innes ireland

Innes Ireland* giving Gauld a lift back to the paddock in the factory Lotus 19 after winning the sports car race at the 1961 British Grand Prix at Aintree.

Last week while Graham Gauld was giving Toly Arutunoff a nice birthday greeting on September 22, we missed Graham’s 92nd birthday, which was on September 24. We can’t let that pass without notice! Below, we offer up a few memories from his new autobiography as well as a few thoughts from our own Graham Gauld archives.

Born in Edinburgh in 1934, Graham still can recall WWII. “My most vivid memory was about a week into the war, standing on the roof of our house in Edinburgh with my father hanging on to the chimney pots watching the Junkers Ju88s trying to bomb the Forth rail bridge** and the Spitfires trying to shoot them down.” Fortunately for us, young Graham’s attention soon turned to cars.

Even that wasn’t easy. “I was brought up in a family where ownership of a motor car was never considered for the simple reason that few of our family could ever afford to own a car far less tax, insure and run one,” recalls Gauld in his forthcoming autobiography. [Read more…] about Happy Birthday Graham Gauld!

Graham Gauld finds oddities at the 1958 Ollon Villars Hillclimb

Clearly the readers of VeloceToday have enquiring minds. They appear to warm to the oddities of this world and no doubt in future months the odd oddity will make its way into my features. Just to give you a warm up I want to take you back to 1958 when Brazil won the world soccer cup and Mike Hawthorn became the first Englishman to win the World Formula 1 drivers championship.

I had decided to return to Modena to see what was happening since last I had been there, but I was stuck as I did not have a car – even though I was sports editor of an automobile magazine. The fact that a friend loaned me his Heinkel three-wheel “bubble car” and I drove it from Scotland to Modena and back…including over the Alpine passes…is another story but we were tough back then as well as stupid! However, on the way to Modena I planned to go to the European Hill Climb Championship event at the Ollon-Villars Hill Climb near Lake Geneva.

Hans Herrmann on the line at Ollon-Villars with the Borgward 1500. Note Wolfgang von Trips looking at him behind the car with von Trips’ RSK lined up behind. The red and white car is Albert Leuenberger’s Lotus II-Maserati with a 1500cc engine.

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