How difficult is it to win in Formula 1? Ask Toyota. For the eight seasons and 140 races that the world’s largest car company contested between 2002 and 2009, not once did it manage to place a driver on the top step of the podium.

I mention this only because it puts the achievements of the car you see here into some kind of perspective. It’s a March 701, its name denoting the year and formula in which it ran. When March made its F1 debut, at Kyalami in March 1970, Jackie Stewart put his Tyrrell-run car on pole and led for the first quarter of the race until his Dunlops started to wilt in the South African heat, letting Jack Brabham‘s Goodyear-shod BT33 and then Denny Hulme‘s McLaren M14A through before the flag. Still, it was a podium for a brand new constructor.

A fortnight later at the Race of Champions, the same car and driver took pole and scored March‘s first F1 victory. Stewart could only manage the front row at Jarama for the Spanish GP, but won the race and lapped the entire field in the process. Its next race was the Silverstone International Trophy, but while JYS won one of the two heats, overall victory went to Chris Amon in another 701. Two more Grands Prix followed, at Monaco and Spa; it would be hard to imagine two circuits more different in character, but Stewart’s 701 made no distinction. He claimed pole in each, although in both races his DFV let him down.

And that was that. The March, chassis number 701-2, retired. In two months it had done six races, scored four poles, two wins, a second and a third. After Spa the car was returned to Tyrrell’s base at Ockham in Surrey and sat in the workshop until it was sold to Eoin Young in 1977. It then found its way to the York Motor Museum in Perth, Western Australia. Thirty years later it was repatriated by Andrew Smith and, after two painstaking years of what’s best described as preservation rather than restoration by WDK Engineering, it was raced again at last year’s Monaco Historic Grand Prix. Smith put the car on pole and was leading by 45 seconds when he nudged a barrier, burst two tyres, crept back to the pits, changed the wheels — and still finished third.

Smith believes he was only the second person to drive the car and, after he let his Ecurie Ecosse team-mate Joe Twyman do a few laps, that makes me the fourth. Donington Park is cold but dry, 701-2 looking and sounding like it means business. The car is as original as it can safely be: the DFV had to be replaced, because the one used at Spa blew itself to bits (though its cam covers have been retained), and you’d not want to race on the original wishbones today, even though Smith still has them. Otherwise everything — the bodywork, tub, wings, gearbox and uprights — are the only ones it has ever had.

“We were really quite lucky,” says the unmistakable voice of Max Mosley, the man who provides the ‘M’ in March and found the money to make the 701 happen. “The general view was that no one would start a venture like ours without a huge amount of money. One journalist speculated we must have had about £500,000 to play with. In Fl terms that’s like having a budget of £500 million today. I didn’t start these rumours but nor did I think it was really my place to set them straight. It meant suppliers were very relaxed about getting their bills paid because they thought we were sitting on a huge pile of cash…”

Nothing could have been further from the truth. The four founders — Mosley, Alan Rees, Graham Coaker and Robin Herd — stumped up £2500 each, but even with a derisory budget of £113,000 for the first season that left a mountain to climb. “In September 1969 we had 10-20 people working in one unit,” Mosley says. “We had, I think, one metal bending machine and a lathe. That was it. But they were outstanding people.”

The source of the next tranche of cash was surprising. “Porsche gave us £30,000 to provide a seat for Jo Siffert. He was about to do a deal with Ferrari that would cover both sports cars and F1. To keep him in its sports cars, Porsche had to put him in somebody else’s F1 team.”

The bulk of the remaining money came simply from selling cars: the works kept two but sold three to Tyrrell initially for £6000 each minus engine and gearbox, which Ford’s Walter Hayes then told Mosley to raise to £9000 and ‘not worry’ about the difference. The Blue Oval would cover that. Mosley remains convinced to this day that March wouldn’t have survived its first season without those extra funds. “Staying with Matra meant using its new V12, which Ken rightly refused to do,” Stewart says. “He’d tried to buy cars from Lotus and Brabham, but both refused, I guess because they didn’t want to risk being beaten by one of their own cars. So March was really the only way to go.”

Other customers included Andy Granatelli, who bought one for newly crowned Indy 500 champion Mario Andretti, and Colin Crabbe’s Antique Automobiles team, for whom a talented young Swede called Ronnie Peterson would make his F1 debut.

“The 701 was a simple car,” says Robin Herd. “It had to be, really, because we had neither money nor time. It seems unthinkable now, but in November ’69 we had nothing but a few sketches. Then Max goes and announces to the world’s press that we’re going to launch the team at Silverstone in February. We had 10 weeks to design and build a Formula 1 car. All hell broke loose. I lost a stone and a half, but on that cloudless day we had two cars, a red one for Amon and a blue one for Stewart.”

Mosley takes up the reins. “I think most people thought we’d have one car parked there. We turned up with two and both ran. Then we announced we’d sold another to Granatelli: that really got people’s attention.”

The simplicity of the 701 is easy to see. It had a monocoque tub to which a DFV was bolted as a fully stressed member, but by 1970 so too did most cars on the grid. Suspension was by wishbones, brakes outboard at every corner. Those inverted aerofoil sidepods are interesting, though: Peter Wright was in charge of the 701’s bodywork and was clearly trying new ways to exploit airflow. “We didn’t have the money or time to do what we wanted with the suspension or bodywork,” Herd says. “It could have been the first ground-effect F1 car.” Instead Wright would need to wait until he was at Lotus at the other end of the decade before he could perfect the technique.

Simple it might have been, but the 701 was quick. Walking down the pitlane at Kyalami, Mosley could hardly believe his eyes. “I was there with Robin and saw our cars first and second on the grid. I was 29 years old and on top of the world.”

The light of the 701 burned brightly, but briefly. Although Herd maintains that a little reliability might have made the 701 a title winner in Stewart’s hands, the car having taken pole in three of its first four World Championship races and won the other, there were no more firsts in qualifying or racing for the rest of that year. Lotus finally started to extract the potential of the 72 while Ken Tyrrell, who had always viewed the 701 as a stop-gap while he built his own car, immediately put his top driver in the Tyrrell-Ford 001 as soon as it was ready, before the season’s end. The Scuderia woke up too, scoring a hat trick of late victories with its 312B.

What Herd says about the car lacking development potential is entirely true, but there was something else going on, too, and Mosley doesn’t hesitate to put his finger on it.

“At Kyalami I really thought we’d done it,” he says, “but I was too young to realise it was only going to get harder from there. Realistically we were lucky. We caught F1 when it was half-asleep. At some races in 1969 you’d only get 13 cars on the grid. And then we came along and made the F1 establishment look stupid. We were, if you like, the most enormous wake-up call and stung a lot of very talented people like Colin [Chapman] into action. It was always going to be hard after that.”

Quite so. But you make a lot of your luck, and the fact is that four young men, penniless in F1 terms, came together and in 10 weeks designed, built and delivered a Grand Prix car good enough for a talent like Stewart’s to score pole in its first World Championship race and lap the field en route to victory in its second. Formula 1 has always provided a rich seam of stories but few that are more extraordinary or less widely acknowledged than this.

Our thanks to Andrew Smith, WDK Motorsport, Donington Park and Christopher Tate for their help with this feature.