Snowgood's Blog

By: snowgood

Jan 30 2019

Tags: 1975 British GP, 1976 Candian GP, Mosport Park, Shadow DN8, Tom Pryce

Category: ART, Cars, family

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Sam says if I can draw one sketch a day I should start to get the hang of it.

So I’m doing two or three to try and improve my technique.

I’m currently going back to the golden era of motorsport.

The seventies, which spawned everything from the JW Gulf Porsche 917 in the World Endurance Championship to this Shadow DN8 formula 1 car.

As a teenager I was obsessed with motor-sport.

Dad took me and a friend to see the British Grand Prix on 19th July 1975.

Just to get things straight that’s what most of us would call summer time.

The great Welsh F1 driver Tom Pryce started from pole position, and was second after the first lap.

Later James Hunt started to charge through the field.

Then we had a hailstorm, and virtually the entire grid fell off the track.

Me, Dad, and Michael Trzincski were soaked.

We piled into our Opel Rekord Coupe, and headed home.

Hunt was 4th, but I felt the weather robbed him of a podium.

Can you imagine there were 7 British drivers in the race!

Tom Pryce was supremely talented but lost his life whilst racing at Kylami in 1977.

The advance of safety structures and procedures in Formula 1 has achieved so much, but it took “silly accidents’ like Tom’s to shake up the establishment.

He was in the wrong place at the wrong time when a marshal ran across the track on a 170 mph straight.

Both the teenage fire marshal and 27 year old Pryce died instantaneously.

His body was flown home, and he was laid to rest at St.Bartholomews, Otford, Kent.

My drawing shows him en route to 11th place at Mosport Park two years earlier.