‘THE JAPANESE’
Doug Serrurier’s uncanny ability to ‘size’ up top overseas racing cats and come up with his own interpretations on the same theme infuriated at least one Formula One constructor…
REPORT BY JOHN BENTLEY
“THEY used to call me ‘The Japanese’…” Doug Serrurier, once a constructor of Grand Prix cars and a pretty mean driver himself, chuckles as he describes the reaction of overseas car-builders when they first came across his homegrown LDS single-seaters.
Out here in the Transvaal, 10 000 km from the center of the Formula One action in the early ’60s, they found racers as sophisticated as those that were winning in Europe. And what’s more, they were generally better built…
The unlikely name-tag referred, of course, to Serrurier’s uncanny ability to “size up” (in many cases quite literally), the latest models from overseas and produce something similar – and often significantly improved – in what seemed like no time at all. All-in-all, Doug built 13 racing cars, the first being his front-engined Speedy Engineering Special, the others all mid-engined designs to which he gave the LDS moniker derived from his full name, Louis Douglas Serrurier.
All the LDS cars, he freely admits, were based on the creations of Cooper and Brabham. “Why go to the trouble of reinventing the wheel when a successful set-up is staring you in the face?” he comments. Press him a little more and he’ll modestly admit that all the cars incorporated his own detail improvements. Speak to those who drove them and you’ll be told that the quality of workmanship was always better than that of the original.
All used space-frame chassis and all featured perfect welding that drew grudging admiration from the fabricators working with overseas teams.
LDS No 1 was based on a Cooper that Serrurier imported in 1959. “That was the old ‘bent-frame’ Cooper, and in fact I built three cars of that type before the ‘flat’ 1960/61 type came out. The first of these I saw was the one Jack Brabham brought out here to drive in the December, 1960 Grand Prix at East London.
I got involved with his mechanic, helping him as I wasn’t racing myself. I wasn’t only preparing the car, I was preparing my mind…
“I’d already started building another car, but changed it all after my experience with the Jack Brabham version. That’s how the first ‘flat’ LDS came into being.
Amazing handling
“We didn’t copy the bodyshell designs, though. They were made up for me in aluminium, first by an Italian chap and later by Geoff Collins. The ‘flat’ type handled so much better than the original Coopers… it was amazing.
“I said to Jackie Pretorius, who used to help me back then, that he could have the use of my older-type LDS if he put it together. But a mistake which he and his crew made when assembling the steering box had him off the road upside down at Grand Central. And although he was only slightly hurt, the car was a write-off.
“But George Mennie also wanted a ‘flat’ type. So, I built him one, traded in his old car and used that to repair the chassis Jackie had pranged…”
Doug was now really learning the art of racing car manufacture, though he insists that most of the cars he built for himself to race, selling them later. Exceptions were the cars he built to order for Mennie and Sam Tingle.
Another made-to-order machine was the LDS-Porsche he built for Arthur Pillman, which was campaigned by John Love and later briefly by Dawie Gous, before Serrurier bought it back and adapted it to take the more usual Alfa motor.
He eventually built a total of six ‘flat’ type Cooper-derived LDS machines, using Alfa and Climax power. All used Cooper wheels, suspension uprights and steering boxes, ordered direct from the Surbiton factory.
“John Cooper was one bloke who didn’t mind. He supplied me with everything I needed. As long as he had money coming in, he was quite happy, even though he knew I was virtually copying his cars. With Brabham it was a different story, though…”
So, all Serrurier’s later, Brabham-based creations still used Cooper suspension. For instance, although Sam Tingle’s final, 2,7-litre Climax-engined LDS looked like a Brabham (it was in fact based on the Nucci Brabham driven by Pieter de Klerk), it was fairly extensively redesigned to take the Cooper bits.
Doug laughs as he recalls how the car fooled Denny Hulme – and really upset Jack Brabham. “We were at Kyalami one day and Jack Nucci got hold of Denny and said to him ‘Do you know what kind of car that is?’ Hulme replied that it was obviously a Brabham.
Brabham ‘not amused’
” ‘Have a good look,’ Nucci insisted. Then Denny noticed the Cooper suspension and just shook his head. But Jack Brabham wasn’t at all amused that I’d sort of copied his car…”
Ironically enough, Brabham, the archetypal engineer-driver who began his career on Aussie cinder tracks and went on to win the World Championship at the wheel of his own car, could almost have come from the same mould as Serrurier. For Doug’s ability behind the wheel, and his talent for getting the most out of a racing machine, whether it was two-or four-wheeled, matched his technical prowess.
Serrurier started a long competition career in 1 937 when, at the age of 1 6, he began racing his motor cycle, an Imperial Clubman sports racer. “I had my first race at a track known as the Old Barn, just off the Alberton-Heidelberg main road, ” he recalls.
Built by the riders themselves, it was a kidney-shaped circuit, with about 200 drums of oil poured onto the gravel surface to settle the dust. “It cut down the dust all right, but if it was slightly wet it was lethal…”
The young Serrurier and his four brothers were all bitten by the ‘biking bug. “My old man didn’t know we were racing,” he remembers. “We used to say we were going for a ride. Then just round the corner, we’d ditch the headlights and mudguards and head for the track. But when he later found out we were racing, he gave us all the encouragement we needed.”
Then came the war and Serrurier, after completing his apprenticeship, joined up, serving in the transport section of the SAAF. Wartime North Africa was full of opportunity for a technically minded youngster with his kind of resourcefulness.
“We used to organize race meetings in the desert. There were plenty of AJSs and Matchlesses around. We used to go to the REME dumps and just help ourselves. Buddy Fuller was also up there and three of my brothers, and we were able to organize some pretty good equipment.
Speedway pioneers
At the end of hostilities Doug and Buddy Fuller found themselves in Italy. “Two speedway JAPs were advertised for sale in a motor cycle magazine -they belonged to English enthusiast Alec Mil lea, who later emigrated to South Africa.
“We wrote to him and eventually bought them. They arrived out here in 1947, two very good bikes with plenty of spares. In fact, those bikes really got speedway going in South Africa.”
Serrurier and his brothers Jack, Allen, Harry and Bob were hotshot speedway riders and Bob went on to become national champion. But Doug had meanwhile been given an ultimatum by his girlfriend Doreen, who told him “You choose, it’s speedway or me…”
He promptly headed for England, where he signed up to ride for Liverpool. But some years later he was back and when he finally quit riding, all was forgiven. “I met him when I was 18 and we finally got married when I was 36,” laughs the lady who became Mrs. Serrurier.
Even while still active in Speedway, Doug had been casting around for other ways to satisfy his daredevil streak. “In about ’55 I teamed up with Buddy Fuller and New Zealander Dick Campbell to start stock car racing at Wembley. We called our company Thrills Incorporated and it was very successful, making quite a bit of money.”
Serrurier finally quit speedway in 1956 and he and Fuller then formed the Dunlop Helldrivers. His friendship with Jackie Pretorius, who later drove Formula 5000 cars for him, stemmed from this time.
But the relationship almost didn’t make it to first base. “We started off at Nelspruit with our first show and Jackie and another chap named Hills, whom we had cast as clowns in the act, were sweeping the ramp used for our car-jumping stunt.
“Despite warnings on the PA, Pretorius went on with his sweeping, oblivious to the fact that a car was careering up the ramp behind him. At the critical moment, he slipped, the car hit him up the backside and he ended up in Barberton Hospital.”
Around this time, Doug also started dabbling in circuit racing, running his first event at Palmietfontein in 1956 with a Triumph TR2. The new type of competition appealed to him, but he decided he needed a real racing car.
Racing cost money
“I’d never really got involved in four-wheeler racing, never even been along to watch. I’d always concentrated on speedway because that made money. In those days, car racing cost you money…”
After considering buying Frank Maritz’s famous MG Special, Doug decided to go his own way and built the famous Speedy Engineering Special. It had a tubular ladder frame, a front-mounted Climax engine, wishbone front suspension and a de Dion back end. Initially he used a Hallibrand diff, but later switched to a VW unit.
But even before the Speedy was completed, he bought a 500 Cooper-replica from Syd van der Vyver. “I nearly killed myself in that at ‘Maritz-burg,” he recalls. “I left the nut loose on the steering box, lost my steering in the Sweep and crashed through the fence. The car landed upside down, completely destroyed, but I was unhurt.”
Once it had the VW diff, the Speedy proved quick but fragile and Serrurier became a “name” in national racing, though not a regular winner. He decided to quit the Dunlop Helldrivers, getting a healthy payout for his share of the business, and used some of the money for an extensive overseas trip which took in visits to Alfa, Lancia, Porsche, Jaguar and Lotus.
Impressed by a hair-raising trip down the streaming wet autostrada alongside an Alfa test driver, he bought a Giulietta Spyder Veloce. He also visited the Cooper driving school at Brands Hatch.
“After my course I received a letter from instructor Ian Burgess, saying I had done well enough to be promoted to the next course,” Doug recalls. “But by then, I was ready to leave for home…” Planning to sell the Speedy when he got back, he ordered a Cooper T51 rolling chassis from Alan Brown as well.
“But there were no immediate takers for the Speedy and I needed the cash from that to pay for the Cooper. So, I persuaded Syd van der Vyver to take it over…” That was the famous Van der Vyver Cooper which pioneered the “Cooper-Alfa” combination that became such an important part of the South African racing scene.
“I then took the motor out of my new Alfa Spyder and fitted it to the Speedy Engineering Special, but I never ever raced it that way because Bruce Johnstone made me an offer for it. I kept the Alfa motor and helped him fit a Volvo mil! to the car.”
A Cooper copy
Serrurier ordered another Cooper from overseas and promptly began building a copy. He eventually built three cars based on that first Cooper import…
“It was all thanks to John Cooper’s willingness to sell me suspension bits. I could never have built the cars if I’d had to fabricate everything. I had a brother in the casting business and he used to make a lot of things for me, but when it came to wheels and uprights, using materials like Electron which have lo be cast under pressure, we had to call on Cooper.”
In fact, though he was already building LDS cars, Doug relied largely on his original Alfa-engined imported Cooper for his own racing until well into 1961, when he won the Rand Autumn Trophy with the old “bent-frame” machine. But later in the season several good placings were achieved in an LDS-Alfa, a sleek machine featuring the later “low-line” chassis.
The first nine LDS machines were Cooper-style cars, with six “low-line” versions following the first three “bent-frame” examples. Of the other three, one was based on the Brabham BT11 Formula One. car (built for Sam Tingle) and two were modelled on the Formula Two Brabhams. One of these was built for Jack Holme, the other for Doug’s own use.
Doug raced most of his cars before selling them. “I got ideas for improvements from driving them, and sold them off when I felt I could build something better,” he says. “I remember crashing the first Cooper-based ‘low-line’ very badly in its first race, at Bulawayo. I got into a slide in the corner at the end of the long straight and as I corrected, I bumped the toggle switch for the ignition. That sent me into the straw bales and the car landed upside down. I had to rebuild it completely, and Sam Tingle bought it.”
Tingle became one of the most successful LDS drivers, winning the Rhodesian national championship with this 1,5-litre Alfa-powered machine before progressing to the later, Brabham-based, 2,7-litre Climax-engined chassis that fooled Denny Hulme. The latter car, which was built by Doug to Tingle’s order, took the Rhodesian driver to second place behind John Love in the 1966 South African Championship.
Another car built from the start as a customer machine was the John Love LDS-Porsche. After teething problems and a spectacular shunt at Westmead, it eventually won the Rand Autumn
Trophy at Kyalami in the Rhodesian’s hands. Then there was the Climax-engined George Menniecar, campaigned successfully by SP (Fanie) Viljoen in national events.
Doug’s own contribution behind the wheel was the richest of all. First using Alfa engines and later the four-cylinder Climax, Serrurier was a top contender for national championship honors right through from 1961 to the end of 1966, when he switched to driving a Lola T70 in the national sports car series.
His favorite racer
His personal favorite was the machine shown in the Leon Hoffman cutaway sketch accompanying this feature.
“The bodywork, done by Geoff Collins, was the prettiest of all. It had a two-liter Climax and Colotti gearbox,” he recalls. “It was one of the few cars I could sit in properly, too, because I was big for the Formula Ones.”
It took him to his best national championship placing, third in the 1965 series. After the switch to the Lola, he sold the LDS to the Domingo brothers. When he saw it years later, someone had ditched the pretty Collins bodywork, planning to turn it into a sports car. Now owned by classic car racer Brian Tyler, the squarish bodywork is nothing like the flowing original lines.
Doug knows of seven other LDSs still in existence, Sam Tingle still has both his cars, two more are in England, there are two examples in Australia and an Alfa-engined machine is on display in an Italian museum.
The end of ’65 saw Doug’s first contact with Lola, a marque with which he was to forge close links over the next few years. It began when he allowed himself to be persuaded by Alex Blignaut to partner Roy Pierpoint in the David Good Lola T70-Ford during the Springbok Series. “I’ll never forget the moment I first saw that car. It looked huge, compared to our Formula Ones. I wondered if I’d ever be able to drive it…”
Doug tells the story of a classic motor racing “wild goose chase” on the night before the ’65 Rand Daily Mail Nine-Hour, as the team tried to find the source of a ticking noise coming from the big 289 Ford V8 engine. “The mechanics had stripped it, checked everything and put it all together again, but when they started it up, there was this ‘tick-tick’ noise.
“It was late and Grosvenors, where the car had been prepared, had already closed, so we went back to my workshop. David Good felt the mechanics had already had enough, and as they had to be fresh for the race, he sent them off to bed.
“Then he, Pierpoint and myself took the motor out again and stripped it right down, but we could find nothing wrong with it. It was only after an ‘all-nighter’ that we found that in jacking up the car to work on the clutch, they’d dented the sump. A big-end was catching!”
The car retired from the race – “It dropped a valve or something” – and after the Springbok Series it was shipped back to England
Leading the Nine-Hour
Towards the end of 1966 Blignaut ‘phoned again. Didn’t Doug perhaps want to buy the Lola, if Pierpoint brought it out again? Serrurier said he didn’t have the money but Alex worked wonders, and he had a Springbok Series drive and the car, for far less than he could believe.
The Serrurier-Pierpoint pairing led the Nine-Hour from the start but then were sidelined by a broken rocker. Later, victory in Lourenco Marques, then a second place in the Cape Three-Hour, gave some consolation, and the looming clash between Doug and Bobby Olthoff in the 1967 national sports car series was keenly anticipated by the fans.
But although Doug and the Lola were the fastest combination all season, Bobby and the McLaren were more regular finishers and took the title. One of those retirements was the spectacular end to his efforts in the Cape South Easter, when the car lost a wheel.
With a lack of “big bangers” in the line-up, the sports car series was on the wane, and for 1968 Serrurier turned his attention to the newly instituted single-seater Gold Star series for Formula A cars. Using the T70 as a “donor”, he put together the first of his Lola single-seaters, a T140, for old stock-car sparring partner Jackie Pretorius to drive.
But first there was the 1967 Nine-Hour, which saw Doug and the Lola lead in the early laps before retiring. This was also the debut of the famous white Walls tee Cream livery, with the “Stop me and buy one” slogan across the rear of the car. Organized by Doug’s great friend Pat Coles, the sponsorship remained a feature of local racing for many years.
There was better luck for the ice cream car at ‘Maritzburg, where Doug and co-driver Pretorius chased Paul Hawkins’ oil-spewing Lola-Chevy. “They black-flagged him but his mechanic convinced the officials that it was just blowing off excess oil, so they let him carry on. Our car was black with the stuff, my goggles were covered in it -and I didn’t have tear-offs.
“We were slipping and sliding all over the place. Then Jackie took over and he kept bumping Hawkins up the back… he didn’t care, it was my car!” Doug recalls. But the pressure told and Hawkins slowed, letting Pretorius through to win, while the Chevy blew up in a big way a few laps later.
Sportsman of the year
Jackie Pretorius had a blistering ’68 season in the Serrurier-prepared Walls Lola (later a T142), and finished second overall behind John Love in the national championship. He and Doug were named joint winners of the Guild of Motoring Writers’ Motor Sportsman of the Year Award.
At the end of the season, the ageing T70 was dusted off and the bits fitted for the Springbok Series as usual. But it almost “fried” Serrurier when it caught alight at Clubhouse.
When the old two-seater Lola was finally retired, its remains ended up on a dump in Alberton, an area that was later filled in to make a rugby field. “That’s where it is. to this day. buried under the rugby field,” Serrurier says.
“I let Ian Glasby in Australia have the other bits. He’s trying to recreate the car, but unfortunately he’ll have to build another chassis…”
Doug’s role was becoming more and more that of entrant and two Walls Lolas, for Pretorius and Paddy Driver, ran in 1969. Now a “father figure” in local racing, he was always ready to help the opposition. For instance, it was “Uncle Doug” who jumped in to do the welding required on John McNicol’s Lola-Chevy, to enable the championship contender to make the grid at that year’s Rand Spring Trophy, after a suspension failure on the warm-up lap. Today he and McNicol are great friends and keen supporters (and helpers) of the latter’s young son Stuart in Formula M (micro midget) racing.
In 1 969 Serrurier was presented with one of South African motorsport’s highest accolades, the Ken Lee Award. He continued preparing racing cars for several years, changing to Surtees chassis with William Fergusson and Spencer Schultze as drivers.
In fact, his entire operation was taken over by Wynn’s, although he continued preparing cars for them until 1 972. His last drive in a track race was in the 1 970 ‘Maritzburg Three-Hour, when he shared the ex-Van Rooyen Mustang with Fred Cowell.
That year he tried a bit of powerboat racing and his final competitive car outing was with Fergusson in an LDS of a different kind, an off-road special built for the 1976 Roof of Africa Rally. “We won the round-the-houses section but ended up stranded on the edge of a mountain in the middle of winter. I had never been so cold and hungry in my life,” he recalls. His old rival Bobby Olthoff picked up the shivering pair and gave them a ride to safety.
Still building cars
Meanwhile, “Uncle Doug” had been doing what he’s still doing today at the age of 72: building and rebuilding cars in his backyard workshop in Henley-on-Klip, south of Johannesburg, in the mid-’70s he completely rebuilt a Ferrari Daytona that had been written off after flipping on De Waal Drive in Cape Town.
More recently, he’s built an immaculate Ford GT40 replica and a perfectly detailed Cobra replica and both have the Serrurier hallmark of superb workmanship. “And they handle well, not like most of these kit cars,” he assures me.
“I fit my own suspension design, with bits specially made up for me by Bilstein.” With Serrurier’s background, they just have to be standard-setters and the Cobra ended up as first prize for the Jackpot competition at Sun City.
Next, there’ll be another Cobra. And he also pians a Ferrari Daytona replica. Old car builders, it seems, just go on and on…
Scanned from CAR 1993 February
about Doug Serrurier
