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– and not everybody in car racing
welcomed me with open arms [he
was too quick for that to happen].
Plus I knew very little about it.”
The thing he thought he knew
– an extended tenure at Lotus –
blew up in his face: “Colin offered
me the number one seat and my
choice of team-mate.” He didn’t
pick Ireland. “To then suffer in
a contractual dispute that was
nothing to do with me… it
was a bit much.”
Surtees, like all great bike racers,
was physically tough. Beneath that
leather exterior, however, beat a
sensitive heart and soul: mental
knocks were the harder to endure
and took more out of him. Pushed
too hard, too far from his chosen
path – a marcher of routes, he
had no time for Machiavellian
meandering – he tended to make
snap decisions not always to his
benefit. Shot through with steel,
he was also speckled with naivete.
“Perhaps I should have – totally
Surtees confirmed by Ferrari (left) and goes
on to get green cover for 1964 title (above)
out of character – stuck two
fingers up and said, ‘Bugger this!
I’m just going to look after number
one’ and stayed,” ponders Surtees.
He didn’t, of course. Nor would
he six years later.
Ferrari was in a slump when he
signed. Complacent after its 1961
successes, industrial disputes and
economic crises had (temporarily)
sucked the fight from Enzo, and
Ford had brashly come a-courting.
Though not offering the carte
blanche that Stirling Moss had
provisionally received for 1962, the
team clearly viewed Surtees as its
new number one, even though he
wanted no such stipulation in his
contract: being the fastest would
be sufficient proof of his worth.
Ah, different times.
“The first thing they mentioned
was that they didn’t have much
money,” he says. “But there were
other advantages: staying full board
at the Hotel Real Fini in Modena
for £1 a night, for instance. The
GLORY, THEN RANCOUR
By Paul Fearnley
Surtees would become one of the most significant drivers in Ferrari’s history
Silverstone 1963: leading Graham Hill’s BRM on way to second in British GP
team just wanted me to come and
work with it on all its cars. I didn’t
take a lot of persuading. I felt very
much back at home.”
With support from old hands
Franco Rocchi – “a wonderful
creator of things when he was
allowed to” – and Angelo Bellei
(motore) and Walter Salvarani
(telaio), plus engineering young
blood Mauro Forghieri as the
coordinator, Surtees was positive
that his speed and British
connections and experience, allied
with the Italian artisanship that
he admired greatly, plus Ferrari’s
forge, would be a winning F1
combination. Had he not achieved
something similar at MV, which
had yet to win a TT or a world
title with a large-capacity bike
when he joined it in 1956?
“I didn’t want to take the Italy
out of Ferrari, but there was no
doubt that it was suffering because
of its isolation; the British teams
were piggybacking each other,”
he says. “I wanted cooperation
and to get rid of some of the
old-fashioned thinking. I never
suggested not using a Ferrari
engine – that would have been
wrong. I had a lot of time for
what Ferrari could do.
“It was not a question of
revolution but of introducing
lateral thinking alongside the
traditional methods. When Ferrari
had a monocoque built in England
[for 1973] it didn’t work; when it
set up a design office in Guildford
[in 1987] that caused problems
too. These were steps too far.
Something along the lines of what
Niki Lauda got thanks to Luca di
Montezemolo in the mid-1970s
was what I was after.”
Although he would win the 1964
world title in dramatic fashion, and
occasionally had the F1 car to beat,
he was not entirely successful in
that aim. He introduced fibreglass
bodywork and Firestone tyres to
Ferrari, but his suggestions that it
January 17 2013 autosport.com 29