Bruce Halford (18 May 1931 – 2 December 2001) was a British racing driver from England. He was born in Hampton-in-Arden (then in Warwickshire) and educated at Blundell’s School.
Halford drove in Formula One from 1956 to 1960, participating in nine World Championship Grands Prix and numerous non-Championship races.
He died in Churston Ferrers, Devon. Halford’s obituary in The Daily Telegraph described him as “one of the last of the 1950s’ select band of private-entrant owner-drivers from the heyday of the classical front-engined Grand Prix car.” Info from Wiki
Bio by Stephen Latham
Born on the 18th May 1931 in Hampton-in-Arden, Warwickshire, Bruce Halford competed in Formula One from 1956 to 1960, in nine World Championship Grands Prix and numerous non-Championship races. He was described as one of the last of the 1950s’ select band of private-entrant owner-drivers from the heyday of the classical front-engined Grand Prix car and, running a Maserati 250F, lived a semi nomadic lifestyle while racing on the Continent from 1956 to 1958.
His parents owned an hotel business in Torquay after the War and after his education at a public school in Devon he worked in the family business and, along with his brother David, was a director by the time he started racing. He started in 1954 with a Riley TT Sprite in sports cars and he took several podiums at Davidstow. More podiums came the following year at Ibsley and Castle Combe plus he began competing in Formula 2 with his own Cooper-Bristol T23, as Equipe Devone, finishing fourth at Aintree plus he and Tommy Kyffin raced it in a Bol d’Or race at Monthlery.
In an ambitious move, he decided to enter Formula One in 1956 and he and his father purchased the ex-Prince Bira Maserati 250F from Horace Gould with the aim of touring and racing on the Continent. The first World Championship race that season was in Argentina, which was too costly a venture for them so they waited for the European season to start. Stirling Moss’s former mechanic Tony Robinson was recruited to maintain the car and an ex-long distance coach was obtained and converted to carry the Maserati (with most of the seats being removed, a full-width access door cut into the tail and ramps fitted) plus plus space for them to sleep in. Thus equipped, he travelled round the Continent from 1956-58 and later claimed he spent more time behind the wheel of the coach than in his Grand Prix car. At this time there were restrictions on the amount of money which could be taken out of Britain and he relied on money received from racing to keep them running (from starting fees and prize money, plus result bonuses from his oil, fuel, tyre and spark plug suppliers). Although the coach was used for living purposes, they sometimes stayed in a hotel near the factory in Modena, along with fellow drivers, including Horace Gould. It was said the British contingent ran up big debts at the hotel through the season although the proprietress always seemed to be prepared to lend more and had faith that they would repay the money. Alongside his races abroad, he was sixth at Brands Hatch, second at Mallory Park and third in the Aintree 100 plus had a win in a Formula Libre race at Oulton Park. However, during April’s Aintree 200, he noted a tank strap had come loose on newcomer Jack Brabham’s car but in trying to alert him to it he went off the track and hit the wall! He spent the evening following this drowning his sorrows in the bar of a Liverpool hotel. He qualified ninth for the German GP but was disqualified for receiving a push start after spinning off. He was running seventh at the time but during this incident, he knocked off his exhaust pipe and the exhaust gases blowing into the cockpit were making him groggy. As he became drowsy and began weaving about the track, the race officials had been notified of him receiving a push start by spectators after going off and began waving the flag to tell him to get off the track. However, as he was now in fourth place he continued for three laps and when finally pulled into the pits, he somehow persuaded the officials he was ill, with the result that he only received a small fine though lost his fourth place. He retired from the Caen GP while holding third place while engine problems ended his race in Italy. His first year on the Continent had been a challenging one, and he lost 6lbs in weight, as due to money being scarce he had often had to survive on milk and salads.
1957 saw him contest three more GPs and a number of Continental races with the Maserati, plus in the UK at Silverstone’s International Trophy. Their journey to race at the Sicilian road circuit at Siracuse saw them driving flat out in shifts, 24 hours a day, though he retired from it with engine failure. There was a retirement due to transmission failure at Pau, followed by a sixth place in Naples, and then it was on to Reims where he finished eleventh. Their travels then took them to Italy for the GP at Pescara, which he described as “one of the most marvellous circuits on which I ever raced” but frustratingly, the gearbox broke while he was running sixth. The car was sent to Maserati to be repaired but when Bruce arrived to race at a following race at Caen, having travelled from Torquay with D.S.Jenkinson in a Porsche, there was no sign of his car. Unbeknown to him, the bus had broken down en route from Modena and Tony had had to do a deal with a lorry driver to transport the Maserati all the way to Caen. However, poor Tony had to endure a nerve-wracking journey, due to the lorry’s two drivers’ driving efforts, and finally arrived at lunchtime on the Saturday at Caen, shortly before practice started. Bruce went on to take an excellent third place finish there, behind Jean Behra and Roy Salvadori.
After more deal-making by Tony, the lorry was then used to transport the car to race at the following weekend’s German GP. Bruce would eventually finish eleventh at the Nurburgring though his negotiations with the organisers regarding start money were not concluded until he was actually sitting in his car ready on the grid. He raced at Le Mans with Franco Bordoni in a Talbot Lago but unfortunately, the car only went a number of metres before its transmission broke, giving Bruce one of the shortest debuts on record.
Bruce continued into 1958 for another season with the Maserati plus joined Ivor Bueb in the works Lister Jaguar team. He was third again at Caen (behind Stirling Moss and Jo Bonnier) plus won a Goodwood Handicap, and had podiums at Snetterton, Crystal Palace, Mallory Park and in the Kingstown Trophy. There were three third place finishes at Oulton Park (including the Gold Cup), sixth at the British GP support race and fifteenth at Le Mans with Brian Naylor. At Le Mans, the car had to have an extra fuel tank fitted in the headrest on the tail to make sure it we could go the minimum distance between fuel stops. They were running fourth in class before they suffered gearbox problems, resulting in it eventually being jammed into third gear and remaining like this for the rest of the race. At the end of the year the Maserati would be sold and his last race with it came at the non-championship Modena GP. Despite breaking a rear axle in the second heat he pushed the car over the line to qualify and after being classified in both heats he went on to finish seventh and last of the finishers in the race.
From there he contested national sports cars in 1959 as Ivor Bueb’s Lister-Jaguar team-mate as well as driving John Fisher’s F2 Lotus 16-Climax. He shared the car with I.Bueb at Le Mans though they were forced to retire after 121 laps, while running fourth. He also raced it to fifth place in a sports car race during the British GP but in a race at Oulton Park the car ended up in a lake. Towards the end of the season, there was a works BRM F1 drive at Snetterton’s Silver City Trophy and he finished third but this never led to any further outings with the team. He raced the Lotus at Rouen, Syracuse and in the Aintree Trophy, but his debut in the Monaco GP ended almost at the start when he was caught up in a multiple accident which took out his Lotus, plus Wolfgang von Trips and Cliff Allison. While competing in the Trophee d’Auvergne at Clermont-Ferrand he was injured after puncturing a tyre and told how “I was thrown out onto the road just after Ivor crashed and we both arrived at the hospital at the same time. I was quickly flown back to Hum from where my father collected me with a mattress in the back of the family estate car.” Sadly, Ivor Bueb later succumbed to his injuries. During this period there were some drives with a Diggory-Gwyniad Formula Junior car, which he said “was so low that my bottom was dragging on the ground—literally!”.
1960 saw him in an F2 Cooper at numerous events, with his best results second in the Lombank Trophy and fourth at Snetterton’s Vanwall Trophy, though he failed to qualify for the Monaco GP with Fred Tuck’s Cooper-Climax. He later raced a Yeoman Credit Cooper T51-Climax in the French GP at Rheims and was classified eighth, despite having retired with engine failure before the end, but this would be his final World Championship GP. There were wins with Brian Naylor’s JBW Maserati in a Libre race at Snetterton, plus a Brands Hatch sports car race with a Lister Jaguar and he took a win and second place with an Aston Martin in the Raffles Club Trophy race at Brands Hatch and Silverstone. He was back at Le Mans, this time racing Ecurie Ecosse’s D-Type Jaguar with Ron Flockhart, though they retired after 24 hours due to a broken crankshaft.
In 1961, invited by David Murray to race Ecurie Ecosse’s Cooper Monaco in the Whit-Monday Goodwood race, he went on to win the race, though later retired from the 1000Km Nurburgring race due to suspension failure when sharing with Tommy Dickson. He returned to Le Mans for a fifth time though suffered a nasty accident when he lost control and crashed approaching the Dunlop Bridge. Thrown out at over 120mph, he suffered severe lacerations to his back after sliding along the track with the tarmac wearing away his overalls. Describing the accident, he told how “I came past the pits, swung into the Dunlop curve under the bridge and suddenly realised that I wasn’t going to make it because it had rained at this corner and nowhere else on the track. I didn’t notice it because I was sitting awkwardly behind the full-width screen which the regulations then demanded. Really, it was one hell of an accident. I just relaxed, loosened up and was shot out into the middle of the road on my backside. Mike Parkes was the next man round and I count myself extremely lucky that he didn’t run over me. I’d always been lucky in surviving lurid accidents relatively unhurt-I think it’s all to do with the fact that once I realise the car is out of control, I relax and let it throw me out rather than fight with it. But after this one, I began to think perhaps it’s time to stop.”
Following this he scaled down his racing activities, and his only notable results were a second in class with the Lister Jaguar at Brands Hatch in 1962 and sixth with a Cooper Monaco at Silverstone in 1963. He retired at the end of that year and was away from racing until returning in the mid-1970s to compete in Historic events, after visiting a race and having his enthusiasm rekindled. He had some outings in his friend Barry Simpson’s Lister-Jaguar, taking second at Silverstone and third in class at Thruxton in 1974 while the following year had a win at Silverstone and second place finishes at Brands Hatch and Oulton Park. He continued sporadically over the following two years before taking up a full season of historic racing with a Lotus 16 in 1978 and won an Allcomers race at Cadwell Park and a European Historic event at the TT plus took podiums at Brands Hatch and Donington’s Empire Trophy. In 1979 he won his class in the Esso Donington Historic Series and took three wins, twice at Donington Park and one at Oulton Park. 1980 saw a repeated success in the Esso Donington Series plus he won the Mike Hawthorn Memorial Trophy at Silverstone and was victorious twice again at Donington Park. He won his class in 1979 and 1980’s Donington Historic Championship, taking wins at Oulton Park and twice at Donington Park in the first year, then the following season won the Mike Hawthorn Memorial Trophy at Silverstone and was victorious twice again at Donington Park. The next year saw him take the Swedish Airforce Historic Trophy at Knutsdorp and second at Donington while in 1982 he won at Oulton Park, the Nurburgring, Monaco plus twice at Montlhery. Competing in that year’s Lloyds & Scottish series he had two wins at Silverstone and was fourth in the Championship. 1983 saw him win at Silverstone, Brands Hatch and Cadwell Park and in a final year with the Lotus, despite contesting a short number of events, he won at Ingliston and took the Mike Hawthorn Trophy at Silverstone. His last year of racing came in 1985, now fittingly back in a Maserati 250F, and had a victory and sixth at Silverstone plus fifth in the historic race supporting the British GP at Brands Hatch.
Of his races, he said that two stuck with him were Le Mans in 1959 plus the same year’s Monaco GP. At Monaco, besides his Lotus, only two other 1 1/2-litre cars qualified (both being works cars) “and everything else on the track was a works entry, so was delighted to get into the race at all..Monaco was a long-shot; we just hadn’t thought we would qualify. There were no reserved places for F2 cars, and we hadn’t thought about fuel loads or tactics. And it wasn’t down to clever chassis tweaks; there really was nothing you could alter apart from tyre pressures. You just drove it the way Chapman designed it. But it handled nicely, and it certainly suited Monaco’s twists. The two other F2 qualifiers were Cliff Allison in the Ferrari 156 and Taffy von Trips in the Porsche 718..As we approached Ste Devote I was lying last, which was where I’d qualified, but only just behind Allison. In those days Louis Chiron marshalled at Ste Devote, which was blind. I saw him signal, so I knew something had happened. When I got there it was Taffy von Trips who had spun the Porsche. There was not much we could do except try not to hurt Taffy, so Cliff hit him at the front and I hit him at the back. When I stopped I felt something trickling down my throat, and I thought, “Bloody stroll on, I’ve gone forward so far I’ve cut my throat on the windscreen.” So I asked Cliff “Am I alright? I’ve got something trickling down my throat.” He said, “it’s sweat, you fool, get out.”
He felt Le Mans was a real achievement as “We had so much trouble: it rained for about 22 of 24 hours, so hard I couldn’t find the pits entrance at one point, and we broke a camshaft, but we got back to the pits and fixed it. Then at about 10am the gearbox stuck in neutral while Brian was driving. He struggled with it at the trackside in the rain, and then hit it with a King Dick wrench, the only tool we carried apart from a screwdriver. It went into gear, so he drove back to the pits without even bothering to put the lid back on there was oil everywhere. In the pits we managed to select fourth -or was it fifth? and we knew we could get it going but there could be no restarts. So we filled it to the gunwales with fuel and sent Nobby Taylor out about midday to cruise round. We’d had a fright in practice about our consumption, which seemed to be about 7.5mpg instead of the 10mpg we’d planned for and the 12mpg Jaguar had told us to expect. I had a very good mechanic, who had also looked after my 250F, and he rigged up an extra tank in the fin, held in place with bungees and connected with beer piping. It held 2 1/4 gallons, I remember. Brian just rolled around in top for four hours; he was smoking fags on the straight. But he finished, and they paid up. I’ve still got a finisher’s award.”
Alongside his racing he owned several Brixham trawlers, plus raced yachts with his brother David, and was involved in the restoration of a former Brixham lifeboat. He and his wife Patsy ran a Cafe, located next to Dartmoor jail, but sadly his son Peter was killed in a road accident and his wife passed away not long after this.
Bruce died at his home in Churston Ferrers, Devon, on the 2nd December 2001 after a short illness.
Bruce Halford. Euro Series Championship. Donington Park 1981 (Keith Nunns, flickr)
Gallery F1
