Vic Elford: The ultimate all-rounder?

He became a full-time Porsche driver in 1967. Apart from winning three major rallies outright, and taking the European title in the GT class, Vic soon got the break he’d been waiting for.

“He said to me one day in Stuttgart, did I ever think about racing? And I said ‘Huschke, I’ve been thinking about nothing else since I was 13 years old.’ He decided we’d better start with the Targa Florio, which was the nearest thing there was to a rally. I finished third in a 910, with Neerpasch again.”

There was no looking back, and Vic became a key member of Porsche’s sportscar squad. The ’68 season started superbly with that famous Monte Carlo victory, after which Vic jumped straight on a plane for Daytona.

“I didn’t even know where it was. I got off the plane and it was warm and humid, and I was assaulted by this wonderful smell of citrus trees and everything, and I remember thinking ‘one day, I’m going to live here.’”

Vic won at his first attempt, although his efforts were devalued when Porsche insisted that all the top drivers took turns in his car and qualified as winners. “Fortunately they had an immense wreath and we all fitted in it!”

In April he made his single-seater debut in the unloved F2 Protos at the Nürburgring. In May he scored a sensational Targa Florio victory with local hero Umberto Maglioli, and then won the Nürburgring 1000kms with Jo Siffert. A second F2 outing at Monza in Jochen Rindt’s Winkelmann Brabham saw Vic lead a thrilling slipstreamer – only to retire when a spinning Derek Bell triggered a multiple shunt.

Shortly before that race, Tim Parnell had offered Elford a BRM F1 test at Silverstone. John Cooper was also present that day, and gave Vic a run.

“He slid off the road and took off the two left wheels. One of them came bounding back across the road. Beltoise squeezed past. By the time I got there, which was only a yard later, it had done another little bounce and I hit it. I did a huge 20 foot high somersault and landed upside down in the trees. Fuel was dripping out, I was trapped underneath, and I couldn’t move. I could see the marshals standing about 20 yards away with their fire extinguishers ready! It wasn’t until Andretti came back and kicked their arses that these guys actually thought about getting me out…”

Vic was lucky to escape with a broken collarbone and arm. But the McLaren was scrap, and Vic’s F1 career was all but over. For the next few seasons he concentrated on sportscars, winning the ‘Ring 1000kms twice more and showing blinding speed in Can-Am races, but in the mid-1970s he slowly faded from the scene. In 1973 he won the GT class and finished sixth overall at Le Mans, sharing a Ferrari Daytona with Claude Ballot-Lena, and the following year made a few appearances in Porsches, but that was the end of the line for Vic Elford, professional racing driver. He was 39 years old.

For a while he was March’s sportscar agent in France, and in 1976 he was hired by Jean Rondeau to run his Inaltera Le Mans team. In 1977 he had a brief and very unhappy spell managing the ATS F1 outfit. There was also to be one final fling as a driver. In 1983 old pal Rondeau invited Vic to race one of his Group C cars at Le Mans. “It came along out of the blue. It occurred to me that it was nine years since I raced at Le Mans, and I’d raced at Le Mans nine times, so how about one more?”

Alas, the car was hardly a frontrunner, and it retired after nine hours. After living in France for 15 years Vic headed to the States in 1984, when former co-driver Larrousse steered him into a job managing Renault and AMC’s motorsport programmes. He later returned to his roots working for Porsche in North America, and found time to write The Porsche High Perfomance Driving Handbook. More recently he worked as an instructor at the famed Skip Barber school; in 1992 he came across a teenager called Juan Pablo Montoya.

“At the end of the three day course I announced to everybody that he was a future World Champion. And they all fell about laughing! The kid was just brilliant, right from the word go.”

Now 64, Vic is enjoying life in sunny Florida, still smoking like a chimney. He’s far from retired, and has turned his attention to coaching drivers one-on-one. Does he have any regrets?

“In the early seventies I should have said to hell with Europe, and gone to the States to go stock car racing. I’d already proved a couple of times that I could do it. Not that I ever had any doubts. Whatever I did in a car I could always do it, whether it was driving downhill on ice or snow, or driving down the Mulsanne straight at night at 250mph in a 917. It was the one thing I could do well.”