Special Brew recalls magic days of motor racing

MODERN-day motoring enthusiasts are familiar with Ferrari, Red Bull, Mercedes, McLaren, Alpine, Aston Martin, Audi, Williams, Haas and now even Cadillac, making up the grids of the top echelon of the sport.

The drivers, mostly starting from racing karts and graduating to various national and international championships, then on to Formula 4, Formula 3, Formula 2 and a top handful eventually make it to Formula One.

There, they get into cars developed by the world’s finest engineers, using space-age techniques and materials, and maintained by several hundred expert technicians per team.

Things were a bit different in the wake of WWII, especially in the colonies.

But where there’s a will, there’s a way.

While Jack Brabham, Bruce McLaren, John Surtees and Dan Gurney managed to build their own cars and drive them in world championship grands prix, so did a couple of enterprising South Africans.

Doug Serrurier drove his LDS in the South African Grands Prix of 1962 and 1963 and Peter de Klerk piloted his Alfa Special in the 1963 and 1965 editions of the race.

Moreover, they did all the design, welding, fabricating, assembly and engine preparation themselves.

Interestingly, both Jack Brabham and Doug served in North Africa during WWII – Jack with the Royal Australian Air Force and Doug with the South African Air Force.

Their stories, and details of many others who competed in the South African Drivers’ Championship in the late 1950s and 1960s, are featured in Special Brew, a beautifully-produced 176-page hard cover book by Robert Young.

Young, who spent many years gathering all the data, is an accomplished writer and former provincial champion driver, and the foreword of his book is by famous F1 car designer Gordon Murray. 

‘Motor racing specials have been around since the very early days of our sport,’ Murray said.

‘But the postwar period of the 1950s and early 1960s were some of the most innovative and the austerity that followed WWII meant that for most folks who harboured an ambition to go motor racing, building a special was the only option open to them.’

‘This book . . . is a great story of some of our pioneering designers and their machines.’

Peter de Klerk was born in the quaint Eastern Transvaal town of Pilgrim’s Rest, where he qualified as a diesel mechanic.

He later saw some racing films and knew that was to be his future.

He knew he had to get to the UK to get experience, but without enough money for a journey by ship, he opted to hitch-hike through Africa. 

So with a knapsack on his back, he set off on the daunting trip and finally got to London.

There, he knocked on the door of Colin Chapman, to ask about a job – and was hired on the spot. 

Turned out, of all the workers there, he was the sole qualified mechanic. 

He built the 2.5-litre engines for Lotus stars Graham Hill and Cliff Allison – and none of the De Klerk-built motors ever broke.

Years later he returned to South Africa and worked for BRM – not the famed racing car, but Blake Road Motors, run by racing champion Syd van der Vyver. 

There he prepared Syd’s Alfa Romeo-powered Cooper T43 before finally managing to build his own and very successful Alfa Special.

After the Rand Grand Prix of 1964, Colin Chapman told him to ‘take that car to Europe,’ adding ‘It must be the fastest four-cylinder car in the world!’

There are many more wonderful tales of success, and a few of heartbreak, in Special Brew.

There’s the Riley Special of Bill Jennings, which gave him the national drivers’ championship in 1954, 1956 and 1957. 

It started life as Freddie Dixon’s 1936 Riley TT and ran in the pre-war grands prix.

Then its engine blew up and Jennings acquired the discarded 1500cc four-cylinder twin-cam unit in 1952 and developed it into the most successful racing car in southern Africa.

Jennings then sold it to Rhodesian ace, John Love, who, in 1958, drove it to third place in the 500-mile Grand Prix of Angola.

He finished just behind Jimmy de Villiers’ D-Type Jaguar and Alain de Changy’s Ferrari Testa Rossa – not bad for a car with a 22-year history.

Many other specials made it into Young’s book, among them Stanley Reed’s Auto-Citroen, which first ran in the late 1940s – and was still running in major events all over the country until 1961.

Rauten Hartman was a shaft sinker in the mining industry, but he was also a whiz at mechanics and built a potent Peugeot-powered special called a Netuar which ran to second place in the 1957 Union Day Handicap and first in the Transvaal Autumn Cup Handicap.

Despite his shoestring income, Hartman built several more Netuars in ensuing years before retiring in the late 1960s.

John Hanning started racing at age 41 after acquiring a pre-war Aston Martin Ulster fitted with a 3.8-litre Nash engine and other weird but impressive specials include Tony Kotze’s super-low and shapely Assegai (spear), the Cooper-Chev and zany specials of George Cannell, the shapely Plathond (flat dog) of the Thompson brothers and the excellent LDS racers of Louis Douglas Serrurier.

Doug Serririer built ‘about’ 10 of them – he never kept records – and in the six years from 1960 to 1966 he personally achieved 40 ‘top six’ placings and 25 podium places in races all over southern Africa. 

The pages of Special Brew are packed with a great many action and still pictures, making it a comprehensive and very readable summary of a ‘special’ era in motorsport history.

It’s available from Evro Publishing, priced at $97.

 

 

 

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