The car that almost won Jackie Stewart the 1966 Indy 500
The 1966 Indianapolis 500 was relatively infamous. With a third of the field wiped out by a crash right at the start, Jackie Stewart lead almost to the end of the race before his engine failed. This left his team-mate, Graham Hill, to take the chequered flag by just under a lap from a third Brit, Jim Clark. However, Clark’s team believed that he was in fact a lap ahead, but that it hadn’t been counted due to the belief that his car had been involved in the first lap crash.
Both Hill and Stewart were driving the Lola-Ford T90. The T90 replaced the T80 as Lola’s IndyCar chassis, and the John Mecom team cars raced by the two Britons used the 4.2-litre Ford V8.
Following the success of 1966 – Stewart actually finished the Bowes Fast Seal T90 sixth despite retiring 25 miles from the end - the team returned for the 1967 race with an updated car. Officially known as the T92, the car had such minor changes compared to the T90 that the Indy 500 scrutineers simply referred to it as the T90 MkII.
If anything, Stewart had an even more torrid time with the 1967 car. He only just managed to qualify the Bowes Fast Seal car, while Al Unser Jr. in the sister Retzloff Chemical car qualified in 9th. The rain-affected race ran over two days, and Stewart suffered another engine failure 65 miles from home.
At the end of the season, Lola retired the T90, replacing it with the T150 for 1968. Stewart’s 1967 car found its way into the collection of Martin Birrane, who owned Lola Cars from 1997.
Driver Ian Beatty, Group Operations Manager at Mondello Park, explains: “It’s owned by the late Martin Birrane who owned Mondello Park. Unfortunately Martin passed away a year ago so it’s stored in a museum at Mondello – we’ve renamed the museum ‘The Martin Birrane Collection at Mondello Park’.”
Birrane, himself a former racing driver, had taken the Stewart Lola-Ford up the Hill several times. The first outing was back in 2007, and most recently it ran last year, five weeks after Birrane’s death, this time driven by Kevin McGarrity for Lola’s 60th anniversary celebrations. 2019 is Beatty’s first time driving the car here at Goodwood.
“It’s a four-speed box, but it’s quite high-geared because it’s made to go around Indianapolis and not a hillclimb,” says Beatty. “It’s no problem here today though; it’s great, and going really well.”
The Ford V8 runs on methanol and it too is more at home on an oval than on our Hill. “It doesn’t like it when you’re on full throttle and then you lift off fully,” says Beatty. “The way the engine is designed, the way it fuels, is that they start the race and then it’s full throttle to the end. So going up the Hill for the corners you’ve got to back off a little bit of throttle and change gear, not to lift off fully or it starts to cut out and stutter.”
Stewart returned to the Indy 500 the following year only to retire on lap 168 with another engine failure. Given how close Stewart came to winning in ’66 and how successful he was in every other motorsport discipline in which he competed, his adventure at Indianapolis in the Lola-Ford T90 ‘Bowes Fast Seal Special’ is, arguably, the biggest near miss of his career.
Photography by Joe Harding.