F1 v the Indy 500: when two worlds collide

British drivers in British cars were running 1-2-3 with just 10 laps of the 1966 Indianapolis 500 remaining. The leader had only eight days before won the Monaco Grand Prix for BRM. Chasing him, though in what order is debated still, were an eventual five-time Monaco winner and a man who would win most things bar Monaco.

Their transatlantic schedules had been hectic but manageable due to a Formula 1 world championship calendar less demanding than today’s and the 1960s’ consolidation of passenger jet travel. That also Indy was in the midst of a rear-engine revolution – fomented in 1961 by a British car driven by another Monaco winner – had created a perfect storm. That has long since blown out.

Fernando Alonso’s 2017 bid is born of frustration and ambition: McLaren-Honda’s inability to provide a competitive F1 car plus his desire to match fellow double world champion Graham Hill’s achievement: the latter’s 1966 Indy win was the second part of a unique Triple Crown, the clincher being his 1972 Le Mans victory.

With his team’s blessing, Alonso will miss Monaco to chase the dream. Hill’s relationship with Indianapolis was more prosaic. He’d tested an oddball car there in 1963 and walked away – and stayed away – after it hit the wall when a wheel fell off. He was neither keen on the race’s longwinded hoopla nor its sanitary arrangements: no doors on public toilets! His 1966 deal to drive a Mecom Racing Lola as replacement for the late Walt Hansgen was very last minute and so his testing programme had been severely restricted. Starting mid-pack, he was last ‘through the gate’ of the pile-up that caused a long stoppage and, despite passing no one, had many hours later worked his way to the front. Progress noted by very few.

Most eyes had been on Jackie Stewart, Hill’s precocious team-mate at Mecom and BRM, who was almost two laps ahead, and also Jim Clark, who had spun twice yet somehow kept his Lotus off the wall. When the leading Lola’s Ford V8 suddenly lost oil pressure – classified sixth, Stewart was awarded Rookie of the Year – fellow Scot Clark presumed that he was about to score a second consecutive Indy 500 victory. As in F1, so Lotus had picked up its cross-London rival’s rear-engine ball at Indy – eventual three-time world champion Jack Brabham had finished ninth for Cooper in 1961 – and run with it. Its American inexperience cost Clark in 1963, when he finished second, and 1964, when he started from pole and led briefly before a decision to use unproven Dunlops punctured all hope. But in 1965, having elected to miss the Monaco GP, this combination was dominant, leading all bar 10 laps and winning by almost two. Motor racing had its ‘Fifth Beatle’ – albeit a shy sheep farmer from the Borders – and Indy was never the same.

In 1966, however, Clark was surprised to find Hill celebrating in Victory Lane; a Lotus lap charting error was many hours later blamed for the confusion. Whichever way you read it, however, Brits were in charge – and perhaps becoming complacent. Clark and Hill, by now team-mates at Lotus, were early retirements from the 500 of 1967; and Stewart was running third when his Lola again lost oil pressure. Rocked by Clark’s death in a Formula 2 race in April 1968, followed by replacement Mike Spence’s fatal accident testing at Indy, Lotus was falling out of love with the world’s biggest race and had fallen from favour by the decade’s end. Hill qualified its 4WD turbine second in 1968, but crashed out because of suspension failure; American team-mate Joe Leonard was within nine laps of victory when he, too, suffered a mechanical failure. And finally, a fiery testing accident for Mario Andretti in 1969 triggered a total withdrawal and an unedifying argument with bullish entrant Andy Granatelli that caused the latest Lotuses, turbocharged 4WDs, to be spirited away and hidden in a suburban garage. 

The first phase of the British invasion was over. Commercial sponsorship, which arrived in F1 via a Team Lotus inspired by American pizzazz and chutzpah, was weakening the lure of Indy luchre. So the second phase would be left to its F1 also-rans – barring a 1970s spell of success for McLaren’s Stateside offshoot – and would have to succeed without its big-name drivers. The adventure had become an inconvenience.

The French invasion had been much more romantic. Peugeot, a revolutionary and dominant force in GP racing before WWI, sailed to America in 1913, and Jules Goux fortified himself with sips of champagne during pit stops on his way to victory – by 13 minutes and 8 seconds! The race was just two years old, ripe for the picking. René Thomas won for Delage and Goux was fourth in 1914 – French drivers in French cars filled the top four places – and both men would return after WWI. Thomas started from pole in 1919 and finished second in 1920, both times in Ballots, and Goux’s conversion was complete in 1922 when he married a lady from Indianapolis.

This flow, however, was stemmed gradually during the decade. Locals copied and improved the influential Gallic engineering architecture, and though motor racing on both sides of the Atlantic followed roughly the same formulae, Louis Chiron’s seventh place in a Delage in 1929 was a European/Indianapolis endpoint. Ironically, he had chosen to miss his inaugural hometown race, the creation of which he had been fundamental to. He would neither want nor could afford to miss the Monaco GP again.

The next 30 years witnessed a continental divide. Italy’s Tazio Nuvolari attended Indy in 1938 but, his intended Alfa Romeo badly burned at the Pau GP, had to be ‘content’ with an embarrassingly short guest drive – he stripped his car’s transmission with a wheel-spinning getaway for which it had not been designed – before dropping the flag at the start. His arch-rival Achille Varzi surprisingly failed to qualify a Maserati in 1946 – Luigi Villoresi finished seventh in a sister car – and German pre-WWII ace Rudi Caracciola might have been killed when he crashed during an impromptu run had he not been forced by regulation to swap trademark linen cap for borrowed crash helmet.

Even Indy’s inclusion in the world championship from 1950-’60 failed to bridge the gap. Only Alberto Ascari was persuaded over to the USA, his Ferrari running eighth after 40 laps in 1952 when a wire wheel unsuited to loads generated by an oval circuit collapsed. Having skipped the Swiss GP, he returned to Europe to begin a sequence of nine GP victories that would make him a double world champion. In contrast, inaugural world champion Giuseppe Farina’s long GP career was over by the time he failed to qualify at Indy in 1956 and 1957, and his successor Juan Fangio had five titles under his belt, but just one more GP left in the tank, when he was wisely ‘called home on urgent business’ after underwhelming tests of a pair of Indycars in 1958. 

Do not expect an Alonso still thirsty for victory – in F1 still, now at Indy and ultimately at Le Mans – to be deflected as easily.

Image courtesy of LAT