16th, Stewart's Last-Lap Triumph Seals Historic Championship Win
You’ll notice that Bruce McLaren’s name doesn’t feature in the results panel to the right… even though he finished less than two tenths behind Jackie Stewart’s winning Matra. At pre-chicane Monza, such margins were no guarantee of a headline result.
There had been a one-month break since the German GP, although most leading teams had taken part in the Oulton Park Gold Cup (where Jo Bonnier had crashed his Lotus seriously enough to have to withdraw from Monza). Long acknowledged as F1’s next big thing, following the loss 17 months earlier of Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart came to Monza with a 29-point lead over Brabham rival Jacky Ickx and a chance of clinching his first world title. The Scot qualified third, behind Jochen Rindt’s Lotus and Denny Hulme’s McLaren, but all three would feature in an engaging, race-long battle featuring up to eight cars. Ickx, meanwhile, started at the back following a string of engine problems.
Matra brought along a four-wheel-drive MS84 – F1’s fad du jour – for Stewart to try, but he would race the conventional, better sorted MS80. Lotus persisted with the 4WD experiment, though, entering a 63 for John Miles (not that many people noticed, because its engine would fail within a handful of laps).