Over at F1 Fanatic, Keith Collantine has just quadrupled his workload (impressive enough already) by offering to look through his extensive collection of old motor racing magazines and tell his commenters what happened in F1 on their birthdays. At the time of writing, he has had 121 comments, which should keep him out of mischief this weekend.
Connaught A Type, 1955 - 1956
I did comment but only to point out that I am older than F1 so the answer to the question for me is a big fat zero. But that led to me to ponder on what makes us F1 fans in the first place; what life-changing event was it that decided we should follow the sport ever afterwards?
The answer for me was very easy. It was the first motor race I attended - one look and I was hooked. The year was 1962 and I had attained the tender age of 14. I cannot remember how I happened to be there but the memory of that event is still clear in my mind. It was a club race on the old Salisbury Airport circuit in Zimbabwe; I sat on the outside of the most demanding corner, a hairpin at the end of the longest straight, and the cars, mostly old front-engined secondhand F1 and F2 cars, came swooping over the crest of the hill, down to the corner, braking at the last second and then swooping through the bend, engines roaring and drivers sawing away at the wheel as their cars twitched at the very edge of adhesion.
One car in particular I remember, an old A Type Connaught with cockpit deeply cut away at the sides so the driver could be seen from the waist up. Out of date it may have been but this was the real thing, the bellowing growl of a 2.5 liter engine (I cannot remember what motor it was - you could throw just about anything into those Connaughts), gorgeous dark green paint job, a driver visibly working away at the limit of his ability. It was inevitable that the sight, sound and smell of F1 should capture my sensibilities and from that moment on I was a devotee.
On reflection, I realise that the age of the cars involved in that race gave me an overview of the history of F1 in a nutshell - many of them dated back to the early years of the sport, almost as far back as 1950, its birthdate. There were a few F2 Coopers involved and the rear-engined revolution was already complete in Europe, but I was allowed a glimpse of the dying years of the front-engined race car, drivers all flying elbows, T-shirts and goggles, the very spirit of open wheel racing in its first half century. How far we have come since those carefree days.
So this is the question for my readers to consider: how did you become hooked by F1 and what do you remember of that first experience of it? Note that I avoid the hard work that Keith has taken on - I make no promises of hunting through dusty archives or assembling interesting statistics. But we can enjoy a few moments of delicious nostalgia as we recall that initial experience that impacted upon us so strongly.
Ah, nostalgia and the way things were...