For the burgeoning Formula Two category for 1½-liter cars, French star driver Jean Behra based a new racing car of his own on Porsche components. In 1959, it showed its class by beating the factory Porsches in the year’s biggest F2 race.
Built in Modena, Italy, in 1959, for French racing champion Jean Behra, the Behra-Porsche was a handsomer and, in its time, more successful car than Porsche’s own first open-wheeled effort. “I like Porsches very much, above all because I had such great successes with them last year,” said Behra, explaining why Ferrari’s number one team driver would take the trouble to build his own car. “I’d like to try out a few things I’ve thought up on the basis of my racing experience in recent years. This project with the Formula Two car is tremendous fun for me!”
At a time when Formula One cars used 2½-liter engines, Formula Two was nicely placed at 1½ liters. Introduced in 1957, it quickly picked up speed thanks to the wide availability of suitable power plants from the likes of Coventry Climax, Alfa Romeo, Borgward, and indeed Porsche. Interest picked up as well when it became known that in 1961 the mandated engine size for Formula One would be 1½ liters.
The basis of Behra’s Formula Two car was a set of 718 RSK components obtained on very favorable terms from Ferry Porsche. The RSK was advanced enough in its suspension, especially at the rear, to be suitable in this role. This is the most credible account, although some reports credit the use of a complete RSK, 718-016, as the basis for the Behra-Porsche. However, recent restoration of the car suggests that this was not the case. Mysteriously its chassis plate is that of a 550.
Behra took his RSK parts to Valerio Colotti, a young engineer who had left Maserati to set up his own design office, in Modena, at the end of 1958. This was the Studio Tecnica Meccanica, known as Tec-Mec for short. One of its first projects was the Tec-Mec Formula 1 car, which is more successful in vintage racing that it was in its heyday. Colotti was perhaps best known as a maker of racing transaxles.
Following Behra’s suggestions, Colotti prepared drawings of a new frame to unite the Porsche running gear and a body to clothe the result, which its initiator named the Behra-Porsche. Although a tubular lattice design like the RSK’s, the new frame was a unique Colotti creation.
Inevitably the Colotti design had some attributes in common with the Porsche works single-seater, especially the tubular structure of the front bay, between the suspension and the dash. The RSK’s 82.6-inch wheelbase was kept. The front torsion bars and their carrying tubes were shortened by about five inches to reduce the front track to 46.9 inches.
At the rear, the Behra-Porsche’s track was reduced by two inches to 47.6 inches. Rear suspension remained the original RSK design, with low-pivot swing axles located by Watt linkages. Although these were heavier, bulkier and harder to adapt to an open-wheeled auto than the semi-trailing wishbones at the rear of the single-seater that Porsche was building, Colotti made a good fist of it. In fact, he put the coil/damper mounting platforms outside the frame instead of inside so that the main tubular structure could be narrower for strength and better body lines.
Valerio Colotti and “Jeannot” Behra gave their improvisation the look of a thoroughbred with an oil-cooler inlet in its pointed nose, a distinctive sharp peak line ahead of the windscreen, shapely bulges above its carburettors and screened air inlets in the tail. Its shell was hammered out of aluminum by one of Modena’s many artisans while an ex-Maserati mechanic rebuilt the chassis. The workshop of another former Maserati man, Giorgio Neri, was the site of the car’s final assembly, supported by Behra’s personal mechanic Auguste Stocklin.
Behra’s aim was to have the car ready for a Formula Two race at Pau on May 18, 1959. However, the project was coming along well enough, Behra decided, to enter it for the Monaco GP eight days earlier. This was for Formula One cars but F2 entries were allowed to take part. However, they had to qualify among the 16th fastest cars, this being the maximum number of cars that were then allowed to compete on the twisty two-mile circuit.
There was no time to paint the Behra-Porsche before the race in Monte Carlo. It missed Thursday practice and arrived on Friday to be driven by Behra’s choice, Maria-Teresa de Filippis, a relative newcomer to Grand Prix racing although with experience of the Monaco circuit from a qualifying attempt the year before. Getting under 1:45 was the bogey, but at first she could not improve on 1:49. A handicap was the RSK gearbox, with only four synchronized ratios and “crash” engagement of low gear, which was needed on the tightest corners.
Finally, Maria-Teresa reduced her time to 1:47.8, which did not threaten the man on the bubble’s 1:44.8. It was her last attempt at Grand Prix qualification. Behra, who was in the front row and fastest Ferrari qualifier for the race, offered his F2 car’s cockpit to Porsche’s hill-climb star Edgar Barth, but as a newcomer to the circuit he was unable to better the best time of de Filippis. The Behra-Porsche sat out the race while her owner retired his Ferrari at quarter-distance.
Pau, on May 18, was destined to be one of only two races in which the great French driver personally piloted his Behra-Porsche. “Much to Behra’s continual regret,” wrote Denis Jenkinson, “Enzo Ferrari would not give him permission to drive the Porsche in Formula Two races. While he could not stop Behra running the car and lending it to people, the whole project was not received with enthusiasm at Maranello.”
With his own Formula Two car having been wrecked at Monaco a week earlier, along with the first works Porsche single-seater, Enzo Ferrari granted Behra permission to race his special on Pau’s twisty street circuit. Only a tenth of a second in arrears of the fastest practice time, he put it in the middle of the front row for the start. On the fourth lap he took the lead, only to spin and bend a wheel on the wet track. Behra spent a frantic five minutes in his pit searching for a replacement, then set the race’s fastest lap while pressing hard—too hard—to get back in the running. He spun and bent two more rims but kept going to place fifth in spite of the delays.
The Pau performance proved that with a world-class driver at its wheel the Behra-Porsche was one seriously fast Formula Two car. The best outing enjoyed by the rakish-looking French-blue car was in the biggest F2 race of the year at Reims on July 5, 1959. Staged after the French GP, 23 cars started a contest that was seen as a preview of the Grand Prix competition coming when the 1½-liter Grand Prix Formula took effect in 1961. The Behra-Porsche was driven by Germany’s Hans Herrmann, to whom Behra said, “You drive it, Hans. You’ll get more out of it.”
His was not the decisive voice, however, for Porsche’s Huschke von Hanstein also had a say in the selection. This could well have been the result of a likely deal between Behra and Porsche to cover the cost of a fresh drive train for the demanding and important French race.
Huschke had lined up Briton Colin Davis when Herrmann — a notorious oversleeper — was delayed in getting to practice. Whoever was fastest in training, Huschke said, would race the car. The canny Herrmann arranged for a friend to time the laps and stand in advance of the pits, where he was to lift the front of his red sweater if Hans were the faster. “Then when I roared by after a few laps,” said Hans, “he had taken it off completely and was waving it in the air!”
Herrmann gave the car one hell of a ride. He set practice times faster than the works single-seater Porsches. In broiling heat he fought hard for the lead in the race with Stirling Moss’s Cooper-Borgward. “On lap four,” wrote Denis Jenkinson, “Herrmann and Moss were side by side, where they stayed for the next eight laps in a typical Reims circuit dice, Moss being quicker round the back part of the circuit but the Porsche gaining on maximum speed and braking, in spite of its old-fashioned drum brakes. On this very fast circuit its performance was a tribute to the aerodynamic ideas of Colotti and Behra.
“The battle for the lead finished when Herrmann took the escape road at Thillois,” added Jenkinson, “which left Moss unchallenged in first place.” A front brake had finally seized and thrown Hans into a skid. The Behra-Porsche finished 12.6 seconds behind in the 129-mile race and almost a minute ahead of Jo Bonnier in the Porsche factory’s F2 car.
Herrmann drove the Behra-Porsche once more in an F2 race at Rouen on July 12. “I still remember a scene that was typical of my friend Jean,” said Herrmann. “When I indicated before the start that the mirrors needed adjusting, he told me with gestures, ‘Oh, that, the mirrors. We’d rather take them off altogether. You should just look forward and win!’” Starting from pole position Hans was contending for third place when a seized gearbox forced him to retire.
Already strained, Jean Behra’s relationship with Ferrari was not improved by the way the Behra-Porsche had handily defeated the latest F2 car from Maranello at Reims. At Ferrari, said team driver Phil Hill, “Behra had never been happy with us. He resented Tony Brooks as a Number One, was uncomfortable at the performance of a newcomer like Dan Gurney, complained about always being given the slowest car—which was simply not true—and lost his temper more often than the Italians, which is going some!” The upshot was that Jean Behra and Ferrari parted company that July, after which he was free to drive the cars of his choice.
On July 26, 1959, Behra drove his blue Behra-Porsche in the Auvergne GP on the Clermont-Ferrand circuit, a mini-Nürburgring in the heart of France. In the curtain-raising two-hour sports-car race for cars of up to 2-liters he dominated the field in his personal Porsche RSK, setting fastest lap. An incipient fault caused a brief pit stop, however, culminating in a broken cam follower with ten minutes to go that dropped him to second at the finish.
From row two with his Behra-Porsche at the start of the 26-lap Formula Two race, Behra established himself in a clear second place behind the dominant Cooper-Borgward of Stirling Moss. “On lap 16,” reported Denis Jenkinson, “Behra stopped out on the circuit when a petrol pipe to his left-hand carburettor split and he had to watch the whole field go by while he made a temporary repair with a piece of plastic tubing from a breather pipe.” The subsequent pit stop for a permanent repair set him well back. Though only 12that the finish, he duelled with Moss for fastest-lap honors, losing narrowly.
“Jeannot” and Auguste Stocklin prepared—impeccably as usual—both his RSK and his single-seater for the German Grand Prix at the Avus in Berlin on August 2. Tragically, the plucky Frenchman was killed outright in the sports car race that was the warm-up for the Formula One event, for which he had practiced among several outclassed, but plucky, F2 entries.
The popular Behra’s death at only 38 years spread gloom over the weekend. His car was withdrawn from the Grand Prix together with the lone works F2 Porsche as a sign of respect for one of the Zuffenhausen team’s most successful drivers.
Taken over by the American Camoradi team formed by Lloyd “Lucky” Casner, Behra’s special was entered for the Argentine Grand Prix on February 7, 1960. Although the race, on the city’s shade-free municipal Autodromo, started at 4:30 p.m. the ground temperature was still at 100ºF. Drivers happily slowed at the tightest corner to have buckets of water poured over them.
Starting the unique racer from 16th on the grid, thrusting American Masten Gregory made a pit stop to change his right rear wheel, his team using an air wrench to speed up the process. His Behra-Porsche placed 12th among 14 finishers, respectable for its 1.5 liters against the 2.5-liter GP cars.
The teams were invited to stay on for the Ciudad Buenos Aires Grand Prix, a Formula Libre event strangely held in a park at Cordoba, 430 miles upcountry from the city in the 158-mile race’s baptismal name. “When we saw the circuit we just couldn’t believe it,” said one entrant. “Around the city boulevards with trees at the kerbside and a huge statue slap in the middle of the road at one point. We asked the guide which side the cars were meant to go round it and he just grinned and said, ‘Either side, ees up to da driver.’”
While the Walker, Ferrari and Centro Sud teams declined the privilege of participation, 18 cars mustered for practice at Cordoba. Among them was the Camoradi Behra-Porsche, which attracted a distinguished driver. Although he had retired from the sport a year and a half earlier, Juan Manuel Fangio was eager to try the little Porsche special on the streets of Cordoba to see what these new-fangled mid-engined cars were all about.
Wearing an unfamiliar white helmet, Fangio took a number of practice laps and was credited with a time of 1:30.0. This was six-tenths of a second less than Masten Gregory recorded in official practice to be ranked 13thfor the start. A chaotic race, in heat even worse than in Buenos Aires, saw only two cars complete the full 75 laps, with five ranked as finishers. Numerous retirements included the Behra-Porsche after 17 laps.
Camoradi’s Behra-Porsche rested until the German GP, in July of 1960, which was run on the Nürburgring’s South Loop for Formula Two cars. Both Hans Herrmann and Olivier Gendebien tried it during training but chose other cars for an important race in which the blue racer really should have participated.
For Behra’s hybrid, the 1960 season ended in September with a Camoradi entry in the Italian Grand Prix, the last race in Europe for the 2.5-liter Formula One. Run over the combined road and banked-oval circuits, the race was boycotted by British teams on the grounds of the bumpy oval so the Monza organizers were desperate for entries.
Driven by America’s Fred Gamble, the Behra-Porsche was running in eighth place as first non-works entry when it slowed to a stop in Monza’s South Turn, its fuel pumps ticking impotently. Although the car’s builders had assured Camoradi that it carried enough fuel to finish the race non-stop, the team had added a precautionary churn at a splash-and-dash pit stop. However, the fuel system didn’t pick it up. Running back to his pit, Gamble collected enough fuel to get going just in time to be awarded 10th and last place, albeit nine laps in arrears.
After brief ownership by a young American, Ray Colet, who had loaned it back to Camoradi for the Italian GP, this unique car languished outside the customer service department at Werk I, in Zuffenhausen. In retrospect, it was surprising that the Behra-Porsche—which had shown such commendable pace in 1959 and ’60—wasn’t picked up by an enterprising team or individual for the new 1.5-liter Formula 1 of 1961. With some development, including a gearbox like those in the works cars and good preparation, it could have made a more-than-decent account of itself.
In 1961, however, it was brought to America and purchased by Vic Meinhardt of Merrick, Long Island. Meinhardt raced it successfully, winning the SCCA Formula Libre Championship in 1963. Vic sold the unique racer to Dick Souan, from whom it was bought, by Philip Sadler, in 1969. A later owner, restorer and racer of the Behra-Porsche was Murray Smith. The blue car now resides in Florida’s Collier Collection in impeccably restored condition, liveried as it was when Hans Herrmann showed its furious pace at Reims. It is a fitting tribute to Jean Behra, one of the greatest drivers of the era.
