Monaco Grand Prix - May 30 1965

The next problem was preparing for the Monaco GP, and we sweated out every day, hoping that Coventry Climax would be able to produce a four-valve-per-cylinder engine. They did manage to get it to us just in time for it to be installed in the chassis, but Tim Wall and Roy Billington had to work terrifically hard to do this and then drive the 800-odd miles down to Monte Carlo. Denny, due for his first GP outing, still had Dan's car, since there hadn't been time to look at his own.

The first day's practice at Monaco was wet. I found the new engine, though not impressive at low revs, was extremely good high up the rev range, and it certainly had more poke than any 1 ½  litre V8 I had driven before. But because of the rain I took things pretty easily; losing a car on the Monaco circuit can be disastrous, and I didn't want to bend it before the race.

On the Friday morning we were starting to get somewhere with sorting out the injection system at the bottom end of the rev band. But about half-way through the practice period the rev counter drive broke, and this put an end to motoring, though I had fourth fastest time with 1 minute 33.9 seconds. This was pretty good, but not good enough, because front row of the grid is important at Monaco, and I knew the car would go quicker.

I always tell people that I stopped smoking when I left school, but when I started up the engine at the end of practice, to drive back to our garage, I began smoking again-for the third time in a few days! In fact, it was a blessing in disguise, because we found that the injection pump needed changing, and this was half the answer to our problem about power low down. The fire meant a complete renewal of all the injection pipes and all the ignition wiring.

The final practice on the Saturday afternoon went better. I spent some of the session playing around with different lengths of megaphones. In theory the longer pipes should have given more punch low down, but I found that in fact the shorter pipes produced better lap times.

It just happened that the car was right towards the end of the training period, when John Surtees looked like pushing me off the second row of the grid. So I went out and had a go. With a lap in 1 minute 32.8 seconds (more than a second quicker than I had gone previously) I snatched pole position . . . but only for a brief period. I didn't know that Graham Hill had gone out when he had spotted me leaving the pits, and he knocked out an even quicker lap. All the same, I was happy to be on the front row for the start, and happy that the engine seemed to be performing well.

Tyre wear during practice seemed to be pretty good to me, and there didn't appear to be any concern about it until about half an hour before the race began, when the Goodyear people told me, `We're afraid you're only going to do 80 of the 100 laps on the tyres you have on the car'.  I was far from being convinced that this was so, and I wasn't relishing the prospect of starting a GP on new tyres, particularly at Monaco where it takes a lot of laps to scrub in a set. Anyway, I went to the grid with two new rear tyres and a new one on the nearside front wheel.

This tyre change meant that I would have no chance at all of winning the race if it went smoothly, and in fact I had lost 15 to 16 seconds to Graham Hill and Jackie Stewart before I was able to start motoring at their speed. I also had the disadvantage of having both Ferraris in front of me.

I got some terrific wheelspin at the start, because of the unscrubbed tyres which gave no traction worth mentioning. It took some 12 to 15 laps to get the tyres in the right condition ... and me, too, after frightening myself a few times with some wild slides! Several times 1 found the car sliding across the road and feeling as though it would never come under control again before I hit something solid-and the Monaco circuit is simply littered with hard objects all the way round.

But with the tyres scrubbed I started to get in the groove. First of all, I got on the tail of the two Ferraris, in time to see Graham Hill pushing his BRM back from the escape road at the chicane. A few laps later I flashed past Jackie Stewart, whose BRM was facing the wrong way on the hill up to the Casino. By this time I had only Bandini in front of me, because I had got past Surtees. There was no real trouble getting ahead of Surtees, who saw me in his mirror and pulled over like a gentleman, but I had a lot more trouble trying to overtake Bandini. The flat-12 Ferrari seemed to be extremely slow in the hairpins-particularly at the station-but was very fast indeed on acceleration out of the slow corners. I just couldn't squeeze through when he put his foot hard down.

In the end I did manage to overtake Bandini, by out-braking the Ferrari at the Gasworks Hairpin, and then found it possible to pull away a little-not much, but enough to feel safe. At that stage things were going well, and I wasn't having to drive absolutely flat. Graham wasn't then starting to catch up materially, and I settled down to some smooth motoring, hoping that nothing would break. Then I lost my rev counter. In fact this didn't slow me down at all or make the car harder to drive, because by then I was well in the groove and making gearchanges at exactly the same points on the circuit.

But what I didn't know then was the reason for the rev counter packing up. What happened was that part of the rev counter drive had come adrift and jammed between the rev counter gearbox and the camshaft, and this pulled the rev counter gearbox off the back of the engine. This resulted in the engine losing oil from the back of the cam box, and in turn this brought on oil surge. The next thing was a very sudden locking-up of the engine as I came out of Tabac Corner. I had to be mighty quick getting the clutch out, otherwise 1 would have clobbered the wall on the way out of the corner.

So that was that. A big disappointment, but at least it showed that this new Climax unit is very promising. Incidentally, the engine I had at Monaco had the larger valves, which made it better at the top end but not so good low down; in fact, the smaller valve version would, I think, have been better at Monaco.

Graham's drive at Monaco was absolutely terrific. He really had a go. I don't think he has ever driven a better race, and to score three times in succession is a record which I feel will probably never be equalled.