For five years, the Monaco Grand Prix played host to the cut-throat world of Formula Junior racing. The Grand Prix Monaco Junior was a prestigious event – the one that everybody wanted to win – with its victors going on to careers in the very top echelons of motorsport. Michael Oliver recounts the story of this brief but hectic series of races held in the Principality.
Formula Junior had originally been conceived by Count Giovanni (Johnny) Lurani and the Sporting Commission of the Automobile Club of Italy as an affordable means of bringing on new Italian single-seater talent. However, the idea gained widespread acceptance within Europe to the point where manufacturers from Italy, France, Switzerland and the UK undertook to build cars, and so it became an international formula almost by accident.
It was a simple and affordable concept, which explains why it captured the imagination of so many drivers. Cars were required to be open-wheel, single-seaters and to use engines derived from series production cars, homologated by the FIA. The maximum cubic capacity was originally fixed at 1,000 cc, although an amendment to permit the option of using a 1,100 cc engine with a weight penalty was added before the formula came into existence. The required capacity could be achieved by increasing or decreasing the original volume or by changing the bore or stroke of the unit. Finally, only commercially available fuel could be used. Early machines were nearly all front-engined, despite the fact that Cooper had already shown the way to go in the future with its nimble rear-engined racers. In terms of cost, a good Formula Junior car cost around the same as a GT car of the same capacity and about half the price of a 750 cc sports car.
The inaugural Grand Prix Monaco Junior was staged in 1959 the year after the FIA formally approved proposals for the new formula. The format for the Monaco race, as it remains for the Formula 3 race which replaced it, was for the race to be held on Saturday. Practice for the Juniors was held on Thursday and Friday. As it had been developed in Italy, it was no surprise that Italian manufacturers, led by Stanguellini, were the early pace-setters. The 1959 Monaco race, held over 50 laps, was dominated by front-engined Stanguellinis, taking the three front-row slots on the grid and a 1-2-3 at the chequered flag. The top three finished in their starting order in what was, by all accounts, a quite processional affair, with the Swiss driver Michael May leading home Italian Giovanni Alberti and Argentinian Juan Manuel Bordeu, a protégé of Fangio at the time. The first non-Stanguellini finisher was the fourth-placed Raineri of a young Lorenzo Bandini, who would later turn in some strong performances at Monaco as a Grand Prix pilot before meeting his death there in 1967.
The pace of these cars was quite impressive, with May turning a 1m and 57.2s pole lap compared with the pole for the Grand Prix (Stirling Moss in a Cooper-Climax) of 1m 39.6s and the first three all beat two minutes. In the race, May went even quicker, lapping in 1m 54.5s, which was only 10 seconds slower than the slowest qualifier for the following day’s Grand Prix.
Only a year later they were circulating nearly 10 seconds faster, with Jim Clark putting his works Lotus 18 on pole in 1m 45s. But how the tables had been turned in the space of 12 months! The front-engined Italian cars were completely outclassed by the new breed of rear-engined British racers, led by Lotus, Cooper and Lola. The previous year’s pole-sitter and race winner, May, was only 12th fastest in 1m 54.8s; second finisher Alberti, scraped into the race on the last row of the grid in 21st with a 1m 56.7s, and Bordeu was only fractionally faster, 18th on 1m 56.3s. The fastest Italian machine, Colin Davis’s Osca, was nearly eight seconds off the pace. Clark shared the front row with his teammate Trevor Taylor and another Briton, Henry Taylor, in a BMC Austin-powered Cooper.
At the start of the 50-lap race, Clark roared off into the lead, setting such a pace that he lapped May by the ninth lap. However, an increasingly persistent misfire began to cause problems, and his lead fell from around 10 seconds to just 4. It seemed to right itself at about half distance, but cruelly, it returned with only five laps to go, causing the engine to stop altogether. Although Clark got the car going again, Henry Taylor and five others had passed him in the meantime, and his chance of victory had gone. The Cooper driver ran out a comfortable winner, well ahead of Peter Ashdown’s Lola-Ford and the Team Lotus cars of Clark’s teammates Trevor Taylor and Pete Arundell. Although he was never truly pushed, the Scot set the fastest lap of the race at 1m 45.8s, nearly nine seconds quicker than the previous lap record.
Photo: LAT
Trevor Taylor remembers that year well, as the Lotus team stopped off on the way down to Monaco for a Formula Junior race at Aix-les-Bains and he had been lucky to escape serious injury when a spectator footbridge collapsed onto the track only seconds after he had passed under it. In the ensuing melee, as the pursuing field crashed into the collapsed bridge, one driver was killed and several spectators injured. Taylor remembers that money was tight by the time they got to Monaco: “When we got down there, we were quite poor then and we were sleeping in the transporter on the quayside! We’d only had just enough money to get down there, and we had to do something in the race to get back home again…finishing third got us some money.”
So many cars turned up for the 1961 edition of the race that the organizers had to change the format to two heats of 16 laps and a final over a reduced length of 24 laps for the top eleven finishers from each heat. Among the entries were the works Lotus-Ford 20s of Trevor Taylor, Mike McKee and Pete Arundell and Sir John Whitmore’s privately-entered Austin-powered Lotus. Lola fielded a three-strong works team of Pete Ashdown, John Hine and Dick Prior, while the Tyrrell Racing Organziation, yet to become a major force in Formula 1, entered South Africans John Love and Tony Maggs in their Cooper-Austins. Jim Clark was present but only for the main event of the weekend, having already followed the path anticipated by the originators of Formula Junior and moved up to the Lotus Formula 1 team.
Other interesting names on the grid included: 1959 victor May, this time at the wheel of a De Tomaso; the German Gerhard Mitter, who would go on to be a top hillclimb exponent; the Swiss driver Jo Siffert, who went on to win two Grand Prix; and one B.C. (Bernie) Ecclestone, now “God” in Formula 1. More obscure entrants included an Austrian ski champion by the name of Kurt Bardi-Barry and the intriguingly titled Count Stephen Ouvaroff of Australia.
Heat 1 saw Trevor Taylor take the chequered flag first, followed by Love, McKee, Arundell, Siffert and Whitmore. In the second heat, Maggs won from the three works Lolas and David Piper in a Lotus. In the final, Taylor jumped into the lead but spun on the first lap: “On the warm-up lap, somebody dropped all their oil at the Tabac corner and the marshalls put all this cement down – washed the track with it to dry the oil off. I was in the lead and first around the corner, and I hit the cement and understeered straight off and into the wall. I pulled into the pits, and there was no bodywork damage but it had bent the front stub axle. I went out again, but the car was just uncontrollable.”
This probably represented Taylor’s best ever chance to win the race and to capitalize on the clear supremacy of the combination of Lotus chassis and Ford Cosworth engine: “It was a pity because, that particular time, it would have been a walkover for us – that’s the way the car was built. The Lotus at that particular time was a very quick car. It was a winning car anyway. With Mike Costin and Keith Duckworth (Cosworth Engineering) we used to get the best engines, so we knew that we were either going to finish first or second. I know it might sound a bit ‘big-headed,’ but that’s the way it was!”
Taylor’s exit left Love in front, ahead of Arundell and Maggs. The leaders were very evenly matched; although Arundell nipped into the lead on the fifth lap, he could not pull away and was passed again on lap 14. After leading for four more laps, Love relinquished the lead, this time for good, to Arundell, who ran out the winner from the South African and his teammate Maggs, followed by McKee and Siffert. Taylor had the compensation of setting a new lap record of 1m 45.3s.
There was another quantum leap in lap speeds in 1962, led yet again by Lotus. Pete Arundell was back again, joined this time in the works team by Alan Rees (later to go on to be the AR of Formula 1 constructors March and Arrows) and former motorcycle racer Bob Anderson. By this time, Trevor Taylor and his trademark yellow helmet and overalls had followed in Clark’s wheel tracks to join him in the works Lotus Grand Prix team. This time Ford power overwhelmed the opposition, filling the first nine places in the final. Arundell’s Lotus 22 led home the privately entered Lotus of Mike Spence and the works machine of Anderson, setting a sizzling lap record of 1m 41.6s, faster than either Bonnier or Maggs had qualified for the following day’s Grand Prix!
The final Formula Junior race to be held at Monaco was in 1963. Arundell was back again in search of a hat trick for both him and the works Lotus team, now run by Ron Harris, with Mike Spence and John Fenning as teammates. He duly won the first heat to gain a front-row grid position for the final, while his team-mates both spun out in accidents entering the Casino section at the top of the hill – caught out by the adverse camber on the outside of the bend. Fenning: “I came up the hill, turned left, and I must have had my brain in neutral because I was over the crown and I just lost it and tapped the barrier. It didn’t mark the car at all, but it had these funny steering arms on the top of the Herald uprights, and it twisted the upright and it wouldn’t steer because it kept lurching from left to right. So I parked it, sat in the stand, and about five or six laps later, Mike lost it in the same place and so he joined me in the stand!”
Alongside Arundell, on the front row for the final, was the Australian driver Frank Gardner (who had won the second heat at a faster race average than Arundell) at the wheel of his privately entered Brabham-Ford BT6. However, it was not to be the Englishman’s year: the rear axle on his Lotus 27 broke up on the opening lap. Gardner and Richard (Dickie) Attwood, at the wheel of the Midland Racing Partnership Lola-Ford Mk 5, fought tooth and nail for virtually the whole race, with the Briton just taking the verdict, ahead of the French driver Jo Schlesser in a Brabham. All three broke the old lap record and eventually Gardner left it at a staggering 1m 39.5s. This was the first ever sub-1m 40s lap of Monaco by a Formula Junior car and would have put him 13th on the grid for the following day’s Grand Prix, ahead of the likes of Jim Hall, Maurice Trintignant and Jack Brabham.
The following year, the new Formula 3s replaced the Formula Juniors and continued to provide the same kind of wheel-to-wheel racing that had characterized virtually all of the FJ races held in the Principality.
Grand Prix Monaco Junior winners invariably went on to reach the top echelons of the sport with all of them becoming Grand Prix drivers. The 1959 winner Michael May, competed in three Formula 1 races during the 1961 season at the wheel of Wolfgang Seidel’s Lotus before an accident persuaded him to step out of the limelight to work for both Ferrari and Porsche in his specialist area of fuel injection.
Henry Taylor made his Grand Prix debut the week after winning the 1960 Monaco race, taking his Yeoman Credit Cooper to seventh place and going on to start six races before hanging up his helmet after the fateful 1961 Italian Grand Prix which saw the death of Von Trips. He maintained his links with the sport, taking up rallying before later becoming Ford’s Competitions Manager.
Pete Arundell drove for Team Lotus alongside Jim Clark in the 1964 and 1965 Formula 1 seasons before he had a serious accident in a Formula 2 race at Reims. Although Chapman kept a place open in the Grand Prix team for him when he had recovered, Arundell never regained his previous form and slipped gradually out of the spotlight.
Richard Attwood never really broke into one of the top teams in Grand Prix racing – drives with Reg Parnell’s team in a Lotus in 1965 and the works BRM team in 1968 failing to lead on to better things. He used his knowledge of Monaco to good effect in 1968, finishing second in a BRM behind Graham Hill’s Lotus 49; while in the 1969 race he was fourth, this time as Hill’s teammate, replacing injured regular driver Jochen Rindt. Attwood is probably best remembered for his 1970 Le Mans victory at the wheel of a 917 Porsche, along with Hans Hermann. Attwood still competes in historic events today.
Photo: Ferret Fotographics
Of the enormous number of marques that competed in the five Grand Prix Monaco Junior, Lotus was the most successful, taking two victories compared to the one each of Stanguellini, Cooper and Lola. Lotus led the rear-engined takeover of the race in 1960 and should have won the race that year but for the problem with Clark’s car. European drivers and constructors never featured as contenders after May’s initial 1959 triumph, with British rivals taking the honors on each subsequent occasion.
Three engine manufacturers tasted victory with Fiat providing the motivation for May’s Stanguellini in 1959, BMC-Austin being used by Taylor in 1960, and Cosworth-Fords winning in 1961 and 1962 with Lotus powering Attwood’s Lola in 1963. A Ford 105E 997 cc engine modified by Cosworth and giving 85 bhp had been used for the 1960 Lotus cars and those raced in the first part of 1961. However, a new 1,100 cc engine made its first appearance at an international race at Reims in the back of a Team Lotus car – Lotus being the official Cosworth works team. It was based on the Ford Classic 109E 1,340 cc unit which had been linered down. The unit provided an impressive 100 bhp, which comfortably compensated for the extra weight which had to be carried by a car with a larger capacity. This engine was subsequently adopted by other Ford teams and powered the victors at Monaco in 1962 and 1963.
Today, only Lola of the four victorious constructors continues to build racing cars. From small beginnings it has gone on to greater things, first winning Indy in 1966 (and countless Indycar races since) and providing the basis from which the all-conquering Ford GT40 sports racer was created, as well as being a major supplier of single-seaters for a variety of international formula. Although it is no longer in the control of Eric Broadley, who was forced to sell it after the marque’s disastrous attempt to enter Formula 1 in 1997, it continues to thrive, supplying a range of sports cars, Champ cars and the control chassis for the FIA Formula 3000 Championship. Stanguellini and Cooper fell by the wayside in the 1960s, while Lotus never really recovered from the death of Colin Chapman in 1982 and finally closed its doors as a racing team at the end of the 1994 season.
The Formula Junior era at Monaco was short but sweet. Fittingly, the famous marques and types of cars that raced there returned for the Grand Prix de Monaco Historique races held on Sunday, May 28th. Once again the streets of the Principality echoed to the sounds of tortured Ford, Fiat and Austin engines as these scaled-down Grand Prix racers took to the track.
