Chris Amon
| Chris Amon | |
|---|---|
| Nationality |  New Zealander
|
| Years | 1963 - 1976 |
| Team(s) | Parnell, Raby, Cooper, Amon, Ferrari, March, Matra, Tecno, Tyrrell, BRM, Ensign, Wolf |
| Races | 108 |
| Championships | 0 |
| Wins | 0 |
| Podiums | 11 |
| Poles | 5 |
| Fastest laps | 3 |
| First race | 1963 Monaco Grand Prix |
| First win | |
| Last win | |
| Last race | 1976 Canadian Grand Prix |
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Chris Amon (born 20 July 1943 in Bulls, New Zealand) was a Formula 1 (F1) racing driver active in the 1960s and 1970s and widely regarded to be one of the best drivers never to win a championship Grand Prix (GP). His reputation for bad luck was such that fellow driver Mario Andretti once joked that "if he became an undertaker, people would stop dying".
Early life
Chris Amon was the only child of wealthy sheep-owner Ngaio Amon. On leaving school, he was able to persuade his father to buy him an Austin A40 Special, which he entered in some minor local races and hillclimbs. He progressed to a 1,500cc Cooper and then an old Maserati 250F, but only began to draw attention driving the Cooper Bruce McLaren had used to win his first Grand Prix.
In 1962 Amon entered the Cooper for the New Zealand winter series, but was hampered by mechanical problems. However, Scuderia Veloce entered him in a similar car, and, in the rain at Lakeside, he performed well. One of the spectators there was the English racing driver Reg Parnell who persuaded Amon to come to England and race for his team. In a test at Goodwood Amon continued to impress and was on the pace in the Goodwood International Trophy and Aintree 200 pre-season races.
Racing career
1960s
1963
For the 1963 F1 season the Parnell team were using year-old Lola cars powered by year-old Climax V8 engines. Amon was teamed with the very-experienced Maurice Trintignant for the first race of the season at Monaco and his Grand Prix career started with what was to become typical bad luck: Trintignant's Climax developed a misfire, so he took over Amon's car.
At the Belgian GP Amon was partnered by Lucien Bianchi and started ahead of him from fifteenth position. After nine laps, however, an oil fire ended his race. He continued to experience mechanical problems at the Dutch, Mexican and German GPs; and after an accident in practice for the Italian GP left him hanging out of his car's cockpit with three broken ribs, he missed both the Italian and United States GPs.
Amon usually qualified in the midfield and generally outpaced his team-mates, who included his good friend Mike Hailwood. His best results of the year were seventh at the French and British GPs. During this time, however, Amon's social life was attracting as much attention as his driving. He was a member of the Ditton Road Flyers, the social set named after the road in London where Amon shared an apartment with American Peter Revson, Hailwood and Tony Maggs.
Parnell was nonetheless impressed with Amon's results in what was regarded as less-than-competitive machinery and promoted him to team leader. Tragedy struck soon afterward, however, when Parnell died from peritonitis in January 1964. His son Tim took over the team.
1964
In a series of four pre-season races in Britain and Italy, Amon recorded three fifth places at Snetterton, Silverstone and Syracuse. He failed to qualify for the first F1 race of the season, the Monaco GP, but at the next race, the Dutch GP, he scored his first World Championship points. The rest of his season, however, was blighted by mechanical problems.
1965
Parnell was offered BRM engines for 1965, but only if it ran Richard Attwood as its regular driver. Reluctantly, Parnell agreed and Attwood took Amon's place. Spotting an opportunity, Bruce McLaren quickly signed Amon for his new McLaren team, but when no second McLaren F1 car materialised, Amon could only drive in CanAm races.
At the French GP Amon rejoined Parnell to stand in for an injured Attwood and was also given the opportunity to drive a third Parnell car, a Brabham, at the British GP. The car, however, failed to arrive. For the German GP Amon was promoted to second Parnell driver, but mechanical failure again forced an early retirement. His last drive before Attwood's return, a non-championship race in Enna, Sicily, also ended in retirement.
1966
During 1966 Amon continued to race for McLaren in CanAm, but, with an unimpressive record of only two points from twenty Grand Prix starts, he failed to secure a full-time F1 drive. However, an opportunity arose to drive for the Cooper F1 team after Richie Ginther left them for Honda. Amon drove for Cooper at the French GP and was scheduled to drive for them for the rest of the season, until the more successful John Surtees left Ferrari to join Cooper and Amon found himself dropped.
Amon made one other F1 appearance during the year, driving a Brabham powered by an old 2-litre BRM engine at the Italian GP under the banner of "Chris Amon Racing". He failed to qualify.
Amon did however score his biggest success to date when he partnered Bruce McLaren in a Gulf Ford GT40 Mark II at the 1966 Le Mans 24-hour race, spearheading a formation finish. He subsequently received an invitation to meet Enzo Ferrari at the Ferrari home in Maranello, where he signed to race for Ferrari in 1967 alongside Lorenzo Bandini, Mike Parkes and Ludovico Scarfiotti.
1967
Amon's first year with Ferrari did not begin auspiciously. En route to Brands Hatch for the pre-season F1 Race of Champions, he crashed his road car and, following race practice, had to withdraw. Tragedy then struck the Ferrari team when Bandini died following a crash during the Monaco GP, Parkes broke both his legs at the Belgian GP and, in the aftermath, Scarfiotti went into temporary retirement. Amon therefore became Ferrari's only driver for the rest of the season, until joined by Jonathan Williams for the final race in Mexico. At the end of 1967, Amon had achieved three third places and finished fourth in the Drivers' Championship.
Amon's Ferrari contract also included racing sportscars and he began 1967 by winning the Daytona 24 Hours and Monza 1000 events with Bandini in the 4-litre Ferrari 330P4. He finished the year partnering Jackie Stewart to a second place at Brands Hatch.
1968
1968 was the year aerodynamics first played a significant role in F1 car design and early on Amon worked with engineer Mauro Forghieri to place aerofoils on the Ferrari 312. He then won the first two rounds of the Tasman Cup before narrowly losing the series to Jim Clark.
After the first race of the F1 season in South Africa, Amon achieved pole positions in three of the following four races (at the Spanish, Belgian and Dutch GPs) but ever-present mechanical problems meant he secured only a single Championship point from them. Throughout the rest of the season he never qualified in less than fifth place and nearly scored victories at the British and Canadian GPs. In Britain he duelled to the line with Jo Siffert's Lotus 49B and in Canada he dominated the race despite a dysfunctional clutch. Seventeen laps from the finish, however, his car's transmission failed and a distraught Amon had to be consoled by Jacky Ickx. From at least ten promising starts that season he was only able to finish five races and score ten Championship points.
Outside F1, Amon was runner-up in the Formula 2 race at Limbourg, Belgium, testing the Ferrari Dino F2. He also came third in that year's International Trophy.
1969
Amon began 1969 with success driving the Ferrari Dino F2 in the Tasman Cup, but in F1 his abysmal luck continued. Despite six starts from top-six positions, he was only able to achieve a third-place at the Dutch GP. Ferrari's F1 V12 engine was too unreliable and although its replacement had proven very fast in testing, Amon had no reason to believe it would be any more reliable. He therefore decided to leave Ferrari. Unfortunately for Amon, the new flat-12 engine would become one of the best F1 engines of the 1970s.
During 1969 Amon continued to drive for Ferrari in events outside F1, partnering Pedro Rodriguez to a fourth place in the BOAC 500 and coming second at Sebring, but retiring from the ADAC and Monza 1000 races, all in the Ferrari 312P sportscar. He also drove in a few CanAm races. His last race for Ferrari would be the 1970 Monza 1000 where he finished as runner-up.
1970s
1970
For the 1970 F1 season, Amon made what was to be the first of several moves to smaller, newer teams. March Engineering had been formed the previous year to build custom chassis for Formulas 2 and 3, but quickly moved into F1, designing and building the March 701. Amon and Siffert were signed as drivers, with IndyCar driver Mario Andretti making an occasional appearance in a third car. March also sold their 701 chassis to Tyrrell, where Jackie Stewart drove it to its first victory in that year's Spanish GP.
Amon won the pre-season Silverstone International Trophy, but once the F1 season began he found himself prevented from converting good qualifying positions into good results. He qualified second behind Stewart's Tyrrell March for the opening South African GP only for his own March to overheat within fourteen laps; then qualified sixth for the Spanish GP only for his March's Ford-Cosworth DFV engine to expire within ten laps; then qualified and ran second in the Monaco GP until his suspension failed twenty laps from the finish. This was the race where Amon refused to drive unless his entry number was changed from 18 – the number under which his then team-mate Lorenzo Bandini had crashed and died in Monaco – to 28.
Amon's close second place from a third-place start at the Belgian GP, finally gave the March team their first Championship points, but after qualifying fourth for the next race, the Dutch GP, his car's clutch broke after just one lap. Amon duplicated his Belgian result at the French GP, but thereafter only achieved one further result of note in the year, a third place from sixth at the Canadian GP.
By the end of the year, disagreements with March co-founders Max Mosley and Robin Herd meant that Amon had decided to move to another relatively new team, Matra.
1971
In 1971 Amon once again scored a pre-season victory, this time at the Argentine Grand Prix. Once the F1 season had begun, he managed to covert a third-place start at the Spanish GP into a third-place podium finish and scored a couple of fifth places in the South African and French GPs. Apart from these results, however, his run of poor F1 returns continued. At the Italian GP he qualified in pole position and despite a poor start to the race looked as if he would capitalise on it – until, that is, the visor on his helmet became detached. Amon had to slow to avoid risking a major accident, thereby allowing other drivers to catch and overtake him. He finished the race in sixth place, scoring just one Championship point.
During the year Amon also competed in the non-championship Questor Grand Prix at the new Ontario Speedway, where he qualified second and, despite suffering a puncture during the race, managed to finish fourth.
1972
In the 1972 F1 season Amon achieved a handful of points-scoring finishes, but only one podium appearance, at the French GP. Here he achieved the fifth and final pole position of his career and was leading the race until a puncture forced him to pit, but he charged back through the field, annihilating the circuit's lap record to finish third.
With the money he had made from motorsport, Amon decided to set up a racing engine firm with former BRM engineer Aubrey Woods. Amon Racing Engines supplied Formula 2 engines to a few drivers, but the company quickly became too expensive to run and was sold to March for a loss.
Matra decided to end their participation in F1 at the end of 1972, so Amon found himself looking to return to March as a driver. The place, however, was given to Jean-Pierre Jarier, purportedly for financial reasons. Amon therefore signed for another recently-formed F1 team, Tecno.
1973
Tecno had entered F1 the previous year, having been a successful chassis-builder for other Formulæ. Their first year in F1 proved to be dismal, however, so they had jumped at the chance to sign Amon in the hope he would help transform their performance.
Unfortunately, the team went from bad to worse and wasn't able to field a car until the fifth GP of the season, the Belgian GP. Amon managed to finish in sixth position, but was unhappy with the car. He commissioned Gordon Fowell to build a replacement and although Amon commented at the time that it was "the best chassis I've ever sat in", it too proved virtually undriveable. By the time of the Austrian GP, four races from the end of the season, Amon's patience had run out and he left the team. He would later claim that the months he spent with the team "felt like ten [seasons]".
Tyrrell offered Amon a third car in which to drive the last two races of the season. After a mediocre first outing at the Canadian GP, he and Jackie Stewart withdrew from the final race of the year, the United States GP, following the death of their team-mate François Cevert during qualifying.
1974
For the 1974 F1 season Amon revived Chris Amon Racing. Fowell designed the car, the F101, which featured a single central fuel tank, titanium torsion bars and a forward driving position. Structurally, however, it proved to be weak and was not ready for an F1 appearance until the fourth race of the season, the Spanish GP. Amon was only able to qualify twenty-third, thanks to brake-disc vibration that only became worse with the tyres for the wet race that followed. Despite cautious driving, a brake shaft finally broke and Amon was forced to retire after twenty-two laps.
Following further work and testing, Amon returned for the Monaco GP and qualified twentieth, but, thanks to mechanical problems, he was unable to start the race. Further problems and illness meant Amon was not able to reappear with the F101 until the Italian GP, three races from the end of the season, but this time he was unable to qualify. That sealed the fate of both the car and Chris Amon Racing, leaving Amon to drive the season's last two races with the faltering BRM team. He would later reveal that he had turned down a chance to join the Brabham team earlier in the season.
1975
Apart from a Tasman Cup victory in January 1975, Amon's racing career seemed once again to have stalled. However, a chance meeting with Morris Nunn of Ensign led to two GP drives in the Ensign N175 at the Austrian and Italian GPs. Although the results were unremarkable, he and Nunn worked well together, so Amon joined Ensign for the 1976 F1 season.
1976
Ensign's first race of the season was the South African GP where Amon qualified eighteenth and finished fourteenth. Thereafter results began to improve, with Amon qualifying seventeenth and finishing eighth in the USA West GP; qualifying tenth and finishing fifth in the Spanish GP; and then qualifying eighth for the Belgian GP. More points then seemed likely from the race until his car lost a wheel nineteen laps from the finish and Amon was lucky to escape unhurt from the ensuing accident. He then achieved a third-place start for the Swedish GP and in the race looked as if he would join Tyrrell drivers Jody Scheckter and Patrick Depailler on the podium, until suspension failure threw him from the track after thirty-eight laps.
Amon had again been lucky to escape serious injury and decided to miss the next race, the French GP. He returned for the British GP, qualifying in sixth and running fourth in the race when his Ford-Cosworth DFV engine developed a water leak. Rather than risk losing an engine, his team called him in to retire.
At the German GP problems dogged his attempts to qualify well, but it was Niki Lauda's now infamous crash during the second lap of the race that had a far greater impact. He refused to restart the race and Nunn fired him from the team. Amon declared his retirement from the sport and returned to New Zealand.
"I'd seen too many people fried in racing cars at that stage. When you've driven past Bandini, Schlesser, Courage and Williamson, another shunt like that was simply too much. It was a personal decision..." Amon, on his retirement in 1976.
However, Walter Wolf contacted Amon and persuaded him to drive for his Wolf team in the North American races near the end of the season. After recording some promising times in preparation for the Canadian GP, however, Amon was involved in a heavy collision with another car during qualification and once again was lucky to walk away unharmed. He did not then take part in either the Canadian or United States GPs.
1977, 1978
Amon turned down an offer of a full-time F1 drive for 1977, but did attempt a return to CanAm racing in 1978 with Wolf. After only a few races, however, he quit, saying "I'm just not enjoying this anymore." His place was taken by the young and then unknown Canadian Gilles Villeneuve, whom Amon would later that year recommend to Enzo Ferrari.
In the meantime, Amon returned once again to New Zealand, this time to retire from F1 motor racing for good.
Retirement
Since his retirement from F1, Amon has dedicated himself to running the family farm in New Zealand's Manawatu District. In the early 1980s he became more well-known in New Zealand from test-driving vehicles on the TV motoring series Motor Show and later consulted for Toyota New Zealand, tuning the 1984 Toyota Corolla and subsequent cars for sale there. He also appeared in TV commercials for the company, where much was made of the acclaim he won from Enzo Ferrari.
Legacy
Despite never winning a championship Formula 1 Grand Prix, Amon won eight non-championship GPs, the Silverstone International Trophy, the Monza 1000, the Daytona 24 Hours, the Tasman Cup and, perhaps most significant of all, the famous 24 Heures du Mans. Many of these races attracted some of Amon's otherwise more successful fellow F1 drivers, all of whom he was able to beat.
In Formula 1, Chris Amon took part in 102 Grands Prix, scoring a total of 83 Championship points and reaching the podium eleven times.
Formula 1 results
(Note: Grands Prix in bold denote points-scoring results.)
| Yr | Team | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | Team |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1963 | Lola | MON | BEL | DUT | FRA | GBR | DEU | ITA | USA | MEX | SAF | Lotu | ||||||
| 1964 | Lotu | MON | DUT | BEL | FRA | GBR | DEU | AUT | ITA | USA | MEX | Lotu | ||||||
| 1965 | Lotu | SAF | MON | BEL | FRA | GBR | DUT | DEU | ITA | USA | MEX | Lotu | ||||||
| 1966 | Coop | MON | BEL | FRA | GBR | DUT | DEU | ITA | USA | MEX | Brab | |||||||
| 1967 | Ferr | SAF | MON | DUT | BEL | FRA | GBR | DEU | CAN | ITA | USA | MEX | Ferr | |||||
| 1968 | Ferr | SAF | SPA | MON | BEL | DUT | FRA | GBR | DEU | ITA | CAN | USA | MEX | Ferr | ||||
| 1969 | Ferr | SAF | SPA | MON | DUT | FRA | GBR | DEU | ITA | CAN | USA | MEX | Ferr | |||||
| 1970 | Marc | SAF | SPA | MON | BEL | DUT | FRA | GBR | DEU | AUT | ITA | CAN | USA | MEX | Marc | |||
| 1971 | Matr | SAF | SPA | MON | DUT | FRA | GBR | DEU | AUT | ITA | CAN | USA | Matr | |||||
| 1972 | Matr | ARG | SAF | SPA | MON | BEL | FRA | GBR | DEU | AUT | ITA | CAN | USA | Matr | ||||
| 1973 | Tecn | ARG | BRA | SAF | SPA | BEL | MON | SWE | FRA | GBR | DUT | DEU | AUT | ITA | CAN | USA | Tyrr | |
| 1974 | Amon | ARG | BRA | SAF | SPA | BEL | MON | SWE | DUT | FRA | GBR | DEU | AUT | ITA | CAN | USA | BRM | |
| 1975 | Ensi | ARG | BRA | SAF | SPA | MON | BEL | SWE | DUT | FRA | GBR | DEU | AUT | ITA | USA | Ensi | ||
| 1976 | Ensi | BRA | SAF | USAW | SPA | BEL | MON | SWE | FRA | GBR | DEU | AUT | DUT | ITA | CAN | USA | JPN | Ensi |