AUTOMOBILSPORT #27

RACING | HISTORY | PASSION

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ISSUE #27

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COVER STORY

Rallye Monte Carlo 1971

The grande dame of rallying – 40th Rallye Monte Carlo 1971
Retirements galore – Arrival and opening loop
Showdown – The night of the long knives
‘A rally to forget’ – Interview Jean-Pierre Nicolas
‘I don’t think we could have done better’ – Interview John Davenport
‘All I wanted was to finish the Monte’ – Interview Jean-Claude Andruet

The grande dame of rallying

40th Rallye Monte Carlo 1971

The Rallye Monte Carlo is the oldest winter rally in the world. The 1971 event was both the 60th anniversary of the first Monte and the 40th running since 1911.

During the years of 911 dominance, the term ‘winter’ had been more an indication of the season rather than the conditions. The vast majority of the special stages was held on dry roads. Photographers and TV cameramen would travel hundreds of kilometres into the hinterland to find enough snow to keep the image of a winter rally alive through their pictures. A fairly consistent occurrence, however, was heavy snowfall three or four days after the event finished. So for 1971 the organisers decided to push the Monte back a week, to 22–29 January.

The event

Traditionally, all competitors had to set off from one of 10 specified starting locations (Almeria, Athens, Bucharest, Frankfurt, Glasgow, Marrakesh, Monte Carlo, Oslo, Reims, Warsaw) and make their way to the Côte d’Azur. From a sporting perspective, the 3,000-kilometre trek had no value – it wasn’t timed. There was only a minimum average that had to the maintained, and for professionals that wasn’t much of a challenge. There was, however, the risk of a traffic crash or a technical problem.

Those who made it through the two-day and three-night excursion met on the Monday morning in the French Alps north of Monte Carlo, where things got serious with the first 38.5-kilometre special stage. Between Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, the event continued with the Parcours Commun, a 1,500-kilometre loop including nine special stages above Monaco. Following a day’s rest, there was the smaller loop, including the Col de Turini night stage, otherwise known as the ‘night of the long knives’, on the Thursday night. There, the winner was determined over seven more special stages. On the morning of Friday, the 29th of January 1971, the winners would arrive in front of the palace in Monte Carlo. It was a Swedish/English pairing, driving a blue car…

Failing a great name

BRM P351 and BRM P301

The end of Group C plunged sports car racing into crisis. On the upside, the small grids meant that some rather unusual and daring designs got their shot at Le Mans glory. One such project was the BRM P351. The British prototype was initially greeted with a lot of hype, but turned out to be an abysmal failure.

In 1992 the World Sportscar Championship was on its last legs. It would prove to be its final season ahead of a near-20-year hiatus. Authorities had made the devastating mistake of abandoning the consumption-based Group C rules, which had been in effect since 1982, in favour of the naturally-aspirated 3.5-litre engines that were used in Formula 1 at the time. In 1992 the Peugeot 905 dominated the championship, winning every race except for the opener at Monza, which went to Toyota.

John Mangoletsi, a wealthy Greek entrepreneur, son of a British engine specialist and later founder of the International Sports Racing Series, wanted to end Peugeot’s dominance. So he revived one of the most famous names in motorsport history: British Racing Motors, BRM for short. Founded in 1947 by Raymond Mays and Peter Berthon, the team was originally intended to become the British spearhead in Formula 1. BRM began racing in 1951, but ran into financial troubles as early as 1952. Help came from Rubery Owen, whose boss Sir Alfred Owen took over management of the team. BRM was reasonably successful, even winning the 1962 Formula 1 world championship with Graham Hill. After Alfred Owen’s death in 1975, the company went bankrupt. Following a futile attempt by Louis Stanley to get the team going again, it closed down for good in 1977.

BRM P351

In 1990 Mangoletsi approached Alfred Owen’s family about the rights to the BRM name. He managed to persuade John Owen to allow him to use the name for his planned prototype programme. He was also on the hunt for money to fund the project.

Mangoletsi then commissioned former Zakspeed engineer Paul Brown to design the car. Brown penned a carbon-fibre monocoque, common in Group C at the time. The chassis was made by Courtaulds Engineering and the engine, based on the old Weslake V12, was designed by Graham Dale-Jones. The core motor design harked back to 1967 and had been used by Dan Gurney in his Eagle Formula 1 car. Its last use in motorsport had been in 1977…

The return of the silver arrows

Gran Premio Perón 1951

Mercedes’s return to grand prix racing is well documented. On the 4th of July 1954, Juan Manuel Fangio and Karl Kling secured a dominant one-two in Reims, France, right as the German football team took a shock win in the World Cup final in Bern. It was also 40 years to the day since Christian Lautenschlager, Louis Wagner and Otto Salzer had taken a one-two-three for Daimler-Benz at the French Grand Prix in Lyon. But the real return had started even earlier, some 70 years ago in Argentina.

In hope of a way out of the economic crisis, the German nation had followed a brutal ideology that had brought death and devastation all over Europe. In the wake of this man-made catastrophe, the dominance of German racing teams Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union came to an end as well. Following the war, bombed-out Europe required a laborious rebuild. In order to escape their dreary everyday lives, some motorists quickly took up motor racing once again. The racing cars that survived the war, some of which had been stashed in hiding places, were brought back to life. In the autumn of 1945 the first race was held in Bois du Boulonge in France. Not long after that, the construction of new racing cars started. In Germany, where the loss of both human lives and materials had been high, motorsport got back off to a sluggish start. The country allowed motor racing to resume in July 1946, the German scene initially made up of self-built cars or small manufacturers like Veritas and AFM. It wasn’t until 1950 that Germany rejoined the international scene.

Once it had its production manufacturing up and running again, Mercedes-Benz returned to motor racing. When general director Dr Wilhelm Haspel asked Alfred Neubauer whether they should resume a racing programme, it was probably a rhetorical question. After all, the former race director had already been back attending races for some time, keeping his finger on the motor racing pulse. Mercedes initially planned to race three cars in two Formula Libre races in Argentina in February 1951. An entry into the new Formula 1 world championship, meanwhile, was waiting on the regulations to come out of Paris. If the 1.5-litre rules were extended until 1954, Mercedes would enter. There were also plans to race at Indianapolis in 1951.

The Argentinian Adventure

To preface the Pan American Games in March 1951, Argentinian president Juan Perón organised two races in Buenos Aires. The ‘Gran Premio Presidente de la Nacion Juan Domingo Perón’ was scheduled to take place on 18 February and the ‘Gran Premio Eva Perón’ on 24 February. Mercedes-Benz initially wanted to race in both events with its three top drivers from 1939, Rudolf Caracciola, Manfred von Brauchitsch and Hermann Lang. However, Caracciola was still shaken from his huge crash in practice for the Indy 500 in 1946 and, after some testing, didn’t see any prospect for success. Neubauer gave von Brauchitsch the thumbs-down due to several negative incidents, not least von Brauchitsch’s visit to Argentina in 1949. But veteran Lang was ready. He’d already won the first post-war race in Germany, the Ruhestein hillclimb in July 1946…