Grand Prix Gold: Brazil 1975

Seldom in modern GP racing does one man with one car have a spectacular advantage in one race meeting and, even less likely, is he to enjoy it again at the following meeting.

Thus when Jean-Pierre Jarier put his UOP on pole in Argentina, only to be let down by a mechanical fault even before the start, it was a tremendous disappointment. Fortune seemed to be making up for it a fortnight later in Brazil, however, for he was again fast and took pole by a wide margin and, indeed, started the race.

Once he got around Carlos Reutemann, he simply vanished in the distance, building up a lead of more than 25 seconds by three-quarters distance. Certainly it was morally 'Jumper's' race, but fortune's smile was a false face. With eight laps to go a seizure of the shuttle in his metering unit stopped him on the circuit. Disconsolately - stunned in fact - he had to sit on a tyre and watch his race being won by Carlos Pace.

The Martini Brabham driver, a Brazilian performing before an adoring home crowd, had been tempering his natural fire with visible intelligence. Nursing a particular tyre combination that turned out to be right in the conditions of the day, he moved from the third row into third place immediately at the start and then neatly slipped by his team-mate Reutemann when 'Lole's' own tyre choice deteriorated.

'Moco' was, in fact, troubled in the late stages by oversteer, as well as physical deterioration caused partly by the strain of cornering forces on his neck, and when he found himself in the lead he knew the determined two-times former winner of the Brazilian GP was not far behind and gaining with every lap.

But Emerson Fittipaldi, starting from the front row alongside Jarier, had fluffed his start and then been trapped behind the Brabhams. Pace knew a steady finish would keep his first major victory safe in his hands, and he held on to defeat his fellow Paulisto by just over 5 seconds.

Of course, the result cemented the Texaco Marlboro McLaren driver's firm grip on the early part of this year's world championship, and McLaren's performance as a manufacturer was augmented by a brilliant job from Jochen Mass. Troubled by an unhappy practice, the young German found his form in the race, caught up the leading group, overtook Patrick Depallier, Niki Lauda, Reutemann, and Clay Regazzoni, and carried on with Fittipaldi in sight to finish a splendid third. It was a drive that earned him the Jo Siffert award.

Tuesday evening, the seafront at Rio. A small figure, a familiar one, stands on the mosaic pavement biting a cigarette, Arturo Merzario. "Ah, hello, ca va?" He's having a bitter holiday: doesn't like the food, his hotel's no good, and the weather has been dull and wet for five days straight. Then, directing himself to professional matters, he squints attentively and asks, "Hey, what you hear, is true about Peterson? He driving for Shadow in Interlagos?"

Good lord, is that still going on?

"No, really, I see a German journalist today sending a telex."

Wednesday morning, the Rio papers are full of it. Long stories, and lots of photos of Ronnie sitting in a bare Shadow chassis. Tom Pryce's by the look of it. The keen photographer has taken care to get lots of UOP insignia in his shots, and Alan Rees' face. Too - Alan smiling from one side of his face clear across to the other.

Wednesday evening, the television devotes several minutes to it. There is flashback footage to Argentina, and more recent interviews with everybody available; the driver, the Shadow people, the Lotus people (but none with Pryce seemed to be included). The implication of the broadcast is that the deal is all signed and sealed. But Ronnie states, on camera, that it isn't. It's still all theoretical. It's too early to say, etc. His face, his boyish, placid Nordic face, through a trick of the lighting perhaps, looks strained about the corners of the mouth and the eyes.

Thursday afternoon, a street corner in Sao Paolo. A friend, rushing along through the crowd. "It's definite, Ronnie told me at noon, it's a straight swap with Pryce. I've just been to send a telex."

About an hour later, just before five, in the lobby of the Hilton, why there's Ronnie himself, here's luck. We join the small crush around him, and not the sardonic smile on his Swedish face, as he says: "No it's changed again, I'm driving for Lotus here."

Sometimes in motor racing it's difficult to understand exactly what's going on. If you can't photograph it, or read it on a stopwatch, you pretty well have to depend on what people tell you. The trouble comes when you start asking more than one person. You sometimes get more than one story. The truth seems to become fluid.

We hear that Ronnie feels that Lotus should have told him earlier in the winter that the racing budget had been cut approximately in half. We hear, however, that both drivers had been kept full informed. We hear, that Peterson doesn't think that Lotus can now build him a car capable of winning the World Championship. We hear, however, that Colin Chapman himself is at this moment strewn round about with drawing for a brand new car, and this will likely be ready to race in Spain.

We hear that the Shadow and the Lotus people had agreed that Peterson would be loaned to Shadow for a couple of races. We hear that the major sponsors had each stated, in their opposite directions, that a short-term deal would be unacceptable. We hear that the Lotus team manger had drafted a press release announcing the swap, and had had it duplicated, and that Peterson had a copy in his pocket ready to issue. But then, we hear, some time before 5pm on Thursday a phone call came through to Brazil from Norwich calling the whole thing off.

We hear that some members of the press asked Peterson for his views, and recorded them, but then honoured his request to "clear it" with the team manager - the result being that, to keep the relationship with the driver one of mutual trust, the press men considerably altered his expressed views for their publications.

We hear, too - and this is another one the details of which are not meant for publication - that much of the swap-deal and its turbidity has to do with ultra-confidential negotiations between teams in the matter of driver transfer fees. This doesn't seem to be the first swap under recent accords, but it does seem to be the (financially) biggest one.

We also heard someone say, when it all seemed to be over and done with, "He's slipped through our fingers twice now, but we're not going to give up. We're going to fight really hard next time!" And you, gentle reader, always thought Grand Prix racing was a simple matter of 15 Sundays a year.

You haven't seen the half of it.

Entry

Friday, at the track. What a delightful relief to stop hearing people and listen to the Formula One engines again.

There's sometimes a particular point during practice when you can stand directly behind a car as it is started up and revved for a couple of minutes to warm it up. You can look down into the exhaust pipes, the acrid gases gusting about your face, the sharp savage noise painful in your ears, and there, in the dark tubing you can see the flames popping; little flames, very brief little bursting flames, quite dull and not easy to see.

Sometimes they're orange, sometimes they're blue. They cavort down there inside their twisting tunnels like little smoking demons mischievously anxious to frighten you. As you gaze down into their hellish little play. You find yourself you're trying to grasp the true fiery cacophony deeper within, inside the grey engine itself. The flames, the sparks, the violence of the chemistry, the desperation of the metallurgy, the exquisite whirling precision of the design.

Then the wheels give rubbery trembles, gears mesh and the driver moves his feet on the pedals inside and takes the machine away from you, leaving behind only the noise. It's a good noise, a pure and honest and true noise, a hanging sound of hard, simple work. It cleans your mind out.

Of the 23 cars that had raced in Argentina, 22 would race in Brazil. The 23rd was replaced by a new one, nominally the same as its crashed-and burnt predecessor but showing the result of a lot of experience and rethinking.

Wilson Fittipaldi's Copersucar-Fittipaldi No 2 now had a pair of water radiators located Parnelli-style either side of the engine, angled a bit and fitted with vanes to help scoop in air. What had formerly been a complete rear bodyshell was now an abbreviated semi-cover acting as little more than an airbox. What had been the airbox intake inside the roll-bar arc was now filled in, and a conventional tall scoop rose to standard height above.

Below, much of the whole rear suspension had been strengthened to prevent a recurrence of the failure that had caused the Buenos Aires crash - designer Richard Divila hadn't been able to exactly pinpoint in the wreckage what had broken first, but it was something in the rear, and revised his calculations on certain key elements. Despite this, the new car weighed in some 12kg less than its predecessor, and in testing at Interlagos during the intervening weekend between GPs, some encouraging lap times in the 2m36 bracket were recorded.

Another major change was incorporated in Vel's Parnelli Jones team. Having tried their own tyres at the first race of the new season, they had now decided to go over once and for all to Goodyear.

Within the team there had been conflicting points of view, but finally the decision was left to Mario Andretti, and he chose to take advantage of the ongoing Goodyear development programme rather than handicap his chance of winning races by staying with a stagnant technical situation out of a sense - possibly misplaced - of loyalty.

As for the Goodyear efforts for the race, the first GP in which every car used their product, there were as in Argentina, two basic tyre compounds supplied. One was especially intended to last in the conditions imposed by the Interlagos circuit, the other was a softer rubber, which was, in fact, the Argentina race compound. At that first race, there had been something of a problem involving the separation of the treads at the splices; some people had called this 'chunking.' The Akron technicians had altered some of their techniques to prevent this, but inevitably the sheer logistics of the situation required that there were still some of these original questionable tyres left over from Buenos Aires.

On along the newly revamped paddock/pits row at Interlagos, closer examination revealed a number of subtle changes in the outwardly familiar cars.

Team Lotus, reacting with magnificent determination to the adversity of their unhappy current situation, had entered a remarkable redesign of the rear suspension of their pair of ageing JPS 72s.

At base, explained Peter Warr, the constantly altering tyre designs of the past couple of seasons had often left them with a poor marriage of car to road. At one stage the front tyres wouldn't work on the 72, at another the rears were inferior. In Argentina, the whole weekend had been spent trying to obtain grip at the rear. On race morning the two cars had appeared with a 'bodge' in the rear suspension, whereby it had been lowered through the adaptation of shorter damper units intended for the front suspension (spacers had been made up out of two-inch lengths sawn off jack handles, which had been borrowed from Team McLaren!).

When he came out to Brazil, Warr had with him a kit of bits to render a rear suspension improvement beyond this: essentially a new roll centre was obtained by modifications to the upper pivot points of the (cast) rear uprights. Time had precluded making new uprights, so a makeshift structure had to be bolted on top of the castings to carry the new pivot. It looked makeshift, and the amount of artful fiddling to make all the elements of the whole rear structure fit without binding on each other was astounding.

Some teams would probably not have considered it worthwhile putting themselves out to this extent for one race meeting, but the history of Lotus is full of incidents where tireless, inspired effort has earned just reward. At the Brazilian GP this time, every man jack of the compact little team looked exhausted. Their eyes were all sparkling with that nagging pain that comes from staying awake too long, and their movements were uniformly sluggish. But there was a solid impression about them of unspoken determination that, if their flesh could only hold out, their spirit would convince their driver to stick by them.

The older Hesketh model, the one still fitted with steel coil springs at all four corners, had been fitted experimentally with track about three inches wider; this was removed after the first day. The newer UOP Shadow of Jarier had been altered to suit the circuit by, rather surprisingly at first thought, removal of the spacer between engine and gearbox to shorten the wheelbase by a couple of inches.

The reason for Jarier's crown-wheel failure at such a dramatic point of the last race had been traced at Hewlands to a wrong piece of material. "The steel was EN24, whereas it should have been EN36. All but about six of the teeth broke of like carrots."

The Texaco Marlboro McLarens had available both current patterns of nosepiece, with their different supporting framework, and Fittipaldi's car ended practice with the older longer nose fitted. There wasn't, however, much need, inclination, or time, to change the bulk of the entry. Some had carried out one or more days testing at the Sao Paolo circuit, some had tried but been frustrated by mechanical trouble, some hadn't managed to come or even wanted to. McLarens, Brabhams, Ferraris, Heskeths and a few others had done testing, but Shadows (due to a shortage of gearboxes after the last race) did not, and the startling speed of Jarier as practice opened made the days of hard work by the others look futile indeed!

The impression of meagreness gained in Argentina was still invoked in Brazil. There were teams who confessed themselves almost desperately short of machinery.

There were teams that were visibly short of personnel - including financially sound Brabham, who had two men ill. There were a lot of people missing whom one would normally expect to see at an interesting race in a good climate, in a politically stable nation.

Colin Chapman was missing, his first non-Monza GP, nor were Tyrrell designer Derek Gardner, McLaren designer Gordon Coppuck, Parnelli designer Maurice Phillipe or Penske designer Geoff Ferris anywhere on the scene. Neither of the big men from March came, nor did either Vel Miletich or Parnelli Jones come - why, we were even deprived of their Lordships Hesketh and Stanley.

There were plenty of enthusiastic South Americans who had managed to gain pits passes and the grounds were not deserted, but there was overall a peculiar sense of partial abandonment about this early GP of the 1975 season... beautiful people, where are you? Is anything wrong?

Practice

Practice was, for almost everybody, two days of growing, disgruntled displeasure.

Jean-Pierre Jarier, just as in Argentina, was pushed by the Shadow team out to the very front of the line awaiting the opening of the track for first practice. Again, as two weeks ago, his DN5 started turning in some startlingly good times that no other car could match.

After the first hour, from 09:30 to 10:30 in the comparative cool of Friday morning (the whole weekend was supposed to take place early in the day for reasons having to do, among other things, with anticipated afternoon weather and with crowd control), Jean-Pierre was quickest overall with a lap of 2m31.52s.

At this stage James Hunt was only about two tenths behind, and Reutemann, Pace, and Emerson F all looked to be in striking distance (less than a second on this five-mile circuit). But there did not seem to be a sense of confidence pervading these other teams. After considerable testing on their part, here was a car new to the track ahead of them. The "flash in the pan" of Argentina was turning out in Brazil to not be a flash in the pan at all!

The weather conditions seemed favourable for good times. In the 11:30-12.30 session, the already partially cloudy sky grew darker, there was almost no sun at all, and the air with its light breeze was perfectly comfortable to European skin. The pole position time of the year before (Fittipaldi/McLaren) was 2m32.97s, and several drivers had already bettered this.

But there had been a better F1 lap recorded in 1973, when Peterson took his JPS - then an ultra-competitive car - around at 2m30.5s. It was a matter of keen technical interest now to see whether anyone could take a car around at anything approaching this speed.

Against it were the facts of not having a supply of tricky-sticky tyres, and also of the evident further deterioration of the track surface. While carrying out the CSI-barrier-moving programme in recent weeks, the Interlagos owners had done some resurfacing here and there. But the new cover seemed to be almost all on the straight bits, and it wasn't any smoother than the old one anyway, and several drivers commented that the untouched parts of the track were even bumpier than ever. Hard work for a modern F1 car.

Jarier broke the 1973 record by 16 hundreths of a second. Nobody else - Reutemann was best of them - did more than approach it.

As the nice racing engine noises died away, a buzz could be heard running up and down the garages. Whew! It's quick. Do you think he can be taking the first pair of bends flat? It certainly sounds like it. Well, they're running a lot of wing on the car but still...you know, the chassis must be getting the best out of the tyres. Yes, but did you see the megaphones?

A study of corner times which was incomplete and amateurish nevertheless generated a good deal of interest in the garages; it indicated that in the famous Curva do Sol, the fast, spectacular, endless right hander below the paddock, Jarier's Shadow was getting through the quickest. Once it was caught at 12.1s between reference markers, J-P working hard but not drastically so. Once Fittipaldi did 12.2s, the McLaren looking reasonably steady but sliding, and Scheckter did 12.3s, the Tyrrell looking pretty exciting on opposite lock for much of it.

The man of the hour seemed to be taking the flock of interest in him in stride. He said he was surprised himself that Tony Southgate's shortening of the wheelbase proved to be a good thing on the circuit, but there it was. His gears weren't right yet, and he was going to have his tiring engine changed.

One - and all, for that matter - seemed to be left with a nagging feeling that the question wasn't 'Why is Jarier so fast?' But rather 'Why is everybody so slow?' Obviously, Jarier, Southgate, and Shadow were doing something right. Whatever could it be?

Everyone had, incidentally, been started off by the tyre company on the harder, base-line rubber. At one point, so it is said, Brabham switched Reutemann over to the softer, 'Argentina' pattern and he went a little quicker - but the company representative came along and gave the team a bollocking for doing it without official leave. This is just hearsay, of course. In the later session nearly everyone was allowed to swap over, and while some drivers were able to show an improvement of anything of anything between half a second and a full second, some showed no improvement. So these soft tyres weren't necessarily an answer, and Goodyear was paying close attention to wear rates, particularly at the front.

As a generality, these tyres seemed to work on most cars on the Interlagos circuit to give understeer. The same rubber had given a general oversteer at Buenos Aires. As understeer is not considered desirable on a circuit with lots of long corners - it tends to build up, and there isn't anything a driver can do about it except wait until the end of the corner. Most teams were not happy.

Chassis tuning seemed to take on the nature of chassis jacking around as various compensations were cranked in, and while cars became more and more manageable it often looked like hard work to hold them on line. The bumpiness of the surface was a further handicap, so that, much as at Brands Hatch, the drivers were being forced into giving good visual value.

These were conditions which drivers hate but in which spectators can't tear their eyes away from the leaping, weaving, fishtailing cars.

There were mechanical reasons for unhappiness, too. Emerson Fittipaldi had to abandon the early session early, his arm up, so that a fuel pump could be changed. Mike Wilds abandoned this session when the Stanley-BRM took charge coming out of the hairpin, shot across the road, and rammed its nose into the inside guardrail. The sub-frame holding the right front suspension was badly bent, and as the chastened Wilds watched his mechanics tear into the job of straightening it he was nursing a wrist that had been slightly sprained by the impact.

Hunt, too, had a spin, which damaged his nose; in this case only the projecting forward parts were bent and within minutes the other car was cannibalised and he continued (he was trying the coil-suspended car rather than the rubber one at the time; he said the spin was not at all similar to the one that had cost him his lead in Argentina. There a restriction in the steering lock caused by the rubber spring assembly had aggravated the situation; here he simply lost control).

Others seen to spin, but without damage, were Vittorio Brambilla, who was not repeating his Buenos Aires form, and Scheckter, who spun once and once again. Rolf Stommelen was bedevilled by fuel system trouble, which held his Embassy Lola's engine down to 8000rpm; he got no clean laps.

Mario Andretti's Parnelli engine lost its oil pressure as the sump began to fill with oil; the scavenge pump was slipping its clutch drive due, it was thought, to overload created by the addition of another oil cooler in the system. Besides that, a rear roll-bar bracket broke, and two dampers failed. Arturo Merzario had to stop when his Williams broke the triangular piece which mounts the engine to the chassis on the right-hand side.

Several different drivers reported, in the quiet of the post practice afternoon, that their cars weren't actually going badly. "But it's just not quick enough." Other drivers said their handling was so bad it left them at a loss to describe it.

Oh, yes, and Peterson ended up at the very bottom of the time sheets. That time came from the one lap he completed all day. He didn't do more because he was in and out of the pits trying to find the reason his engine, a brand new unit fresh from the box, wouldn't run. Besides that he was worried about a severe front brake vibration. The reason for that was found, finally, with a dial gauge: the disc was mis-shapen. Unfortunately, Team Lotus had with them in Brazil precisely the four front discs already fitted to the two cars. No other car's discs would fit the 72 design.

Tom Pryce, sitting quietly on his pit counter, a bit apart from the crowd persistently surrounding his team-mate Jarier, said his DN3 wasn't going too badly, thank you, although earlier oversteer had mysteriously changed into understeer. He'd seemed to have learnt the track easily. When asked, he went on to say that, no, the present crisis atmosphere of uncertainty about who he was going to belong to didn't really affect his driving. "I know that the main thing for me is to just get experience. All this doesn't bother me. Just as long as I'm quicker than Ronnie!"

Once again Jarier took up his place at the head of the queue for the next day of practice.

This time there was a delay that stretched to upwards of an hour because - it was said - one of the circuit's maintenance vehicles had blown up and spread oil all over Curve Three. Jean-Pierre stayed in his cockpit the whole while, his mechanics sitting on the wheels around him, occasionally chatting with someone but largely looking in his young French face as if he wished the whole thing were over and done with. There was still, in some minds, the 'flash in the pan' question and the former F2 champion was certainly going to have to prove himself all over again.

Behind him as he waited the long blank period allowed groups from other teams to wander up the line and, with studied casualness examine the UOP Shadow in hopes of spotting its secret. Team managers, chief mechanics, designers, all could be seen in the general crowd, hands clasped innocently behind their backs, those backs occasionally bent as they tried to see under things...

But nobody seemed to discover any secrets. There probably weren't any.

Southgate had simply, after three years of trying, refined his basic design into a cohesive whole that worked properly with the tyres available on the given circuit. F1 seems to have evolved to this stage, where there aren't any major conceptual advantages. It's not like five years or so ago, when one could say with confidence: Well, it's the inboard brakes, isn't it? Or that new wing location, of course it is.

It's hard now to see why a car happens to work so well - it's so hard that sometimes two supposedly identical cars within a team behave differently. It appears to be a very fine game indeed nowadays, the rules of which are increasingly cloudy.

His rivals standing back there with their hands clasped seemed to rate Southgate highly, but they couldn't bring themselves to say he'd discovered anything they didn't know about. Yes, it's all working well here, isn't it, but wait till we get to Kyalami. It's likely to be an entirely different story there! Hope always springs eternal in motor racing - it's a province of optimists.

The man himself remarked that he felt the new era of tyre relationships was an important clue to his car's speed. He had often felt in the past that his team wasn't towards the top of the list as regards the best compounds; now, with everyone given the same thing, the car rose to its proper level among the rest.

To put the results of the day simply, Jean-Pierre went on in the first session to take the pole by a stunning margin over all the rest, breaking under the 2m30s mark for the first time in Interlagos history. He was so far ahead of anyone else that it was almost ridiculous. That sort of superiority hasn't been seen in F1 for quite some time.

It demoralised the other would-be competitors. It elated the UOP team, whose delight after two years of frustration was like the sun after a monsoon. Flash in the pan, indeed! For nobody else did that last day of practice go anything like as well.

Many people were generally faster than the day before, despite warmer temperatures from a less cloudy sky, but still dissatisfaction was rampant. Most people found the so-called Argentine tyres quicker at Interlagos, but oddly enough they made the cars behave differently.

At Buenos Aires most people were complaining of oversteer. Here in the long, fast corners the tyres seemed to cause understeer instead. So chronic was this that certain people became worried whether there was enough rubber depth on the soft tyre to last the race distance - but strangely, some people were worried about the fronts, others about the rear. Ken Tyrrell had an experience which illustrates wonderfully well just what a puzzle modern racing cars can be. On Friday, his drivers found the softer compound was worth about half a second (some other men reported an improvement of nearer a second, others found no improvement at all). As the Saturday got hotter and hotter, though, the summer sun beating down finally unhindered from a clear blue sky, Ken wondered if the Argentine compound might not be too soft. He had the harder rubber put on. His drivers recorded times 2.5 seconds slower.

Why, Tyrrell wants to know, should there be a difference of two seconds in the difference itself on two different days? Not even for Jarier did the practice end up well. Satisfied with the morning time, quite confident nobody would be able to threaten his pole, Alan Rees put him on full tanks and devoted the afternoon to setting things for the race.

'Jumper' was doing some laps in the middle of the time sheets when he suddenly vanished. Such a thing had happened on Friday, when he occasionally slowed on the circuit or failed to come round on schedule. He had explained those relapses by saying he "was going slowly to look at my tyres." But this time he never did appear. A couple of Shadow mechanics took some tools and went out to look for him, but returned in vain. "We can't find them anywhere." Interlagos is, after all, a long track with several steep banks which block vision.

But Ronnie Peterson knew just where he'd got to. He'd been pounding along behind when it happened. "He can go by me, and the Brabhams as well, like I'm parked. But then he was just in front and blew up. There were little metal pieces everywhere."

If Ronnie got any small smile of satisfaction from that, it was sorely needed. He still couldn't get the JPS to handle. Just as the day before - and as the year before, come to think of that - he said it was "penduling" from over to under steer unpredictably. The slaving Lotus men tried everything possible to adjust the chassis, but nothing worked. He still had the brake vibration, too. The warped disc had been reset on its drive straps as straight as possible, but it wasn't enough. But since there wasn't anything to be done about that he didn't remark on it.

There wasn't anything the overextended team could do about his engine situation, either. The new one that didn't work had been replaced by the only available spare, the one raced by Ickx. It was tired, but it was the only one.

Ickx, too, was having the same handling problem. To him it was just as at Buenos Aires, the car handling reasonably well at low speed but just being unmanageable at high speeds. At one point, he tried so much front wing angle that, at speed through the ultra quick first and second turns, he lost all steering control. The steering became so heavy that, in the middle of the corner, he literally could not turn it - either way. Fortunately, he reported to Peter Warr, the chassis was lurching about on its bump stops so that at the exit of the corner it stopped turning by itself and he could go straight again....

But if Team Lotus were unhappy, they were members of a big club. Mario Andretti's crew spent the half-hour break starting to change engines again. As on Friday, the second engine lost its oil pressure. The only replacement available had been, again, raced in Argentina. There were only a few minutes left when Mario could go out and participate in the final session.

Scheckter had terrible oversteer, "worse than Friday," although he didn't spin this time and late in the afternoon he gathered himself up and was one of the few who, in the hot conditions, improved his time. In fact he was second fastest to Fittipaldi. Team-mate Patrick Depailler, however, didn't improve, in fact he was a bit lucky to participate. In the morning session he suddenly shot off into the barrier, damaging both ends of the car's superstructure. There was a front wishbone cracked, as well: Patrick said the braking had been growing more and more unstable until he suddenly crashed.

Wilds reported that the straightened BRM was tracking well, and he was making quite pleasing progress, although the chassis seemed to be rolling too much and the tail would jump out. Pryce, too, was making progress, and so was John Watson in the Surtees although there was still an overall lack of traction.

Mark Donohue said he'd made some mistakes, taken the chassis tuning the wrong way, and was getting slower. James Hunt, trying both cars, said there wasn't anything wrong except he just couldn't do a good time. Reutemann, driving the team's spare at the time, stopped on the circuit with no fuel pressure. Pace, troubled with severe understeer, was also being bothered by the G-forces on his neck in fast corners. His ribs, he maintained, were all right, but his neck was painful.

After having a look at the head bracing pads Donohue had rigged up the sides of the Penske cockpit, and after discussing an Indy fix involving bungee cords looped around the upper arm and hooked to the helmet, he went away and worked out his own solution.

He did have thin pads put into the cockpit sides, but he planned to rely on simply jamming his helmet back into a thick cushion of foam rubber built out from the rear of the cockpit. In the bad corners, he thought, he could hold his heady steady this way - much like using a "dead pedal" to hold one's body in the seat in a road car.

The tyre situation, or something, changed yet again in the final moments of practice. In the last 15 minutes drivers started reporting their chassis had switched over to giving oversteer.

As the racing noises once again died away and everyone settled into the evening of race preparation, and as big Sao Paulo afternoon rain clouds suddenly built up overhead, there was a feeling of mystery, not to say puzzlement hanging over the garage, everybody had a lot of questions that needed answers, but they didn't know how to answer them. Maybe the race would provide more information, but there were people ready to expect that the result of that would be a surprise too.

The famous names in GP racing are often described as brilliant people with faultless understanding and vast experience, but there were a lot of wrinkled brows at Interlagos this time. If there was one man in Brazil who really knew what was going on, the name was Tony Southgate. But his expression remained bland. He wasn't telling.

Race

As the race was to start at 11:30 am, the morning's unofficial practice was scheduled for nine. In fact, there was a delay of about 10 minutes because, just as in years past, the over enthusiastic crowd which had been jammed together in the grandstand along the pits straight all night, protecting their places, were amusing themselves by throwing debris on the circuit. Goodyear's Denny Croback was adamant that it all would be cleaned up before any of his tyres could turn. The only tyre firm to support F1 racing nowadays didn't need any ill informed publicity about punctures, thank you very much.

The delay might have been critical to Lauda, for his engine blew up in that half hour session. It didn't really blow, but the oil pump drive sheared, and it was considered wise to change the whole unit. Luckily, the Ferrari team had prepared for such an eventuality by having already removed the entire back half of their Muleta.

There it sat, ready to be bolted on to Niki's race chassis, complete with gearbox and rear suspension. The job was finished with plenty of time to roll the gleaming red machine out to join the others. However, there had been no chance to race tune the chassis on full tanks on the day. Mauro Forghieri could only try to assure his star driver that his settings were exactly like Regazzoni's. But Niki, from his expression of pent up explosive anger, was thinking about too many times when supposedly identical cars had behaved unexpectedly....

Other troubles befell Hunt, who stopped on the verge with no fuel pressure, and Wilson F, whose engine started spraying oil out because the oil pressure was too high. Pace brought his car back with oil leaking from the front gearbox seal into the clutch housing, so the Brabham men had to take his car apart to fix that. Luckily here, too, there was time.

For most drivers and team managers, the half hour was precious for it was still a big question as to what tyres to choose. The idea of the season is that there is really only one tyre choice, but there were, in fact, two available and, racers being the sort of people they are, there was much nail-biting about which to choose as ever there was when several were available.

Most of the faster men seemed to think the softer rubber would last - which perhaps gives us some clue as to why they were fast, meaning that their chassis may work more properly and their own styles might be smoother. A few were happier with the harder stuff, though, while certain ones put on, finally, a mixture. And then they carefully tried to keep everyone else from finding out what it was. As if anyone else could have benefited from knowing.

Once the local Bombeiros drove the length of the grandstand straight, pumping water into the crowd which cavorted like children in the cooling spray.

A fresh quantity of debris was thrown out over already the tall fencing, and it was in fact, after noon when finally the string of 23 racing cars rasped their way around the long, twisting circuit and formed up on the grid.

There was a pause of a couple of minutes, time enough to trade last-minute jokes and take snapshot pictures, and time enough, barely, for Team Lotus to send men running all the way back up to the pits, a long way at Interlagos, for a new set of front tyres for Peterson's car.

Ronnie had selected a mix of hard rears with soft fronts, but there hadn't been a chance to try the combination on full tanks. On his single lap just now he found the JPS was impossibly vicious, so he wanted hard tyres all round. His mechanics had finished the job when the signal came to start up the 23 engines. In 21 sets of exhaust pipes, little ghostly flame demons began to cavort on cue, and 21 sets of flat rubbery wheels jumped as the gears meshed and the clutches bit. With a crescendo of frantic shattering noise most of the race rushed away into a cloud of grit and the first corner.

Luckily for Ronnie this time his grid place was well toward the rear, not far from Wilson, for both their engines refused to start. In both cases the trouble was boiling fuel, and their mechanics, protected only by their thin racing shirts, crouched around the cars as the tail of the field poured by.

Then they got stuck into the problem, and first the Copersucar and then the John Player Special rasped into life and finally, a long time in arrears in Peterson's case, drove away.

Up at the front of the race, Emerson F had fluffed his getaway. Apparently, one hears, he had put on another set of tyres since the warm-up, still a soft compound but a set with a less-worn tread, and perhaps the difference was enough so that he misjudged their grip.

He lagged badly off the line, back wheels wreathed in smoke, as cars lunged by him on all sides. Jarier on his left, the pole, but allegedly the less favourable side at Interlagos, got away cleanly towards the bend, but he didn't get there as quickly as Reutemann from the row behind.

As in his home country, 'Lole' made his own interpretation of the starter's twitch and there are observers, who, one hears, saw him take the lead from 'Jumper' before they cleared the startline. 'Moco', meanwhile, was making a fine start, and although he was blocked for an instant by the sluggish Fittipaldi he piled with the best of them into the wide, banked first turned and rushed around about three people on the outside and emerged on to the long straight in third place.

All around the multiple twists and returns, between the black and yellow guardrails and the bright green grass, the little white speck that was Reutemann's Brabham led the black one that was Jarier's Shadow.

It was Pace's white speck behind and then a pair of bright red ones close behind (it was Regga leading Lauda) and a blue one that was Scheckter with a red and white one representing Fittipaldi separating it from the Depailler speck: then there was a black one, that was Jacky Ickx, and a yellow one for John Watson, and a white one, must be Arturo Merzario, and the Jochen Mass McLaren...

The silvery Copersucar came along at the tail of the string, but in touch with it. Then, whole minutes later, as it seemed, another black speck came along with a blue helmet inside and it was stuttering and stumbling very badly out of the hairpins. At the end of the lap Peterson drove into the pits and stopped for a moment so the mechanics could reach in and set his fuel mixture on to full lean. To start it up on the grid they'd had to put on to full rich, but the instant he heard the engine fire Ronnie was on to full throttle and was gone before they could set it back to normal. He rejoined a bit after the leading bunch had roared by on their second lap.

Halfway round the second lap Mass had moved up behind Ickx. There was a gap in front of the JPS where Depailler was at the tail of what was now an eight-car string of leaders, so already the race was broken into the parts and the second part was rapidly losing sight of it.

Around this second time too, in the section of multiple hairpins, they were all greeted by an oil flag. There was the orange March off the road, its external parts coated with oil and its throttle slides all jammed with little bits of valve and piston. So already it was beginning. It was a hot day and the sun was relentless and there was still a long way to go.

After a couple of laps sitting behind the Brabham, Jarier could see a way by. Reutemann was getting along the straights very quickly, and he was extremely quick through the right-handers, but the Shadow driver could see him beginning to slack off in left-handers.

So at a suitable moment he simply drove down the inside at the bottom of the long straight and slipped easily ahead. That act broke the race up again. Jarier's UOP Shadow commenced to show the same form as in practice, and with no apparent effort, proceeded to leave everything else behind so rapidly that they couldn't see how. They were left with nothing better to do than race for second place.

It was a good race though, Reutemann's problem was a growing understeer, much as had afflicted him last year. He'd fitted a hard tyre to the right front, but still it was going off, and presently the rubber began to scrub off both threads. Clearly he was bottling up the bunch behind, for they were all nose to tail.

It was perhaps important for the outcome of the race, however, that the first in queue behind was his team-mate. 'Moco' could easily see what was going wrong. Having set his own Brabham on a mix of soft fronts and hard rears he obviously had different handling characteristics and the ability to get through left-handers better than the BT44B ahead. Choosing his moment as coolly as had Jarier, he slipped by in the same place and drove away after him, not as rapidly but rapidly enough to have second place secure in only a few more laps.

It took the others rather longer to get around 'Lole.'

They stayed strung together, driving around in a hectic pack, some sliding and twitching more than others, sometimes feinting in all the braking areas, but staying still all together.

One of them after sliding more spectacularly than the others, dropped out of it. It was Scheckter, whose Tyrrell had blistered its right tyre. He came in to have it changed, reporting at the same time he could smell oil. The oil was coming from a split in the tank, so that although Jody rejoined, he got worried about oil spurting on to his tyres and retired.

The loss of one of the six was made up, though, for up from the rear was coming Mass.

He'd disposed of Ickx and was setting himself about the job of wiping out the gap up to Depailler. He was driving very hard, so hard that one expected that his strong jerks and slides might soon blister his tyres as well, but it didn't seem to happen. Lap after lap the number two McLaren charged into sight and each time it was slightly closer to the blue car that was its target.

It looked like a rough performance, but it was impossible to argue with its effectiveness and finally Jochen had his reward. He was part of the race for third place. Peterson had made a second stop to have some more angle cranked into his front wings. He was still lapping hopelessly slowly, bothered even more than in practice by a huge, violent brake vibration.

There was the inevitable moment when Jarier brought the clean, steady Shadow around to lap the Lotus another time. It made a memorable little vignette. Jean-Pierre cruised up behind, and flashed down to go by entering the hairpin section. As he slipped ahead, he flipped a cheery little wave to say, thanks for moving over Ronnie...

It certainly was Jarier's race. He was totally out of sight of the others, over 20 seconds ahead and still adding to his advantage. Gradually those trying to race for worthwhile places somewhere behind were running into trouble. Depailler had to give way to Mass' advance, and then the Tyrrell suddenly went flying off into the catch fences at the end of the long straight. Apparently a front wishbone had broken. Luckily the damage was fairly light and although the firemen stationed there covered the broken blue car with white powder, it will race again.

Reutemann was dropping ever backwards, as the rubber stripped off his front tyres.

Lauda was losing ground too as the car was, after all, not properly balanced and anyway, from about the third lap there was a nasty vibration from the front. Regga, too, was in growing trouble, as an understeer had begun at around lap ten. It got worse and worse, and presently Fittipaldi's relentless advances couldn't be beaten off.

Emerson measured the Ferrari up for a couple of laps, then shouldered his way by under-braking into the first of the hairpins. He didn't wave thanks. All the while Mass, too, was moving up, his McLaren running as perfectly as the other, and it wasn't long before he too, was knocking on the Regazzoni door and getting through. Afterwards, the Ferrari crew measured Clay's tyre pressures and found that both the fronts, but especially the left front, had been losing pressure. So after getting around what might be described as the two widest drivers in F1 racing, Reutemann and Regazzoni, Fittipaldi was free to do what could toward recovering from his bad start. But it was a lot to recover.

Think of Jarier, who had reached some 26 seconds of advantage over Pace, and really a long shot to think of Pace who was a good 10 seconds ahead. There was only quarter of the race left.

Suddenly, those reading stopwatches could see the leader was in trouble. His advantage began to shrink erratically. Some thought they could hear he was in trouble: was he using higher gears than before? Was he driving jerkily? What was going wrong?

It turned out to be a metering unit. There had actually been some suggestion that the locally supplied petrol, which was being used by everybody regardless of fuel contracts, might be deficient in "lubricity." For whatever reason, the little shuttle that distributes the fuel inside the Lucas pump was sticking. The symptoms were those of a sticking throttle - it happened as many as five times on one lap - and dropping fuel pressure.

Brutalise his engine as much as he might Jean-Pierre couldn't keep the thing running, and partway round his 33rd lap he had to coast silently onto the grass. He climbed out and, whole body slumped in disbelieving dejection, watched Pace win his race. The cup of UOP's disappointment was well full already. Pryce, having started the race by moving up a few positions and holding off a short queue, which included the other two American GP cars, was visibly in deep handling trouble. He lost several places as lap after lap he got into scrabbling oversteer in slow corners.

What was really going wrong was a worsening case of understeer, and it suddenly caught him out in the rising bend that leads onto the pit straight. Off onto the marbles the Shadow took him and crunched itself into the catch fence. Like Depailler's accident moments before, it wasn't a bad shunt, and nobody was hurt. So it doesn't matter if perhaps a certain driver of another black car, struggling with multiple difficulties of his own, found some slight lightening of his mood as he drove by both the abandoned Shadows on his last lap and found himself finishing. Last, but finishing.

It was a bitter day for a lot of people. John Watson, dammit, lost what might have been a finish in the points when he had to change a tyre that had been clearly slit by a piece of glass. He'd been driving the Surtees extremely well and moving away from those he'd started with.

Ickx found that, just as in practice, the JPS was frightening at high speed and exactly as in Argentina, he finally slacked off. Stommelen found his car quite hopeless, Hill had strong vibrations, Jacques Laffite had severe understeer, while Fittipaldi was giving Wilson a very trying day with a bad vibration and also an oversteer at high speed that turned out to be caused by the failure of some rivets that were supposed to hold the wing flap in position but couldn't at high air speeds.

He got slower and slower, after his small advance in the early stages, and on the last lap suffered a nose-bending incident as Stommelen came around to overtake but spun off instead. However, all these unfortunates finished.

Of the eight who didn't, Donohue and Wilds quit after the same number of laps, but at different times. The BRM driver had been trying to put together a steady run, without fireworks or dramas, but the engine took his chance away. Not the engine exactly, but the clutch. Keen students of F1 may recall that at last year's Italian GP Jean-Pierre Beltoise stopped seconds after the start when a little clutch nut loosened and backed off far enough to damage an electrical lead. Can you guess what happened to Wilds now in Brazil? Yes you're right, no prizes.

Donohue quit in the pits after losing touch with the Pryce and Hunt and Andretti end of things. He thought there must be something wrong with his rear tyres, because suddenly there was a bad oversteer, but after several changes gave no improvement, and after a series of hard looks at the suspension disclosed nothing visibly wrong, Roger Penske himself stepped in and called a halt.

Then there was poor old Merzario, who stuttered into the pits early in the race with exactly the same thing that had gone wrong in Argentina. Another new throttle linkage to the metering unit had failed. That was once again fixed, but then the metering unit itself went wrong. He said there had been understeer, too, when he walked back.

In those last eight laps Fittipaldi was obviously a menace to Pace, but only if something went wrong with 'Moco' or his Brabham, and it didn't. The gap closed a little, and was down to less than six seconds by the last lap, but the crowd was already long gone in loud exuberant cheers for their great friend and close personal companion, "Pah-seh, Pah-seh, Pah-seh." All around his arduous but triumphant last lap the crowd was celebrating victory as if already won. After all, if he didn't make it there was another son of Sao Paulo who would, so shout now.

The Ferraris were only hanging on, their very exhaust notes disgruntled, but there was a keen struggle behind them. It involved Hunt who, for the entire race, had Andretti behind him. It was a close tussle, and at one stage Mario looked sure to try a way by. At the critical moment, driving into the banked first turn, he found that Copersucar was in the way and he couldn't bring it off. James stepped himself up a bit after that and just preserved what became another championship point by the margin of less than two seconds.

The Hesketh driver, fighting what he described as monster oversteer, said with a grin on his sweaty face and that he had been using Andretti for practice. "I was pretending I was in the lead like in Argentina, and trying not to fall of the road this time."

The cooling-off lap at the long Interlagos takes quite a while, and there was time for a pretty frightening crowd to gather to greet the beloved 'little snot' as he rolled into the pits. They literally tore him out of the car, ripping his overalls at the knee, and hoisted him on to a dozen shoulders before he had time to even open his visor. In the crush a couple of moments later an over-eager radio man smashed him in the mouth with a microphone. But these aren't the memories that last.

Carlos Pace looked hot, tired, and sore, but he looked as if it had been worth it. Someone asked him, as he was sitting on the floor in the cool garage afterwards leaning against the flank of his Martini Brabham, if winning the Brazilian Grand Prix as his first event, here at his home circuit, beating Emerson Fittipaldi, made this an important day in his life and was he happy and thrilled and pleased.

'Moco', nursing a bottle of water, looked down at it for a long moment, and then pretty clearly at a loss for words finally said. "...Yes, you're right."

We want to hear from you!

Let us know what you would like to see from us in the future.

Take our survey

- The Autosport.com Team

Read and post comments