Remembering a lost Dutch F1 hopeful

At just after half past two on Easter Monday, April 20 1992, Gil de Ferran and Marcel Albers led the field around to the Thruxton grid to continue their fight for the British Formula 3 Championship title. After the opening two rounds the scores stood at one win apiece: Albers had triumphed at Donington Park; de Ferran at Silverstone.

Eight laps later at the Chicane: screams, shouting, silence. Albers, who was attempting to fight back up the field after dropping to seventh, had clipped the rear of team-mate Elton Julian's car as he tried to slipstream him on the approach to the Chicane.

Albers' Ralt lifted skywards, before it flipped, somersaulted, cleared the tyre wall and smashed into the protective fencing. Debris showered the terrified spectators, some of whom sustained minor injuries. The car itself did not get through, but 24-year-old Marcel Albers was dead from a huge blow to his head on a fence support.

Across the North Sea, Albers' Dutch racing friends were at Zandvoort for their first big meeting of the year, blissfully unaware - in these pre-internet days - of the tragedy that had unfolded. The news would only reach them as they feted the first win in cars for a new young talent named Jos Verstappen...

"Marcel was my best friend for eight years," says Albers' karting team-mate Rob Niessink, who today is CEO of top Formula 3 and 4 team Van Amersfoort Racing. "He had a really sweet character. He didn't like any confrontations except when he was on track - and when he was on track he started fighting more than you could ever expect from him."

That Albers and Niessink ever met VAR boss Frits van Amersfoort, who fielded the car with which Albers started his car-racing career, is one of those typical motorsport stories of chance, coincidence and even paradox. The Albers family was wealthy - his grandfather established a successful company in post-war Netherlands importing Japanese cameras and sound systems including Akai, Asahi, Fuji and Pentax.

The family business sponsored famed Dutch 50cc motorcycle racer Piet Plompen, before in 1977 Marcel's older brother Ronald was bought a kart by their father Jacques and began racing.

"Marcel was very interested, but he didn't have the strength to push the kart and get it started," remembers Jacques. "Ronald helped him, so he could drive around a bit."

Needing an engine rebuild, Jacques Albers took the kart to Plompen, who by now was renowned as a top tuner of two-stroke 50cc powerplants. Intrigued by the sport, Plompen went to watch Ronald and Marcel compete in what was Marcel's first-ever race meeting. It was 1983.

"He immediately saw Marcel's great talent," says Albers Sr. "Piet stopped his own [bike] racing team and started training Marcel. Ronald did not go on karting and instead concentrated on the sport he really loved: hockey. In the meantime I told Marcel he could go on karting, but serious racing in a racing car was out of the question."

Meanwhile, Niessink had been watching karts from the main grandstand at Zandvoort. In his early twenties, he already had a hire-car business based in Rotterdam - the Albers family's home city - and when he got to work he started phoning around various motorcycle shops to ask if they knew anything about karting.

They put him in touch with Plompen: "He said, 'You can buy one of the second-hand karts of Marcel', and from one day to another, very slowly, I ended up in the same team as Marcel. I was more the recreation level, club-racing stuff, and then we found there was a Marlboro Challenge."

This prize had been established one year earlier, offering a free season in Formula Ford 1600 with a Van Diemen run by Van Amersfoort Racing.

"This was the hot thing in Holland!" remembers Niessink. "We all filled in the forms and we were all rejected, because the marketing agency behind it had put questions on the forms, and one of the questions was, 'Do you feel you need to win the race or complete the race?' And of course everyone filled in 'winning the race'.

"The agency were completely unaware of any racing culture and thought, 'Well, it's more important to be on the track all the time to give the brand more exposure'. So they told everyone we weren't in, including Marcel and myself!

"At one stage all the competitors of the Marlboro Challenge were invited onto outdoor tracks in rental karts to show what they could do. Piet was the chairman of one of the tracks, so he put on a demo with us in our race karts, and of course the speed difference was spectacular! One of the guys from the jury said, 'Why aren't you in the Challenge?' and we told him we were kicked out. And so we were let in again - and Marcel won."

"After many wins and two championships [in karting], Marcel asked me if car racing was still forbidden," says Jacques Albers. "I nodded, but he was so determined to go racing he told me he would do it his way. He told me he had entered the Marlboro Challenge, and when I asked him how many entrants there were he told me about 15,000. I wished him good luck and thought the possibility to win was very small.

"One day [when the entrants had been whittled down to the final three] I got a telephone call from Marlboro asking if I would allow Marcel to race if he should win. I discussed the matter with his mother, and we gave him our blessing. We understood that we could not stop him."

Albers won and, when Frits van Amersfoort asked him if he knew a mechanic, Niessink came along too: "And today I'm still here!"

"I met him and Rob in the old Mickey's Bar on top of the old pit boxes in the Zandvoort pitlane," recalls van Amersfoort. "I was drinking a coffee, waiting for Marlboro to present me the winner. Immediately I felt this was a nice guy, and so was Rob. We were all fond of racing. I had his new car [a Marlboro-liveried Van Diemen RF89] in the back of my truck and said, 'Let's have a look'. And they nearly fainted!

"His father didn't want him to race, and Marcel always told us that in the first couple of laps he drove the Van Diemen he thought, 'Bloody hell, I've got it, I've done it, I'm in it!' That's of course a sentence I'll never forget."

In 1989, Albers scored five wins and claimed the Dutch title, but was denied the Benelux crown in the Zandvoort finale when he collided with rival Evan Kersbergen. "We'd had one or two technical mayhems in the Benelux rounds," says van Amersfoort. "Evan and Marcel crashed, and that decided the championship."

There was a sixth FF1600 win for Albers. He went to Brands Hatch for the Formula Ford Festival, taking pole and winning his heat. In his quarter-final, he was running third behind Michael Vergers and David Coulthard when he was taken out spectacularly in a clash with Brands specialist Andy Stapley (pictured above). Still in Britain, he tested for the Eddie Jordan Racing and Alan Docking Racing F3 teams - both were impressed but recommended that he contest one season in the mezzanine Opel Lotus Euroseries.

Van Amersfoort wanted to step up to Opel Lotus with Albers, "but Jacques said, 'No, no, we're going to an experienced team'". The logical choice was Team Lotus Nederland, with Dutch racing deity Jan Lammers as team figurehead and which had carried Peter Kox to the 1989 Euroseries title.

Albers blew everyone away in the opening round at Donington, but that proved a false dawn and his only win. After three rounds he still jointly led the standings with Rubens Barrichello, but a disastrous sequence of non-finishes put paid to his hopes. While Barrichello would win a fight with Vincenzo Sospiri for the title, Albers finished sixth.

"To be honest we were a bit spoilt with Kox the year before - he basically did his own thing," says Ronald Heiligers, who engineered the sister car of Andre Ribeiro. "We were only 19 or 20 at the time - younger than Marcel! - so we were learning as well. At the beginning we were struggling, and then we hired some outside engineering and it went better."

Heiligers, who would establish AR Motorsport for 1992 and go on to take Jason Watt, Etienne van der Linde and Tomas Scheckter to Euroseries titles, remembers that Lammers was busy for much of the season with his Jaguar Group C and IMSA commitments. "Jan wasn't involved a lot at times," he says. "Marcel expected more from the team, and maybe we expected more from him. To be honest we didn't have the experience.

"I remember one race at Spa, it was for the German championship or something, he finished on the podium, and when he got out of the car he realised he still had his normal shoes on - Timberlands I think - and went to the podium in them. He'd forgotten to put on his race boots!"

After testing Albers a year earlier, Docking signed him up for British F3 in 1991. The newcomer started brightly with a third at Silverstone, but his technique - turning in too fast, so damaging his exit speed - caused results to tail off.

Mid-season tuition from renowned coach John Stevens and recent F3 ace Derek Higgins turned things around, and by season's end he was outpacing team-mate Hideki Noda. Seven consecutive top-four finishes brought him fifth in the points, as Barrichello beat Coulthard to the crown in a final-round showdown.

"Marcel was working on his road cars here [at the workshop] when he got a moment," says Docking. "He was mad keen on little Fiats and restored this 600. He lived in Brackley and was just wide-eyed about F3 in the UK and the circuits. Everything was new and it was quite a step up but he was going for it, he loved it."

The dedication of Albers was highlighted at the Macau Grand Prix when he hired a Mini Moke, which he took around the circuit in the evenings while Higgins stood at each corner to watch his lines. It paid off when he was fourth in qualifying on day one, only to hit the wall twice on the second day.

Albers finished 11th in heat one, then massively jumped the start of heat two to get himself up into fifth. He was still in that position when he spun at Lisboa on the last lap, causing team-mate Noda to hit the tyres in avoidance. Oops.

Still, he would definitely be a contender for his second season of British F3. With an exodus of teams to Reynard, Docking was the only team in Class A left as a Ralt customer. The new RT36 was designed by Andy Thorby - who'd been responsible for the 1991 TOM'S - and soon Albers was raving about it.

Chris Weller, who engineered Albers in 1992, recalls: "It was a good car. And Marcel was obviously a very talented driver. It was a sociable team - we used to do quite a lot of things together. We'd go for meals and I played squash with Marcel probably once a week. We tried to look after him and because he was such a superb bloke it was no hardship to do that."

When Albers won the Donington opener, fighting back after being beaten away from pole by Oswaldo Negri, it looked game on for the title. At Silverstone for round two, Albers was closing in on de Ferran to challenge for the lead when he was forced into a lengthy pitstop because of a misfire.

"It was a stupid misfire," bemoans Docking. "It was data-logging that had a bit of a short in the sensor, and that power was running down the sensor to the ground and it was overheating the data-logging box, which was also a computer for the car. It was overheating it and a thermal fuse was cutting in and out. That was a bugger."

But the title was still on when disaster struck at Thruxton in round three. It has never been 100% cleared up why Albers had dropped back from challenging de Ferran: one theory is an incident; one is a temporary gearbox glitch.

"Elton [Julian, in the sister car] was in the thick of it - he was a pretty talented young driver but he had never been in that situation before," says Docking. "Marcel towed up behind him and just clipped him - Marcel's left-front wheel just ran over the back of Elton's right-rear wheel and that was that.

"Everything was just running against him. There was a lot of rain the week before and when the car rolled the rollover bar dug into the ground, where normally it would have been rock hard and he would have just bounced along. But that ripped the rollover bar off and it was just a disaster from then on."

"We soon twigged that Marcel was involved and you never assume it's going to be serious," adds Weller, who now engineers Toby Sowery at Lanan Racing in BRDC British F3.

"Then the drivers started coming back, and when drivers are quiet you know it's fairly serious. That's the first sign - when nobody says anything. I went down there and saw where the car had ended up, and the fact that he was still in the car at that point... that was six or seven minutes after it had happened.

"And the car was impaled in the fence and even then you think, 'It'll be fine' - you have to assume the best in this business. As it unfolded, things quite obviously weren't fine. It took quite a long time to rescue him from the car, and then we heard the worst."

Unusually, Albers' family was not at this race - from fighting against his passion they had turned to fully supporting it - and his stunned father received the news while on business in Japan.

Over at Zandvoort, meanwhile, the Benelux Opel Lotus series was kicking off. Van Amersfoort Racing had finally graduated to the category with Marlboro's new star karter Jos Verstappen; Heiligers was a still-very-youthful team principal of his brand-new AR Motorsport squad.

"I had to go home for a bit," says Heiligers, "and I always looked at teletext to see what Marcel's results were. And I couldn't believe what I saw, because there was only one sentence, and it was 'Marcel Albers died at Thruxton in an F3 race' or something. I was really shocked. Then I went back to the circuit..."

"That was the weirdest experience ever," says Niessink. "Jos won the race, and we were standing in front of the podium cheering, completely over the moon, absolutely excited about the achievement. While we were cheering Ronald came to me in the pitlane.

"There were tears in his eyes and my first thought was, 'It can't be that you're so emotional about not winning; what's happening?' And he said, 'Have you heard?' I said, 'No, no', still cheering. 'Have you heard about Marcel?' 'No'. 'He had an accident.' 'Oh? OK...' And then, very slowly, the coin started to drop, and I said, 'How serious is it?' And he said, 'He's dead'.

"That was the most extreme experience I ever had, you know? Cheering for one driver, then finding out your best friend has been killed in a race accident."

Niessink wasn't the only guy who loved Albers; most within his racing orbit did. And most are convinced he could have been a decent F1 driver, if not a professional in sportscars or touring cars - or even rallying. "He had enormous car control," points out Niessink.

"He and the family were pretty special," says Docking. "At his funeral, his father said that if Marcel could have had his time again, he would have done exactly the same to support him because that's what he wanted to do.

"Marcel was ambitious, and he was liked by everybody. We had a church service for him at Silverstone and that was rammed - he was only here for a year and a half and the amount of local people who got to know him... Just an outgoing type of kid."

Marcel Albers would be 50 this week, but achieved a lot in his almost-25 years. And he's commemorated at Zandvoort not only by the 'Marcel Albers Straat' walkway above the pits, but in memorial trophies at the circuit, including the Spring Bank Holiday FF1600 extravaganza and for the fastest lap in the Masters of F3, a race in which he finished third in 1991.

"There aren't many race drivers that become true friends, but Marcel was surely one of them," sums up van Amersfoort. "It's incredible that a guy who never got into F1 is still so remembered. I think it's an honour for his family, and his friends are very happy with that. Me too."