Kenneth McAlpine was there when the Connaught racing team came to being, and was one of the British drivers who periodically took part racing during the first years of the Formula 1 World Championship. His record includes seven Championship starts and 13th place in the 1953 German Grand Prix remains his best result. David Holland had an opportunity to do this interview with him in March 2000.
D.H. What got you interested in the first place, how did you start on the ladder so to speak?
K.M. Driving an Allard, which I bought just after the war, in hill-climbs and trials. It had a V-12 Lincoln engine, I mainly drove in trials in those days. I was living at Poole and used to go to those events all over the country. I suppose I bought it from Continental Cars, which was Rodney Clarke & Co. because the family house was near there.
How did you meet Rodney Clarke?
Because he was Continental Cars and they were purveyors of fast motor cars nearby at Cobham, where I was born. Rodney and his salesman used to visit my parents, they were selling foreign cars so I knew them. That’s what started the connection. I bought Bugatti 57 SC coupe from them in about 1948 because it was faster than the Allard. I then went from there to the Maseratis for speed trials at Brighton front, Shelsley Walsh and Prescott.
Was that the ex-Whitney Straight Maserati?
Yes there were two, ex-Whitney Straight and ex-Prince Bira they were two single-seaters…the photographs are in the album. Then there was the first race for Formula Libre at Gransden Lodge. I raced one of the Maseratis there and that was the beginning of my circuit racing. That then became a bit fraught, we then started the sports Connaught, which was Lea-Francis based.
You were linked to Connaught though out your career, how did that happen?
It was Rodney who then had the idea of producing a sports car, his chassis and a Lea-Francis engine. So I went in with him to do that and then decided that we’d better run this as a business, so we then wondered what to call it and came up with Connaught Engineering. CON came from Continental Cars. I was the sole owner from 1950 until the end of its days in 1956.
So with Connaught as a concern you were always the main principal?
I was the one producing the money for it all. Rodney Clarke was the designer of the cars and also the manager of the business side. I didn’t spend any effective time there, I was building power stations and runways down in Poole and other places. My business has always been construction. I was there at weekends whatever and Rodney was running the thing. Mike Oliver then came in as the engine developer.)
Is fair to say he came at a later date and wasn’t quite so important.
He had a very important roll to play. I’d been racing a Maserati in Ireland, Mike had been over there with a Bugatti. He used Continental Cars. Connaught couldn’t afford to build an engine, we were buying them from Lea-Francis and then we went to Alta, Geoffrey Taylor’s thing. Mike then came in on the engine development side, which was important. You can always try to improve an existing engine.
So when and why did you move from the sports cars to single-seaters?
Sports cars were getting so complicated and they were just as highly tuned and you needed a transporter any way. We said why bother with headlights, silencers and all this bodywork when we could do the thing more economically as a pure racing car. The other thing it was rather too easy in sports cars, we were winning all the races. Rodney and I used to decide before the race who was going to win and who would be second, they were way ahead in road holding.
The first single-seater appeared in the summer of 1950 I believe.
I was down at Castle Combe. I suppose October 1950 was the first race.
Prior to that in testing, I was reading you had a bit of an incident at Stowe corner, Silverstone?
I was most unpopular. That was in the summer getting it ready this one in Castle Combe, which was bloody cold. They were hay making and somebody decided to go across the track with a tractor and trailor and a wagon of hay and in avoiding them I hit one of the indicator corner signs. It got the other side of the car and bent the chassis in the fuel tanks and I was most unpopular.
I don’t know whether it’s true that you damaged the seat and decided not to repair it to remind yourself of that incident.
No, I’m not that sort of person. That’s folklore I think.
I’ve also read, and I don’t know what your feeling is, that Connaughts were so well built in great detail and so many were involved in it that it slowed down the overall advancement of the car.
The great difficulty in those days was that no engineering works or anybody in the motor trade would have anything to do with motor racing, so there was no way you could get the things done. Mike Oliver had been developing the engine and decided he wanted different timing on the camshafts, but one of our big problems was we couldn’t get anybody who would machine six camshafts, if you want six hundred…fine. Eventually we got it sorted by getting friendly with a firm that made machine tools and when they’d got a machine, a grinder they were making for somebody that needed testing, then they would do us a batch of half a dozen. But the motor trade, as such, was totally uninterested in doing one offs. So everything that we wanted, we either had to make ourselves which was slow, as we didn’t have machine shops like Mr. Ferrari or Mercedes, or you had to spend hours battling with the likes of Girling to do disc brakes or something. Their idea of motor sport was something to be avoided at all costs, and it did slow the thing down. Best part was we used a preselector gearbox, and we then decided we wanted a five speed and no one would produce one and we designed it ourselves and that took a year to do whereas Mr Ferrari would have the thing run up in a month or something. Raymond Mays then came into the act with BRM and persuaded some of the motor industry to subscribe, his thing in the early days was a howling disaster which made it even worse for the small people to get anything out of the motor industry at all. They just didn’t want to know.
You found that frustrating I imagine.
Well it was frustrating. We were always behind. It took an awful amount of time to get anything done. Well it could easily take three months before you got it whereas factory team would have had it in two days time. We knew what we wanted to do but couldn’t do it. So we were at a disadvantage. It was the major snag in the whole thing.
The car started off as a Formula 2 car, which became by default as such the Grand Prix formula.
Yes, the GP formula changed in 1952. We didn’t really want to do Formula 1 because we were doing very nicely thank you in Formula 2. We were top of the list for F-2 but when it came to F1 you were up against much stronger competition.
How did you find the competition? In 1952/53 you raced in Britain, Italy and Germany.
We were always struggling. Mercedes would come to a GP with six beautiful lorries, bags of mechanics and we would turn up in two converted Greenline buses. So the whole we were out of our league as far as winning was concerned, and we had fun and I was doing it because I enjoyed it and I was paying for it. And we had some success as a small outfit…not like in Formula 2 where we competed much more successfully.
You had reasonable success with Connaught in points scoring positions. Yet, would you say the greatest success of Connaught was Brook’s win in Syracuse, even though it was not a Championship race?
Oh yes. Top of the whole thing.
Were you there at the time?
No I wasn’t. To be fair we weren’t expecting to win. We couldn’t compete on level terms with Ferrari people. The place where we gained was the road holding. We could corner faster than anybody else and in those days you could slipstream if close behind. At fast circuits you could go round the corners faster than they were and then if you kept it in the right place you could then get the pull. There was no way we could overtake them. You could keep with them and if you drove close enough coming out of the corners, which was easiest for us to do as we could corner faster than they could, you could stay in their slipstream and get a tow. At Le Mans I was doing that for a couple of hours behind a Bristol. He had more speed down the straight and so if I could keep with him, which I could coming out of the last corner, then I was going down the straight 10 miles an hour faster than I would if I was on my own. He was a 2½ litre we were a 1½ litre. The road holding was always our big success.
The win in Sicily, did it help with British Industry contributions?
Not really.
Of the drivers who raced for Connaught who do you have particular memories of.
We had a wide selection, Stirling Moss downwards. Archie Scott Brown was probably the best, but he got himself killed. Tony Rolt was driving a Connaught for Rob Walker. Dennis Poore was competing with me in the old pre war cars he had this Alfa Romeo, we were the top two. Then when we went into the racing car Dennis became part of the team and a dear friend. Eric Thompson drove quite a lot, he then drove with me at Le Mans we built a Connaught 1½ litre and was doing very nicely at Le Mans. It was the first and last time in Connaught`s career we had a bad batch of valve springs, and things happen after 6 hours at Le Mans. Anyhow there was a whole range of drivers; they all drove in their own peculiarities. Stirling was a brilliant driver but absolutely hopeless at telling you what was wrong with a car he just drove it as it was and he couldn’t tell you if it was over-steering or under-steering. Other people like Jack Fairman were able to come back and say you’ve got too much oversteer and if you do this and that, but Stirling was absolutely useless. He just overcame all the problems fullstop.
You mentioned Archie Scott Brown. Is it true because of his arm the Italians refused him entry at Monza after he had practiced there?
Yes he had a disability, one hand had no fingers and so he held the steering wheel by side pressure. Fortunately for him we had a preselector gearbox so he wasn’t having to take his hand off, just flick the lever up or down. So it was an easier car to drive for him in others he would have to change gear with the palm of his hand.
Of the foreign circuits were there any particular favourites of yours?
Nürburgring, that was an exciting place. It was a fabulous thing always exciting and a challenge. Roy Salvadori and I went out the day before practice and I spent the day going round the circuit and got on quite well, Roy arrived later in the afternoon and he was an absolute juddering wreck. There were so many blind bends, you go over the brow of a hill sometimes you turn sharp right or straight on whatever, so you had to know where you were. That was the only real racing track. Monza aside, they were all artificial compared to that. Some of the Irish tracks were interesting. At Dundrod I got stopped by a chicken that decided to cross the road, and was hit fair and square in the radiator. The radiator was then filled with feathers and I had to stop to get rid of them, otherwise there was no cooling going on. It was so different as you were racing through towns and villages and you had none of these safety barriers or anything else. At the Nürburgring there was a left-hand downhill bend with a hedge on the outside where Onofre Marimón slightly over did it went through the hedge and the other side down was a hundred foot (30 meters) drop. Nowadays you would have barriers and goodness knows what. You didn’t drive with the intention of going off the road, nowadays it’s all par for the course.
What did you feel about the Connaught B type streamliner?
That was not a success, we only ran it in two or three races. It was good in theory, it might have been good on a very, very fast circuit, but Aintree wasn’t the place for it. It was too complicated it was too difficult to work on the car, you had to lift the whole bodywork off the car to get at it…didn’t really help.
What was it like to drive?
It didn’t make much difference accept you couldn’t see the wheels, which was a disadvantage.
I spoke to Leslie Marr and he said it was like driving in a goldfish bowl.
True, you couldn’t see what was really going on.
Are there any streamliners in existence?
I shouldn’t think so. We just took it off and converted it back to a normal B type.
When and why did you realise this adventure was coming to an end?
I was running out of money, the thing never made money. The taxation was getting less, that sounds odd but when you were paying 90% tax, spending 10% on the cars wasn’t a great deal of money. You got 90% of the loss back from the taxman so I was only paying 10% of the loss. So when they reduce the tax to 60% say, I was than having to find
40%. The other change was that I decided to get married and I had no intention of driving after I got engaged. So my personal incentive and my enjoyment stopped.
So basically your private life stopped the racing.
They tried to get funding elsewhere and after a year they tried to get external money to finance it to go on for another year. There were no profits and no racing team could live on its winnings and nothing else.
Would another reason behind the marriage decision be the danger aspect?
Oh from that point of view I was flying in the war and I always said I would never get married during the war if I was flying or after if I was motor racing. It isn’t fair to your wife to sit at the track and wait for you to come round. I don’t think it’s fair to put them through that sort of strain.
You witnessed certain incidents throughout your career. In 1953 at the Modena GP Baron de Tornaco was killed in practice were you there that day?
I was there, I was telling you about Marimón. In those days you would lose so many drivers a year it was part of the sport.
I heard there was no medical assistance at that practice, is that a fair accusation?
It wasn’t just practice. The level of medical care was pretty basic at most places. Nobody particularly specialised.
Was that a particular concern?
One knew this was the name of the game. You were flying during the war and friends got killed and that was part of life. And in motor racing the same thing happened.
Do you think it was a continuation of the wartime atmosphere?
To a degree, yes. People didn’t worry about personal safety, we were racing in short sleeved shirts and it was a great annoyance when they insisted we wore helmets. Originally you were wearing a cloth cap, or an ordinary cap worn back to front. Fine, we were doing our own thing, so be it. One thing you learnt not to do was wear nylon overalls, other than that, safety was not a factor.
The best form of escape was to jump out.
I crashed at Snetterton, and got thrown out, it landed up side down and had I remained in, I would have been severely crushed. You did get thrown out, there was no safety control, you just got into the car and drove it. Flannel trousers open neck short sleeve shirt
Why to you think the British became and maintained their strength in motor racing from the late fifties to today?
Well basically they were very good engineers. I don’t know why but we certainly had a pool of knowledge. Starting with Mays and the BRM, it then grew from the enthusiasts like the Coopers and Colin Chapman and people. They were around the same time that I was, when we all built cars in the south of the country. Our knowledge was separate from any individual motor manufacturers. In Germany it was Mercedes-Benz and in Italy all Ferrari, whereas ours was a group of people with skills developed outside the industry and was available for other people to take it on. Once you are successful it is easier to grow. People come to you and you have more money and once you get it going, then it develops every year.
When you left motor sport you concentrated on your business interests. What were they?
What I always have done. The family business began in 1867, I am one of the last two surviving grandsons of Sir Robert McAlpine, a totally family owned business. Those days it was entirely construction and so I was in it before the war and I was doing my motor racing at the weekend. When you went to a Grand Prix the professionals had been there for two days or something and I would arrive on a Friday night in order to practice on Saturday and race on Sunday. And I had to drive back for work on Monday, they had not much else to do until the next Grand Prix in two weeks time, to me it had to fit into my business.
Did you perceive a big difference between the amateur and professional drivers?
Well there were very few professional drivers, yes some were coming in like Mike Hawthorn and Fangio. The English were always amateurs until Hawthorn and Stirling Moss. Duncan Hamilton, Tony Rolt, Les Leston, they all had other jobs and went motor racing for the fun of it. We all knew each other and went to parties together. Nowadays after the race they get in their helicopters and executive jets and never see the other ones or talk to them either. It’s totally different, they are dedicated professionals and you certainly don’t go and talk to some other team. We all did things together as friends would.
Are you still in contact with fellow drivers from that era?
No. I happened to go to party to celebrate the 50th anniversary of BRM and met Stirling Moss. No, I have a philosophy in life that once you’ve finished something there is no point in going back. I’ve gone on flying or sailing or whatever it may be. I am a member of the BRDC (British Racing Drivers Club) but have been there only once, I think.
Will you be going to Silverstone this summer for the retrospective meetings?
No, I’ve done motor racing, been there, done that. Despite the fact that one of my sons and his wife being involved with saloon car racing and helicopters. It really doesn’t intrigue me at all. I’ll occasionally watch it on television. It’s a damn sight better on television than it is in the stands.
Do you have any regrets?
I did that and moved on. It was something that didn’t fit into my new mode of life being married with young children. I devoted my energies to the construction business and went back to sailing.
I believe you ran the Lamberhurst Vineyards
Yes I sold it three years ago. I had a farm, we grew hops. Then when that went in the Common Market the price went out of the bottom. We started a small vineyard that became a large vineyard and after 21 years decided to sell up. I like starting something and developing it and when it’s up and running I’ve lost the interest.
Have you always lived in the Kent area?
Since I got married in 1955 I’ve lived here, although bought up in Cobham and with construction you move around where the work is and where the family sent you. Being a family business you get told where to go.
Ken or Kenneth?
The motor racing world knew me as Ken, slightly to my annoyance. I strongly resisted it anywhere else.
DH-Who was the driver the journalists went to first in the beer tent after the race?
The person who won. And if it was not one of them, then Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins, a nice chap and quite a character too.
Team Connaught definitively unraveled during the 1957 season, yet thanks to privateers like Bernard Ecclestone, Paul Emery, or Bob Said the car competed in the World Championship until 1959. As was said, its greatest success came in form of Tonny Brooks winning the non-Championship Sicily Grand Prix in 1955. A year later Ron Flockhart brought Connaught to a third place at Monza, which became the only podium result for the team in the World Championship. The car’s swan song was Jack Fairman’s futile attempt to qualify a Connaught Alta at the 1962 Indy 500.
