Revs Digital Library By Doug Nye
One of the many joys of working with the Revs Digital Library photo archive is the way in which every frame of the original film strips has been scanned, providing a true indication of the photographer’s progress through the practice, qualifying and race periods of any great event attended.
One of my briefs is to caption the Library’s individual racing images (I know nothing of production street cars, and freely confess I care less) almost at random – just to accumulate towards getting the job done – some time down the line, since myself and the other contributors participating (and anybody suitably enthusiastic and knowledgeable is welcome) tend to be outstripped by the number of extra photographs being added every month.
Not only do the images themselves give us a preserved and enduring view of great events gone by, they are also a window upon bygone times, customs, ways of doing things. Take, for example, the coverage by Swedish photographer Ove Nielsen of the 1970s Swedish Grand Prix.
The race was run mid-season through the annual Formula 1 World Championship, using the Anderstorp Raceway circuit which was a pretty unprepossessing place with peculiar – for the time – geometrical corners, some of them banked, and a huge great straight which doubled as a 3,220-foot long airfield runway. The Raceway had been built in 1968 on an otherwise useless area of marshland, and with the Swedish driver Ronnie Peterson becoming a major Formula 1 player into the 1970s it drew healthily large crowds for the annual Grand Prix, of which it hosted six.
Today the very thought that the Formula 1 glitterati would ever consider spending a weekend racing around a flat, featureless, swampy raceway in rural Scandinavia, remote from any six-star International hotels, much less any lock-up pit-block garaging, is inconceivable.
But as one studies Ove Neilsen’s photographic record of the GPs run there, it’s an evocative joy to follow his progress as he toured the paddock, and recorded the action out on track.
His full coverage can be found easily with the search function on the Digital Library’s ‘home’ page. Key in ‘Swedish Grand Prix’ and hundreds of thumbnail images flash up.
They will include several years’ editions of the Nordic race, from only 390-odd thousand images – and rising – in the Library today.
Typical of the period was car preparation taking place club-race style in the open air, under awnings extended from the flank of each team’s transporter trucks.
The car is the Cosworth-Ford DFV V8-engined Brabham BT44B, which team driver Jose Carlos Pace would crash on race day. Just nearby was the Embassy Hill team’s area, with the former double-World Champion Driver, Indy ‘500’ and Le Mans winner Graham Hill’s new team running its GH1 cars for the hugely promising new young British driver Tony Brise and the Australian Vern Schuppan.
Roger Penske’s team had entered Formula 1 with the beautifully-built PC1 for Mark Donohue
Local superstar Ronnie Peterson is settled into his Lotus-Cosworth 72E, talking with team principal Colin Chapman in his habitual cap.
Team driver Jochen Mass is standing there bare-chested while recently retired team driver Denny Hulme is just on his way out in the quartered-cap – and there’s fret-saw action going on in the background – by itself a blast from the past…
Down in the Ferrari paddock area chief engineer Ing. Mauro Forghieri was taking a few moments to relax in a picnic chair as Ove Nielsen’s all-seeing camera came by. Quite what the great Ferrari engineer was investigating at the time remains an enduring mystery…
It was pretty standard for driver’s wives to serve as team timekeepers and lap scorers. Here’s Maria-Helena Fittipaldi with husband Emerson studying progress in the McLaren pit:
But this photo set also remind me what a risk-filled and dangerous life those young men led back then. Mark Donohue – ‘Captain Nice’ himself - would crash fatally in practice for the Austrian Grand Prix two months later. Graham Hill, Tony Brise and three other members of their team would die in November when Graham crashed his twin-engined aeroplane in North London while attempting to land in fog. And Ronnie Peterson himself would suffer fatal injuries in a multiple crash at Monza just after the start of the 1978 Italian Grand Prix.
With his death, and the premature passing of his natural Swedish racing successor, Gunnar Nilsson of Team Lotus, victim of cancer, collapsed national interest in Formula 1, and Anderstorp – that unprepossessing, somewhat peculiar marshland circuit in rural Sweden – retreated into half-forgotten Formula 1 history. But images such as Ove Nielsen’s now preserve that history, with vivid brilliance…