Ian Burgess – F1 | The “forgotten” drivers of F1

1960 USA GP Riverside. Photo from the Collections of The Henry Ford

1962 GB GP. Scan from Motor Racing 1962 Vol 9 No 09 – P326 British GP Aintree Photo 01

Ian Burgess #17 1962 – The Aintree International “200” race, 28th. April 1962. Eight years before the Lotus 72 appeared, there was this little gem… entered by the Anglo-American Equipe, financed by Louise Bryden-Brown. Although it is thought to be based on a Formula Junior Cooper T59, though Denis Jenkinson describes it as follows in his report of the Pau race, in Motorsport Magazine: ” … the car, which has a new chassis frame along Copper lines, but much more narrow, Cooper-like alround suspension but with different geometry, and radiators mounted on each side of the engine so that the nose of the car had the smallest aperture to let air into an oil-cooler. The hip-mounted radiators took air from scoops on each side of it’s narrow body. The 1.5 Climax FPF engine had twin exhaust pipes.” Ian Burgess was it’s – not too fast – driver, and in later years the car became known as the Aiden Cooper… Typically, Burgess claimed he did design the car, in later life, though it is more likely to have been the work of Aiden Jones of Shannon fame. To complicate matters, Aiden Jones became Hugh Aiden-Jones over the years, though I am sure it is just Aiden and surname Jones, father of Ed Jones, who raced his dad’s SuperVee cars in the early eighties. The SuperVee was a nimble but simple wingcar design. Ed Jones survived a huge wall impact at one of the ovals, but in an Anson, sustaining severe leg injuries, though when in the Shannon, he might have not survived. Back to the “Cooper”, it used a Cooper 5-speed gearbox, and although it was seen in this guise at some – non championship – races, there were overheating problems which led to the radiators being moved to the front, a shame as the hip mounted radiator shrouds were probably not big enough with the cooling elements so close to the engine. Same happened to the 1971 Costin designed March 711 bodywork. Shown above is Burgess, during the Aintree race. The race report mentions him coming in on lap one with a misfire, and continued the race in desultory fashion… here he is lapped by the works Lotus-FPF 24 cars of Jimmy Clark and Trevor Taylor. Not sure if that massive piece of bodywork above the left sidepod belongs there, or if the whole engine cover got lose… Burgess wasn’t classified with only having done 24 of the 50 lap race. Photo from the Liverpool Echo and info Ed Brunette

Ian Burgess 1962 – The Aintree International “200” race, 28th. April 1962

1963 GB GP Silverstone – Scirocco-BRM. Photo and info Ian Gittins