Cliff Allison Interview

It is a strange event where you are in no rush to leave the car park but that was exactly the scenario at the Ferrari and Maserati Festival of Speed recently held at Donington. Whilst we commoners parked our various cherished but perhaps not as desirable vehicles together, on the inside of Redgate Corner Ferrari after Ferrari was parked. All in all around 200 gleaming Ferraris were lined up in the car park, mercifully the vast majority of them red. There was the odd one which deemed to be different, yellow Ferraris are just about passable in my eyes, blue just isn't right and orange, orange?!

Once into the paddock and the red horizon continued with all manner of races taking place such as the Ferrari 360 Trofeo Pirelli Challenge, the Pirelli Maranello Ferrari Challenge and a new race series, the Ferrari Formula Classic, which saw pre-1990 Ferrari roadcars take to the track including possibly one of the most famed Ferraris, the Testarossa. With Donington's undulating backdrop it was a quite display and there was the welcome return of the sound of a modern F1 engine ringing around Donington's natural amphitheatre as Schumacher's 1999 Ferrari was demonstrated.

But, I was preparing for a very special meeting; a meeting with one of the few people who can say 'I raced for Ferrari in Formula One'.

As I made my way through paddock two on way to my rendezvous at Donington's watering hole, Redgate Lodge, it was akin to travelling through a rather warped time tunnel, running the gauntlet of cars past. Setting out for their race were the F1, F2 and F5000 cars, given a new lease of life in the FORCE racing series. Literally within centimetres James Hunt's McLaren M26, winner of the 1977 British Grand Prix, hummed by, followed by Vittorio Brambilla's TS20

Surtees. Another flash back to 1977 was Jody Schekter's Wolf WR1. A March 761, which had once been driven by Hans Stuck but more often by Brian Henton, himself a Castle Donington Garage owner, needed an extra push up the paddock before the Lotus 69s made their way to the pitlane. It was all quite surreal with a romantic, nostalgic twist.

Once ensconced outside the Lodge I realised I didn't actually know who I was looking out for. Cliff Allison, raced for Ferrari in 1959 and 1960 and of course I was visualising photos of him sat in the car as 27 year old. I feared I'd be removed from the circuit if I accosted older gentleman but as Cliff came round the corner, as dapper as I was told he would be, you could see the young man who'd featured in some spectacular F1 moments and with a warm greeting, his Cumbrian accent as strong as ever.

Now admittedly my first thoughts weren't actually of motor racing. My link to Cliff is one of those long stories however, you'll probably better understand why this meeting was of extra importance to me if I try to at least give a condensed version. In the 50s and 60s my family were involved with motorbike racing and there's always been a tight-knit motorsport community 'up north' crossing both two wheels and four. My grandfather's friends, who travelled with our family to events such as the Isle Of Man TT, were also friends of Cliff, both coming from Brough in Cumbria. Sadly, my grandfather was killed long before I was born yet I often hear such marvellous stories of racing in those days and how I'd love to just be able to have spent one day with him. So when I meet people from the same generation, and in Cliff's case someone who knew many of the same people, it's rather like getting a glimpse back to those days which my family have such fond memories off.

A further link I found in common with Cliff was with the arm of my family in Cumbria, a number of who competed in what was called Sulkies also known as Harness Racing or Trotting - a form of horse racing where the jockey sits in a two wheeled kart close behind the horse. Cliff started out with horsepower of the four-legged variety as a jockey in what was called 'Flapping'. "They called it Flapping," recalled Cliff, "which was like ordinary flat racing but not on affiliated tracks. I rode a horse called Black Beauty and she was very good at her job. I won quite a few races."

With a taste for speed and competition I asked how Cliff had come to find himself in car racing, Cumbria not known as a hotbed for motorsports on more than two wheels.

"My father used to do motorcycle racing" Cliff explained, "and my Uncle in particular was a works rider. My father always wanted to do car racing but could never afford it. Then the Formula Three category came about and you could buy a car very cheaply and so we bought a cheap car, a Mark 4 Cooper, and it all started from there."

And what a start it was. Travelling the country from 1952 to 1957 Cliff was soon impressing people in the new Formula Three series. His talent was noticed by those influential in Formula One when as a privateer he started to regularly beat works teams, "That's how I got my drive for Lotus because I managed to beat the Cooper works" he remembers.

Cliff's family had a successful garage business back home in Cumbria and this link also proved beneficial. At a time when sponsorship was yet to be embraced by the sport it was the partnership between teams and fuel suppliers that carried a lot of weight.

"The only sponsors then were the fuel companies." explained Cliff, "When I was driving the Cooper, we had an Esso garage and Reg Tanner was the competitions manager of Esso. Colin (Chapman, Team Lotus Principal) asked him to suggest a driver, because that's the way they did it in those days, and I was suggested. I went down to Snetterton with my own car and had a drive round there."

Having impressed Colin Chapman, Cliff was signed to the new Lotus Formula One Team with Graham Hill as his team-mate. "Colin Chapman? He was great, I got on very well with him." The Lotus-12-Climax debuted at the second race of the 1958 season, Monaco, where Cliff finished sixth, followed by another sixth place at the next race, The Netherlands Grand Prix. But it was at the team's third Formula One race, the Belgian Grand Prix, that a Lotus dream very nearly came true.

On a hot June day the F1 circus made its way to the arduous Spa circuit to race 24 laps which would see them cover 210miles. Having qualified 12th it was a long evening for Cliff (the race started at 4pm) and with many cars overheating and breaking down his Lotus was soon in 4th place. For a new and not fully competitive team 4th place may sound like a great achievement but had the race lasted one lap more this could very well have been the first Formula One victory for the famous Lotus marque. Tony Brooks's winning Vanwall crossed the line with an overheating gearbox and ground to a halt. Second place Mike Hawthorn's Ferrari crossed the finishing line in a cloud of smoke as the engine gave way and third place man, Stewart Lewis-Smith just made it over the finishing line as his suspension broke. Then came Cliff!

He couldn't help but laugh when recalling that day, "Spa would have been quite fun if there'd been one more lap. I was the only car that got round the cooling down lap!" He may not have scored Lotus's first win (that would come in 1960 with Stirling Moss at the wheel) but he did bag their first points for his fourth place at a time when points were awarded to the top five places, 8-6-4-3-2 and an extra point for fastest lap.

His first year in Formula One with a new and emerging team had won him many admirers and at the next British Motor Show he found out how far that admiration went.

"In those days contracts were gone into at the British Motor Show. I was on the Lotus stand and a tall, smart gentleman came across and just tapped me on the shoulder and said 'would you come along to the Ferrari stand, we'd like to see you'. I went straight away and they said 'would you like to come over and test our car at Modena." There was no need to ask Cliff what his response had been, the glint in his eye, the smile like a child in a sweetie shop relived the moment.

"When Mike Hawthorn retired he was asked to suggest a driver, because Ferrari wanted a British driver in the team. Mike said Graham Hill or myself. Graham said he would rather drive for a British team and had an offer of a drive with BRM so he went to BRM and I went to Ferrari."

From a Flapping Horse to the Prancing Horse, it does have a fairytale quality about it and how did Cliff remember his first meeting with the great Enzo Ferrari?

"Well the whole set up was absolutely fantastic. When I went over there for a start he (Enzo) met me at the station at Modeno himself and drove me to Maranello, which was quite an honour or at least I thought so. Then another one of his oppos took me to a hotel in Modena and I stayed there the night and the following morning they brought the car down to the track."

1959 was an uneventful year but educational year for Cliff at Ferrari and it was at the start of the 1960 season that all seemed to be coming together. The first race of the season was held in Argentina.

Cliff posted his best race result in Argentina with a second place. But not only did he have a great F1 result to be pleased with but a sportscar win too. It was not unusual at this time for drivers to take part in other classes and series. Paired with Phil Hill, Cliff took the 1000km win for Ferrari at Buenos Aires. Being able to take part in other series, was Cliff glad this era of motor racing was his time? "Yes I think so, I was also fortunate that Ferrari at that time were nice cars to drive, the F1 and the Testarossa. The Buenos Aires track wasn't very interesting but I enjoyed very much driving the sportscar round the Old Nurburgring."

And of course you cannot talk of these historical tracks without your mind turning to banking.

"The Avus banking was worse than Monza, the Monza one was not as difficult. If you get the 1959 Ferrari Annual there's a caricature of me going round the Monza banking."

Cliff returned from the promising start in Argentina to Europe for the second round of the 1960 season, Monte Carlo. "I was on top of the world when we came to Monte Carlo. I was really buzzing and it was a little unfortunate but there you go" he said, philosophically for it was at Monaco that year that he was thrown from the car at the waterfront chicane suffering injuries that would hospitalise him for weeks and keep him out of the rest of the season.

I asked whether they found out the cause of the accident. "Oh, I changed into the wrong gear, as simple as that". And of course there is no room for mistake at Monaco, "Well there is now there's an escape route there now." Cliff adds. It's hard to imagine that Monaco could ever have been narrower but Cliff's accident highlights the many changes made not only to the physical aspects of safety but to reaction to it.

The Autosport report of Monaco 1960 includes a dramatic photograph of Cliff being thrown from his Ferrari with the surprisingly restrained caption "Cliff Allison - fortunately not seriously injured - is flung out of his Ferrari after his crash at the chicane during Friday's practice." In today's terms Cliff's injuries were not only serious but would have covered pages of reports and sparked mass debate. Suffering severe facial injuries, Cliff was hospitalised in the principality for a long time and was out of the rest of the season but in those days such injuries were nearer the bottom of the scale of seriousness for this was a time when death was a real possibility.

Earlier in the day Cliff had visited the Grand Prix Collection at Donington where there is a replica of his Mark 12 Lotus that came so close to winning in Spa in 1958 and it brought back many memories for him, "Just behind the car there's a picture of refuelling and it's me holding the funnel! Mike Costin is looking on, me holding the funnel and someone else pouring fuel into the car, an interesting comparison to nowadays." We discussed the recent fire that occurred when Schumacher refuelled at the Austrian Grand Prix.

"The one thing I always feared, actually it was the only thing I feared, was fire because I saw two of my friends burn to death and they were alive in the car. Not good" he remembered with great sadness. This was the reality of racing at that time, it was expected that drivers would be killed.

"It was just a lottery. You knew out of twenty of you, three of you weren't going to be there for the next season" he told me, a chilling account of the dangers of racing in the 1950s and 1960s, "But you always thought it would never happen to you, things just happen to other people."

But it did happen to Cliff. Cliff returned to racing in 1961 with the UDT-Lotus team but a fateful accident awaited him at Spa. On his approach to Blanchimont on his first practice lap on the Friday he crashed heavily breaking both legs, injuries that ended his racing career.

And whilst the physical injuries were difficult enough to overcome, it was the abrupt loss of both the sport he loved and the lifestyle that devastated Cliff.

"I had my nasty accident in Spa, that was in 61 and in 62 I didn't go to any races at all. In 63 I went to Silverstone and I absolutely hated it because all my friends were still doing it and I couldn't so I said 'that's me finished' and I never went to another race until about 1980. I buried myself in work at home. I had to do something."

"After the accident I was offered all sorts of things but none of them appealed to me but I always had the business back home to fall back on." Cliff recalled, "I often wondered why the likes of Tony Hancock (British comedian) and George Sanders (the actor) and those sorts of people committed suicide but I could understand after I had my accident because it was devastating. Not the money or anything like that, it was the lifestyle and, not wanting to be big headed, but the attention. When you drove for Ferrari and you went into a restaurant, they'd clear the place and push a table right were you wanted it and that sort of thing. In those days I'd never experienced anything like that, oh, to give that up was, oh" and Cliff's voice trailed off but you can fully understand where he was coming from.

Here was a man brought up in the Lake District at a time when travelling out of your county let alone country was an experience to behold. Yet, every other weekend he would jet off to the far corners of the globe, the journey often as adventurous as the racing!

"It was amazing because travel wasn't as good as it is today. You couldn't just jump on a plane and go to Buenos Aires. We had to fly from Heathrow to Dakar, then Dakar across to Recife in Brazil and then from Recife to Buenos Aires in a Cobra!"

No wonder the loss of this lifestyle was so painful as not only was Cliff living a racing dream but the camaraderie and community that he became part of sounded mesmerising.

"The thing is" Cliff says with a smile, " there weren't that many big hotels in those days so you just found out where the best hotel in town was and all stayed there. Everyone stayed there, all the different teams mixed up. The social side was great."

Strong friendships were formed and remain to this day amongst the drivers and teams, "Dan Gurney joined Ferrari at the same time I did" Cliff said, "and we hit it off straight away. All the time he was at Ferrari he was my best pal, well he still is!"

The picture Cliff drew of this fun loving and friendly community was making me want to step back in time and, being a self confessed gossip, surely there must be no end of saucy tales and wicked asides? Here, Cliff's smile became distinctly wry. Was I allowed to be privy to the stories, indeed where they fit for a lady's ears?! "Well they could be doctored!" Cliff said teasingly, " I'm thinking quite seriously about writing my autobiography but I don't want it to be just a succession of 'we went here and came third'. I've got a lot of interesting asides that would make it readable." That is one book I look forward to reading, especially as I was left with an image of John Cooper up a tree and titbits of gossip but no punch line!

After twenty years coming to terms with the sudden end of his race career Cliff explained how it was with some trepidation that he ever returned to the Formula One paddock.

"I stayed away, like I said for twenty years, so I was very tentative about going back because I didn't know what sort of reception I'd get. I got a tumultuous reception from my pals." A return to the Formula One paddock meant being reacquainted with Lotus and Ferrari, a chance to meet new up and coming stars, "I remember Mika when he drove for Lotus."

"The main thing is the people." Cliff told me, " When I was racing the main thing was the cars but now the main thing is the people because I'm not really interested in the cars. I know that may sound terrible but I don't understand how they work!"

In fact, Cliff was travelling to Monaco the next day for a week, taking in the Grand Prix as a guest of Ferrari and to catch up with old friends. "We always have a good time at Monte Carlo because we have our annual meeting of retired Grand Prix drivers" said Cliff, "though it's slightly depressing in one way when you think of a lot who aren't there."

Looking back at the list of people Cliff raced against there is one name that jumps out from the 1958 season, a certain Bernard Ecclestone, could he remember Bernie the racing driver?

"Oh yes, and fortunately he can still remember me! He gives us a pass every time for the race. He was just one of us but he obviously wasn't going to make a racing driver but you never really thought he was the business man he is. At the time I thought someone of his ability, his business acumen would be able to take over as he did but what has absolutely amazed me is the way he's been able to hang on to it. There are so many sharks out there and he's managed to do it so he must be a very clever fellow."

After a long time away from the sport, Cliff is now a regular, "I go to the Monte Carlo Grand Prix every year and I go to the British Grand Prix and occasionally I go to the Italian one. I would say these are three of the best ones though they've ruined Monza putting in chicanes and things. It used to be a real nice, flowing track. Of all the ones they have messed about with I think Spa is the best to drive on now," (Typical, I thought, another fine track bites the dust.) "but it's still not even a shadow of the old track though I don't think it wanted to be really because boy was it a hairy thing driving there!" Cliff carried on distinctly excitable, "Going through Eau Rogue is quite something especially when you go over the bump there and it all gets a bit light!"

Spa, the circuit where he had endured great sadness, the loss of his friends Bristow and Stacey, where a terrible crash ended his race career yet at heart he remains a racing driver and the first thought to his mind is the experience of racing there.

When thinking back to his racing days, there was little hesitation of who he thought the driver of his generation was. "Of course we all idolised Fangio. He was such an unassuming, quiet spoken champion, you just didn't expect him to be a racing driver really! His handling of a race car was fantastic."

And of today's crop I wondered who was impressing him and without hesitation he answer,. "Well there's only one fellow that's really racing and that's Michael Schumacher, the rest of them for one reason or another are just not in that class." And of the new breed? "I think Raikkonen is the one who impresses me the most." But there is one aspect of the life of a modern day racing driver Cliff wouldn't covet, "One of the things that I wouldn't like about present day motor racing is they have a hell of a tight schedule entertaining sponsors and things and that's just not my scene I'm afraid. I go and see the likes of David Coulthard who I know and your talking when all of a sudden someone comes to get him and he's off. Oh I wouldn't like that side of it but I'd like some of the money!"

The sounds of another race started outside, and I knew a young driver Cliff had met at the reception party the evening before was racing so it was time to let him go though I could have listened to him for hours and hopefully prised some of those tasty tales out of him! I'd been privileged to a rare glimpse into a world very few have ever encountered, or ever will encounter, from a true gent with great charisma and I cannot thank him enough.

©Rebecca Hobbs

(c)RH PR 2007