers Association at the time, the senior citizen of Formula 1 I suppose and I'd been around since 1966.

All the top guns were there: Emer-son Fittipaldi, Jackie Stewart, Jacky Ickx, Francois Cevert, Peter Revson, Carlos Reutemann, Graham Hill, Clay Regazzoni, Jean-Pierre Beltoise, Hailwood, Carlos Pace and a youngster called Niki Lauda.
Marlboro always put on a tremen-dous show up there, so we had fun. We were all staying at this crazy cowboy ranch they have near Anderstorp and we did all the usual things: setting fire to swimming pools by pouring petrol on them; taking all the wheels off the police cars and chaining them in the trees! That sort of thing... And we had a tremendous time in the bars.

Formula 1 had a really fun atmosphere in those days, with none of this debriefing stuff they have nowadays. It wasn't as scientific as it is today. We told the mechanics what to do and they did it.

The McLaren M23 wasn't new at the time, but it had showed all the potential of being a good car.

In those days Goodyear had heaps of different compounds and the most vivid thing I remember about the whole race weekend was how I tried one compound here and one there and came up with a bunch of different numbers and plumped for a different tyre compound on each corner of the car!

I suppose we could have ended up with three or four hundred possible combinations but we made that deci-sion because of the constant radius corners of Anderstorp - which are very difficult things to get set up nicely for - and the resulting tyre wear. If I remember correctly I only qualified the car about fifth.

The weather on race day was fine and, as soon as the flag dropped, I was off and chasing the leaders. Then someone put a wheel on the dirt and a cloud of sand went up in the air and straight into my air scoop, which jammed the throttle open. I had to try and clear that so I lost a lot of time.

When I came round past the pits I think everyone had written me off totally, but I got the throttles cleared and set off after the field.

And I started to reel everybody else in... It was just one of those lucky days.
The nice thing about Sweden is that it had that damned long straight and I was able to get a big slingshot and go past people. Those were the days when you could actually overtake at the end of a straight by slipstreaming. That doesn't happen nowadays.

I put a lot of that down to the four different compounds I was using.
The odds against me were enormous, because I had lost a lot of ground, but I whittled my way through the field and towards the end of the race I was right behind the leading JPS Lotus of Ronnie Peterson.

Well you always had to race Ronnie and we had a hell of a battle and then, with just a couple of laps to go, he suddenly had a puncture.

I was in the lead and I duly took the flag. I felt a little bit mean, taking victory from Ronnie at the Swedish Grand Prix but, damn it, all points on the board are points on the board.

That was the race I enjoyed more than anything, it had the whole atmosphere. Driving back to London in a Rolls Royce really did feel like the big time.

Nowadays of course they've all got Lear Jets...