Atlas F1 Magazine: Rear View Mirror

ATLAS F1 - THE JOURNAL OF FORMULA ONE MOTORSPORT

Rear View Mirror
Backward glances at racing history

By Don Capps, U.S.A.
Atlas F1 Columnist

The Death of History?

Several months ago - in October, I used the following quotation in an article: "Only the icing and the frills have changed." The quote is from Denis Jenkinson in an article written for the 1981 edition of Autocourse. At the time, I professed to accept what Scribe Jenkinson said. Since then, I think I may have changed my mind...

Quiz Time! Okay, Sports Fans, put on your Tom Terrific Thinking Caps and get ready:

Question: Who won the first Canadian Grand Prix and when and where was it held?

(Hey! This is an absolute No Brainer, Sports Fans! Easy points to put on the board!)

And the Answer is: Jack Brabham in a Brabham-Repco in August 1967 at Mosport!

Sorry, Sports Fans - that IS a good answer, but not really THE answer.

"Oh, Really?" is the response I see on the lips of the vast majority of you F1 Fans out there. That response is followed by, "Just what is he talking about? It says so right here and everywhere else that the first Canadian Grand Prix was in 1967!" As usual, it really isn't all that difficult, but it just gets that way when we fail to understand that - well, the past is at times not what we think it was.

The first Canadian Grand Prix run for Grand Prix cars - or 'Formula 1 (F1)' machines to use the term currently in use, was indeed the answer given above; as well as being used on Speedvision as the response to the identical question which they asked in the moments prior to the race.

However, the "real" answer is also something of a surprise since it is once again Common Knowledge that Gilles Villeneuve was the first Canadian to win the Canadian Grand Prix in 1978. Well, Villeneuve was the first Canadian to win the Grand Prix as a round in the World Championship, but he was not the first Canadian to win his home Grand Prix. So, just exactly who was the winner of the first Canadian Grand Prix?

Peter Ryan - hailing from Mont Tremblant in Quebec (by way of Philadelphia, PA), beat the field to the checkered flag at Mosport after 100 laps of racing while driving a Comstock Racing entered 2.5-litre Lotus 19 - Climax FPF in September 1961. He was all of 21 years old at the time. At a time when such events were essentially rounds in the Stirling Moss Retirement Fund Series, this was a result that made folks sit up and pay attention. One of these was Colin Chapman. Chapman signed up the young Canadian for the 1962 works Lotus Formula Junior. In addition, Chapman arranged for another Lotus 18/21 to be brought over for the United States Grand Prix at Watkins Glen. It was not an audacious or conspicuous debut, but the car wasn't much to start with in the first place. Alas, Ryan was to die from injuries sustained in a crash the following July in a Formula Junior race at Reims.

In 1962, Masten Gregory won the Canadian GP driving a Lotus 19 - Climax FPF. Pedro Rodriguez driving for the North American Racing Team, drove Ferraris to win back-to-back races in 1963 and 1964. In 1965, Jim Hall and his Chaparral emerged the victor after a dice with Bruce McLaren in an TRACO Oldsmobile-powered Mark 2 McLaren. In 1966, the race was a round in the initial season of the Canadian American Challenge Cup - Can Am - and was won by Mark Donohue in a Lola 70 - Chevrolet entered by Roger Penske. It was the first major victory for this duo, but it certainly was not to be the last.

Many of your are trying stifle yawns and are muttering, "So what?" under your breathe. The reason I mention this that however the "official" list of Canadian Grand Prix winners might look like, if Ryan, Gregory, Rodriguez, Hall, and Donohue are missing - it is not correct.

Again, many are saying, "Oh, PLEASE! Get off it! Who cares?"

Well, I care.

"Well, Speedvision and the other F1 programs are aimed at the general F1 audience. Therefore, any questions concerning history relate only to the events of the World Championship. Get a life, Capps!"

But, the answer given by Speedvision was not correct.

"So? And, what difference make? It was an F1 race and therefore it was assumed to be concerning the first F1 Canadian GP. Jeez, Capps, you are beginning to bother me."

I don't make this stuff up. Not every major race that carried the title "Grand Prix" was a race in the World Championship. Generally, yes, a "Grand Prix" was usually for either Grand Prix cars (F1) or Voiturette cars - Formula 2. Or, in some cases, for sports cars. The Grands Prix of Canada, Sweden, and United States were once run as sports car races.

"Wait a minute! No way that the US GP was ever a sports car race! The first one was at Sebring in 1959 and was for F1 cars! It says so in the record books!"

Actually, the title "United States Grand Prix" was applied to a major professional sports car race sponsored by the Los Angeles Times-Mirror Company at Riverside in October 1958. Basically, they just did it and most folks either didn't mind or care. This was somewhat stretching things, in my opinion, but when they lined up on the grid in December 1959 at Sebring, it was the "II United States Grand Prix." Now the Swedish GP did count towards the World Championship, only it was the Sports Car WC.

"Hold it, hold it, hold it! It is exactly this stubbornness concerning the exact truth and terminology that scares the vast majority of F1 fans away from folks like you, Capps! Who really cares? Face up to it, very, very few F1 fans are really interested in F1 history! It is boring, irrelevant to what is happening today, and those old guys couldn't cut it today anyway. Jeez, go away and leave us alone!"

Voltaire said something in Oeuvres (1785) which I believe applies here:

On doit des égards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que la vérité.
We owe respect to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth.

It is not always easy finding the truth. In his essay The Use and Abuse of History, William L. Burton wrote something that is perhaps more common than most realize: "If you do not like the past, change it." The past of the Canadian Grand Prix is merely one example. It is a round in the FIA F1 World Championship and therefore it is convenient and consistent that the "First" Canadian Grand Prix has to be an F1 event - 1967 in this case. If you ignore the Canadian GPs which were held for sports cars, sooner or later so will everyone else and the "correct" history will be in place.

Perhaps the real issue to how to follow the instructions that Lord Chesterfield set forth his son in Letters to His Son (1774): "Speak of the Moderns without contempt, and of the Ancients without idolatry." Indeed, many F1 fans will find themselves nodding in agreement with something that Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 'World and Days' from Society and Solitude (1870): "Whatever is old is corrupt, and the past turns to snakes. The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment."

History has its place, but obviously not a very large place, in F1. The very definition of when history really begins and what defines the "past" is one that defies an easy, pat answer. This alone makes history out of place in F1. The current F1 scene is one that is focused on the here and now, not yesterday. Its drivers are Stars. They are expected to conform to the business culture that now dominates professional sports. This is simply how things are.

The races are now marvels of standardization. Failure to meet the standards expected by the FIA brings swift retribution in the form of fines or an assault by the media incited by the FIA to fever pitch.

An observation that surprised me at first, but then made since is that today's races are better observed than read about; whereas in the past it was often the other way around.

Well, what does all this have to with the so-called "death of history?" Actually, quite a bit. I think that it was not necessarily an intentional move on the part of the FIA and the motor racing media to kill history, but history is merely a niche market at best and a sump hole for resources at its worse. Even here at Atlas F1 it is clear that the past is not a popular stopping place for F1 fans: the Readers Comments Forum has approximately 220,000 posts versus about 33,500 for the Nostalgia Forum. And if you add in the other posts at other sites, it gets even more lopsided since there are very, very few fora for 'nostalgia' or history.

Well, there is something that Edward Shils wrote in his book Tradition (1981), that is one reaction that I often find difficult to purge from my mind when I realize how few care about history: "Modern culture is...a titanic and deliberate effort to undo by technology, rationality, and government policy the givenness of what came down from the past."

The past - or history, take your choice - is not a particularly pleasant subject even for those of us whom make our living writing about it. Needless death, deliberate distortion of the record, the scarcity of records, the fallibility of memory, and many other problems make looking backward less than a joy at times. However, there are stories that simply cannot be told without turning back the clock and kicking over rocks to see what is there.

In the wonderful movie The Third Man, Orson Welles has a speech in which he talks about the chaos, warfare, and general anarchy of Italy during the period of the Borgia family.

"You know what the fellow said: In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love--they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Well, do be it. Speedvision was incorrect and that is how it is. And at some point in the future, some will look back at when F1 started to produce cuckoo clocks...

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