The opening race of a Formula One season usually provides some extra thrills and spills for fans eager for some racing fun after a long winter off. So with 2011 about to get going, Patronise F1 remembers six great opening GPs.
1) 1967 South African Grand Prix
Despite the reputation of the swinging Sixties in Formula One being a time of champagne, parties, playboys and miniskirts, it is probably safe to assume that the paddock New Year's Eve party in 1966 was a bit of a quiet affair, given that the 1967 season kicked-off in Kyalami on January 2nd. And the stupidly-early start (made all the more bizarre when you consider that Round 2 in Monaco wasn't for another five months - five months!) meant that the grid for the South African round was somewhat of a ramshackle affair., with only 14 series regulars bothering to travel, and most with old cars.
To boost the grid size, four locals were chosen to race a heady mix of GP machinery alongside the F1 regulars, including the excellently-named Rhodesian pair of John Love and Sam Tingle, who in an alternative career might have ended up opening a specialist dating agency. Love was the star of the show in qualifying, securing an impressive fifth-place start in his ancient Tasman Series-spec Cooper T79.
Things were to get better for him in the race itself, as the field thinned out with some early-season gremlins. With barely a quarter of the race gone, the big name trio of Jackie Stewart, Graham Hill and Jim Clark were all out, and cars continued to drop as the laps ticked on. Not as Love needed retirements to help his progress. He ran third as the race passed the midway point, and was then sensationally promoted into the lead after erstwhile leader Jack Brabham fell back with a misfiring engine and then Denny Hulme was forced to pit to top up his brake fluid.
He clung on to the lead from that point on, and seemed on the verge of one of the most unlikely race wins in the history of motorsport in his venerable old Tasman machine. But the dream died with seven laps to go as he was forced to pit for extra fuel, his car simply incapable of completing the full GP distance on one tank (paging Mr Wirth...). The win was gone, but Love did salvage second place, beating factory Honda and Brabham machinery to the finish.
For a more detailed write-up of the 1967 South African Grand Prix, check out the F1 Rejects page on the race here.
2) 1999 Australian Grand Prix
As season-opening venues go, Albert Park has been inordinately kind to Formula One fans. No matter how terribly dull the season as a whole goes on to become, the Australian GP is more often than not a thrilling mixture of clashes, crashes and shock winners. Think Jacques Villeneuve's turn one elimination and David Coulthard's win in 1997, or Ralf Schumacher's brief first corner flight followed by Mark Webber's 5th place in 2002, or even 2009's race, where Brawn GP's dominance with their double diffusers of doom was enlivened by Rubens Barrichello's recovery drive.
But probably, Melbourne's finest race was in 1999, because this was just a never-ending stream of twists and turns, rather than a narrative set by some apocalyptic first corner carnage. As with the 1998 race, the Australian GP looked set to be dominated by Adrian Newey's gleaming new MP4-14 cars, with Mika Hakkinen taking pole position with an advantage of nearly one and a half seconds over everyone bar his team mate and lackey David Coulthard.
But things soon became clear that it was not going to be a straightforward day for McLaren. Hakkinen was delayed in getting to the grid with some teething issues on his car, and nearly brought the whole garage down on top of his mechanics when his car got tangled in some leads as he hurriedly dashed out to avoid a penalty for being late to his slot. Then, after both Stewart Fords comically burst into flames in unison on the grid, Hakkinen stalled from pole, which then caused Michael Schumacher directly behind him to stall as well.
While Hakkinen got going before the grid cleared and was able to retake his front row spot, Schumie was sent to the back of the grid (for the second race in a row following his embarrassing stall on the grid of the decisive Japanese GP in 1998). A puncture later in the race blighted the German's comeback drive (again, mush as one had done in Japan). But if McLaren dodged a bullet there, it didn't really matter, because by lap 21 they were both out of the running. Retirements, either self-inflicted or otherwise left a field of just eight cars at the end, and it was the barely-credible form of Eddie Irvine that took his first-ever F1 victory for Ferrari.
For a review of the 1999 Australian GP, courtesy of a probably soon-to-be-deleted YouTube video, go here.
3) 1956 Argentine Grand Prix
The opening round of the 1956 season, in the aftermath of the withdrawal of the dominant force of Mercedes following their decision to abandon their motorsport endeavours in the wake of the preceding year's tragic Le Mans 24 Hours disaster, was a dreadful-looking grid. Just thirteen cars started the race, all either Ferraris or Maseratis of various ages and quality, and the prospects of the race going down as a memorable event of any description were slim from the start.
Nevertheless, there was still quality in the slim field, with the two Mercedes superteam drivers from 1955 having gone their separate ways for the new season. Juan Manuel Fangio had moved to Ferrari to campaign one of their D50s, not the prettiest of cars, but an effective one, while Stirling Moss had moved to the factory Maserati squad. But it was the former that made an immediate impact, qualifying on pole position at the Buenos Aires circuit by some 2.2 seconds.
In the race though, Fangio looked set for a disaster of a debut, as he dropped back early on before retiring with fuel pump failure while the Maserati duo of Carlos Menditeguy and Moss led the race. Back in the days when cars could be swapped around on a whim during the race itself, something that even Michael Schumacher and Ferrari never experimented with as a means to further emasculate Rubens Barrichello, the Argentine great got himself back into his home race by taking over the sister car of Luigi Musso, which was running fifth.
And then, Fangio was dealt a series of quickfire doses of luck, as one-by-one the cars ahead of him hit trouble. Menditeguy and Ferrari driver Eugenio Castellotti retired within two laps of each other, while Moss's car began to ail with an oil leak, allowing Fangio to catch and pass him to take a famous, if fortunate, win. It was the season-opening victory that started Fangio off on his inexorable run to title number four.
Watch some gloriously ramshackle old news footage of the 1956 Argentine Grand Prix here.
4) 1981 South African Grand Prix
As we've seen in 2011, the best laid plans of a season-opener can often go askew for reasons off the racetrack. For Bahrain this year, the problems were political turmoil on their own part, but in 1981 the planned South African season opener found itself in the midst of a fine mess of a weekend thanks to political issues from within the sport itself.
The 1981 season kicked off with the FISA-FOCA war already raging, with political mutterings from Bernie Ecclestone and FOCA throughout the winter that they were preparing a breakaway series for the new year (we'll pause for a second here while you all calm your irony alarms down) leading to a number of delays for the new championship. FISA cancelled the planned Argentine GP from its January date, and attempted to do the same with the South African event, but the race organisers, who had already started selling tickets and advertising their February 7th racedate, were having none of it.
FISA retorted by saying that whatever the circuit wanted they would only be attending on an alternative date, offering them April 11th as their new preferred time for the race, but the Kyalami track decided to go ahead with their original date, holding a Formula Libre event rather than a full-blown Grand Prix. The FISA-aligned manufacturer teams stayed away, but the FOCA lot turned up, all oddly running cars complete with ground-effect boosting sliding skirts, which had ostensibly been banned for the new season but were entirely legal under the now non-FISA race rules.
And so the race happened, passing unrecognised by official Formula One records, with 19 Cosworth-powered cars competing in the Sunday grand prix. Carlos Reutemann took victory for Williams, finishing 20 seconds clear of Nelson Piquet's Brabham following a clever early switch to slicks on a drying circuit. Annoyingly for Reutemann, had the South African result actually been allowed to count towards the 1981 world championship, he would have beaten Piquet to the title that season, so his potential title goes down as another victim of the FISA-FOCA war.
Despite the lack of official recognition, the BBC still covered the 1981 South African Grand Prix. Watch highlights here.
5) 1958 Argentine Grand Prix
Another race from the era of the 1950s, another long-haul overseas opening round, and another somewhat paltry entry list. Just ten cars took to the starting grid for the first round of the 1958 championship, and only nine cars left it after Peter Collins's Ferrari broke a driveshaft on the line. All in all, it didn't have the makings of a great season-opener.
But it was, though perhaps more for what it represented than for the actual action on show. Since the start of the Formula One world championship in 1950, the grid had been dominated by huge burbling front-engined monsters, and this new season was set to be no different, as a trio of factory Ferraris took to the track in Argentina, without any opposition from their late-starting rivals from Vanwall or BRM, who chose to skip the trip to Buenos Aires.
So, it was Ferrari versus a haphazard collection of privateer Maseratis, and one other entry. The dinky, underpowered, rear-engined Cooper-Climax from Rob Walker's team, driven by Stirling Moss. After the Italian cars dominated qualifying, there didn't seem to be much hope for anything other than some domination from the men from Maranello, but as it turned out, the Cooper was to have its day, and take arguably the most significant win in the history of motorsport, and certainly the most unexpected.
Moss used the maneuverability and nimbleness of the smaller Cooper to make up for his lack of outright grunt, and he harried the leaders throughout much of the early running. As Mike Hawthorn pitted with oil pressure issues and Fangio (in one of the private Maseratis) and Luigi Musso's Ferrari stopped for tyre changes at the punishing track, Moss remained out, pulling off the rarely-used 'no-stop strategy' to just hold off the charging Musso by the end. It was the first win for a car with its engine anywhere other than the front, and it was the beginning of the end for the old front-engined monsters. To take the liberty of straying gratuitously into cliché: Grand Prix racing would never be the same again.
Moss talks about his incredible win in the 1958 Argentine Grand Prix in the first portion of this clip here.
6) 1990 United States Grand Prix
Every new Formula One season brings new surprise packages and new power-shifts, and while the one witnessed in 1990 at the United States season opener around the unimpressive and unloved Phoenix street circuit was a fleeting display of power from an unlikely source, with Jean Alesi and Tyrrell's performance proving something of a false dawn, it remains an abiding season opener, nestling in the memory in the section marked 'did that really just happen?'
The grid for the race was already bizarre enough before the racing got going, with the Pirelli runners benefitting from the Italian company pulling something of a blinder with their new qualifying tyres compared to rivals Goodyear. While the established names struggled on their Goodyears - The Ferraris of Alain Prost and Nigel Mansell qualified 7th and 17th respectively - the Pirelli runners shook the order up. Pierluigi Martini gave Minardi what would be their only front row start in F1, while Alesi and his Tyrrell lined up 5th, ahead of a certain Ayrton Senna.
At the start, Alesi's race got even better, as he gunned the car off the lights to take the lead into turn one from Berger. And the McLaren didn't simply re-pass the weaker opponent immediately either, indeed when Senna managed to get himself up to second place on lap 9 following a spin by polesitter Gerhard Berger, he was over 8 seconds adrift of the Frenchman.
Senna soon caught him, a pass seemed inevitable, and indeed it was as the Brazilian outbraked Alesi into one of the right handers. But Alesi shocked everyone, not least Senna, by holding his line around the outside and re-taking the lead into the following left-hander. On the following lap, Senna pulled the same move, but this time defended the inside line into the following corner and the lead was his, though this didn't stop Alesi having another few looks up the inside of the McLaren as the race progressed. After the race, Senna was full of praise for the young Frenchman who had pushed him so hard, and well he might have been. Because yes, that really did just happen.
Watch the drama of the fight for the lead of the 1991 United States Grand Prix unfold, as described by an excitable Japanese man, here.
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