You may now have concluded I have made this considerable mental leap through a desire to have one last laugh, one final celebration of the hydrocarbon culture in which we all grew up, to end the era in the company of one of the most gloriously irresponsible kinds of car ever to race. But it’s not that at all.
The first thing to say is I’ve never driven a Formula 5000 car, and I’ll understand now if you need to pause to hold tears. Formula 1, 2 and 3 cars, sportscars, Can-Am cars, touring cars and many other forms of racing car. But never an F5000 machine.
And yet, if there were ever a single seat series to which my heart really belonged, it was not F1, but F5000. You may recall the formula emerged in the late 1960s as an affordable way to scare yourself witless in an open wheel racing car. The idea was that you could get a proprietary chassis from any one of a number of manufacturers and power it by pretty much anything you like so long as it didn’t displace more than the requisite 5,000cc. In reality, almost everyone ended up using the small block Chevy V8 for its ubiquity, reliability and cost. Chassis were produced by many of the biggest and best names in racing like Lola, McLaren, Lotus, Chevron and Surtees and series popped up all over the world, from the US, through Europe to South Africa and Australasia.