Details, Explanation and Meaning About Grand Prix motor racing

Grand Prix motor racing Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description

Grand Prix motor racing has its roots in organized automobile racing that began in France as far back as 1894. It quickly evolved from a simple road race from one town to the next, to endurance tests for car and driver. Innovation and the drive of competition soon saw speeds exceeding 100 mph but because the races were held on open roads there were frequent accidents with the resulting fatalities of both drivers and spectators.

A seminal event in racing came in 1900 when James Gordon Bennett, Jr (1841-1918), the owner of the New York Herald newspaper, established the Gordon Bennett Cup, a series of international races bearing his name. Each country was allowed to enter up to three cars. Influenced by these racing events, Louis Chevrolet (1878-1941), a Swiss-born employee of a French motor vehicle manufacturer would move to the United States and beginning in 1910 would become a major figure in American racing and the designer of a car for General Motors that bears his name.

In 1906 the first (and at that time only) race carrying the name Grand Prix was organized by the Automobile Club de France (ACF), and run over two days in June. The Le Mans based circuit used was roughly triangular in shape, each lap covering 105km (65 miles). Six laps were to be run each day, and each lap took about an hour using the relatively primitive cars of the day. From the 32 entries representing 12 different automobile manufacturers, the Hungarian-born Ferenc Szisz (1873-1944) won the 1260 km race in a Renault.

Races in this period were heavily nationalistic affairs, with a few countries setting up races of their own, but no formal championship tying them together. The rules varied from country to country and race to race, and typically centered around maximum (not minimum) weights in an effort to limit power by limiting engine size indirectly (10-15 liter engines were quite common, usually with no more than four cylinders, and producing less than 50hp). The cars all had mechanics on board as well as the driver, and no one was allowed to work on the cars during the race except these two. A key factor to Renault winning this first Grand Prix was held to be the detachable wheel rims, which allowed tire changes to occur without having to lever the tire and tube off and back on the rim. Given the state of the roads, such repairs were frequent.

For the most part, races were run over a lengthy circuit of closed public roads, not purpose-built private tracks. This was true of the Le Mans circuit of the 1906 Grand Prix, as well as the Targa Florio (run on 93 miles of Sicilian roads), the German Kaiserpreis circuit (75 miles long), and the French circuit at Dieppe (a mere 48 miles), used for the 1907 Grand Prix. The exceptions were the steeply banked egg-shaped near oval of Brooklands in England, completed in 1907, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, first used in 1911, and Monza, in Italy, opened in 1922.

In 1922, Italy became the first country outside France to host a race using the name Grand Prix, run at Monza. This was quickly followed by Belgium and Spain (in 1924), and later spread to other countries. Strictly speaking, this still wasn't a formal championship, but a loose collection of races run to various rules. (A "formula" of rules had appeared just before World War I, finally based on engine size as well as weight, but it wasn't universally adopted.) In 1924, however, many national motor clubs banded together to form the Association Internationale des Automobile Clubs Reconnus (AIACR), whose Commission Sportive Internationale (CSI) was empowered to regulate Grand Prix and other forms of international racing. From 1927 to 1934, the number of races considered to have Grand Prix status exploded, jumping from five events in 1927 to nine events in 1929 to eighteen in 1934 (the peak pre-World War II year).

All the competing vehicles were painted in national colors: blue for the French drivers, green for the British, red for the Italian, yellow for the Belgians, and white for the Germans. Beginning in 1934, the Germans stopped painting their cars in an effort to reduce weight. The unpainted metal soon had the German vehicles dubbed by the media as the "Silver Arrows."

French cars continued to dominate (led by Bugatti, but also including Delage and Delahaye) until the late 1920s, when the Italians (Alfa Romeo and Maserati) began to beat the French cars regularly. In the 1930s, however, nationalism entered a new phase when the Nazis began pouring money into the hands of Mercedes and Auto Union to further the glory of the Reich. The two German marques utterly dominated the period from 1934 to 1939, winning all but three of the races run in those years. The cars by this time were single-seaters (the riding mechanic vanished in the early 1920s), with 8 to 16 cylinder supercharged engines producing upwards of 600hp on alcohol fuels.

In 1946, following World War II, there were only four races of Grand Prix caliber held. The next year the old AIACR reorganized itself as the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile or "FIA" for short. Headquartered in Paris, France, at the end of the 1949 season it announced that for 1950 they would be linking several national Grands Prix to create Formula One with a World Championship for drivers. A points system was established and a total of seven races were granted championship status including the Indianapolis 500. The first World Championship race was held on 13 May at Silverstone in the United Kingdom.

The Italians once again did well in these early World Championship races, both manufacturers and drivers. The first World Champion was Giuseppe Farina, driving an Alfa Romeo. Ferrari appeared at the second World Championship race, in Monaco, and has the distinction of being the only manufacturer to compete during the entire history of the sport, still competing in 2004. Follow the Formula One link for more history after 1950.

Some of the important Grand Prix races:

Some of the notable drivers of the Grand Prix motor racing era including a woman who competed equally with the men:

This is an Article on Grand Prix motor racing. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Grand Prix motor racing


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