Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Casto
At 50+ years of age, I am MUCH too young to remember this race. My biggest memory of 1977 is watching Star Wars and even that is somewhat hazy at this point! 
Given I can't remember, I had to look at the race report on Wikipedia to see the details. So it looks like...
* 11 cars didn't even qualify
* 26 cars taking the start
* 12 cars retired during the race. This is nearly half the field. This includes cars that were running as high as third at time of retirement.
* 6th through 15th was from 1 to 6 laps down at the end.
* Leaving five cars spread out on the lead lap.
So qualifying was close, but apparently the cars were crap? The excitement of the race was to see who could make it to the end? Maybe a bit of a battle between a select few drivers? How is that better than now?
I am a bit over the top with my comments, but it's easy to cherry pick statistics to say how good it was in yesteryear. Cherry pick another set of statistics and it reads like amateur hour compared to today. Fix F1, but don't try to replicate the past. It is a bit uglier than we think it is/remember it being.
Richard |
You can't help being born too late!
At the time, Silverstone was limited to a maximum of 26 cars to start the race.
In 1977, 36 cars were entered. Compare that with this year!
There was pre-qualifying and 6 cars were eliminated through that, leaving 30 cars to chase the 26 available places. The slowest 4 didn't make the grid. Of these, the slowest was Emilio de Villota (father of the late Maria) who was just 3.04 seconds away from James Hunt's pole time.
This was also the race in which David Purley GM almost met his maker when the throttle of his LEC Cosworth jammed open and his hit a wall at 173kms/hr and survived a 180g stop.
Cars in that era were less reliable for sure - race cars and road cars (DAMHIK!) - but even Silverstone this weekend saw Hartley fail to qualify because of a car failure.
Different times for sure, but just 20 cars on a grid and, realistically, only 6 cars in with a shout of winning doesn't make for great racing. It needs to get better.