Motor Sport Magazine September 2021

THERE WERE MANY HIGHLIGHTS AT THIS year’s Festival of Speed as we explain a little further on in this month’s magazine. But one thing that stood out and which it is easy to take for granted is the wonderful preservation of the cars. This is as it should be: these are genuine historic artefacts that tell a story and have a value well beyond the sum of their parts. They are worth preserving – as the crowds of people gathering around them attest. It is curious then that we do not always afford the same reverence to the places they come from. In fact we can show a careless disregard for locations at the heart of our racing history. This was brought to mind this month when we received a letter from…

In our track test of the final Lister Costin ever built, on page 100, a 1954 photo, left, finds company founder Brian Lister in conversation with Archie Scott Brown, who is behind the wheel of the first Lister Bristol. The car’s registration, MVE 303, is part of Lister folklore. It was chosen by Brian on a visit to the Cambridge vehicle licensing office, and refers to the.303 cartridge used by Lee-Enfield rifles, which Brian would have been familiar with from his post-war RAF national service. It was hoped, of course, the car would be as fast as a bullet.…

PEUGEOT HAS REVEALED ITS NEW arresting 9X8 Le Mans Hypercar design, set to enter the World Endurance Championship and Le Mans in 2022, after an 11-year absence from top-level endurance racing. Unveiled in a virtual press conference by drivers, it features no rear wing thanks to more flexible rules for the Hypercar class, which replaced LMP1 at the top level of endurance racing this year. The 9X8 will compete against cars from Toyota and Glickenhaus, which are already racing in this year’s WEC, and Ferrari which plans to enter possibly in 2023. It will also race against machines from BMW, Audi and Porsche which will be running in the LMDh class from 2023 after the two series reached agreement on equivalence. Peugeot said that it had taken advantage of reduced design constraints in…

THERE WERE MANY HIGHLIGHTS AT THIS year’s Festival of Speed as we explain a little further on in this month’s magazine. But one thing that stood out and which it is easy to take for granted is the wonderful preservation of the cars. This is as it should be: these are genuine historic artefacts that tell a story and have a value well beyond the sum of their parts. They are worth preserving – as the crowds of people gathering around them attest. It is curious then that we do not always afford the same reverence to the places they come from. In fact we can show a careless disregard for locations at the heart of our racing history. This was brought to mind this month when we received a…

CARLOS REUTEMANN – QUICK, moody, handsome. He was one of the greats of the ’70s and ’80s but somehow never quite found his perfect fit within F1, other than for the occasional weekend when the planets aligned and all was right with his world. On those days he was untouchable. But it was as if the sport itself was sometimes just a little too crassly aggressive and hustling for someone of his sensitive nature. He had the persona of an artist, not a sportsman. Deeply introspective, thoughtful but often conflicted, he believed he wanted to be world champion. With talent enough to put a mediocre lobster-claw Brabham on pole position on his debut, it seemed well within his grasp. But there was always something in the way, not always definable, but…

SIXTY YEARS AGO THIS SUMMER – AT Kristianstad in Sweden – Honda won its very first World Championship. The rider was Mike Hailwood, who wasn’t even an official Honda rider at the time. His millionaire dad Stan ‘The Wallet’ Hailwood had rented a Honda four- cylinder RC144 for the 11-round 250cc grand prix series. Hailwood’s remarkable natural talent did the rest. Company founder Soichiro Honda rarely made visits to Europe because he was too busy working in Japan, but he was at Kristianstad that day to see history made, after flying from Tokyo to Stockholm via Hong Kong, Mumbai, Karachi, Cairo and Rome. Honda-san’s desire for world domination had his riders and engineers take control of grand prix racing with stunning speed in the early 1960s. This followed his 1954 declaration that…