Out of time
Aston Martin’s DBR4 meets the Ferguson P99 in a battle of the F1 what-might-have-beens. Jack Phillips discovers two grand prix legends that never were
PHOTOGRAPHY: LEE BRIMBLE
The Aston Martin receiving some fettling in the Silverstone pits on its debut in 1959 as Roy Salvadori sits ready and Carroll Shelby surveys over his shoulder. Right: Stirling Moss in full flight aboard the Ferguson at the 1961 Gold Cup
EVENING STANDARD/NATIONAL MOTOR MUSEUM/HERITAGE IMAGES VIA GETTY IMAGES
Somewhere in a parallel universe tractor maker Ferguson is held in the same esteem as those other tractor constructors Lamborghini and Porsche. And maybe in that world another tractor builder, Aston Martin owner David Brown, is a Formula 1 champion with a luckless Le Mans squad.
Because in our universe it seems F1 simply doesn’t want tractor makers to succeed.
Their goods were surely good enough: the Ferguson P99 and Aston Martin DBR4 are a pair of F1 racing’s great British what-mighthave-beens. But motor sport could never be accused of being fair.
There are various mitigating circumstances surrounding both cars’ unfulfilled potential, though the P99 did claim a non-championship grand prix win at Oulton Park. The DBR4 has to settle for being known simply as one of the prettiest of the 1950s F1 cars.
Today, with the sun threatening to break through a damp morning, it upholds those standards as caretaker Martin Greaves of Classic Performance Engineering busily coaxes it noisily and carefully into life. The P99, so happy in the wet, needed less persuading to fire. It could hardly look further apart from the DBR4 – so low and so squat, like a stretched-out 500cc F3 machine.
Their respective visual differences are both cues of, and representative of, an era of grand prix racing that was moving at a frantic pace. Breakthroughs in downforce via wings were still years away, and the engine was just beginning to push rather than drag the car along – although the Cooper T43 preceded the P99 of 1961 by four years and, had the Aston not been mothballed, would have been a contemporary rival for the DBR4.