The greatest heist in F1 history

It's one of the best-known heists in motorsport history. Formula 1 aficionados are well aware that Hans Heyer somehow started the 1977 German Grand Prix at Hockenheim despite failing to qualify. But few know exactly how he pulled it off.

I counted myself among the ill-informed, even though I'd talked in length to the legendary tin-top driver about his caper. The problem for me 10 or so years back when I came to writing about his escapades was that Heyer's story didn't quite tally with those of another participant in the strange affair, nor contemporary press reports. There seemed to be discrepancies in the tales of how Heyer illegally - and quite blatantly - snuck out onto the track to claim an unlikely place in F1 history.

Now I finally understand, and I have Motorsport Images to thank. A trawl through this massive photographic resource under the guidance of archivist Kathy Ager gave me a new insight into how Heyer started his home grand prix aboard an ATS Penske more than 40 years ago. One photograph unearthed within the archive's LAT Images collection shows how he did it, and another why he was able to do it.

The 'how' is quite evident in the grainy long shot of the grid - that's a close-in crop of the back portion of the field (below). It backs up reports of the day in Autosport and what we now call Motorsport News.

Heyer was "sat at the back, off the road, strapped in and ready to go as soon as the field had departed", said Autosport. He was "neatly parked alongside the main grid", suggested what was then called Motoring News.

Eyewitnesses, and I count Heyer himself as one of those, had told me a slightly different stories, quite understandable given the time that had passed. Ian Dawson ran Emilio de Villota's privateer McLaren together with Giuseppe Risi, now boss of the successful Ferrari sportscar team that bears his name, and he was there when Heyer pulled off his stunt.

De Villota's Iberia Airlines-sponsored McLaren M23 had lined up in a kind of collecting area - club racers among you, think Brands Hatch or Snetterton here — at the far end of the Hockenheim pitlane. The Spaniard was there along with Heyer in his Penske PC4 and Patrick Neve aboard the fledging Williams Grand Prix Engineering team's March 761 as reserves, waiting for their chance should any of the 24 qualifiers hit problems on the warm-up lap.

"There used to be a little infield area that led out either on to the back of the grid or the back of the pitlane," explained Dawson. "When the race began, Heyer just drove straight out."

"I spoke to the 'grid girls' and I persuaded them to leave the gate open and then give me a signal" Hans Heyer

That's not quite right as we can see from the photograph. Heyer yellow arrow, above) was already waiting and ready to go. The flag had already dropped at the time the shutter clicked, because you can see Alan Jones's Shadow sandwiched between Patrick Depailler's Tyrrell six-wheeler and the fast-starting March of Ian Scheckter.

The truth sits somewhere between Dawson's story and the accounts of the time. There was a collecting area and Heyer did drive out of it, but clearly not at the moment the cars left the grid. He was ready and waiting to go at that point, though not at the back and certainly not neatly parked.

There's also a gate involved in the story. It enabled access to the track and this, recounted Heyer wearing the 'tirolerhut' hat that he made his trademark, was conveniently left open. This is where the second photograph (below) - the 'why' - helps out. This shows the previous year's German GP grid layout at the Nurburgring, and the same system was being used at Hockenheim in 1977.

The organisers of the German Grand Prix were years ahead of their time. Liberty's decision to do away with grid girls in our politically-correct times was predated by 40 years: there were no scantily-clad 'dolly birds' - to use a period term - holding the pitboards, rather apparently ordinary blokes dressed in a uniform that made them look somewhere between a dustman and Afrika Korps veteran. These were members of a local kart club, and they were well known to Heyer.

"They were all my old rivals and I came up with a plan," said Heyer. "I spoke to the 'grid girls' and I persuaded them to leave the gate open and then give me a signal."

Heyer's antics were applauded by the big crowd in the stadium section of the Motodrom Hockenheim, and for good reason. There was now another German in the race to join Hans Stuck and Jochen Mass, and he'd put on a show the previous day in the DRM Group 5 support race. Heyer, driving his Zakspeed Ford Escort, had been the only driver to offer anything approaching a challenge to Jacky Ickx aboard Porsche's new 'baby' 935 in the Division 2 class.

So, the crowd noticed, and so did the commentators on German and Austrian TV, as you can hear on YouTube. Frank Williams and Patrick Head were all too aware of what happened, as well, and according to Dawson, "got pretty excited about it". But race control appeared oblivious to the fact that there were two ATS Penskes, one driven by Jean-Pierre Jarier and one by Heyer, in the race rather the one that had actually qualified.

There was no attempt to curtail the illegal entry, to bring Heyer into the pits with the black flag. There was an argument that, since Jones had not actually crossed the startline after an incident with Clay Regazzoni's Ensign, a reserve was entitled to start. But even if that one held water, Heyer wasn't actually first in line to take the spot.

Both Neve and de Villota were quicker than Heyer in qualifying. So, that made the ATS driver only third reserve. Neve was the fastest of the non-qualifiers, which explains the rage of his team bosses.

What Heyer described as camshaft problems stymied his performance during the two qualifying sessions. He was, though, only half a second away from making the cut and ended up faster than no less a driver than Emerson Fittipaldi.

Heyer can forever call himself a grand prix driver. A fraudulent one, but a grand prix driver nonetheless

Heyer owed his one and only grand prix appearance to the deutschmarks of Willi Maurer. The young German, who would go on to found the Formula 2 team that propelled the late, great Stefan Bellof to fame, had been handed the keys to the Berlin-based Mampe drinks company and was indulging in his love of motorsport by sponsoring Heyer's DRM campaign.

The ATS Penske they hired for the German GP, said Heyer, was essentially run by his own mechanics and he got just one hour of testing in the thing ahead of what was a rare single-seater appearance. He faced opposition to racing open-wheelers from his family after the death of Gerry Birrell, one of his team-mates in the Ford Cologne touring car squad in 1973, during an F2 race at Rouen that year.

That explains why Heyer wasn't too unhappy with the punishment he eventually received for his misdemeanour. German motorsport federation boss Huschke von Hanstein, the former Porsche racer and then its head of racing, told the imposter of a grand prix driver that he would have make an example of him.

"I said, 'Why don't you ban me for five F1 races?'," recalled Heyer. "I knew it would make no difference because there was no chance of me racing an F1 car again."

But Heyer can forever call himself a grand prix driver. A fraudulent one, but a grand prix driver nonetheless.