2022 Monaco Historic that’s streets ahead

Monaco’s Historic Grand Prix roared back to its best in May with packed grids, covering seven decades of single-seater racing, once more lining up on the sun-drenched Côte d’Azur.

After Covid delays and a slimmed-down event last year, more than 200 cars filled the paddock and blasted through the Principality over three days of nostalgic and typically intense competition.

Among the entrants in eight categories were 34 Lotuses, including Stirling Moss’s 1961 race-winning 18, in celebration of Colin Chapman who died 40 years ago.

This year’s 13th running also brought new meaning to the term ‘historic’ with the addition of a new category for more modern, non-turbo cars from the early 1980s.

There were two victories for the British GT racer Stuart Hall: firstly a dominant win among 1966-1972 Formula 1 cars in a McLaren M19A, before the more tense 1973-76 race in a McLaren M23, where he held off three-time Le Mans-winner Marco Werner in a Lotus 76.

For a place that lays claim to the highest density of Ferraris in the world, the streets of Monte Carlo have been unforgiving to the Scuderia in the past 12 months.

The latest episode in Ferrari’s misfortune came at this year’s event where a brake failure on a 1974 ex-Niki Lauda Ferrari 312B3 sent Charles Leclerc spinning at Rascasse and rear-ending the wall, right.

At last year’s gathering, a collision sent Jean Alesi to a similar fate while driving another one of Lauda’s 312B3s. Two weeks after that, Leclerc was in the barriers during qualifying for the modern Grand Prix and was unable to start from pole.

The 24-year-old’s latest brush with the Monaco Armco abruptly ended a lunchtime demonstration run alongside Jacky Ickx in his 1972 Ferrari 312B2. Their laps were captured by 360-degree cameras and the stunning footage has been released on YouTube by the event organisers, ACM — minus the crash.