Commentary On: the Making of Grand Prix

It is the film of films for those of us who follow Formula One, and incredibly, in 2006, the movie "Grand Prix" celebrates its 40th Anniversary, having been made by the late John Frankenheimer during the 1966 racing season.

"Grand Prix" continues to be an icon all these years later, and this year Warner Home Video will, at long last, release a two-disc special edition Grand Prix DVD, which will include special features that cover how the film was made.

This will include a site visit to Brands Hatch, behind-the-scenes interviews with the actress Evans Frankenheimer (the widow of the late director, who behind-the-scenes helped her husband with the film and even got a racing license to prepare for it), James Garner, who plays American driver Pete Aron in the film, cameramen and other participants in the making of the film, as well as Formula One observers of that period and current pundits for their take on the significance of the film.

Although Warner Video remains tight-lipped about the DVD's release date, by the end of the year, this will be one Christmas present every Formula One fan will want to receive.

I was consulted by the people making the special features for the "Grand Prix" DVD, and, in connection with that project, I watched the film for the umpteenth time and continue to be astounded at what a fabulous piece of work it is, both as a film covering this sport, and, now, 40 years on, as an unintended but priceless archive of an era that summed up all that was best about Grand Prix racing: great drivers, great cars and great venues.

The visit Pete Aron makes to the mid-1960s Ferrari factory in the company of Senior Manetta playing an Enzo Ferrari-like Commendatore discussing Grand Prix driving while surrounded by Formula One Ferraris and the Ferrari sportscars that ran at Le Mans, is alone worth the price of admission.

The real meat and potatoes core of this epic film is symbolized by the marquee shots of Sarti's red Ferrari 312 V12 with its gold wheels and its white snake pit of exhaust pipes, on the streets of Monte Carlo or on the Monza Banking, and the fascinating interplay of reality and Hollywood movie magic that unfolds as the real cars and real drivers mix it up across Europe with MGM's Jim Russell-prepared mocked-up Grand Prix cars and drivers in the historic melange of fact and fiction that keeps us coming back for more all these years later.

It was a triumph of movie-making, with Frankenheimer sticking to his script as to who should win the six races he featured in the movie - Monaco, Clermont-Ferrand (in lieu of the actual site of the 1966 French Grand Prix - Rheims), Spa, Zandvoort, Brands Hatch and Monza - despite the fact that he guessed wrong as to the winner in all cases.

To make things even worse, Frankenheimer was faced with many changes of scenery in the real 1966 Formula One season that meant that he and the scriptwriters and film crew were required to be nimble and resourceful to react to and keep up with the events of the real 1966 season and weave those events into the 1966 season portrayed in "Grand Prix".

One variable for Frankenheimer introduced by Formula One itself was that the 1966 season marked the beginning of the 3-litre era, replacing the 1.5 litre engine specification formula that had prevailed since 1961.

Inevitably, some teams were better prepared than others for the new formula in 1966, and the cars - including BRM, Ferrari and McLaren (posing as Yamura Motors), the principal teams starring in "Grand Prix" - kept changing each race as the new 3-litre cars came on stream, causing havoc for Frankenheimer and the cameramen and the mechanics trying to keep the cars being filmed as identical as possible to the cars actually put on the track by the Formula One teams, down to the numbers assigned to the cars during the actual Grands Prix.

Although Frankenheimer was incredibly successful in stitching together this patchwork of the real and the imagined, there are flaws and inconsistencies that are cleverly disguised and are only apparent when the film is seen more than once and able to be better absorbed and dissected. But even then, the shortcomings - though interesting - are slim pickings.

Managing the fake Ferraris and fake BRMs, Lotuses and Eagles used in the filming was, of course, a nightmare for Jim Russell, who somehow had to pull this legerdemain off largely with a fleet of Lotus 20 Formula Junior/Formula Two cars used in his driving school.

One of the distinguishing features of these Lotus 20s was their less sophisticated suspensions, including the very obvious front outboard springs/shock absorber arrangement that the Formula One cars had long since given up, developing inboard shock and springs, in part to keep those mechanical parts out of the airflow.

In order to make the shocks and springs less obvious, Jim Russell painted the springs and shocks black and in some cases fashioned metal pieces on top of the shocks to give the effect of chrome wishbones.

The colors of the mirrors on the fake Ferraris and the location and angle of condensers, an engine part near the driver's helmet, kept changing too, probably one of the discontinuities easiest to catch for the casual viewer. And sometimes the fake Ferraris have louvres ahead of the windscreen and sometimes not, even within the same racing sequence.

In the exciting opening sequence at the 1966 Monaco Grand Prix, you can clearly see the real John Surtees in the real Ferrari 312 V12 being introduced at that race with its Ferrari-red mirrors and see-through air vents.

Some of the loveliest shots of the real 1966 Formula One cars are in the intimate setting of the streets of Monte Carlo, where the No. 17 Ferrari of Surtees and the No. 12 BRM 261 of Jackie Stewart are seen in aerial shots along the Mediterranean and in tight close-ups, as the two chase one another in a headlong rush down to the "Station" hairpin (the Monaco railroad station had been demolished by 1966), Surtees lifting an inside wheel at one point on the kerbing as the two Champions traded the lead.

But when the really close-up shots of actor Jean-Pierre Sarti's Ferrari at Monaco are shown, you can see that the mirrors are silver, not red, and the air vents ahead of the windscreen on the real Ferrari 312 are sometimes mocked up on the Jim Russell cars with black tape as if they are vents or are not there at all.

At Monaco in 1966, Ferrari entered entirely two different cars, with Surtees in the new car, the Ferrari 312, a V12, and teammate Lorenzo Bandini in the old car, a smaller-engined 2.4 litre V6 Ferrari Dino, thought to be the better of the two cars around the tight Monaco street circuit and preferred by Surtees himself.

The VHS cover of "Grand Prix" © Warner Video

Thus, Frankenheimer also had to have two kinds of Ferraris for his drivers, Sarti and the second driver for Minetta/Ferrari, Nino Barlini. In the end, Surtees was right about which was the better car for Monaco and his teammate, Lorenzo Bandini, finished second at Monaco in the Ferrari V6 and took fastest lap while Surtees went out in the V12 after 16 laps with differential failure, having led 14 laps.

To give a broader context to the rich motorsport world of the times in which Frankenheimer was filming "Grand Prix", some of the drivers in the 1966 Monaco Grand Prix, held on May 22nd 1966, had just flown in from Saturday, May 14th qualifying for the 1966 Indianapolis 500, which was to be held after Monaco that year on Monday, May 30th 1966.

Both at the 1966 Indy 500 and the 1966 Monaco race, the BRM drivers - Graham Hill and Jackie Stewart - would shine, with Stewart winning Monaco in his BRM P261 and leading Indy in his John Mecom Jr.-owned Bowes Seal Fast Lola-Ford until his Ford engine gave up with 10 laps to go.

For his part, Graham Hill finished third in the BRM P261 at Monaco and won the Indy 500 in the American Red Bull Lola-Ford, also owned by Mecom, the first "rookie" to win the Indy 500 since 1927: quite an eight days for the two Britons. Interestingly, the chassis of the winning Lola at the 1966 Indy 500 became the basis for the real Honda (Yamura) Formula One car of 1967, dubbed the "Hondola".

The other Great Scot, Jim Clark, also raced at both venues, having a horrible start at Monaco in his Lotus 33-Climax and then suffering a broken suspension at the Gasworks hairpin while catching the leaders; at the 1966 Indy 500 (Clark had won the 1965 Indy 500 in the famous No. 82 Lotus 38-Ford), Clark distinguished himself on a few levels, having at least two dramatic spins while leading the 1966 Indy 500 in his No. 19 day-glo colored STP-sponsored Lotus-Ford with whitewall tires on the left side.

Amazingly, Clark deftly recovered from these spins without hitting other cars or the walls (not an easy thing to do at the Brickyard, ask Ralf Schumacher), and then headed for Victory Lane only to find his compadre Graham Hill there, who, the timekeepers said, had passed Clark on lap 167, Colin Chapman of Lotus having filed and then withdrawn his protest of Hill's victory.

By way of contrast to the luck of the Britons, American Dan Gurney had horrible luck in those same eight days, at home and abroad. Gurney had entered and qualified an impressive five Eagle-Fords for the Indy 500, and he skipped Monaco to prepare for his assault on Indy.

Unfortunately, on lap 1 at Indy, Gurney himself got caught up in a front straightaway melee that eliminated his Eagle and 11 other cars. Another of Gurney's Eagles, in the hands of Texan Lloyd Ruby, the Bardahl Eagle, led the 1966 Indy 500 for 68 laps before going out with engine problems.

A week later in Monaco, Frankenheimer's mock-up of an Eagle Formula One car with its wild exhaust pipes was there as part of the MGM fleet of Jim Russell cars, but Gurney and the real Eagle did not appear, so, in effect, the debut of the Formula One Eagle was the fake Jim Russell Eagle at Monaco.

Gurney was not the only rookie Grand Prix constructor on the scene in the 1966 season. Another marque that gave fits to Frankenheimer was a race team that are also celebrating their 40th Anniversary this year at Monaco - McLaren.

In those days, Bruce McLaren was still alive (he was to die in a testing crash at Goodwood in 1970) and the first time on the grid for a McLaren Formula One car, the McLaren M2B, was also the first race filmed by Frankenheimer for "Grand Prix": the 1966 Grand Prix of Monaco.

McLaren's fledging team was problematic for Frankenheimer throughout the season because the quasi-Honda Japanese entrant, Yamura Motors, was painted white with a dark green racing stripe, the colors matching McLaren's car.

Over the years, McLaren was to use first white, then brick-red, then the tangerine orange/papaya color, before coming to sponsor-colored paint jobs, as in the McLaren M23 Marlboro-McLaren of James Hunt and Emerson Fittipaldi.

Bruce McLaren, McLaren-Ford © LAT

But Bruce McLaren, on a budget supplemented by contributions from Frankenheimer, still had the devil of a time coming up with an engine for his new car, which meant that at Monaco the McLaren was running a huge and delightfully noisy twin overhead cam Ford Indianapolis-based V8 engine (downsized from 4.2 litres to 3 litres) but when that did not work out McLaren switched to a Serenssima sports car V8 engine built for Count Volpi by famed Lancia and Maserati engine-builder Alberto Massimino, a design that also proved to be a disappointment, so that McLaren switched back to the Indy-based Ford.

The trouble for Frankenheimer was that the bodywork on the white McLaren kept changing with each engine substitution. The Ford Indy V8 had very distinctive center exhausts and the exhaust on the Serenissima engine exited from the side of the engine so that the profiles of the two cars looked very different, and McLaren sometimes ran the car without any engine cowling at all, adding to inconsistencies as to how the Yamura-McLaren car looks throughout the film.

James Garner/Pete Aron drives the Yamura-McLaren and even in the climactic race of the film - the Monza Grand Prix - Garner's white Yamura No. 25 sometimes appears during the race with an engine cowling, and sometimes not.

And given the rookie status of Bruce McLaren's teams, there were several times in the season when an engine blew up in practice and Bruce never even made it to the grid (as at Spa and Zandvoort), thus meaning no Yamura unless Frankenheimer conjured one up. Enter Old Reliable, Jim Russell, who sprayed white the BRM 261 of Bob Bondurant and Lotus-BRM Mike Spence on those occasions when the McLaren was missing in action.

The same thing happened to Frankenheimer with Ferrari at Brands Hatch. There was a sheet metal workers strike in Italy, and the Ferraris never made it to the track in Kent, England. Worse still, the "Grand Prix" script calls for Ferrari to win the British Grand Prix.

So the Jim Russell squad painted up a Bonnier Brabham BT7 to look like Sarti's Ferrari and Spence's Lotus-BRM to look like Barlini's second Ferrari, both cars seen only in a few shots as the cars take the grid. The only actual Ferrari in the Brands Hatch race was the Ferrari 3.0 litre Sports Car engine powering the Cooper T73 of Chris Lawrence, which finished 11th.

In the 1966 season, Dan Gurney was introducing not only his Eagle chassis but also the soon to be legendary Gurney-Westlake engine, powering the elegant blue Eagle chassis with the white racing stripe and distinctive eagle-beak nose. But the Gurney-Westlake V12 engine, which had fabulous-looking gaggle of titanium exhaust pipes, was not ready until later on in the 1966 season at Monza, leaving the Eagle to be powered by the pedestrian 2.7 litre 4-cylinder Climax until then.

Since "Grand Prix" was an American film, the Eagle, with its blue and white American racing colors, had to be featured somehow, and Jim Russell and company outdid themselves in coming up with an outlandish set of exhaust pipes for the movie Eagle that even outdid Dan Gurney's splendid pipes, and that movie Eagle was used throughout the film, waiting for the real Eagle Gurney-Westlake to catch up, which it eventually did by Monza, when there are close-ups of the movie star Eagle, glistening chrome exhaust pipes much on display.

Lotus and BRM are another interesting story. Since the film is basically a three-way struggle among the Ferrari, BRM and Yamura/McLaren/Honda contingent, Lotus did not have a dog in this fight. Ironically, BRM's hopes for the three-litre formula were pinned to a new engine, the complex H-16, which had been painstakingly developed in the deliberate BRM fashion and made appearances at practice sessions but did not end up in the BRM factory race cars until Monza.

Meanwhile Jim Clark's Lotus was also being powered by the BRM H-16 in the latter part of the season, and at the U.S. Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, Lotus took the only victory for the much ballyhooed but not very successful H-16 in the back of the Lotus: it never won again, in a BRM or otherwise.

"Scott Stoddart" (actor Brian Bedford) © LAT

Interestingly, it is said that the engine in Clark's Lotus that day was a works BRM engine loaned to Lotus on race day after Clark damaged his own H-16 during practice and qualifying. Had BRM not lent Colin Chapman that engine, the H-16 would never have won a race.

Strangely for the American-based movie, "Grand Prix" the movie does not feature Watkins Glen as one of the key venues, though cast and crew went there, and there is a scene with Jean-Pierre Sarti complaining about the poor quality of his car's set-up with the trees of upstate New York in the background.

As a cinematic device, Watkins Glen is depicted in "Grand Prix" by a scene in the hotel room of Scott Stoddard (presumably supposed to be the Seneca Lodge in Watkins Glen) when Stoddard's team owner, Jack Jordan (not Eddie Jordan), brings a U.S. Grand Prix trophy cup into the hotel room and lays it down for the camera to see, and the driver and manager begin to divide up the pay packet for the winner's purse paid by Cameron Argetsinger for the 1966 U.S. Grand Prix.

The records show that the winner's purse in 1966 was $20,000 USD, but Jack Jordan counts out $17,000, so perhaps Scott Stoddard was shorted a bit by the always impecunious "Jordan" BRM team manager. We learn in another scene that Formula One cars of the time cost $100,000 USD or so each (Jordan/BRM had lost two of them in the Monaco crash) so the $20,000 purse paid by the organizers of the U.S. Grand Prix was top dollar.

Another cinematic device used by Frankenheimer to convey the happening of other races on the calendar was to show Scott Stoddard's passport being stamped as he goes about his racing season, showing passport stamps for Mexico as well as Spa and Monza, and entry into New York. But the passport stamp for Spa is all wrong, since Spa was held early in 1966, on June 12th, and the passport stamp for Belgium is on July 22nd.

But these shortfalls are understandable given the tremendously dynamic environment Frankenheimer was filming in, trying to concentrate an entire season into coverage of six races and covering a group of cars and drivers whose colors and occupants kept changing, a task of tremendous magnitude, then or now, and the results more than stand the test of time.

If there never is another film made on Formula One racing - which would be a great shame, but Frankenheimer himself, when interviewed in 2001, said that he though it would never happen again - we can at least be reconciled to the fact that Formula One, with its inherent danger, its raw beauty, its pageantry and the sensation and spectacle of speed that is at the heart of it - is captured forever with verisimilitude, panache and style in the classic film "Grand Prix".

In one of the famous lines in the movie, Yves Montand as Jean-Pierre Sarti, has the following query for his friend James Garner/Pete Aron: "Pete . . .do you ever get tired . . .of the driving," to which Aron replies, "No", leaving Sarti to muse "Lately, I sometimes get very tired, you know what I mean . . . very tired." We are with Pete Aron on this one: we never get tired of watching these two at work, in "Grand Prix".