F1 Retro 1966 Part 2 – Power Mad

“Huge revs and 500bhp and more – I was convinced,” says Jackie Stewart, BRM’s boy wonder of 1965.

“But I was naïve.”

Be careful what you wish for.

Surtees was disappointed to discover that his ‘brand new’ engine was a shrunken – internally at least – version of the ‘sportscar’ V12 that could be traced to Ferrari’s roots.

He didn’t want to drive it at Monaco. “Rowed like hell” to put it on the front row. Told the team it wouldn’t go the distance. And led the early laps before retiring because of transmission failure.

Stewart won that day in a 2-litre BRM, and Ferrari’s Lorenzo Bandini, driving the 2.4-litre V6 denied Surtees by meddling team bosses, set fastest lap and finished second.

Less than half of the 16 that started this world championship-opener in May were full 3-litres – and not one of those got within 20 laps of the full distance.

Things were different at super-fast Spa-Francorchamps: Surtees won from Jochen Rindt, whose Cooper was powered by a twin-spark V12 from Maserati’s shelves and dusted down and updated after nine years’ inactivity.

This, however, would be Surtees’ last GP for Ferrari: “We should have walked that championship.” Instead he walked out after one too many spats with management.

It was with great delight, therefore, that he split the Ferraris at Reims in France and beat them off the line – only for his Cooper to suffer fuel-pump failure after a few hundred yards.

Jack Brabham won that day and embarked on the four-win streak that secured his third world title.

In stark contrast to that canny Australian’s simplistic and unheralded Repco V8, BRM purpose-built an H16 – two flattened and stacked V8s of proven performance – that featured no fewer than eight camshafts and 32 valves, with a further 32 on the drawing board.

It sounded unholy – like two separate engines – but was devilishly heavy though sufficiently stiff to carry the rear suspension and its loads, sinfully wasteful and unforgivably unreliable.

Team Lotus knew something was wrong the moment more mechanics were summoned to fetch theirs from the delivery van. Influential designer Colin Chapman, a master of ‘adding lightness’, was agog at H16’s bulk and complexity.

But it was either that or continue with the stretched 2-litre V8 that he’d coaxed from Coventry Climax. 

The latter’s withdrawal from Grand Prix racing after 1965 radically altered the category’s landscape. Its bolt-on power had scored 25 GP wins since the advent of the 1.5-litre formula in 1961. And 19 of those were due to the sublime Jim Clark in svelte Lotuses.

The reigning world champion did all he could in 1966 – pole positions at Monaco and Nürburgring plus a dice with Brabham for the lead at a Zandvoort slicked by oil – but even he couldn’t bridge the widening power gap.

The month before the Italian GP at Monza was filled with feverish activity: BRM’s H16 returned, after a three-race absence, sounding like a single engine due to the altered firing order of a redesigned crankshaft; Ferrari’s V12 now had a new three-valve head – and would score a 1-2; Maserati’s had neater, inclined inlets; and two others made their debut.

Honda’s V12 was powerful – perhaps the most powerful at 370bhp – but big and heavy due to design cues from pre-war Alfa Romeo. Richie Ginther ran impressively until a rear puncture pitched him out of second place and into the trees and hospital.

The V12 in Dan Gurney’s Eagle was more compact due to its 60-degree vee and narrow valve angle, and also the lightest. Based on famed tuner Harry Weslake’s research for BRM owners Rubery Owen – very few, it seemed, had faith in H16 – it looked the business. Whereas the Honda featured a viper’s tangle of exhausts, the Eagle’s tail was adorned by six chromed straight-shooters.

It sounded fantastic, too – between maddening bouts of misfire that caused Gurney’s early retirement – and there could be no denying that the sport had regained its aural and visual appeal.

Albeit at a cost.

Stewart: “No wings, no ground effect, no downforce, those cars were wonderful in the sense of having excess power and were difficult but generous from a driver’s point of view.

“But we were racing the same primitive chassis on the same circuits, approaching the same corners with zero run-offs, lined by grass banks, telegraph posts or buildings, at considerably higher speeds. The risk of a fast accident was greater, the chances of recovery from mechanical failure or driver error reduced.”

Stewart’s naïveté lasted as far as his 170mph crash on the opening lap at Spa.

That he was driving his 2-litre at the time was a footling detail compared to his being trapped in a bent car filling rapidly with fuel, his brave but tortuous rescue by fellow drivers – who had also spun off in the sudden biblical downpour – his being tended to by well-meaning nuns and his ambulance getting lost en route to hospital.

F1 had entered its most dangerous era.

Yet Clark wore a woollen cardigan – a birthday present from girlfriend Sally Stokes – against the Fall chill as he won the United States GP. Perhaps he feared being stranded by another H16 ‘bomb’.

But the engine donated by BRM and fitted overnight – the final nut was tightened on the grid – ran sweetly throughout; Clark’s blow-up in practice had been a blessing in disguise.

He started from the front row at the Mexican finale, too, but suffered gear-selection problems from the drop of the flag and could do nothing about poleman Surtees. Nor for that matter could Brabham.

“With all due respect to Jack, who did a wonderful job, only by some bad luck did we not manage to win the championship,” says Surtees. “I was in a position to win at the Nürburgring when I lost two gears. I was right with them at Monza when a bag [fuel] tank went. And I was in the lead battle in America, too, sitting on Bandini’s tail, able to cope quite nicely, when [Lotus backmarker Peter] Arundell came out of the pits and collected me.

“We had a bit of rough deal. The Maser wasn’t startling but did a good job.”

Meanwhile, at a drawing board near Northampton, a pale and drawn Keith Duckworth – he lost 40lb in nine months of 16 hours a day, seven days a week – was conceiving the most successful engine in GP history: the brilliantly simple, simply brilliant Ford-Cosworth DFV V8.

“That was the best thing ever to happen to F1,” says Stewart. “Ken Tyrrell went to Zandvoort just to see it. As soon as he did – bingo!”

Clark and Lotus won that day – 4 June 1967 – the first of the DFV’s 155 victories over the next 17 seasons.

Images courtesy of LAT