There was never any doubt that Chris Amon was an exceptional talent. Mauro Forghieri, Ferrari’s chief designer for almost 20 years, put him in the same sparsely populated category as the legendary Jim Clark. But even though he was in Formula One for 14 years and a works Ferrari driver for three of them, Chris never won a world championship Grand Prix. Why? Circumstances, bad luck, mechanical ills, pit mistakes, coincidence, misfortune, all of those.
From humble beginnings, Amon, who was from New Zealand’s North Island, showed promise in a 2.5-liter Cooper-Climax at Sandown Park in 1963, when he was spotted by Reg Parnell, who invited the 19-year-old to test drive a Lola-Climax F1 at Goodwood. Amon felt really at home in the car and was soon making top-six finishes in lesser events, like the Glover Trophy and Aintree 200.
Chris’s career rumbled on in uncompetitive cars for a while until he won the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans with Bruce McLaren in a Ford GT40. A victory that earned him an invitation to join Ferrari for 1967 and, not unreasonably, the young New Zealander felt he was on his way to the top. Lorenzo Bandini crashed at the chicane during that year’s Grand Prix of Monaco and died soon afterwards. A sickened Chris was forced to continually pass the blazing wreckage of his team leader’s car, before eventually driving his Ferrari 312 into 3rd place. Amon scored a 4th in Holland and another 3rd in the Grand Prix of Belgium at Spa-Francorchamps, where his more experienced team mate Mike Parkes crashed and seriously fractured his right leg. So with Ludovico Scarfiotti in the doldrums, Chris lowered himself gingerly into the hot seat as Ferrari’s number-one driver at the tender age of 24. He fought some memorable F1 battles with the Brabham-Repcos of Black Jack and Denny Hulme and the Lotus 49s of Jim Clark and Graham Hill, but he never won. A couple of 3rds in the British and German Grands Prix were the best he could do.
And then the New Zealander was lumbered with the freakish bad luck that would follow him like the dreaded albatross. He was catching the two 49s at Watkins Glen when his oil pressure went and Clark managed to shuffle across the line to win, despite a broken rear suspension. In Mexico, the last race of the season, Chris shared the front row of the grid with the Scot, whom he chased with a vengeance and then ran out of fuel just before the end.
The 1968 Tasman Cup series proved a shot in the arm for the unlucky Amon, who won Pukekohe and Levin before Jim Clark’s Lotus 49T snapped up victories at Wigram, Surfers Paradise, Warwick Farm and Sandown Park to win the series. But anyone who saw Jim and Chris cover 55 nose-to-tail laps at Sandown could not help but conclude that, on his day, Amon was a match for the great Scot. Clark won by just a tenth of a second from the New Zealander.
Amon finished 4th behind the Lotus-Fords of Clark and Hill and Jochen Rindt’s Brabham-Repco on New Year’s Day at Kyalami, but his bad luck kicked in again at the 1968 Grand Prix of Spain, which he started from pole and was leading when his fuel pump blew a fuse on lap 58. He and his 312 were way ahead of John Surtees in the Honda at Spa when he was baulked by Jo Bonnier’s dawdling McLaren-BRM and ended up behind Big John. And that wasn’t the worst of it: The Honda sent a stone flying through the radiator of his Ferrari and Chris into retirement. Amon chose the wrong tires for a wet French GP and his differential went at the Nürburgring. At Monza he was lying 2nd when his car slipped on oil and crashed badly. He was leading by one minute in Canada when his transmission broke.
The circus moved Down Under again for the Tasman Cup at the end of 1968 where Chris got a major morale boost. He won the series in the Ferrari 246T with victories at Pukekohe, Levin, Lakeside and Sandown Park. But glory in Oz and NZ did not translate into glory in Europe. The new V-12 in his 1969 Ferrari 312 turned out to be less powerful than the 1968 unit, and the best Amon could do was a 3rd at Zandvoort. The rest was a mish-mash of mechanical failures and repeated retirements.
Things got so bad that Ferrari temporarily withdrew from F1 to develop the 312B and Chris signed for the fledgling March, a disastrous decision. Jacky Ickx won the Grands Prix of Austria and Canada in the new Ferrari and Amon’s March 701 did not come good until mid-season, when he scored 2nds in Belgium and France: Still no victory, though. But he did win the nonchampionship International Trophy race at Silverstone by 10 seconds from Jackie Stewart in another March.
Chris left March for Matra at the end of 1971. The car’s chassis was brilliant but the engine was not, although he did have a lucky win in the nonchampionship (again) Grand Prix of Argentina. He really looked like he was going to do it in the 1972 Grand Prix of France, which he led until he had a puncture on lap 19. He got back into the race in 8th place, broke the lap record clawing his way up to 3rd, where he stayed until the end.
Next, Chris made an even worse career decision, this time to move to Tecno for 1973. He came equal last in the championship, and it was only his great talent that scored the team a point with an incredible 6th at Zolder.
By the end of 1973, Amon firmly believed that the only way to get out of his motor racing nose dive was to build his own car, but the pale blue Amon AF1 was hopelessly underfinanced. Its best performance was to qualify 20th, but not start at Monaco. So Chris packed that in and drove a BRM P201 in Canada and the United States, but that was a flop, too. And all a few rides got him in Morris Nunn’s Ensign N175 and N176 in 1975 and 1976 was a 5th place in the Spanish GP, before Amon decided to retire and move back to New Zealand in 1977.
