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McLaren, From the Cockpit - November 10, 1967
Mexico City, October 26...
Denny Hulme is the World Champ! A lot of people are going to be very pleased at that news. A lot of people everywhere, not just in Te Puke, New Zealand. But I’ll bet that little town is mighty proud of itself right now! Talking about people who will be delighted, next to Poppa Hulme, I’m pretty pleased about it myself, apart from the fact that he’s a New Zealander, because I’ve just won a tenner off an Englishman!
Jim Clark won the battle at Mexico bringing his total of Grand Prix wins equal to Fangio’s at 24, but the Brabhams won the war with Jack second and Denny third. They demonstrated the tremendous staying power of the cars by taking the drivers championship and the manufacturers’ championship. Again.
It seems funny now, but I can remember a good many years ago when Jack’s Dad said to John Cooper’s father, “Look after Jack. He’s only a simple lad”. And I can recall Hulme senior giving similar instructions to the Brabham organization man, Phil Kerr! They’ll probably both wind up being simple old-fashioned millionaires… They say it’s always the quiet ones you’ve got to watch!
Denny is normally a “charger” and he likes to go hard from the moment the flag falls, but this time he played it cool – there isn’t really a better expression. Before the race he said “If Jack finishes 79th, I’ll be 80th!” To win the championship, if Jack won at Mexico, Denny had to place in one of the next three places. In the race he had the necessary restraint to drive only as hard as he had to, to prevent anyone getting between him and Jack. That can be a hard way to drive a race for two hours. I’ll bet even the unflappable Hulme was watching the gauges like a hawk, and hearing all sorts of strange noises that spelt “rod out the side next lap…”
The start was a little scrambled, and I was up with the first few cars for a while, but then Denny came by and sat just in front of me. I dropped back a bit because with full tanks and the odd bit of oil on the track it’s just too easy to bump someone – and it wasn’t going to be ME who ran into him! We need him too much for the CanAm cars, and anything else we build for that matter, if we have our way.
Fortunately the race was incident free, but I haven’t seen so many potentially dangerous situations since the races in Argentine. Normally the crowd control at Mexico is not too bad, but this time it went haywire. The crowd had overflowed on at least three corners, and the happy Mexicans were sitting contentedly on the grass verges only a few feet away from the track. One good spin and the results could have been very nasty. We saw the danger even before the race started and asked the organisers to do something, but apparently the situation was out of control. There were 100,000 people there and the organisers hoped that, once the race started, the crowd might move back a bit!
After driving the 500bhp sports cars, the Formula 1 cars, 7000 feet up on the Mexican circuit and 20 per cent down on normal horsepower, felt really underpowered. The engines run short of breath just like the athletes do, and we were losing the best part of 100bhp in the rarified air. But it was the same for everyone, and the practice times were fairly close. Clark was fastest again, but Chris Amon was next, getting his Ferrari on the front row of the grid for the first time. Not far behind them were Gurney, Hill Brabham, Hulme, Surtees, myself and the rest of the field.
Our V12 BRM engine has never run particularly cleanly and here it seemed a little worse. We advanced the ignition timing, which helped, but it still didn’t have quite the steam to be really competitive. Dan was unlucky in the race. He was right behind Jimmy and he made a beautiful start, but Jimmy hesitated and Dan planted the Lotus-Ford’s exhaust pipe neatly through his radiator. Exit the Eagle. It took Jimmy only three laps to get back through the field into the lead, and there he stayed. I was lying in sixth position behind Surtees in the Honda until about three-quarter distance, when the oil pressure started fluctuating down to zero and then back up to normal. There was still plenty of oil in the tank and as yet we can find no answer, but the works BRM’s were in similar drama so I think we may find that the oil pump is weak on suction. This afterwards bit is the most harrowing part of motor racing – “Now why should that have ever happened…?”
Now it’s back to the CanAm Series again. Our engine men have been working hard and before I left for Mexico they had a consistent 545bhp on the dyno, we’ll just have to see how it works out on the track. In the meantime progress is being made at back at headquarters in Colnbrook on next year’s Formula 1 cars, I just hope they will be as competitive as the sports cars!
Riverside, November 1
Our score in the CanAm races so far is a rather fantastic five out of five. The harder we try, the luckier we seem to get! There is just one race left now, at Las Vegas on 12 November. That is a real gamblers’ city, and since our team is coming out tops in the biggest gamble it has ever taken, we should feel right at home!
Riverside was one race that worried me. The straight there is nearly a mile long and we knew that Jim Hall, Dan Gurney and Parnelli Jones now had more power than we did. We were also well aware that our aerodynamic drag was very high. So here we were gambling again. The advantages we had gained on other circuits in handling were going to have to outweigh what we might lose on power at Riverside.
Last year we had made an adjustable spoiler that we could move from the cockpit, so that I could go through the corners with the flap up gluing the car to the ground, and then flatten it out for top speed down the straight. Last year we played with the fuel injection too, in fact, we experimented with a lot of things half way through the last CanAm series, which helped us this year. But for this series, we resolved to do all our testing and experimenting in England and not change a thing that had not done a lot of test miles. We were going to let 1968 worry about itself this time.
We intended going out to Riverside early in the week and set the cars up for the track fairly carefully and leisurely, but Firestone had the track booked for testing. Jim Hall was running his Chaparral 2G and Parnelli Jones had his Lola-Ford T70 there. So we had no option but to leave our cars sitting comfortably on their Goodyear’s in the trailers, and talk our crew into have a day off. This was their first real holiday in seven weeks of hard work.
In the meantime we followed the enormous Press coverage previewing the race, finding out what lap times Parnelli had been doing, and how he was going to blow us off. Practice started on the Thursday and it took us three attempts to get the gear ratio just where we wanted it. The engines were giving maximum power between 6500 and 6750 RPM, and we wanted to be just in that narrow range towards the end of the straight – no more for fear of breaking the engine, and no less or we would be losing time. On practice times that day, Hall’s Chaparral seemed to be our only opposition, but it was Friday’s sheet that made interesting reading. We had both cars out early in qualifying with my best time at 1m 40.3 s, and Denny’s at 1m 41.2 s. Next fastest was Hall at 1m 41.8s. Things looked promising but Denny’s gearbox was playing up so I parked my car and settled down to help the boys find the trouble. With quarter of an hour of practice left, Gurney surprised us all with a couple of laps just under 1m 40s. I rushed out again, but try as I might, I could not equal his time, and I finished up with a 1m 39.6s – three-tenths slower than Dan.
On Saturday we were all set to do something better when the wicker basket really started to leak. Maybe you have not heard about the wicker basket? Someone had mentioned to our team manager Teddy Mayer, that our team always looked extremely well organized and efficient. Quick as a flash Teddy replied “That’s looking at it from the outside; my job is just like carrying water in a wicker basket, trying to find enough hands to block all the holes before it runs out!”
I had only managed six laps before the engine started pouring smoke which meant a hurried stop to my practice and an engine swapping session for the mechanics.
The grid for race day saw Dan and me on the front row, with Denny and Jim Hall behind us. Jim had fitted a new type of differential to the Chaparral and he had suddenly become embarrassingly competitive. The opening laps took a heavy toll of the hard chargers. Dan lead for a lap and then disappeared smoking, and Parnelli shouldered his way through for a few laps in front until I managed to get around the big Lola-Ford and set out to put as much of Riverside Raceway as I could between Jim and myself. From there on the race was really between the two of us. Denny had been clobbered by a marker tyre chucked up by Parnelli on the opening lap and he had pitted to have the broken fiberglass cut away. I gather the air was blue in the pits when the officials stepped in and announced that Denny was disqualified because of the one exposed wheel on his sports car!
Jim and I had a really enjoyable dice – although I must say I enjoyed the parts where I was leading more than the laps when I was tailing the Flying Wing! Those leading laps were worth $30 a time! Later in the race when we were dodging traffic, I had a few heart stoppers as club-foots spun in front of us and hard-earned seconds that I had notched up getting away from Jim would be lost in tyre smoking avoidances. My engine was really a cross-fingers job since we had fitted it the night before the race and had no real chance of testing it, but in the closing laps I put my foot right in it and drove just as hard as I could. I won by 3 secs from the Chaparral and after 200 miles of neck-and-neck stuff I felt I really deserved it. Well done, Brucie baby, I thought later as l looked down the long, green list of prize money….
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