Starting with a foreword by no lesser a personage than Multi World Championship winning designer Professor Gordon Murray CBE (who himself came out of the “cottage industry” of South African car makers and “DIY-ers”), this new book from EVRO tells a story few enthusiasts, if any, will be familiar with.
Motorsport evolved rapidly in Western Europe and the United States and, quite quickly, in countries where Europeans had settled, in this case Southern Africa. The big advantage of Southern Africa was that when it was winter in the Northern Hemisphere it was summer down there so motor races were held there with visitors from up north. Top level drivers and teams competed and, for a period, the South African Grand Prix was part of the World Championship.
Whilst those events are mentioned in Robert Young’s 176 page hardback book “Special Brew The Story of the Southern Formula One and Libre Specials”, this book really focuses on the story of how the locals could participate and entertain the crowds throughout the year in a well produced and lavishly illustrated hardback format.
Alfa Romeo had an assembly plant in South Africa so engines weren’t too hard to find but there were few, if any, other sources of the bits and pieces needed to make a satisfactory racing car so the locals had to use their ingenuity and innate skills to fill the gap. This book focuses on how thirty of those clever people did it and overcame the various problems
One very interesting story is the variety of engines the locals used; mention is made of Alfa Romeo but that didn’t always meet requirements. A very much favoured engine was, naturally, the Coventry Climax but, for the locals, that usually meant a second hand and much worn version. We see that cars powered by Citroen, BSA, Fiat, Ford, Norton, JAP, MG, Porsche, Studebaker, Riley, Chevrolet, Jaguar and Singer sat on the grids and some achieved a degree of success when up against the European visitors,
Quite clearly a great deal of research and an intimate knowledge of motor sport in Southern Africa has gone into this book so that the achievements of those involved are recorded. The ingenuity and technical skills of the likes of Syd van de Vyver, who cut his racing teethe on a speedway bike, with his Cooper-Alfa, Doug Serrurier, another former speedway rider, with his LDS Alfa car, Stanley Reed who put a Citroen engine in his car and John Hartman (known as Rauten apparently) started with a Peugeot engine in his first effort are amongst the many others who kept motor racing alive and kicking in their part of the world. LDS, incidentally, is the name given to various single seater racing specials built for the South African Formula One Championship. The “specials” were built by Louis Douglas Serrurier, hence the name.
Altogether this very well produced book shines an interesting light on what was happening in an area well away from the centres of motor sport. Many of us will know that Juan Manuel Fangio (the Argentinian F1 driver who won the F1 World Championship five times in the 1950s) honed his world beating skills driving souped-up American saloons up and down South America, but there was plenty going on elsewhere as this book shows.
Publisher: Evro Publishing
Price: £50 at www.bhp-publishing.co.uk
Description: Hardback 176 pages. 25cm x 23cm. Many photos in both black & white and colour.
ISBN: 978-1918070026
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