A day to remember

The writings of L.J.K. Setright in Gran Turismo Magazine (1993-1996)

L.J.K. Setright

Foreword by Gerrit Brand

Colophon

© Uitgeverij Nobelman, The Netherlands, 2018

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Worldwide publishing rights, Uitgeverij Nobelman / Gerrit Brand. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of the publication may be made without written permission. Copyright Act 1956 (as amended).

All photos are copies from the original articles in the magazine

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Cover by A.J. (Bert) Holsheimer (www.ajholsheimer.com).

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From 1993 to 1996 L.J.K. Setright (Leonard John Kensell) (10 August 1931 – 7 September 2005) contributed 10 articles to the Dutch car magazine GranTurismo.

Foreword

by Gerrit Brand (publisher/editor-in-chief GranTurismo magazine)

Whilst visiting a friend of mine in Rotterdam, I came across a stack of old Car magazines from the late sixties, early seventies. As I was absolutely crazy about cars I asked if I could borrow them, and I enjoyed reading the magazines for months. I was crazy about classic cars and literature and was immediately mesmerized by L.J.K. Setright’s writing. It was the ideal mix between writing about earthly affairs, like cars and engineering, and more elevated subjects, like art and literature. The eccentric L.J.K. Setright, who with his long beard and Jewish racket looked like an ancient prophet, was a hero to me.

As a publisher of business magazines (a lucrative affair at the time) I thought of making a business of my hobby, which were cars and classic automobiles at the time. Of course, one should never do that, because, firstly, you put too much time into it, automatically making it a not very profitable affair, and secondly, after a while you start losing the fun you experienced in the beginning. But a young enthusiastic entrepreneur doesn’t shy away from diving into the unknown, and any crazy idea seems to be a fantastic idea. And so I sent a letter to my ‘idol’ L.J.K. Setright (e-mail didn’t exist in those days) asking if he would be willing to contribute to my car magazine, GranTurismo. To my delight Mr. Setright immediately agreed, not doubting the quality of the future magazine for even a second. He immediately sent me the first article which had the same title as this book, A day to remember. From that moment on we received copy from L.J.K. every three months, ten articles in total.

I met L.J.K. twice. The first time was at the AutoRai in Amsterdam, the big Motor Show in the Netherlands. The second time was at an automotive press presentation at which we were both present. Unfortunately, I am unable to recall which presentation it was, but I am guessing it was at the presentation of a new Honda, Porsche or maybe even the newest Fiat. The main thing Setright and I had in common was our love for Italian cars.

Meeting L.J.K. in real life was no disappointment. We had lovely conversations and I remember telling him that I found writing about cars to be even more fun than testing the object for real. Setright agreed. After all, every car was essentially not more than four wheels and one engine. What was exciting about cars was the technology, the design and the romanticism around the brand. Setright was not a man to express his opinion loudly. He would rather do that on paper. He very much liked being alone, I think you can say that he was a loner. At the Amsterdam Motor Show he made clear to me that he’d rather walk around alone, not accompanied by anyone. ‘Much better not to depend on anyone. So goodbye, it was a pleasure meeting you.’

It was a pleasure to be able to publish contributions by L.J.K. Setright in my magazine. I’m not sure if all of our readers at the time appreciated Setright’s complicated writing as much as I did, but I am sure that there are enough people out there who value these articles and who will enjoy reading them more than twenty years after they were originally published in Gran Turismo. Setright’s texts are very much like good wine or cigars, the older they get the better they become. I hope you will enjoy reading this book.

About the author

authorL.J.K. Setright (Leonard John Kensell) (1931 – 2005) was a renowned motoring journalist and author who wrote articles and books about motorcycles, cars and automotive engineering. His articles were published in several magazines, the British magazine Car being the most well-known. Between 1993 and 1996 he contributed to the Dutch car magazine Gran Turismo. The articles in this book are the result of those contributions. Setright’s writing style was very erudite and considered to be slightly over the top by some (he didn’t hesitate to put Latin phrases through his reasonings). However, everybody agreed that his engineering knowledge was formidable. He had a strong enthusiasm for Bristol Cars and for Japanese engineering, especially Honda. Setright was also known for his love of smoking tobacco, in particular Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes, and for his elegant sartorial style. He spent the last 25 years of his life in London.

A day to remember

October 1993

The British Grand Prix of 1951 was more than a race; it was an historic occasion full of ends and omens, remembered and analysed here by one of the spectators. L.J.K. Setright.

There are some days that one never forgets. Everyone, they say, remembers exactly where he was and what he was doing when the news came to him of the assassination of President Kennedy. Setright even remembers his precisely apposite and apparently disconcerting response when asked what he thought of the shooting: “Accurate, wasn’t it?”

They also say that every man remembers similarly the circumstances when he heard of the death of that most perfect of drivers, Jim Clark. On that very occasion Setright was at Brands Hatch watching and photographing the BOAC 800 race which gave the Chaparral 2F, the most impressive racing car of its time and perhaps of all time, its only victory; and the hush that gradually over came the pits as the new spread from one to another (it was not announced over the public address system) will remain a recollection when most of the details of that exciting race are forgotten.

Not many motor races are that memorable. Only some little detail – the precision of Bira handling the big OSCA at Goodwood, Stewart locking his brakes on the way into Station Hairpin at Monaco, Moffat hounding a Connaught (despite his T.35 Bugatti being authentically shod with beaded-edge tyres) at Karlskoga – may linger when the rest of the race, the rest of the day, the occasion or even the year has been erased by Time’s remorseless editing of Memory.

Over one summer race-day in 1951, stored in recollections from before the dawn until after dusk, Memory continues to defy Time. The RAC (or British) Grand Prix of that year was staged at Silverstone, still a fairly raw and undeveloped circuit that had only a few years earlier been converted from the perimeter track of a Royal Air Force wartime airfield. Entries for the race included some cars that were likewise raw and undeveloped, some others that had only recently been brought to fruition, some that were clinging ever more precariously to a dominance that had only recently been dominant and would never again be deemed competitive. The supporting event gave more clues to the distant future than anyone present might predict; and beyond the cars, the careers of men – drivers, designers, manufacturers – hung in a balance that was to tip portentously before the day was out.

It was a day that was to begin early for many spectators. Grandstands at Silverstone were as yet few and poorly placed, and the flat terrain appropriate for an air field offered only a limited horizon and a poor view to the standing spectator. Some, arriving during the night or even earlier, would surreptitiously erect private viewing platforms from which in deck-chaired comfort they could see over the crowd. As for the brothers Setright, setting off from London in the dewy chill of 2 a.m. in an open 12/22 Lea Francis already 24 years old, the plan was to drive it right up to the ropes marking the forward boundary of the grassed spectator area. In this plan we succeeded, but as the smoky dawn brightened into the beginnings of a day that promised to be clear and sunny, as the crowd thickened and the marshals multiplied, representations were made to us that we were not doing the decent thing. We observed that the practice of parking cars on the grass twenty or thirty yards behind the ropes was merely a convention, not a rule; but it was cheerfully enough that we reversed the car as much as was politic, for it was yet early enough that our new position would still afford us to an excellent view. A tall Vintage-style open tourer makes a splendid grandstand.

The crowd was more excited by the prospects for the race than by such minor activities. On the first day of practice, the Ferrari driver Gonzalez had done a lap in 1min 43.4 sec, which had been equated to an average speed of 100 mph; what made matters even more exciting was that the practice time achieved by any of the Alfa Romeo team was by Fangio, a whole second slower. Practice on the second day having been slowed by rain – always a midsummer hazard in the English midlands – this was how matters stood on race day, and it promised a race of Titans.It would be a race between Alfa Romeo, an age-old team which had successfully beaten down all challenges since rising from the ashes of war-torn Italy in 1947, and Ferrari, a still young manufacturer making rapid headway and at last able to offer a real challenge.

It would be a race between established drivers renowned throughout Europe, and newcomers recently coming from Argentina and proving themselves competent to challenge the establishment. Since one of them was for Ferrari and the other for Alfa Romeo, it might even prove to be a race between them. Finally -though it seemed a forlorn hope for those British enthusiasts who, after two years of repeated and bitter disappointments, could only hope for a British challenger but could scarcely retain any faith in one – it might just be a race in which the oft-repeated promises made by BRM would be justified.

BRM had not shown up for the first practice session, but had telephoned to say they would be there for the next. They were not there then either, but sent a telegram promising to be at Silverstone for the race itself. At 7 a.m. on race day, the black BRM transporters arrived in the paddock, and the stewards of the meeting agreed that two cars could start – but, since they had done no qualifying practice, they would have to do so from the back of the grid. It seemed the safest place to put hem; the last time a BRM had stood on the starting line there, it had snapped a drive-shaft when the starter’s flag fell. This time, they should not get in anybody’s way.

Indirectly the BRM was responsible for the presence of the crowds which continued to throng into Silverstone as the morning sun rose higher and hotter. Their motivator was Raymond Mays, a star driver of pre-war days, not only an expert at Britain’s short steep hillclimbs (most famously that at Shelsley Walsh) but also a champion of the British flag at selected overseas venues such as Nürburgring. Mays had seen an ambition partially fulfilled when the need for an English racing automobile was met by the ERA. That operation, of which he had been the founder, was a modest one; but there was nothing modest about his post-war ambition, which was to see a British racing motor that could take on and beat the best Grand Prix machinery in the world. All this time and efforts were devoted to this ideal, in pursuit of which he went soliciting help from every imaginable quarter. This missionary zeal made Mays the most significantly influential individual in post-war motor sport. If he were to persuade the BRM’s supporters of the importance of their aid, he had to persuade them of the importance of motor racing itself. This message was taken up and relayed by each of them, growing rapidly into a crusade that swept England, not only in the veneered halls of commerce and the grubby corridors of industry nor even in the specialist motoring press, but also in the popular media. The national newspapers began to take an interest in a sport that they had previously dismissed as the preserve of monied triflers; they promoted race meetings, they promoted racing itself, preaching a new ethos to new crowds who had never known about motor racing at all, who had a decade earlier known little about motors. The crowd was now a different crowd; a motor race was no longer a social occasion. It was already more than a spectacle, it was a shop window for industry; and it was the BRM salesmanship of Raymond Mays that made the British want to succeed.

Already they were on their way; Jaguar had just won the at Le Mans, defeating the assembled might of the French and Italian sports-car manufacturers. Today, while we resorted to our picnics, we could raise our glass or a cup in celebration as the winning C-type did a lap of honour of the circuit, crewed as at Le Mans by Peter Whitehead and Peter Walker. In the afternoon, in the forlorn hope of doing in Grand Prix racing what had just been done in sports cars, both would go faster and fare worse. Before that, before this, a curtain-raiser, a short race to keep the crowd happy; a race for the tiny 500cc cars that had in them the seeds of the British supremacy that was to colour the motor racing from the mid-1950’s to the early 1970’s and as well were the precursors of the modern mid-engined racing car that would displace the classical machines we were due to be seeing this afternoon.

Their origins lay in the ideas of some Bristol enthusiasts who fancied that cheap motor racing might be enjoyed in tine single-seaters powered by half-litre engines of motorcycle origin. For a few years the idea had been spreading rapidly, to the point where the most successful entrants (father Charles the builder, son John the driver) felt encouraged to become the Cooper Car Company and build replicas of their seminal chassis. Most of the field for this day’s racing was made up of Coopers, in a riot of crackling and banging exhausts (straight for the JAP engines, megaphoned for the Nortons) that could be heard from the paddock right across the circuit.

The driver who was to dominate the race had made his name in Coopers; but the athletic young Stirling Moss, destined to dominate so many races to come, was so clearly gifted that he had been sought to give a new rival make, the Kieft, its debut at Goodwood earlier in the year. I had seen him then, and he was obviously an outstanding driver; but it was equally obvious that the Kieft was an outstanding chassis, offering a devastatingly convincing demonstration of how much could be achieved by thoughtful suspension design. It would take some manufacturers years to learn the lesson, but is was well enough repeated here at Silverstone. In practice, Moss had been the first to lap the GP circuit in less than two minutes in a half-litre car; in the race, with a less powerful engine replacing the one he had used then, he ran away from his rivals to a victory that was a as smooth and sure as it was swift.Was there ever such a day as this for coming events to cast their shadows before them? Were there ever, in any single day of motor racing, so many portents to be examined in such a brilliant blaze of light?

It may be that Enzo Ferrari was not much concerned by auguries for the distant future; it was his past which drove him to a furious concentration upon the present. Once a proud and successful racing driver, then a proud and successful manager of the Alfa Romeo racing organisation, Ferrari had quit them a little while before the war, when Wilfredo Ricart, a Spaniard with a quietly clever wit and a strongly theoretical bent was introduced as chief engineering advisor. Now Ferrari wanted to get even with Alfa Romeo, to show them that he was top dog.

He had been trying for years. He had hired Gioacchino Colombo, the man who had designed the Alfetta – the little straigt-8 1.5 litre racer of 1938 which had made Alfa Romeo a force to be reckoned with in voiturette races before the war – to design him a Ferrari which would beat the Tipo 158 Alfa Romeo that the Alfetta had become. Ferrari remembered the initial testing of the Alfetta under his aegis; but there were some things that he forgot.

For a start, he forgot that Colombo had never done anything truly original, and indeed never would until he created the T.251 rear-engined Bugatti and added again to the probabilities of the future. Colombo was a very fine draughtsman, and for most of his career he had been the one who best understood the ideas put to him by Vittorio Jano, the legendary designer of equally legendary Alfa Romeo cars ever since the firm had head-hunted him from the Fiat Technical Office (wellspring of all good engineering in 1992) at Ferrari’s instigation. Jano himself had gone, however: in 1937 he felt obliged to resign, following the failure of the Tipo C 12-cylinder racer. At that time Ricart, still new to the firm, was fully occupied with diesel and aviation projects; poor Colombo was on his own, posted out to Ferrari at Modena and with only history from which to draw.

Ferrari was not qualified to see what Colombo could not, and what he particularly failed to take into account was the brilliant development of the car after both he and Colombo had gone. Much of this work had been directed by Dott.ing.Orazio Satta Puglia, a brilliant double graduate (in mechanical and aeronautical engineering) who had served under the intellectual Ricart and, after the Spaniard’s contract had expired, had become in 1946 manager of the design and experimental departments.

In 1938 the Alfetta engine had given 195 bhp at 7200 rpm, a modest output from eight small cylinders. By 1940, with a new crankshaft and bearings, it had reached 225 at 7500. and this was how Satta inherited it in 1946. He would probably have preferred to work with the design that had been produced as a replacement by Ricart, the elegant flat-12 rear-enginged Tipo 512 with (a tell-tale Ricart speciality) a perfectly located De Dion rear axle; but the damage suffered during air raids late in the war had made it impossible for any of Ricart’s elegantly elaborate prototypes to be revived, and it was the pre-war straigt-8 which would have to serve. Under Satta, the 158 Alfa Romeo won all the Grand Prix they entered (they gave 1949 a miss, partly for want of worthy opposition, partly out of respect for the passing of their drivers, Count Trossi, Achille Varzi, and Jean-Pierre Wimille, the last possibly the best of his time) and such racing as there was took place behind them. Setright had seen the Alfa team here at Silverstone in 1950, so much in command that they never needed to take the slightest chance. I had watched one of France’s valiant Lago Talbots, driven by Yves Giraud-Cabantous, fling itself past them all as they entered the braking zone before Stowe Corner, only to be repassed by them all as, still in line-ahead formation, they accelerated out of the corner in an insolent display of superior power.

Since then, the 158 had become the 159, more powerful than ever. Under Satta’s supervision it ran higher boost pressures and higher rates of revolution, exploiting revised bearings and accelerated overhaul schedules, and in particular relying on enormous overlap of the inlet and exhaust valve events so that a protracted blow-down of alcohol-rich air could affect some internal cooling. This last measure resulted in a fuel consumption that was now heavier than ever: twice as thirsty as the fastest GP cars under the 3-litre formula of 1938-9, three times as thirsty as the even more powerful 5.7-litre GP Mercedes-Benz of 1937, the 1.5-litre Tipo 159 raced at 1.5 miles per gallon; despite increased tankage, refuelling stops were inevitable in a Grand Prix that ran for more than 250 miles.

Some of the unsupercharged 4.5-litre cars that the prevailing Formula equated with 1.5-litres supercharged, notably the beautiful but old-fashioned Talbots that had lately enjoyed a revamping by the elderly Becchia (who had once been a member of that same celebrated Fiat Technical Office), could run through such a race without stopping for fuel. It was the driver Raymond Sommer who told Ferrari that a frugal unsupercharged car was what he should build; it was Ferrari’s assistant engineer Aurelio Lampredi, recently arrived after a frustrating start to his career at Isotta-Frascini, who told Ferrari the same thing over and over again.

Colombo argued the opposite course, insisting that a good supercharged car could only be beaten by a better supercharged car. The little swing-axled V12 Ferrari that he had confected in the late 1940’s was not the car to do it, alas; effective enough against weak sports-car opposition, it was the laughing-stock of GP racing (if only because BRM performance to date had been too painful for laughter), and it appears to have been Lampredi, in a feet-finding exercise, who at least made it a match for the 1948 San Remo Maserati which had been the car to beat when Alfa Romeo were not racing. This he did with two-stage supercharging a De Dion rear axle on a longer chassis, with enough success to make Ferrari feel that he could dispense with Colombo. At last Lampredi had the authority to proceed with his big unblown car, first fielded with a 3.3-litre engine at the Belgian GP of 1950. At this stage, Ferrari was conducting business along lines reminiscent of that Scottish clergyman who began a prayer with the words O thou who art our eternal hope and ultimate hypothesis, not yet convinced by Lampredi’s arguments, he was hedging his bets and entering both types of cars. By September of that year he was no longer in any doubt: reaching its full 4.5-litre in time for the Italian GP, the big unblown Ferrari shattered the Monza lap record in practice, and was faster than all the Alfas except that driven by Fangio.

In the first three races of 1951 season, Alfa Romeo emerged victorious, but their margin of superiority was disappearing. Here now at Silverstone it looked possible that they were about to be beaten at last.

Lampredi’s car was marvellously neat, apparently understated, classically proper. It looked superficially simple, though there was much detail within it that might bear witness to a strictly thoughtful and shrewdly analytical mechanical engineer’s concern for things that were right and repugnance for other things, however supposedly respectable their provenance, that were wrong. In principle, though, the car was merely an expression of Lampredi’s calculation (again apparently simple, but in many ways audacious) of the worth of supercharging. According to his theory of equivalence, the feeble if consistent provision by Nature of atmospheric pressure – a provision of which few but high-altitude aviators and high-ambition motorists had found cause to complain – might serve an engine in lieu of a mechanically intensified atmosphere if that engine had not only three times the displacement but also twice the piston area, as well as parity in mechanical stresses, as its artificially supercharged rival.

To understand the background to this, it is necessary to comprehend one of modern man’s most misleading fallacies. Since the beginning of the century, he has been persuaded that a big engine is necessarily and maybe even proportionally more powerful than a smaller one. Worse still, he had understood that what is big or small is to be measured, not by bulk or mass nor even by piston area (though the British Government, knowing more than it was prepared to admit, made this the basis for motor car taxation for several decades), but by piston deplacement or cylinder capacity. In this, modern man was monstrously wrong, but no amount of theoretical reasoning would make him acknowledge the error of his ways.By trial and error, by legalisation based always on the past but never recognising how the past had shaped the future, car design in general and motor racing in particular had been corrupted. Engine capacity limits had been introduced in racing in the early years before the Great War; after Fiat had introduced the supercharger to GP racing in 1922, such criteria were more than ever obviously inappropriate, but crass modern man had cluing to his beliefs, and ever since then there had been a bewildering succession of regulations purporting to establish some equivalence between the big unblown engine and the little supercharged one. In 1951, as for some years before, these regulations stipulated a supercharged of 1.5-litres piston displacements or a naturally aspirated one of 4.5-litres as notional equals in races of the Grand Prix status.

Lampredi’s proposition was that, by combining a higher level of volumetric efficiency than unsupercharged cars engines had previously enjoyed with a higher level of thermal efficiency than any supercharged engine could be expected to achieve, the balance that had so far been an accident of history could be tilted. His 4.5-litre V12 GP engine did indeed have ample piston area: in fact it had more than any other racing engine in the whole of Grand Prix history, with the sole exception of the 6-litre Auto-Union of 1937. As for thermal efficiency, Lampredi was at pains to secure efficient combustion, for instance by accepting the breathing limitations of valves opposed at an included angle of 60 deg. rather than the conventional 90, the object being to secure a far better shape of combustion space and thereby make a better use of such fuel as was burned therein. Without the gross thermal problems of the blown Alfa engine, without the need for copious internal evaporative cooling of the engine by excessively rich fuelling, the Ferrari should need to carry less weight of fuel. In fact it commonly came to the starting line weighing about 100 lb less than the Alfa Romeo.

Today they were coming to the lines as nearly matched as they had ever been, the Ferrari with about 380 bhp, the Alfa with over 400 but with some certainty of having to spend longer in the pits refuelling. None of that matters now, as the paddocks signals bare and the sun blazes and the excitable but upper-class voices on the public-address system call us all to attention. The race is on, and for the moment it is not between design philosophies and engineers, nor yet between figures from a dynamometer and figures on a stopwatch. It is between figures clad in blue cotton overalls and orange jerseys, sitting up high and well back behind twitching thin-rimmed steering wheels, behind the long louvred bonnets of such chariots as only these demigods in the image of modern man can aspire to ride. Take no account of figures, measure no geometrics: these cars look the colour of blood, sound like the trumpets of doom, smell like brown paper and boot polish; and they go like the devil.

A shock-wave strikes us at our vantage point half-way around the circuit, assaulting our senses as the mass of unleashed cars slams over the skyline, hurtling past us on the fastest straight and braking hard into right-angled right-handed Stowe corner. A blur of vivid colour, a blare of extraordinary noise, and the leaders, - deep red, every one – are past. The pack is more kaleidoscopic in hue, kaleidoscopic in cry: sky blue Talbots, red Maserati’s, and all the suspiciously varied greens affected by the British, who are convinced that they have never won a Grand Prix since 1924 because the national racing colour, green, is unlucky. How well will this superstition be served by the milky jade tint, as nearly not as green as it can be, affected by the BRMs? They made a good start from their back row, and already are minnowing through the shoal, in sigh if not yet in reach of the Italians now hurtling down the next short straight towards Club corner, now drifting through it, now rocketing up the next long straight to vanish kinking into Abbey Curve.

When they have been past a few couple of times, when the traffic had become a stream instead of a jam, it is possible to take stock. In the van are the two Argentinians, unknown in Europe three years earlier and now seemingly unbeatable in Europe. Juan Manuel Fangio had his fortieth birthday two or three weeks ago, and is forcing the Alfa to the limits imposed by its still heavy fuel load. José Froilan Gonzalez is 29, so heavily built that he seems to fill the cockpit of his Ferrari, wrestling it in a style so lurid that it seems shocking. So is his pace, yet he is driving the older 12-plug Ferrari, not the recently developed 24-plug version enjoyed by his team-mates.

Impassive and authoritarian is the style of Giuseppe Farina. In 1950 it earned him the first World Championship of Drivers (an institution that would in time corrupt the aims and ideals of motor racing) leading the Alfa Romeo team. Today he has the only Tipo 159 to be graced with a De Dion rear suspension instead of swinging half axles; but we cannot tell whether he is visibly steadier because of that, or because he is Farina, or because he is not going as fast as Fangio. He is nevertheless very fast indeed, apparently poised to strike should Fangio encounter trouble; yet he is waging his own battle with a driver twelve years his junior, Alberto Ascari. Ferrari’s number one driver at the age 33. Ascari added his own gifts to the instruction he received from Luigi Villoresi, another star drier who, like Farina, is in his middle forties; today the pupil has his mentor in close attendance, driving another big Ferrari and sparring with rugged Felice Bonetto in number three Alfa Romeo.Number four is driven by Consalvo Sanesi, another pre-war driver (he won the Tobruk-Tripoli race in 1939), but he is not having a good race today. He is forced to check his stride when a spinning Talbot blocks his path; Gonzalez II Cabezon, the Bull of the Pampas, comes up from behind and puts a front wheel over one of the oil-drums marking the edge of the course as he dodges the accident, and nearly has one of his own as the nose of the Ferrari bounces high in the air. He finds himself on the wrong side of the corner’s boundary-markers, but there is no stopping him, scorching down the alley between drums and haybales, he re-joins the track at the end of the corner, emerging in front of Sanesi.

Also in front of Sanesi by mid-race is Reg Parnell in one of the BRM’s. I had seen his burly driver battle through pouring rain at Goodwood, just a few months earlier, to stay in front of the San Remo Maserati driven with characteristically ice-cold accuracy by the Siamese prince whose name, Birabongse Bhanuban, was familiarly shortened to the nom-de-geurre ‘B.Bira’. Whether Parnell kept his BRM just ahead to avoid risks, or by taking them, could not be certain then; today he is clearly fighting hard, as is Peter Walker two places astern.Making one of the most beautiful noises ever heard in motor racing, the BRM is good but not good enough. Provided the drivers can avoid letting the engine falter, its steeply rising power curve gives more urge at its peak than even the Alfa Romeo musters. The 1.5-litre engine, weighing more than that of the 4.5-litre Ferrari, bears an uncanny resemblance to the V16 Alfa Romeo designed by Ricart for the 3-litre formula but overtaken by the war; the essential difference is that its designer Peter Berthon had chosen to use a centrifugal supercharger designed by Rolls-Royce but – such is the bickering and bad management and general cross-purpose within the BRM organisation – not allowed to operate as R-R (world experts in supercharging since 1928) had intended.

As for the rest of the car, its chassis bears an unsettling resemblance to Berthon’s unsatisfactory E-type ERA, itself a pre-war copy of the 1938 Mercedes-Benz chassis with front suspension like that of the contemporary Auto-Union. The Alfetta thrives with the same kind of front suspension, but the distortion of the BRM chassis is visible; compounded by roll and concomitant adverse chamber of the front wheel, it makes life harder than ever for the skinny tyres. The car is slower through bends than its rivals, and the drivers are fighting furious feedback in the steering. We are not to know at the time, but as well as blistering hands they are suffering burning legs and feet in those searing cockpits.A simpler problem waylays Ascari. The gearbox of the Ferrari is its weakest feature, and his fails. A subtler one delays Alfa Romeo drivers when they stop for fuel and fresh tyres: a revised wheel design had made their hubs reluctant to part company from the car, losing time that had been terribly hard-earned. The Ferrari, fuel-efficient or not, also has to make a pit stop for fresh tyres, but Ferrari did not bother to bring their pressure-refuelling equipment; instead they top up the tank with a couple of churns. Gonzalez actually got out of his car expecting that he should have to hand it over to Ascari as he had done 13 days earlier at Reims; but his merit was recognised, and he was waved back into the car.He shows no desire to relax the pace, even though he has built up a substantial lead. Behind him, Fangio fights like a demon, holding his Alfa in long and terrifying slides, one rear wheel pattering as though undamped. Farina too is driving ferociously, until on his 75th lap he comes past with flames and a long plume of oily black smoke issuing from his 159A. Faltering, he manages Stowe and Club corners, everything but the fire and smoke ebbing away as the car slows on its way up the slope towards retirement on the verge near Abbey Curve. Later we were told that it was a clutch failure; such euphemisms are not uncommon.

Fifty seconds behind as the last of the 90 laps draws near, Fangio is still tearing at the sizzling tarmac. Gonzalez is tearing up the pages of history, completing the 269 miles of the race in 2h 42min 18.2sec to average 96.11 mph and to break what was the best-maintained monopoly in history of Grand Prix racing – except that the fastest lap of the race was credited to the Alfa Romeo of Farina in 1min 44 sec at 99.99 mph.

The rest of the results tell many stories. Parnell and Walker, fifth and seventh in agonizing heat, sandwiched Sanesi’s Alfa Romeo between them, which looks impressive: on the other hand, Walker finished only 34 seconds ahead of Brain Shaw-Taylor driving a thoroughly pre-war ERA. Behind that old-fashioned machine came a 4.5-litre Ferrari entered by Vandervell and driven by Peter Whitehead: a year later, despite having Gonzalez at the wheel, it would be trashed at Goodwood by a simple 2-litre Bristol-engined Copper driven by J. M. Hawthorn, a new star raising so rapidly that within another year he would be winning a GP in the Ferrari team. And what of the theory of economical unblown big engines keeping going well enough? Talbots finished 10th, 12th, 13th, the last of them (and the last finisher to be classified) being the Belgian trumpeter Johnny Claes, who at least had the distinction of putting in the fastest Talbot lap in 1min 54 sec. Not classified but still running, having managed 75 of the 90 laps, was Kelly’s Alta, to remind us of the day when some participants entered purely for the sake of the sport.

Those who meant strictly business hat to do some hard thinking afterwards. Alfa Romeo, who were beaten again by Ferrari in the next two Grandes Epreuves (Gonzalez’ feat was rather like Bannister’s four-minute mile: once he had done it, others found that they could also do it). brought an even more frantically powerful 159 to the last major race of the season, at Pedralbes: in it, Fangio managed to win (mainly because Ferrari had tyre troubles), and with that victory went his first championship. Alfa Romeo promptly quit while still on top; race organizers, despairing after yet another poor chowing by BRM in Spain and seeing no other team likely to prevent a Ferrari walkover, promptly demoted the Grand Prix of the next two years to rely on Formula two cars (thanks to Lampredi and Ascari, Ferrari had very nearly a walk-over anyway), and all continuity was broken.

Grand Prix racing would change its tune, its colours, its face and its purpose, to a greater extent in the coming years than ever in the 45 that had passed since the first such event in 1906. Never again would a supercharged car take part – except in a sporting but far from serious gesture by Taraschi with a 750cc Giaur at Rome in 1954. The volumetric efficiency of unblown engines would be quickly and greatly improved, using techniques familiar to those who worked with motorcycle engines (in other words, the 500cc crowd) but better developed by Lampredi than by anybody else. The commercial effectiveness of top-flight motor racing would be much more vigorously exploited; the average age of drivers would be much reduced; the relevance to real life of their cars, and of the circuits on which they drove them, would be seriously reduced. The seeds of all these things, and of so many more, were sown on that fateful day in mid-Juli 1951 when the sky stayed blue and the sun burned strongly and the pulse ran fast at Silverstone.

It was too much to take in that time. Content that we had seen an incredibly exciting race, with a refreshingly interested result, we brothers Setright let the crowds unjam themselves from the fields surrounding the circuit while we idled some hours away with friends from Lagonda Car Club. The skies were softly darkening when at last we set off for home, with the engine’s gratifying warmth coming up between the floorboards to mollify the cool night air; and the dangers of being thoroughly and delightfully tired were displayed when, for perhaps forty yards (which could take quite a while in that old Lea-Francis), I fell asleep at the wheel. No harm was done, except to my self-respect, so that was one more valuable lesson to credit to a remarkably full day.

He that outlives his day, and comes safe at home,

Will stand a tip-toe when his day is named -

He that shall live this day, and see old age…

Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,

But he’ll remember with advantages

What feats he saw that day!