Grand Prix Insider

Today Renault has officially launched its 2008 World Championship contender and plenty of positive vibes have been artificially generated to let everyone know that the Renault F1 team is clearly back into title aspiration mode. Will that be quite enough?

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31st of January – Today is the birthday of Alan van der Merwe, who can rightfully claim to be the fastest Formula 1 driver ever – on a straight line. On July 2006 the Honda F1 team broke FIA class world records with Alan behind the wheel of one of their especially prepared Formula 1 cars with a 3-litre V10 engine, ending up with an average speed of 397.360kph [246.908mph] over two runs of the Bonneville flying mile. At the same time, he set a new class record for the flying kilometer, with an average speed of 397.481kph [246.983mph]. Both speeds as well as the one-way mark of 400,459 km/h are the fastest officially measured speed by an F1 car.

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30th of January - Today is Paul Frère’s 91st birthday and his shown among colleagues at the driver’s briefing prior to the grid of the 1952 Belgian GP. Did you spot Paul? And do you recognize the rest of his colleagues?

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For the first time Rio de Janeiro hosts the Brazilian Formula 1 Grand Prix at the Jacarepaguá circuit and the expected heat benefited two South American drivers with Reutemann winning the race and Emerson Fittipaldi kicking of one huge party for the local race fans by scoring a podium finish for the Brazilian Copersucar-Fittipaldi team.

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29th of January – Emerson Fittipaldi writes yet another chapter in racing history as he crosses the line in 2nd place at the 1978 Brazilian GP as the first Formula 1 World Champion to finish a round of the Formula 1 World Championship on the podium on home soil, driving a car build and entered by his own team. Sadly it would prove to be the only top result he ever achieved with with the Copersucar entry.
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The 1973 season began pretty much confirming the tendencies of the previous season with Emerson Fittipaldi and his black and golden JPS-Lotus maintaining the upper-hand on the Tyrrells. And François Cevert giving team leader Jackie Stewart a hard time for the money.

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28th of January – Precisely 35 years ago, when Frank was far from being Sir Frank and his cars were even more distant from the front end of the grid, the Iso-Marlboro-Team had its debut in the Formula 1 World Championship. Shown above is the FX3B model, that raced in the 1973 Argentine GP and contested only a further two GPs before being replaced by the FX3C. Do you know why its career was so short-lived?

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26th of January - Today would be former British Formula 1 driver David Purley’s 63rd birthday. Looking at the picture above, showing what’s left of his LEC after a head-on shunt in pre-qualifying for the 1977 British GP at Silverstone, it’s fair to say that the 15th of July 1977 was Purley’s second birthday. After all he’d survived a deceleration rate of from 173 to 0 km/h within 66.0 centimeters. That corresponds to 179.8 G, the highest G-force any human being has ever survived. He was rescued with multiple fractures to his legs, pelvis and ribs from the totally destroyed chassis, but recovered well enough to celebrate a comeback.

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25th of January – 100 years ago Frank Kurtis was born, a man with the potential to become America’s Enzo Ferrari. Besides his highly successful Kurtis-Kraft midget and ChampCar race car production he also built a couple of exciting road going sports cars and roadsters with his KSC (Kurtis Sports Car) company as of the late 40s. But high production costs and troubled sales efforts forced Kurtis to sell the operation to millionaire Muntz. Instead Kurtis entered the aeronautics business by bulding start carts for the SR-71 Blackbird, the world’s fastest airplane, with the company now run by Frank’s son Arlen.

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