WINGS, POWER AND LOSS

For 1966 the rules gave the engines room to breathe again, doubling capacity to three litres in what everyone remembered as the return to power.[109] The man who read the moment best was the oldest on the grid. Jack Brabham’s Repco V8 made only around 300 horsepower, but it was reliable and frugal, so the BT19 could start lighter than its thirstier rivals and simply last.[164] At forty, Brabham won the title in a car bearing his own name — the only driver ever to do it.[102] When the press mocked his age, he hobbled to the grid in a false beard, leaning on a cane, and then won the race.[102]

Then, in 1968, the cars sprouted wings. The Monaco Grand Prix that Graham Hill won in the Lotus 49B is remembered as the first race where wings were used in Formula One.[165] Within weeks the idea ran riot: at Spa, Ferrari bolted a strut-mounted wing to Chris Amon’s car and he qualified four seconds a lap faster than anyone, on pole.[166] Enzo Ferrari, tellingly, rejected the fashionable suspension-mounted wings as far too dangerous, fixing his to the chassis while rivals copied the American Chaparral sports cars.[166] He was about to be proved right.

At the 1969 Spanish Grand Prix both works Lotus wings collapsed mid-race — Hill crashing on lap eight, Rindt on lap nineteen — after Chapman had widened them with aluminium and styrofoam until they bent under their own downforce.[167] Jochen Rindt rounded on Chapman, calling the wings insanity that should not be allowed on racing cars.[168] The failures ended the high-wing era overnight: a mid-season ban on towering suspension-mounted aerofoils followed at once.[167]

But the decade’s defining moment was not a victory or an invention. It was a loss. Jim Clark — twice World Champion, the finest driver of his time — was killed on 7 April 1968 in a minor Formula Two race at Hockenheim, sliding off on lap five.[110] The cause was never definitively established; investigators judged a slowly deflating rear tyre the most likely culprit.[110] The paddock could not quite believe that a man so precise could simply be gone — and if it could happen to him, every driver understood, it could happen to any of them.

The sport was changing in quieter ways too. From the 1968 Spanish Grand Prix, Team Lotus ran in the red and gold of Gold Leaf tobacco — the first works team to race in full commercial sponsor colours, money now painted openly on the bodywork.[107]

And a conscience was forming. Jackie Stewart’s long campaign for safety was born of his own near-death at Spa in 1966, trapped in his car as fuel poured into the cockpit until other drivers freed him.[169] He paid for the crusade in popularity, and knew it: he would have been a far more popular champion, he said, if he had only told people what they wanted to hear — and he might also have been dead.[169]

The decade closed on its cruellest symmetry. Jochen Rindt, who had called the wings insanity, was killed at Monza in 1970 with a points lead his rivals could not overhaul — and so became Formula One’s only posthumous World Champion.[168] The 1960s gave the sport the shape of its modern car. It never stopped reminding everyone what the speed cost.