Rodriguez's day in the rain

The Easter Monday F2 race at Thruxton was something not to be missed, effectively a Grand Prix in less powerful cars. Stewart would be there, and Reutemann, Regazzoni and so on; and Rindt always seemed to win it. And the other weekend underlined in everyone's diary was the BOAC at Brands.

Twenty years ago we had a classic race there - so much of a classic, in fact, that the 1970 BOAC 1000kms has become a cliché of motor racing legend. No matter: mention to anyone there that day the name of Pedro Rodriguez, and watch their eyes come alive.

Like Thruxton, it was a Grand Prix by any other name, so let me take a line or two to give you the flavour of the entry. In the Gulf Porsches were Rodriguez/Leo Kinnunen and Jo Siffert/Brian Redman, and in the Porsche Salzburg cars were Denny Hulme/Vic Elford and Hans Herrmann/Richard Attwood. The works Ferraris were crewed by Jacky Ickx/Jackie Oliver and Chris Amon/Arturo Merzario, with Mike Parkes/Herbert Muller in the Scuderia Filipinetti car. There was a factory Alfa Romeo for Piers Courage/Andrea de Adamich, and the Matras were crewed by Jack Brabham/Jean-Pierre Beltoise and Henri Pescarolo/Johnny Servoz-Gavin. There were several Lola T70s for such as Jo Bonnier/Reine Wisell, and a bunch of Porsche 908s, one of which was driven by Gijs van Lennep and a brilliant newcomer, Hans Laine, who would sadly die in the car at the Nurburgring a few weeks later.

Porsche was immensely serious about sportscar racing in those days, to the extent that John Wyer's team - which operated the works cars at the time - had available the awesome 917 for fast circuits and the nimbler 908/3 for tight ones. The latter would have been the thing to have for Brands Hatch, but in April was not ready. Pedro, Seppi & Co had therefore to run the big cars.

Ferrari, too. In 1970 Enzo went the whole hog with his sportscar programme, introducing the 512S as a direct competitor to the 917. It was a beast of a thing, huge and fearsome, with 5-litre V12 motore. Three weeks before, at Sebring, it had won, thanks primarily to the virtuosity of Mario Andretti, who to this day describes it as probably the best drive of his life.

"Usually," Mario says, "you had to drive sprint cars very desperately, but those races were short and sharp. At Sebring that night I drove the Ferrari in just that way, and for a long time. Looking back, I took chances I can't believe..."

The 512S was no real match for the 917, which had been house-trained aerodynamically from the wayward device of the year before. At Le Mans in 1969 Rolf Stommelen had lap after lap wandered down Mulsanne at well over 200mph, finger-tipping the long-tailed car away from the verges. It was amazing, Frank Gardner dryly remarked, what some people would do for the Fatherland.

Now, though, the 917 was relatively civilised, if not the natural vehicle for Brands Hatch on a wet day. And that Sunday in April of 1970 was wet.

Amon must have groaned on race morning, for he had little relish for racing in the rain. In the dry he had put the Ferrari on pole position, a couple of tenths faster than Ickx's sister car and the Elford Porsche, with Brabham, Siffert and Servoz-Gavin also faster than Rodriguez. But Pedro will have rubbed his hands. Never a man much to concern himself with qualifying, anyway, he loved the wet.

In absolute terms, the crowd - around 20,000 - was middling for a World Championship Sportscar race in those days, but in light of the weather it was astonishing. Cars were towed into the parks that morning, among them my Lotus Elan. Had it not been for Rodriguez, I might well have spent much of the afternoon worrying about getting out again. Had it not been for Rodriguez, come to think of it, I'd have left long before the end.

As it was, Pedro made that impos-sible. It is easy, quite commonplace, to add layers of folklore to a day, to let hindsight amplify; but only rarely do you appreciate something of legend as it happens before you. That day, sodden and cold, the crowd stayed.

This owed nothing to a close race, for it was hardly that. I can speak only for myself, but that afternoon I waited simply for the pleasure of enjoying Pedro's victory.

Elford led at the end of the first lap, tailed by Ickx, Siffert, Amon, Brabham, Pescarolo and Rodriguez. In their stead, back in the pack, a T70 spun coming out of Clearways, finish-ing up near the start/finish line, bits of bodywork all over the road. Nowadays, they would stop the race in these circumstances, and you couldn't quarrel with them. Back then, they waved yellow flags, and hoped every-one would see them through the murk.

Pedro didn't - at least, he always claimed so, and John Wyer, for one, believed him: "He would never have gone through the accident scene flat out if he'd been able to see the flag. There was so much spray from the cars in front that he simply missed it. I never doubted him."

Whatever, next time around Rodriguez was shown a black flag, and this one he did see. A lap later the Porsche was into the pits, and while the Clerk of the Course Nick Syrett bawled him out, Pedro impassively sat there, steely eyes straight ahead. When the lecture was over, he let in the clutch with some vim, and hurtled away down pit lane.

By now he was going on a lap down on the leaders - yet by lap 20 he was on Amon's tail, past the Ferrari and into the lead.

Rodriguez's driving that afternoon beggars description. In the course of catching Amon, he had first to deal with such as Siffert, his own team-mate, whom he outbraked into Paddock in a move which left everyone stupefied and shaking their heads.

I can still see those two pale blue 917s blasting through the spray down the main straight, still recall the amazement that, Lordy, Pedro was up with Seppi already, and next time around would be by him.

Into Paddock Siffert braked where a very brave man would brake, but Rodriguez still kept coming, and on an impossibly tight line he aimed inside the other Porsche. I will never under-stand how he made it by; in the dip there was the merest shimmy from the back of the car, and then it was gone, seeking out Elford and Amon. They, like Siffert, were sacrificial lambs this day, nothing more.

"That old joke," Chris said, "about why doesn't someone tell Pedro it's raining... it wasn't a bloody joke that day! I remember the way he came past us all, the things he was doing with that car. It was like sleight of hand..."

After that, it was really a matter of waiting out time. There was no race, as such, yet there was something hypno-tic about the afternoon, the watching of one man, one car. We were soaked and frozen, yet curiously unaware of it. Until mid-race, anyway. At that point Pedro came in to hand over to Kinnunen, his new team mate. It seemed a good moment to seek out a cup of tea and a sandwich. Even at Brands Hatch.

An odd fellow, Kinnunen. He had made his name in Finnish rallying, and would prove shatteringly fast at the Targa Florio, where presumably he felt in his element. But at a slippery Brands Hatch he was clearly not so, and in the pits Rodriguez began to fret. He had built up a lead so substantial there was little chance of their car being caught, but he worried that Kinnunen might stick it in the fence. After an hour he could stand no more, and asked Wyer if he could take over again.

It was done. In dry overalls, now, Pedro resumed his rhythm, continued on his flawless way. Behind him, Redman crashed the other Gulf Porsche out of second place, and Amon was in and out of the pits with a recalcitrant fuel pump. Ickx, the one man who might have kept Rodriguez alert on a day like this, had stopped countless times for attention to his windscreen wipers... Ferrari electrics had struck again.

The Hulme/Elford 917, though, continued without major problem -save that of having covered five fewer laps than the Rodriguez car. At 6.45pm Pedro emerged from the gloom of Clearways for the last time, and took the flag. On South Bank spectators plodded through the mud to their cars, sounded their horns in the time-honoured salute of the day.

On the rostrum Rodriguez looked untouched by his work. The black hair was immaculately swept back, as ever, and there was the faintest of smiles.

What was there about this Mexican - this Latin born to dust and heat - that put him at such ease on so English an April day? Siffert, sometimes a match for him on sheer pace, had been domi-nated, along with everyone else. "Finesse," said David Yorke, Wyer's team manager for so many years. "In terms of speed, there wasn't usually much between them, but you always had the impression that Seppi did the job with arm muscles flexed, while Pedro sat there resting his thumbs on the wheel. His precision and sensitivity were fantastic. A day like that was made for him."

It was years after Rodriguez's death (at the Norisring in 1971) that I spoke to Yorke about him. "He was eccentric in many ways, wasn't he?" David reminisced. "Driving around in that old Bentley, and wearing that Bond Street deerstalker and so on. In fact, if you didn't know him you might have got the impression he was a bit of a dilettante. But, my God, he was any-thing but a prima donna in a car. I never knew a more committed racing driver - absolutely nothing mattered to him but winning.

"Were you there?" he asked, after a pause. "That day at Brands?"