Top 10… Chris Amon Classics

It’s well documented that he was one of the unluckiest drivers of his era, particularly when it came to World Championship Grand Prix racing. Seven times he led a race – four times for Ferrari, twice for Matra and once in a March – and in many cases he looked good for victory until mechanical frailty got the better of whatever car he was in. Three times he took second place, coming agonisingly close to joining a special club. In fact, just 1.1s was the margin between winning and losing around the fearsome, original-spec Spa-Francorchamps in 1970. Fastest lap, at an average of 152mph, in the STP March 701 was scant consolation.

Amon did enjoy his fair share of success in other arenas. He won non-championship GPs against regular, top-class opposition, took victory for Ford at Le Mans, won at Daytona for Ferrari and secured the Tasman Series for the Prancing Horse. His was an impressive CV, with a wide variety of disciplines and machines appearing on it.

By way of celebration of that speed and versatility, we’ve chosen 10 cars – not all of them winners, in fact some of them absolute dogs – that we think exemplify that Amon spirit. 

1966 McLaren Elva Mk11 M1B

Amon qualified one of the two 5.4-litre Oldsmobile V8-fuelled sports-prototypes entered by Bruce McLaren Motor Racing Ltd third – behind the boss – in the inaugural Can-Am Championship race at Quebec’s Mont-Tremblant rollercoaster in 1965, and finished in the same position, with fastest lap. That very car is now owned and raced by McLaren test driver Chris Goodwin, who took it to victory in Can-Am retrospectives in Goodwood’s 72^nd Members’ Meeting Surtees Trophy and Revival Whitsun Trophy in 2014. 

1966 Ford GT40 Mk2

Built to avenge Ferrari’s will-they-won’t-they dismissal of Ford’s take-over bid, the GT40 had a troubled first few outings at Le Mans – sportscar racing’s biggest test and Ferrari’s stomping ground – in 1964 and ’65. For 1966, though, the Blue Oval got it right, with the Mk11s taking a 1-2-3, led by Amon and fellow Kiwi Bruce McLaren, ahead of Ken Miles and Lloyd Ruby in a slightly botched, team-orders-style photo finish.  

1967 Ferrari 330 P3/4 Spyder

Slippery and sonorous, the 4-litre V12 330 cleaned up in the opening round of the 1967 International Manufacturers’ (read World Sportscar) Championship. The factory Ferraris finished one-two, with the Spyder of Amon and Italian Lorenzo Bandini – also his team-mate for a tragically short period in the Formula 1 squad – taking a three-lap victory over the coupé version of fellow Maranello favourites Mike Parkes and Ludovico Scarfiotti. Amon and Bandini also won the Monza 1000km, this time with a complete roof, while Amon and Jackie Stewart finished second in the Brands Hatch 6-hour IMC qualifier. 

1968 Ferrari 312

Amon joined Ferrari’s F1 effort for the 1967 Monaco GP, armed with the sister 312 (3-litre, 12-cylinder) to that of Lorenzo Bandini, who’d been with the Scuderia since ’63. Sadly, the charismatic Italian suffered terrible burns – from which he died three days later – in a fiery shunt at the chicane. Amon finished third that day and took three further podium places in the year’s remaining races. For 1968, a title fight looked a serious possibility. As it was, he led three races from the front row and broke down in all of them. After six races in ’69 yielded a third at Zandvoort and five retirements, Amon left and joined British squad March – attracted by what he hoped would be simple-yet-solid engineering and Cosworth DFV motivation. 

1969 Ferrari 246T

Amon’s final year with Ferrari had started much better than it had ended. Before the F1 season kicked off in March, he tackled the Tasman Series in Australia and New Zealand, the unofficial ‘winter world championship’ tackled by many of the top European F1 pros and their Antipodean counterparts. He took Ferrari’s 2.4-litre V6 weapon to victory at Pukekohe and Levin in NZ and Lakeside and Sandown Park in Australia to beat Jochen Rindt, Piers Courage, Derek Bell and Graham Hill to the title – curiously the only one that ever appeared on his CV. 

1970 March 707

One of the wackiest of Can-Am racers, the low-line, super-wide 707, complete with colossal 8-litre Chevrolet powerplant behind the driver’s shoulders, needed a brute-force-and-deft-touch approach, but even in then-March Grand Prix racer Amon’s hands it was no match for the McLaren M8Ds, which won nine of the 10 races in the 1970 series. Three times Amon tried his best, at Brainerd, Laguna Seca and Riverside, taking a fifth and two fourths respectively. 

1972 Matra MS120C

With its easy-on-the-eye French-blue livery and easy-on-the-ear 3-litre Matra V12 soundtrack, and that trademark Amon red-white-and-blue helmet poking out from the cockpit of course, this was one of early-1970s F1’s coolest combos. Amon joined Mécanique Aviation Traction for 1971 and was on the podium second time out in Spain in the MS120, although similar results didn’t materialise during the rest of the season, even with the upgraded MS120B. He led at Monza after taking pole, but faded to sixth by flagfall. The 1972 C-spec car, and later D variant, were better and Amon cruelly missed out in the French GP at the switchback road course of Clermont-Ferrand after leading the first 19 laps from pole, only to suffer a puncture, forcing a pitstop and a charge back to third. 

1973 BMW CSL

One of BMW Motorsport’s fabulous striated Batmobile CSLs, arguably touring car racing’s most celebrated and revered homologation special, had ‘Chris Amon’ and ‘Hans-Joachim Stuck’ written on its flanks ahead of the 1973 European Touring Car Championship season. The duo tackled five points-paying races, taking victory in the Nürburgring 6 Hours in July and third in the Paul Ricard finale in September. In between, that wretched Amon luck struck, as the car retired at Monza, Spa (in the 24 Hours) and Zandvoort, as well as in the Nürburgring 1000km and Le Mans 24 Hours. All the more galling when you consider the sister car of Toine Hezemans and Dieter Quester won three races, with Hezemans taking the drivers’ title. 

1973 Tecno

After yearning to get back to DFV power – as he had done post-Ferrari/pre-March in 1969, Amon gave up on Matra for ’73 and re-joined March. Except he didn’t. They fell out before the season even began and Amon ended up on the scrap heap. He found a berth with Italian kart manufacturer Tecno, now in its second year in F1, in time for the fifth GP of the year at Zolder in Belgium. Miraculously, Amon finished sixth in the flat-12, Martini-sponsored PA123B. That, though, was as good as it got and after three more races the Kiwi walked, another opportunity gone.

1974 Amon AF1

Commissioning his own car, with design duties falling to Tecno man Gordon Fowell, was one of Amon’s infamous misjudgements. The car, which carried a number of unusual features, including a centrally mounted fuel tank and forward cockpit position, didn’t appear until the fourth race of the 1974 season, at Jarama in Spain. It turned out to be the only time an AF1 would start a race. Various problems kept it off the grid in Monaco, Germany and Italy, after which Amon pulled the plug on his eponymous project.