Race Report: Oulton Park, 10 August 1974

The latest Lombard North Central round was all about the weather, it rained heavily in practice which gave the unusual site of Mike Tyrrell on pole in his ex-Tony Brise March 733, and it rained heavily in the race.

There was chaos before the start when on the warm up lap there seemed to be a misunderstanding between Brian Henton and José Espirito Santo which caused Santo to punt Tyrrell up the rear breaking the oil cooler on the Antiguan’s March. Tyrrell stopped at Druids after leaving a long oil trail on the track whilst Santo came to the grid his brakes covered in oil. Henton arrived very late after having to stop to have a broken fuel injection rod fixed and in the confusion he forgot to switch his engine off.

This wasn’t the end of the problems for Henton as both he and team mate Jose Chateaubriand were penalised 70 seconds for jumping the start. To make matters worse the March pit weren’t informed of the penalty until the race was 10 laps old, although Henton speeded up on hearing of the penalty there was insufficient time for him to build up anything like enough of a gap and at the finish he and Chateaubriand dropped to sixth and seventh respectively despite a protest by the March team.
Henton actually finished first on the road thirteen seconds ahead of Alex Ribeiro who became the winner after Henton’s penalty was applied. Nick von Preussen drove very well to take second after demoting Chateaubriand at Old Hall on the last lap and finishing less than a second behind Ribeiro. Derek Lawrence took third from a closely following Tony Rouff and Marcos Moraes, Rouff might have hoped to do better but his race was ruined by broken mounting points on his GRD resulting in terrible handling problems. Santo’s disappointing race was concluded after five slow tours of the wet track.

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