Doug Nye: Goodwood greats and their first Grand Prix wins

Just to fill an otherwise idle moment or two, let’s take a look at the great Goodwood drivers of the past, and consider their first Grand Prix wins. Well, for a start, Goodwood’s first great stars – such as Reg Parnell and Prince ‘Bira’ – never won any major-league Grand Prix races whatsoever. So what constitutes “a major-league Grand Prix race”? In effect – since 1950 I would mean any World Championship-qualifying Formula 1 race. Before 1950 I would count any Grand Prix of top-line stature, both national and International – what the governing FIA – and its pre-war counterpart the AIACR – used to refer to as a ‘Grande Epreuve’… a ‘great test’.

So Reg Parnell won the Goodwood Trophy, the Richmond Trophy, the Woodcote Cup and the Chichester Cup races at Goodwood as early as 1949, but none of them was of real, even second-level, International significance at the time.

It would be different for young Stirling Moss, of course, who made his Formula 1 breakthrough by winning fat Aintree on May 29, 1954, in his own new Maserati 250F – but then technically the 200-mile race there was open to Formule Libre – free-Formula – cars and was not a pure F1 event. Things back in the ’50s were just… fuzzier. In fact with all the necessary ifs, buts and general caveats attached they are a statistician’s nightmare – a source of multiple record-book footnotes if one tries to be specific.

Stirling finally joined the truly, indisputably, big-time driver echelon by winning the 1955 British GP (again at Aintree) – when he just held off Mercedes-Benz works team-mate Juan Manuel Fangio in their twin W196 cars.

Goodwood’s visiting star ‘Nino’ Farina, scored his maiden Grand Prix win in what might be categorized as a front-line Formula 1 Grande Epreuve event at Monaco in 1948, driving a Maserati 4CLT. When the FIA’s newly-inaugurated Drivers’ World Championship was launched with the 1950 British GP at Silverstone – well, it was won by the good Dottore in his works Alfa Romeo 158 Alfetta, from sister team cars handled by Luigi Fagioli, and by our own Alfa guest driver for the occasion – ‘Uncle Reg’ Parnell.

So when did Goodwood runner – but not winner – Juan Manuel Fangio himself win his first top-line Grand Prix/Grande Epreuve? Monaco 1950 – driving as Alfa Romeo’s third of the ‘Three-Fs’ team-mates – Farina, Fagioli and the Argentinian, Fangio. 

Moving on through the list of topline drivers who starred at some stage at Goodwood and who went on to win at such august level. Mike Hawthorn – famously – notched his breakthrough win for Ferrari when he out-fumbled Fangio of Maserati to win the French Grand Prix at Reims-Gueux in mid-summer, 1953. That was just the prelude to perhaps understandable but decidedly far-reaching celebrations that night – which resulted in the birth of Mike’s natural son, to a French girl working for the organising AC de Champagne, bless her. Mike subsequently did the honourable thing, accepted what had happened and helped support the girl, and their son – in later years. Getting rather more than just the trophy was not at all unique to The Farnham Flyer, but the outcome was… non-standard…

Tony Brooks, of course, scored the first significant all-British Grand Prix win for Connaught at Syracuse in 1955, but the Sicilian race was hardly a frontline national Grande Epreuve. In fact, Tony’s breakthrough Championship-rated Grand Prix win came with Moss in the British event – yes, at Aintree yet again, in 1957 – when they co-drove the victorious Vanwall to defeat the finest that Ferrari and Maserati could offer in opposition (I still love to rub it in). 

Winning in Formula 1 at non-Championship level during the 1950s into the 1960s became increasingly worthwhile, as such F1 races became more significant and progressively better regarded. Roy Salvadori won the Glover Trophy feature race at Goodwood in 1955, at the wheel of Sid Greene’s Gilby Engineering-entered Maserati 250F. He had won nominally Formula 1 races previously, but at nothing like the same level of a full International. He would never win a Championship-qualifying Grand Prix, but ‘Salvo’ had plenty of success, regardless – a wonderful career of course including that 1959 Le Mans win for Aston Martin.

Stuart Lewis-Evans – as previously celebrated in this column – scored his breakthrough Formula 1 race win at non-Championship level in the 1957 Glover Trophy driving the unpainted ‘Toothpaste Tube’ Connaught B-Type – but his meteoric career would be ended savagely by his fatal Vanwall accident in Morocco at the end of the following year…

Innes Ireland was another versatile driver bursting with promotable personality, and he broke his personal Formula 1 duck at Goodwood in the 1960 Easter Monday International ‘100’ race for the Glover Trophy when he beat a field including Stirling Moss’s Rob Walker-entered Cooper-Climax in his Team Lotus-entered box-bodied 2½-litre Lotus-Climax 18. Earlier that same day he had defeated Moss’s Walker Cooper with a 1500cc engine in the Formula 2 Lavant Cup race, that time in a similarly-engined works Lotus-Climax 18. But winning at Goodwood wasn’t the same as winning a World Championship-qualifying GP, and Innes had to wait until the 1961 United States Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, when he won at last in his works Team Lotus Type 21.

Sadly for Innes, Colin Chapman was so pleased for the longtime loyal – but hard-drinking, fast-living and rumbustious Scot – that he promptly dropped him and appointed Jim Clark his 1962 team leader instead. Innes never really forgave Colin for that…and actively conducted a feud which lasted for years to follow.

For Jim Clark the second-level big day had dawned on Easter Monday 1961 – but at the Pau Grand Prix in France rather than the same day’s events at Goodwood – when he won for Team Lotus in a Type 18. Jimmy’s maiden Formula 1 World Championship-qualifying Grand Prix win followed in the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa – in 1962.

Graham Hill broke his duck with a non-Championship race Heat win in the 1962 Brussels Grand Prix – but that was merely doing one-third of the job (the Belgian race was run as a three-Heat peculiarity that day) – and it was yet again the Glover Trophy at Goodwood that saw a great motor racing superstar post his maiden F1 win overall – in the ‘Stackpipe’ BRM, of course. Graham then won the 1962 Dutch Grand Prix to break into World Championship-race level and immediately headed towards that year’s World Championship title.

His later team-mate at BRM – Jackie Stewart – famously scored his first Formula 1 win in Heat Two of the 1964 Rand Grand Prix, at Kyalami, South Africa, driving in Jimmy Clark’s place in a Team Lotus Type 33. But retirement from the event’s first Heat left him only 17^th in the aggregate results that day. So it was in the 1965 Silverstone May meeting that JYS really broke his personal Formula 1 duck as he scored his first non-Championship Formula 1 race win overall – followed by World Championship-level Grande Epreuve success in that year’s Italian Grand Prix, at Monza. Boy, was he happy that day… 

As indeed was the attractively understated – apart from his wonderfully relaxed initial car-to-pit radio link remark – Valtteri Bottas at Sochi last Sunday. Good luck to you boy… plenty more now where that came from?

Images courtesy of The GP Library