He's an all-time great but what did happen to Jacky Ickx's F1 career?
F1
Jacky Ickx was at his most brilliant when confronting F1's toughest challenges with courage, yet he's best-known as an endurance racing master. Matt Bishop struggles to explain why he didn't have more single-seater success
Ickx at Jarama in 1970: he finished second in the world championship on his return to Ferrari
Tomorrow, New Year’s Day 2025, is Jacky Ickx’s 80th birthday. One of the most versatile drivers in the history of motor sport, he won races all over the world – on motorcycles, first of all, then in saloon cars, touring cars, rally cars, Formula 2 cars, Formula 1 cars, and, par excellence, sports and endurance cars. Indeed, he won the 24 Hours of Le Mans six times. It is therefore as a sports car and endurance racing legend – and a Le Mans maestro – that he is most commonly venerated, and rightly so.
As a result, his F1 career is sometimes overlooked. He made his F1 grand prix debut at Nürburgring in 1966, aged 21, albeit in an F2 car. That was par for the course at the ’Ring in those days, since the length of its lap – 14.2 miles (22.8km) – made large fields easy to accommodate without compromising what meagre safety levels the ‘green hell’ was ever able to lay claim to. So it was that in 1966 Ickx’s Ken Tyrrell-entered Matra MS5 was one of 11 F2 cars that, combined with 19 F1 cars, made up a field of 30 cars altogether.
“Spectacular” world championship GP debut at the Nürburgring in 1966
Grand Prix Photo
The young Belgian’s Matra was one of two MS5s entered by Tyrrell, the other to be raced by an experienced 31-year-old German, Hubert Hahne, a BMW touring car ace and a Nürburgring specialist. Indeed, in the German Grand Prix support race for touring cars at Nürburgring that very year, 1966, Hahne had become the first driver to lap the ’Ring in a touring car (a BMW 2000 Ti) in less than 10 minutes (9min 58.5sec). Nonetheless, by the end of F1 qualifying, Ickx, whose driving Motor Sport’s famous continental correspondent Denis Jenkinson had described as “very spectacular”, had not only outperformed Hahne by a large margin but had also ended up the fastest F2 entry, “head and shoulders above the rest of the F2 runners” according to Jenks.
The next day, which was rainy and overcast, Ickx’s F1-grand-prix-in-an-F2-car debut did not go well. Here is DSJ in Motor Sport again: “On lap one [between Quiddelbacher Höhe and Flugplatz] somebody [Bob Anderson, who was driving a privateer Brabham-Climax BT11] caught the front of John Taylor’s Brabham-BRM BT11, and Taylor spun off and crashed in flames. Ickx had to take violent avoiding action, being just behind, and he went off the road, but he managed to get going again after getting out to help the unfortunate Taylor, who was badly burned.” Ickx retired his Matra with accident damage at the end of that first lap. Taylor, 33, had been a late inclusion — for, as Jenks reported it, “the new McLaren F1 team had an entry but failed to arrive, so at the last minute the Brabham-BRM BT11 of David Bridges was accepted as a replacement, with John Taylor driving.” After his accident Taylor was taken to a hospital in Koblenz, where four weeks later he died from the burns he had received at Nürburgring. If only McLaren had turned up.
Twelve months later, in August 1967, Tyrrell entered Ickx for a second F1-grand-prix-in-an-F2-car race at Nürburgring, in a Matra MS5 again, albeit now equipped with a nippy 1.6-litre Cosworth FVA engine instead of the gutless 1.0-litre Cosworth SCA unit that it had been ‘powered’ by in 1966. Even so, by 1967 all the regular F1 cars were running 3.0-litre engines: V12s in the case of the Ferraris, the Hondas, the Cooper-Maseratis, the Eagle-Weslakes, and the McLaren-BRMs; H16s (yes, 16 cylinders!) in Jackie Stewart’s and Mike Spence’s Mike Spences; and new and powerful Cosworth DFV V8s in Jim Clark’s and Graham Hill’s Lotus 49s. So Ickx was still labouring under a very significant brake-horsepower disadvantage.
However, he had already fallen in love with the Nürburgring – the daunting and difficult circuit that over the next few years he would go on to tame more masterfully than arguably anyone else – and, to universal astonishment, he qualified his Matra F2 car third, behind only Clark’s superfast Lotus-Cosworth 49 and Denny Hulme’s lusty Brabham-Repco BT24, the car in which he would win the 1967 F1 drivers’ world championship four grands prix later. Ickx’s best qualifying lap – 8min 14.0sec – was 20.9sec faster than the next best F2 effort, that of Jackie Oliver in a Lotus 48 powered by a 1.6-litre Cosworth FVA engine identical to the one in Ickx’s Matra MS5. In the race Ickx retired with suspension failure on lap 19, but the F1 world had been seriously impressed.
The 1968 F1 season was not a great one for Ferrari, and, as usual, despite driving beautifully, Amon had appalling luck. He finished just three world championship-status F1 grands prix that season – second, fourth, and sixth. Ickx drove very well, scoring his maiden F1 grand prix win at Rouen, in heavy rain, and finishing on the podium thrice more, at Spa, Nürburgring, and Monza.
Ickx in ’68, the year he moved to Ferrari
Mike McLaren/Getty Images
Ickx chases Denny Hulme in the ’68 British GP
Paul-Henri Cahier/Getty Images
In 1969 Ickx left Ferrari for Brabham – at the behest of Wyer, who wanted him to continue to race his sports cars and feared that Ferrari would forbid that – and, although Stewart dominated F1 that year in his Matra-Cosworth MS80, Ickx was best of the rest, often brilliant in his Brabham-Cosworth BT26A, winning at Nürburgring and Mosport and finishing second in the F1 drivers’ world championship, assisted by the good offices of his chief mechanic, Ron Dennis. He returned to Ferrari for 1970, the season in which Jochen Rindt became posthumous F1 drivers’ world champion for Lotus, having lost his life at Monza, and Ickx was runner-up again, winning at Österreichring, Mont-Tremblant, and Mexico City.
He raced for the Scuderia for three more years – 1971, 1972, and 1973, its annus horribilis – winning at Zandvoort in 1971 and at Nürburgring in 1972. In 1973, having not enjoyed his time at Ferrari that year, he accepted an invitation to guest-drive a third McLaren M23 at Nürburgring, finishing a fine third at the circuit on which he had always shone more vividly than anywhere else, which speciality had been the reason why McLaren had asked him to do that one-off race. He duly outclassed the team’s two regular drivers, Hulme and Peter Revson, in both qualifying and race.
I find what happened next difficult to explain. Magnificent where conditions were tough and when real courage was required – in the rain, always, and on tricky, even nasty, circuits such as Nürburgring, Österreichring, and Mosport – he appeared to mislay his mojo when he joined Lotus for 1974. Undoubtedly, the Lotus 72 had passed its sell-by date by that time – but his team-mate Ronnie Peterson nonetheless wrung three world championship-status F1 grand prix wins out of it, at Monaco, Dijon, and Monza, whereas the best that Ickx could manage was a brace of third places, at Interlagos and Brands Hatch. However, to be fair to him, also at Brands Hatch, he scored a memorable non-championship F1 Race of Champions victory, in torrential rain, passing Niki Lauda’s Ferrari around the outside of Paddock Hill. Even when he was out of sorts, Ickx still often managed to work miracles in the wet.
Granted, 1974 was the ninth consecutive season in which Ickx had contested F1 grands prix, but he was still only 29, a year younger than Peterson. Yes, Ronnie was prodigiously talented, but, even so, a man of Jacky’s class had no business being so comprehensively outdriven by him. After all, Emerson Fittipaldi had run Peterson far closer at Lotus the previous year, 1973, and Patrick Depailler would overshadow SuperSwede when they became team-mates at Tyrrell in 1977.
Ronnie Peterson (left) overshadowed Ickx (right) at Lotus in 1974. Colin Chapman stands in between, wearing ear defenders
Whatever the whys and wherefores, things soon went from bad to worse at Lotus, for 1975 would be the team’s nadir, and Peterson and Ickx both struggled unhappily and unproductively. Ickx abandoned ship in midseason, while Peterson soldiered on until the following year, although he fled to March after just one 1976 grand prix, at Interlagos, where he collided with his Lotus team-mate Mario Andretti on lap one and abruptly decided that enough was enough.
Ickx raced for Frank Williams’ and Walter Wolf’s Wolf-Williams F1 team in 1976 – or, rather, he tried to, for, despite finishing an excellent third in a damp and chilly non-championship F1 Race of Champions at Brands Hatch in early March, in the world championship-status F1 grands prix he failed to qualify his sluggish Wolf-Williams FW05 four times and he never looked like scoring points in the four grands prix for which he did manage to qualify. He left the team after DNQ-ing the car for the British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch, and he ended the 1976 season in an Ensign, racing four times for Mo Nunn’s tiny F1 team, but again he scored no points. The following year, 1977, he raced just once in F1, at Monaco, in an Ensign again, finishing 10th; and in 1978, yet again in an Ensign, he entered only four F1 grands prix, his results being one DNQ, two DNFs, and a 12th place at home at Zolder.
That appeared to be that as far as his F1 career was concerned, but he had now won the Le Mans 24 Hours four times (1969, 1975, 1976, and 1977) and in 1979 he raced Carl Haas’s Lola T333CS-Chevy in Can-Am, winning at Mosport (of course), Charlotte, Road America, Brainerd, and Riverside, becoming Can-Am champion as a result. He was morphing into a sports car and endurance racing specialist, by default, such was the weight of his successes in those categories. Nonetheless, when Depailler broke both his legs in a hang-gliding accident halfway through the 1979 F1 season, Guy Ligier called on Ickx to replace him in his eponymous F1 team. Might this be Jacky’s chance to bounce back into the F1 limelight? We all felt that perhaps it might be, for Ligier had already won three F1 grands prix that year – and, so bad were the breaks in Depailler’s legs, that Ickx knew that he would be able to contest the last eight grands prix of the F1 season without the prospect of the injured Frenchman returning to interrupt his F1 comeback. Moreover, Jacky was in great form, notching up Can-Am wins almost at will.
Can-Am victory at Mosport in 1969
Getty Images
Yet, in those eight grands prix that made up the latter half of the 1979 F1 season, Ickx’s Ligier team-mate Jacques Laffite outqualified and outraced him by a veritable chasm, beating him eight-nil by both measures, his qualifying lap times an average of 2.1sec faster than Ickx’s. Yes, Jacky was now 34, but Jacques was almost 36. Again, there was no excuse for Ickx’s poor performances. He said he did not like the new ground-effect F1 cars, but others said the same and drove them much faster. Perhaps, confused and disappointed, he simply gave up, for he had become even slower by the end of 1979 than he had been when he had first stepped into, and floundered with, Depailler’s Ligier.
In the 1980s Ickx became a master of sports car and endurance racing – and, as I wrote at the top of this column, that is what he will always be remembered for. I did not meet him until 2008, my first year as a McLaren team member, by which time he was a spry 63, and long retired. A few days before that year’s Monaco Grand Prix, on the Wednesday I think, I remember hurrying through the F1 paddock to collect some VIP passes from Pasquale Lattuneddu, Bernie Ecclestone’s right-hand man. When I arrived at Lattuneddu’s office, I found Ickx there, waiting outside, so I stood next to him, and we had a pleasant chat. After about five minutes, Lattuneddu’s secretary indicated that I should go in.
What could be the reason for the delay? It was inconsiderate, rude even
“Jacky was before me,” I said.
She went back inside to consult her boss, then she reappeared. “No, Pasquale says you’re first,” she said.
So I went in, I chatted with Pasquale awhile, I was given my passes, then I left. As I walked out, I asked Jacky what he was waiting for. “My pass,” he replied, “and I’ve been here for almost an hour.” I was astonished. What could be the reason for the delay? It was inconsiderate, rude even. Moreover, it cannot have been a clumsy oversight. No, there must have been a rationale, because with Ecclestone — and therefore with Lattuneddu — there always was. Such snubs were never delivered at random or by mistake. As I strolled back to the McLaren paddock hospitality unit, I began to reflect on the matter. At one point I stopped, turned, and looked back. Ickx was still standing patiently outside Lattuneddu’s office.
Jacky Ickx with Jack Brabham (far-right) and Bruce McLaren (far-left) after winning at the Nürburgring in 1969
Bernard Cahier/Getty Images
Even though Jacques Bernard Edmon Martin Henri Ickx won eight world championship-status F1 grands prix and three non-championship F1 races, stood on 25 F1 grand prix podiums, took 13 F1 pole positions, drove 14 F1 fastest laps, and finished runner-up in the F1 drivers’ world championship twice, somehow he never quite fitted the F1 mould. He was happier elsewhere, and ultimately more successful in other categories, too. Those six Le Mans wins will always guarantee him a place in any serious motor sport pundit’s GOAT list. So, tomorrow, please raise a glass on his 80th birthday to the greatest Belgian racing driver of all time… unless you count Max Verstappen as Belgian, that is!
