The checklist of motor racing champions that Peter Briggs has worked with is one of the most impressive in the sport. From Jochen Rindt, Graham Hill and John Surtees through to Niki Lauda, James Hunt and Alan Jones, Briggs was grounded in racing when times were vastly different.
From starting out as a jobbing mechanic and being in on the ground floor of the March team in the early 1970s, the Kent-based team patron went on to run his own highly successful single-seater squad and claimed the British Formula 3 championship spoils in 1995.
Briggs was a mainstay of the Surtees team throughout the 1970s before a chance phone call (or two) led to him striking out on his own in the early 1990s with Edenbridge Racing, a team that eventually ended up in the British Touring Car Championship.
He has now taken a back seat from an active role within motorsport but still follows it in great detail – as you would expect for a man with such a colourful and varied history in all things petrol-powered.
Here, he runs through some of the highlights of five decades at the very forefront of the sport, and it is a fascinating tale.
Question: What was it that sparked the motor racing interest in you as a kid? Where did it begin?
James Hilton
Via email
Peter Briggs: “My father ran a big laundry in Slough, and behind it there was a Ford dealership. I wasn’t really sure what do with my life, so I went into there as an apprentice. I wasn’t a very good mechanic but I was OK. After about a year there, they moved me into the reception department.
“My brother had converted armoured cars for a guy called Roy Winkelmann – they had known each other from school. The business was set up in America, it came over to England and my brother’s job was to line the trucks. Roy then bought a Formula Junior Lola to compete and I used to go with my brother to watch him racing.
“So, when I was working in the Ford garage, Winkelmann Racing was running too and I had got to know them quite well. In fact, my girlfriend had started working at Winkelmann’s too, working under Alan Rees. They had then decided that they wanted an extra person on the team. In those days, even though they were running Formula 1 drivers like Jochen Rindt in Formula 2 machines, there would only be one mechanic on the car. They were winning everything and there were two other mechanics when I joined.
“When I began in 1968, we were running Alan Rees and Jochen Rindt in the Formula 2 Brabham BT23Cs. I was helping out, doing all the paperwork and carrying all the Brabham spares for the other teams. I was responsible for putting the fuel in the cars: it was general dogsbody stuff.
“That continued into 1969, when we were then running the works Lotus cars as such, although they weren’t particularly good cars. We ran Rindt and Graham Hill a lot, and we had John Miles in the car and other drivers as well. Alan Rees had stopped driving at that point and was getting more and more involved with the management side.
“But what was happening in the background was that March Engineering had been formed and I joined the team in September that year – I was one of the first employees and there were only about six of us there. Most of the people came from Winkelmann Racing, which really spelt the end of that concern.”
What was it like being in
