Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2024 i Motor Sport Magazine

Zak Brown once got himself a tattoo after losing a bet with Daniel Ricciardo when the Australian won at Monza in 2021. He has reportedly made a similar bet with Oscar Piastri for the 2024 season. But it is another highstakes wager that could prove a major embarrassment for Formula 1 as a whole. It was placed by Jeff Dodds, the boss of rival racing series Formula E, during an interview. “I’ll tell you what,” he said when asked what he thought the chances were of Max Verstappen winning the 2024 F1 world title, “if any one of the other 19 drivers wins it, we’ll give a quarter of a million dollars to the charity of choice of the other driver that wins it. It wouldn’t be the worst day…

A new front was opened in the off-track wrangles facing Formula 1 with news that Susie Wolff, left, had filed a legal complaint against the FIA. The complaint focuses on the circumstances surrounding an investigation launched by the sport’s governing body into allegations that Wolff and her husband, Toto, who is the team principal of Mercedes-AMG F1 team, had been involved in a breach of confidentiality. Susie had strenuously denied the allegations and suggested at the time that the probe was motivated by misogyny within the FIA. The investigation was quickly dropped in December 2023. Wolff, who as boss of the FIA’s all-women racing series F1 Academy, is one of the most powerful female voices in motor sport. “I feel more than ever it is important to stand up, call…

A memorial service for Sir Stirling Moss will be held in Westminster Abbey, London on May 8 to celebrate the life of one of our greatest all-round racing drivers. His family will be joined by an expected congregation of 2000 people, including Sir Jackie Stewart who will be among the speakers. Outside the abbey, Moss’s 1955 Mille Miglia-winning Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR No722 will head a display of some of his most famous cars. Moss’s death, age 90, came during the Covid pandemic, preventing his life being marked in a manner befitting his era-defining achievements. Now that is being rectified as Stirling’s son, Stirling Elliot Moss, gives his father the long overdue send-off he deserves. “To be able to do this for my father – a man I admired in just…

Eighteen-year-old Formula 2 driver Oliver Bearman was sensationally called up at Jeddah by Ferrari for his Formula 1 debut, as Carlos Sainz was hospitalised with appendicitis. On Ferrari’s Driver Academy, he had made F1 appearances in Friday practice sessions last year for Haas, in Mexico and Abu Dhabi. He’d impressed on those occasions by immediately running at a comparable pace to the team’s regular drivers Nico Hülkenberg and Kevin Magnussen. He’d also driven the new Ferrari on the simulator. On Thursday in Jeddah he had set pole for the F2 race and took no part in F1 practice. He got the surprise call-up on Friday morning and withdrew from the F2 race to become the youngest-ever Ferrari F1 driver. “I think it worked out better for him being thrown straight…

GOOD SARKY TSUNODA Tsunoda’s incandescent radio comments in recent GPs have been a rare cockle-warmer in yawn-fest races. 200MPH ROADBLOCK Magnussen solidified his position as a warp-speed wind-up-merchant by making his Haas wider than the North Jutland coastline to hold back his rivals in Saudi. THE BEAR What more can you say? The boy did good. SMOOTH OPERATION Carlos Sainz was smooth in all senses in Melbourne, winning two weeks after having his appendix taken out. SERENITY PERSONIFIED  Kudos to Max Verstappen, still crushing the field despite being in the eye of a bad-PR tornado – and his dad getting involved. Strong stuff. BAD ONE CAR DOWN Williams was reduced to one car in Oz due to a lack of spares – a team that once produced Le Mans and…

If you look at the Land Rover LRX concept from 2008 and this Range Rover Evoque, you’ll be left in no doubt what a debt the latter owes the former. Some 16 years on Julian Thomson’s transformational design language looks as fresh today as ever. The car beneath, however, is very different. Launched in 2011, an all-new version arrived in 2018 and now this cosmetically lifted version aims to bring things bang up to date. Most notable is the new interior which, in the modern vogue, regards buttons as almost entirely unnecessary evils, so all bar the most basic functions are accessed via the obligatory vast touchscreen. Which means the cabin looks as clean as an operating table and rather more beautiful. But as I have noted with other such…

Miami International Autodrome, Miami, Florida, May 3-5 Momentum for the all-female F1 Academy picked up the minute Susie Wolff took the helm as managing director. Being the last female driver to take part in a Formula 1 race weekend – in 2014, in practice at the British Grand Prix – she’s now implemented structural developments to prevent the budding feeder championship from falling to the same fate as WSeries. Increasing direct involvement with Formula 1 this year, each F1 team will support a driver in 2024’s F1 Academy and have its livery on that driver’s car. In a recent milestone, it was announced that the top five of 2024 will earn superlicence points. Ten points will be awarded to the champion, seven to the runner-up, five to third, three for…

How delightful to read the interview with Alain Prost [It sounds like a joke but Iam completely underrated, March]. Iam sure it will relaunch the debate on who was greater between Senna and himself, so let me add my two cents. There was a period from 1984-1987 when Prost was indisputably the best as well as the fastest. Not many others reigned for a longer period than that. Fangio and Moss perhaps. Schumacher and Hamilton in later years, at a time when careers lasted much longer. The domination of Clark, Stewart or Lauda did not last much longer, if at all. Senna arguably never dominated in the same way as Prost did. Was Senna faster than Prost? In a given car, without any leeway to improve it, I would say…

Think of Prodrive and what comes to mind? I’m guessing it’s Colin McRae in his blue and yellow Subaru leaving his WRC competitors for dust. But maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps its Sébastien Loeb on the Dakar Rally in his Prodrive Hunter T1+ breaking the record for the number of consecutive stage wins, as he did last year. No? An Aston Martin winning its class at Le Mans perhaps, or a Ferrari 550 Maranello. One vision I’m fairly confident is not swimming before your eyes right now is a first generation Ford Mustang, not least because the original pony car made its worldwide debut in 1964, fully 20 years before David Richards founded his now famous company. Prodrive of course does not trouble itself with ancient relics like this and has…

81990s SUBARU IMPREZA SUBARU IMPREZA Race car of the CENTURY 1924-2024 IN ASSOCIATION WITH RICHARD MILLE Subaru’s biggest success was to harness the power of motor sport marketing like no other manufacturer before or since, entirely transforming its image from rustic transport for farmers to desirable icons; complete with gold wheels and blue paint. That was completely down to the World Rally Championship. Subaru’s evolutionary process was already well underway by the time the Impreza made its debut in Finland in 1993. Colin McRae’s first WRC win came at the wheel of a Legacy, and he even took part in the Safari Rally with a tiny Vivio – but both of these cars lacked the aesthetic appeal to make Subaru desirable. It took the Impreza to change all that. The…

Kévin Estre is enjoying himself. He and his Porsche team-mates have been in control of the race for almost nine hours, everything running smoothly through the desert night. Then, suddenly, all is thrown into jeopardy. Within touching distance of the finish, Estre manages to clobber a GT backmarker not once, not twice, but three times in the closing stages. Having smashed the LED race number on the side of his car, the Frenchman has to pit from the lead so an old-fashioned No6 sticker can be slapped onto the side of his 963. It’s nail-biting stuff, but then the Peugeot 9X8 bearing down in second place runs out of fuel on the penultimate lap – while other top-class cars furiously fight it out behind. In a thrilling climax, Estre clings…

Few names have left quite such an indelible mark across so many forms of motor sport as Lola, the company established by the late Eric Broadley in 1958 which grew to become one of the largest and longest-lived specialist racing car builders in the world. Its wide-ranging portfolio of designs – which evolved from the original Austin Seven-based ‘Broadley Special’ – went on to include racing cars made for contesting everything from Formula 1 to Can-Am and from Formula Atlantic to Le Mans, often with unrivalled success. But Lola’s long run of good fortune wouldn’t last forever. The original firm went bust in 1997 after a disastrous attempt to field the first ‘full works’ Lola F1 team and was subsequently sold to Irish racing team owner, Land Speed Record driver…

We often use this space to talk about specific collectibles, but what about toy fairs? Events like this are brilliant, for so many reasons, but as always there’s tips and tricks to ensure you get the most from your visit. Toy fairs happen up and down the country and vary hugely in scale. I tend to follow the BP Fairs around, which organise events at places like Sandown Park and the UK’s biggest toy fair at the Birmingham NEC, which has 500 stalls. The thing about these fairs is the variety, not just on show, but of people selling. You get a healthy mix between in-the-know traders, individuals selling off their collections, and even sometimes random companies splitting up bulkbought lots or house clearance stock. This creates a lot of…

The voting poll is open! Now it’s time for you, the readers of Motor Sport, to decide on your choice of Race Car of the Century, as the centrepiece of our 100th anniversary celebrations this summer. As regular readers will have noticed in recent issues of the magazine, we’ve narrowed down the choice by nominating 10 cars – one for each decade since Motor Sport’s founding in 1924. Our profiles of these 10 cars are completed in this month’s edition with entries representing the 1990s (Subaru’s Prodrive-built Impreza rally car), 2000s (Audi’s five-time Le Mans-winning R8 Prototype) and 2010s (Red Bull’s RB9, in which Sebastian Vettel completed a run of four consecutive F1 world championships). The full choice, as seen in the pictures here, includes cars from a variety of…

Relief all round on the grippy subject of motor sport tyre supply this month after confirmation that the Avon brand has been saved by a newly created company that flips the name in reverse. Nova Motorsport has acquired key assets of the competition tyre specialist, which closed last year after its parent Cooper Tire & Rubber Co was bought by Goodyear. Among race organisers to have already reconfirmed new tyre supply deals for Avon through Nova is the Peter Auto organisation, for its Group C, Classic Endurance Racing prototype classes and single-make pre-1966 Porsche 911 2.0L Cup, along with the British Hillclimb Championship and the pan-European RallyX series. Nova has bought all residual Avon stock and is also setting up a new manufacturing facility, the location of which – possibly…

The first Lotus Formula 1 contender – and the car in which Graham Hill cut his teeth at motor racing’s highest level – is to go under the hammer in Monaco on May 10. Lotus 12 chassis 353 will be a star lot at Bonhams’ sale, which takes places during the weekend of the Monaco Historic Grand Prix. It is estimated to fetch between £250,000 and £335,000. Built for the new 1.5-litre Formula 2 class in 1957, the Lotus 12 was the marque’s first true single-seater and was adapted the following year for F1 – against Colin Chapman’s initial instincts and ambition. Pressure from his racing drivers, plus the increasing might of Coventry Climax and its oversized FPF F2 engines in grand prix racing, pushed Chapman to dip a toe…

Sport is all about rivalry, so what happens if all the competitors in your favourite motor sport championship are now friends with each other? A few years ago MotoGP endured (or enjoyed, depending on your point of view) some of its most vicious rivalries. And most of them involved Valentino Rossi. Rossi was a genius at wooing fans – smiling and waving at the camera, like MotoGP was just a game to him. That’s what made people love him so much. And yet while he waved with one hand, he was sharpening knives with the other. Rossi’s bitter rivalries with his toughest opponents defined MotoGP for a decade and a half. First, there was Max Biaggi. Their rivalry peaked with a punch-up following the 2001 Catalan Grand Prix, won by…

The resignations of Alpine technical director Matt Harman and chief of aerodynamics Dirk de Beer were made before the opening race of the season, though Harman was still in situ during the first two races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. The new car had missed some key targets regarding aero performance and weight and had to be strengthened after failing the side impact test. It was the slowest of all at both venues. Ferrari was already targeting key members of the Red Bull technical department even before the latest controversies within Red Bull caused questions to be asked about whether Adrian Newey would choose to stay. The names of technical director Pierre Waché and aero chief Enrico Balbo continue to be linked with the Italians. Aston Martin has recruited Bob…

In this spot last month I reviewed the new electric Peugeot 3008 and now, hot on its heels, comes its deadliest rival, domestic or otherwise. As regulars will be aware, I admired the Peugeot for its quality, comfort and looks, but Renault appears to be playing a different game altogether. For essentially the same money, Renault will sell you a car that’s a lot quicker, has a far greater range and is infinitely more pleasing to drive, partly because it is a quite staggering quarter of a tonne lighter. But it’s also because those in charge at Renault have taken a different view to the mainstream approach of accepting that EVs are never going to be entertaining and focusing on design instead. Is the Scenic actually fun on the road?…

You can tell from the pale orange endpapers that this is going to be presented with some style, and it is. Palawan style, with groovy covers and a smart box case. Essentially a photo collection, it’s drawn from the archive left by Franco Lini, reporter and photographer for Auto Italia on all fields of motor racing through the ’70s and briefly Ferrari’s sporting director. And as one who knew him from 1966 and now keeper of his archive, Doug Nye is well placed to introduce us to the man and provide knowledgeable and generous captions to over 480 photos in this muscle-testing volume. But that’s only part of it: as a companion to the beefy photo book there’s a slimmer volume which doesn’t mention motor racing at all. Instead it’s…

Thirty years ago this month what made Ayrton’s death so stunning and brutal was that by 1994 we all thought racing had come so far in terms of safety, that so many of the old spectres – even fire, the drivers’ greatest fear – had so successfully been exorcised. Formula 1 had reached the stage where people had almost allowed themselves to believe that death was no longer a visitor to the races. How wrong we were. And how horribly that was proven as, in images that still haunt the sport to this day, he became arguably the first F1 fatality on live television. I loved Imola, and the little hotel in Fontanelice – La Pergola – that was run by a chirpy Italian lady called Rosa, whose husband Leo…

It might not have won the 1993 Formula 1 World Championship, but nevertheless the McLaren MP4/8 holds a special place in the history of F1. Ayrton Senna’s last winning car, it took the Brazilian to five memorable victories in a season that should really have seen the sort of domination by the Williams FW15C that the Red Bull RB19 demonstrated in 2023. Of course Senna’s special talent was a big part of the equation, no more so than at a soaking Donington Park, the scene of the most famous of his quintet of race wins. However the car played a role too. With its compact Ford HB V8 and a simple but effective active ride system the MP4/8 was a nimble and very efficient piece of kit that Senna was…

Jackie Oliver still has his competition licence. Once a racer, always a racer. He’s been there, done it all. Le Mans winner, Can-Am champion, Formula 1 driver, founder of the Arrows F1 team and enthusiastic historic racer in his eighth decade. From Minis in 1961 he broke into the big time with Lotus in Formula 2, making his grand prix debut in the F2 class in Germany. In 1968 Colin Chapman took him into the F1 team after Jim Clark’s death. He joined BRM in ’69 but his best results came in endurance racing, winning Le Mans and the Sebring 12 Hours in John Wyer’s Ford GT40. This was followed in 1971 by victory at the Daytona 24 Hours and the Monza 1000Kms and, without an F1 drive, he joined…

Race car of the CENTURY 1924-2024 IN ASSOCIATION WITH RICHARD MILLE 9 2000s AUDI R8 Wolfgang Appel, chief designer on the Audi R8 Le Mans Prototype, used to joke that work started on the car the morning after its predecessors failed to challenge the frontrunners at the 1999 Le Mans 24 Hours. The reality was it was already on the drawing board by the time the respective performances of the R8R and R8C — one a roadster, the other a coupé as their nomenclature suggests — had confirmed that the German manufacturer had fallen short at the first time of asking. But boy, did Appel and his team put that right. The R8 triumphed at Le Mans five times in six attempts between 2000 and 2005, and won six out…

1977 WOOD & PICKETT ‘SHEER ROVER’ SOLD BY BONHAMS ONLINE, £21,951 Although this rare Wood & Pickett Range Rover looked down at heel, it came with a glamorous history: the car was owned by Peter Sellers, who paid £14,000 for the ‘Sheer Rover’ conversion in 1979 – almost what a standard Range Rover cost new. In the consignor’s family since 1980, it was recently recommissioned to the point that it ran and drove but a long period of neglect left it needing work. Importantly it appeared to have retained its original features, including a bespoke spare wheel cover – which alone set Sellers back £255, the equivalent of almost £2000 today. 2023 PORSCHE 911 (992) DAKAR SOLD BY COLLECTING CARS, £271,470 This example of Porsche’s off-road 911 had covered just…

VOTE NOW at motorsportmagazine.com Once your votes are cast, the winning Race Car of the Century will be announced at our gala centenary event to be held at the Dorchester Hotel in London on July 2. You can read more about each of the cars nominated on our website. Voting closes in May so if you want your voice heard head to motorsportmagazine. com and make your choice now! Motor Sport is pleased to have teamed up with the Grand Prix Trust as our official charity partner for our centenary celebrations. The trust is involved in invaluable work helping support those who have worked within the wider Formula 1 world when things go wrong. Joe Dunn, editor of Motor Sport, said: “The Grand Prix Trust does fantastic work – including…

MotorSport Vision boss Jonathan Palmer is putting his money where his mouth is to encourage female racers up the ladder to Formula 1. MSV’s GB4 single-seater championship will offer a £25,000 contribution to an F1 Academy budget for 2025 to the top female racer in the UK series this year. That amounts to nearly a third of the all-female F1 support category’s budget of £85,000. The organiser reports significant interest in GB4 this year from female racing drivers, with Alisha Palmowski – fastest in a recent Oulton Park test – already signed up with Elite Motorsport, while Megan Bruce will drive for Fox Motorsport. “It is really exciting to have so many more females taking part in motor racing and particularly in single-seater racing,” said Palmer. “There is real momentum…

Air|Water in Costa Mesa, California is anew event from the founders of Luftgekühlt – the brainchild of double Le Mans class winner Patrick Long that organises mass gatherings to celebrate everything to do with air-cooled Porsches. Due to be “the largest single brand auto experience” ever seen in California, Air|Water will certainly be a feast for the eyes of any Porsche fan – not least because Broad Arrow Auctions will stage a sale starring this spectacular 908/02 Langheck Flunder Spyder. This is the class-winning car from the 1970 Le Mans 24 Hours that, during its in-period career, was piloted by stars including Vic Elford, Richard Attwood, Helmut Marko, Gérard Larrousse and Rudi Lins. It competed at Le Mans with Marko and Lins driving under the flag of Martini International Racing,…

A particular set of occurrences in the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix triggered a highly unusual strategic conundrum in which there was no right answer in real time, but only in hindsight. Tyre degradation was particularly low around the Jeddah track. The C2 hard compound tyre was easily capable of doing a full race distance and it was even speculated that the medium C3 could also have accomplished this. Without a limitation on stint length and with a very small difference in performance between new tyres and old, the pitstop window was incredibly wide. In the event of a safety car, it would be feasible to make the mandatory change of tyre compound at any time from lap one onwards! If there was no safety car, then the optimum timing of…

Back in 2011 Rolls-Royce announced that it had made an electric car. Just one, mind, to canvass the views of current and prospective customers and those of a small number of journalists. The responses were rather different. Forgive the sprawling generalisation and with apologies to any dissenting voices, but broadly speaking the media loved the car, called 102EX, for all the reasons you might expect: its torque and silence pre-eminent among them. Yes the range was limited and, of course, it would take an age to charge, but back then a Rolls-Royce was one of just seven cars owned by its average customer, so we reckoned that if the journey didn’t suit the car, they’d take something else. Rolls’ customers thought otherwise. They didn’t want to be stuck somewhere for…

“It was in sleeping mode, and now we are waking it up.” That old chestnut might be a favourite way of describing a defunct watch brand’s revival, but it sounded appropriate coming from Carla Duarte, until recently the CEO of Vulcain – celebrated as the inventor of the mechanical alarm wrist watch. Nothing much had been heard of Vulcain for years until it was acquired in 2017 by a Luxembourg-based investment group which has set out to revive the brand’s glory days when it was among the most innovative, successful and far-reaching dial names in the business. Vulcain’s revolutionary Cricket alarm watch was launched at the 1947 Swiss Watch Fair after physicist Paul Langevin developed a system that combined a tiny hammer and metallic membrane with a patented double case…

Much is written in the pages of this month’s magazine about Ayrton Senna’s fatal accident at Imola and the set of circumstances that contrived against him. A further irony is that other drivers had more severe impacts with the same wall at Tamburello and escaped serious injury. This picture captures a case in point. On the first day of practice for the 1987 San Marino Grand Prix, Nelson Piquet’s Williams-Honda suddenly swapped ends at 180mph and sent him into the wall sideways on with such force that two perfect black imprints were left on the white concrete. Had Piquet gone in backwards, or head-on, the Brazilian might have suffered more than the concussion that would rule him out for the rest of the weekend. When Nelson turned up at the…

The Instituto Ayrton Senna was set up in the months after the triple world champion died at Imola in 1994. Asmall team of people led by his sister Viviane, pictured on the previous page, and his niece Bianca, have since dedicated themselves to building bridges across the canyon that divides rich and poor in Brazil. In 2008 I spent a week in São Paulo, seeing at first hand the work of the institute in and around the city as well as further afield. Having been to the Grand Prix at Interlagos over the years I had become aware of the challenges facing the institute. The circuit sits by a favella on the edge of São Paulo, a tumultuous city that is home to more than 13 million people. This month,…

It is not often we witness an F1 team seemingly trying to tear itself apart even as it is setting new records of on-track success. The complaint by a female member of staff against Red Bull Racing team principal and CEO Christian Horner has had the effect of pulling back the curtain on an inner power struggle at play within the wider Red Bull organisation and it is not a pretty sight. At the centre of this controversy is awoman whose case is fully expected to go legal and who feels she has been wronged, first by Horner, subsequently by Red Bull management which cleared Horner after an investigation and then suspended her. She has appealed the decision as the first part of what is expected to be a full…

The long-running British Hillclimb Championship can proudly boast to pre-date every other British motor sport title. It first ran back in 1947 and this year will be its 77th season, with only the 2020 Covid pandemic stopping an unbroken run. It started before British Formula 3, British Touring Cars and the British Rally Championship and remains as fiercely competitive as ever. Remarkably, there are very few rules for top-flight hillclimbing where 420kg, 700bhp projectiles teeming with electronics create an incredible spectacle on the 10 hills visited during the British Hillclimb Championship. Aside from some basic rules about the overall dimensions of the cars, there is little to hinder engineering ingenuity and driver talent. There are no pitstop penalties, no DRS, no success ballast and no driver grading. This is driver…

10 2010s RED BULL RB9 1924-2024 RACE CAR of the CENTURY IN ASSOCIATION WITH RICHARD MILLE The 2013 Red Bull is the final nominee for our Race Car of the Century. Now it’s up to you to choose which one should be crowned the greatest. Voting starts April 2 at motorsportmagazine.com “We have to remember these days,” said Sebastian Vettel, his voice on the team radio in Austin cracking with emotion after securing his eighth grand prix victory in a row. “Because there is no guarantee they will last forever. Enjoy them as long as they last.” Poignant at the time, the German’s characteristically reflective message resonated into the hybrid wilderness years that followed, with a prescience he could never have imagined. He never again had it so good. Such…

The French historic racing scene rivals Britain as the European home of this branch of sport. One of the key French players is HVM Racing, promoter of the Historic Tour and headline historic race meetings at Paul Ricard and Dijon. The HVM head is Laurent Vallery-Masson, a racer through and through who wheels out his Formula 2 March whenever he can. “I’ve been running HVM since 2003,” he says. “But at the beginning it was just a team for friends and then we started to organise our own meetings in 2009 at Dijon.” That was the catalyst for growth and HVM became the designated organiser for historic racing on behalf of the French motor sport governing body, FFSA. At the heart of HVM’s offering is the Historic Tour, a series…