Bruce McLaren, May 10th 1963

The World Champion [Graham HIll] is certainly starting off the season with a flourish. He had a fine win with the BRM in the Aintree “200”, and also took the laurels in the saloon race with a 3.8 Jaguar – if he keeps this up he will be on his way to another World Championship win! 

As usual the fastest lap man in the race was Jimmy Clark with the works Lotus. After losing over a lap in the pits at the start, he caught up several places, and then took over Trevor Taylor’s team car to fly though to third place. But here was a disturbing glimpse of progress – Jimmy was using last year’s Lotus, last year’s 175BHP engine, and last year’s D12 tyres!

Now the big question people are asking is why he didn’t go as fast last year? I don’t suppose he really had to – he won both races at Aintree as it was.

It is interesting to note the way that Jimmy is taking over the Moss role in motor racing. After practice on the Friday, a certain well-known driver said to me “I’m very pleased with my car – very pleased indeed. I’m only half a second slower than Clark.” There was a time when the proud phrase “only just slower than…” just had to refer to Stirling. 

After his Goodwood win, Innes Ireland was in fine form to take second place at Aintree. Innes has had a fairly unlucky run with his Formula 1 cars up until this year, but he is now starting to show us the results of which he must have always been capable. When the new British Racing Partnership car comes along later this season, Innes will be just the driver to make yet another strong British representative in Formula 1 racing. 

For a driver who professes to be not particularly good in the wet, I thought fellow New Zealander Denny Hulme’s win in the works Brabham F.J. was very good. For a couple of years he ran his own F.J. Cooper as a “privateer” with very little outside assistance, and he did much better than anyone expected. 

He is now being trained in the Brabham tradition by building, working on, and developing his own car. He looks after the car and tunes it in the Brabham racing shop under Jack’s watchful eye, and his fine drive in the rain at Aintree was the result – his first really big win for some time, and a most convincing one, at that. 

Roy Salvadori was the only one to keep the Cooper flag flying during the day with the Atkins Monaco sports car. Earlier in the season it was apparent that the Monaco wasn’t too competitive, but the dint of some hard and effective work by the Atkins mechanics, close to co-operation with Coopers, and plenty of testing, the car has been gradually improved to the race-winner it is now. 

The British Formula 1 cars seem to be getting more and more reliable. Jim Hall and Tony Maggs were the only main retirements from Aintree, both dropping out with defects at the opposite end of the scale to each other. The throttle stuck open on Jim’s B.R.P. Lotus BRM and Tony retired his works Cooper with the front brakes jammed on.

It is noticeable that the gearboxes are staying together these days, and the engines – apart from a broken piston in Jack’s Brabham during Aintree practice – are proving consistently reliable (touch wood!).

However, we’d better not get too complacent, as I hear that Willy Mairesse is taking one of the works F1 Ferraris awfully fast around Monza…

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