1968 Formula One season


The 1968 Formula One season was the 22nd season of the FIA's Formula One motor racing. It featured the 19th World Championship of Drivers, the 11th International Cup for F1 Manufacturers, and three non-championship races open to Formula One cars. The World Championship was contested over twelve races between 1 January and 3 November 1968.
Great Britain driver Graham Hill, driving a Lotus-Ford Cosworth, won his second Drivers' Championship, six years after his first. Lotus were awarded the Manufacturers' Cup for the third time. Repco produced a more powerful version of their V8 to help Brabham's compete against Ford's new Cosworth DFV, but it proved very unreliable: Jochen Rindt qualified on pole position twice but also only finished twice. Hill's main rivals were Jackie Stewart at Tyrrell Matra and champion Denny Hulme at McLaren.
The 1968 season turned out to be a turning point in terms of safety, with four Grand Prix drivers being involved in fatal crashes: two-time World Champion Jim Clark, Mike Spence, Jo Schlesser and Ludovico Scarfiotti. It was the last year where all the races were run on tracks with almost no safety modifications.
On the topic of technology, the 1968 headlines were dominated by the wings introduced by Lotus's owner Colin Chapman. He installed modest front wings and a rear spoiler on his Lotus 49B at the 1968 Monaco Grand Prix. Brabham and Ferrari went one better at the 1968 Belgian Grand Prix with full-width wings mounted on struts high above the driver. Lotus replied with a full-width wing directly connected to the rear suspension that required a re-design of the wishbones and transmission shafts. Matra then produced a high mounted front wing connected to the front suspension. This last innovation was mostly used during practice as it required a lot of effort from the driver. By the end of the season most teams were using sophisticated wings.

Teams and drivers

The following teams and drivers competed in the 1968 FIA World Championship.
EntrantConstructorChassisEngineTyreDriverRounds
Goodyear

Team and driver changes

  • After receiving offers from every team bar two, Jochen Rindt signed with champions Brabham.
  • Reigning drivers' champion Denny Hulme moved to Bruce McLaren's team. After Lotus lost its exclusive right to use Cosworth DFV engines, McLaren also started using Cosworth instead of BRM.
  • Scuderia Ferrari ran Chris Amon as their only full-time driver in 1967, but attracted Jacky Ickx for this year.
  • Ken Tyrrell entered F1 with Matra International, a joint-venture between Tyrrell Racing and car manufacturer Matra. They signed 1967 BRM driver Jackie Stewart. Matra kept running their factory team as well, powered by their own V12s. BRM signed Pedro Rodríguez to replace Stewart.
  • With Rindt, Ickx and Rodríguez gone, Cooper needed a complete new driver line-up, which they found in Formula Two driver Brian Redman and long-time Ferrari employee Ludovico Scarfiotti. The team switched from Maserati engines to take over McLaren's contract with BRM.

    Mid-season changes

  • Jim Clark was killed in a racing accident during the 1968 Deutschland Trophäe Formula Two race. Colin Chapman drew in F2 driver Jackie Oliver to fill the seat.
  • Chapman lost his Indianapolis 500 driver Mike Spence when he crashed during practice for the 1968 event. In F1, Spence had been driving for BRM, who signed Richard Attwood to replace him for the majority of rounds. That year's Indy 500 winner, Bobby Unser, took the seat in Italy and the United States.
  • Both of Cooper's drivers were involved in serious crashes: Redman exited the Belgian Grand Prix with a broken arm, while Scarfiotti would suffer a fatal crash at a hillclimbing race in Germany. The team then hired Lucien Bianchi and Vic Elford.
  • Jo Schlesser was signed by Honda to drive the experimental air-cooled RA302, which works driver John Surtees had refused. In just his debut race, the French Grand Prix, local hero Schlesser crashed on the second lap. The fully-fueled car exploded instantly.
  • Both Matra teams expanded to two cars near the end of the year. The French team promoted F2 driver Henri Pescarolo and the British team went for F3 driver Johnny Servoz-Gavin.
  • Dan Gurney, founder and driver from Anglo American Racers, switched from his own Eagle chassis to a customer McLaren chassis, powered by a Cosworth DFV.

    Calendar

Calendar changes

Technical and safety regulations

became the first driver to wear a full-face helmet at the 1968 German Grand Prix. He had helped to invent it with the Bell Helmets company and had already used it at the 1968 Indianapolis 500. Within some years, it became the obvious choice among drivers and was later deemed mandatory.
All cars had to be fitted with a rollbar that stretched out to at least above the driver's helmet, an electrical circuit breaker, an oil catch tank and a reverse gear. And the cockpit had to allow easy evacuation.

Other

The FIA decided to permit unrestricted sponsorship on cars after the withdrawal of support from automobile related firms like BP, Shell and Firestone. Team Gunston, a South African privateer team, was the first Formula One team to paint their cars in the livery of their sponsors when they entered a private Brabham for John Love, painted in the colours of Gunston cigarettes, in the 1968 South African Grand Prix. In the next round at the 1968 Spanish Grand Prix, Team Lotus, initially using the British racing green, became the first works team to follow this example, with Graham Hill's Lotus 49B entered in the red, gold and white colours of the Imperial Tobacco's Gold Leaf brand.

Championship report

Early season

Round 1: South Africa

The fast and flowing Kyalami circuit between Johannesburg and Pretoria played host to the South African Grand Prix for the second time on New Year's Day 1968. Briton Jim Clark was fastest by a second with his Lotus-Ford/Cosworth teammate Graham Hill alongside him with Jackie Stewart in the new Matra-Ford/Cosworth completing the front row. On the second row there were the two Brabham-Repcos of Austrian Jochen Rindt and Australian Jack Brabham while the third row featured Briton John Surtees in the Honda and the Ferraris of Italian Andrea de Adamich and New Zealander Chris Amon. The race began with Stewart taking the lead from Clark while Hill dropped back to seventh behind Rindt, Surtees, Brabham and Amon. On the second lap, Clark took the lead while Brabham overtook Surtees and Hill passed both Amon and Surtees to run fifth. Further back there was drama when Italian Ludovico Scarfiotti's Cooper-Maserati suffered a water leak and the driver was scalded by the escaping hot water. He was taken to hospital with first degree burns. On the seventh lap, Brabham overtook Rindt for third place but soon afterwards he ran into engine trouble and dropped back, leaving Rindt third again. He came under threat from Hill and on lap 13 the Englishman moved to third place. Amon moved into fifth place having overtaken Surtees on the same lap. The order remained stable as Hill chased and caught Stewart and on lap 27 he moved ahead. Stewart stayed with him until Lap 43 of 80 when the Matra retired with a connecting rod failure. This moved Rindt to third once again and the order then remained unchanged all the way to the finish with Lotus scoring a dominant 1–2 finish with Rindt third. Clark won his 25th and last championship Grand Prix from teammate Graham Hill and Austrian Jochen Rindt in a Brabham. Clark broke Juan Manuel Fangio's 10 1/2 year record of 24 Grand Prix victories, and would go on to hold this record until his countryman and friend Jackie Stewart broke the record in 1973.

Gap between rounds 1 and 2

Many F1 drivers in the 1960s went to compete in the Tasman series in New Zealand and Australia during the European winter and the Southern Hemisphere summer, which was a nine-week, eight-race series that started in early January and ended in late February/early March, with respective races every week in open wheel racing cars that were very similar to F1 cars of the time, with exactly the same chassis- only these variants had 2.5 litre engines, as opposed to Formula One world championship cars, which had 3 litre engines.
The non-championship Race of Champions at the English Brands Hatch circuit near London in March was won by Bruce McLaren in his own McLaren car, ahead of Mexican Pedro Rodriguez in a BRM and McLaren's teammate and countryman Denny Hulme.
The BRDC International Trophy race at the Silverstone circuit in England was another non-championship race held 5 weeks after the Race of Champions. The race was won by Hulme in a McLaren, ahead of fellow New Zealanders McLaren and Chris Amon in a Ferrari.
On 7 April, Jim Clark, one of the most successful and popular drivers of all time, was killed at Hockenheim in West Germany at a non-championship Formula Two event. The Scotsman had gone off the track caused by what was believed to be a deflating rear tire; 90% of the Hockenheim circuit was made up of two long, slightly curving straights running through thick forests. And because there was no protection from the solid trees lining the circuit on both sides, Clark's Lotus smashed into a wall of trees, breaking the Scotsman's neck and killing him instantly; the car was totally destroyed.