It was 50 years ago...part 3: The old Spa and Chris Amon and the March 701

I woke this morning to this tweet by Matt Bishop:

 https://twitter.com/TheBishF1/status/1269548154250289152?s=19. I was expecting it as I'd been half planning this post knowing that today was the 50th anniversary of the 1970 Belgian GP, the last on the Old Spa circuit.

What a shot! Pedro Rodriguez in his Yardley BRM P153. Gorgeous looking car, great livery and what a photo. 

I'm a photographer myself, just a hobby I would add, but I started in the film age in the days long before digital. To take a shot like this needed careful planning and great timing. Pride in place in my motor racing shots is one I took of Gerhard Berger at Brands in 1986 on the straight up to Hawthorn's at 180mph plus.

Kudos to this one.

It's one of my great regrets that I never got the chance to go to the 'old' Spa. I've been to the new, the first time in 1995 when Michael Schumacher won from way back on the grid in his Benneton-Renault but it would have been so awesome to see the fearsome original circuit tackled by some of the greats - and not-so-greats - of the 1960s and early 1970s.


The guy who was second though, what a hero. Chris Amon. The chap who was always in the wrong car at the wrong time. The one with appalling luck, leading GPs by a country mile only to have his car fail - a puncture, a gearbox failure. If he had shown just a little more faith in Ferarri he could have been in a 312B, the car that eventually won four times in 1970 but, instead, he wanted the reliability of Cosworth power so moved to March and took a risk on their very first F1 offering, the 701.

It was a dog. Yes, Stewart won the Spanish GP in it and led several others but Stewart could drive things quickly that others couldn't (yes, I'm looking at the quick but evil and twitchy short wheelbase 006), and, yes, Amon won the International Trophy in his in 1970 but the the thought of setting the F1 lap record at Spa in one as he did...

The man was a hero, as I said. He's the type of person that led me to write historical novels about the early years of aviation, in many ways he was cut from the same cloth as the pilots of WW1 and WW2. 

And he was following a car that ALWAYS broke down on a circuit that was a car killer but, on this June day, didn't.

Yes, Pedro deserved his win, the second and last of his all-too-short career. But Chris Amon would have been perhaps an even more worthy winner.