Don't call it a comeback: Formula Ford at 50 is showing fresh legs

By: Steve Nickless | January 7, 2019 1:48 PMFor more than half of Formula Ford’s 50-year history, it was the SCCA’s most popular and populous racing class. But with costs escalating, supplies of its Ford 1,599cc engine drying up, and entries dwindling in the 1990s, Formula Ford was essentially being put out to pasture. Then in 2009, after much deliberation within the class, Formula Ford was renamed “Formula F,” and a more modern and affordable Honda engine of similar displacement was introduced into the fray.So, is that the FF story? Nope – not by a long shot.Rushing headlong into the SCCA’s 75th anniversary year in 2019, there will be celebrations at several of America’s premier racetracks of Formula Ford’s 50th as the venerable, once-global-giant, single-seater class is enjoying a most unlikely renaissance.A decades-old mantra of “Want to go racing? Go Formula Ford!” is being heard again as drivers young and old are rediscovering the bang-for-the-racing-buck that FF of almost any vintage represents.With a reliable Ford four-cylinder engine and sturdy gearbox, readily obtainable tires, and a wide variety of chassis choices, FFs were proper racing cars – more potent than their nearest-by-the-numbers rival, Formula Vee, when they first showed their space-frame front-radiator faces at SCCA races in 1968.“The basic ‘sense’ of Formula Ford appealed to a large number of people here in the U.S. all at the same time,” the late Jules Williams explained to SportsCar magazine, SCCA’s official publication, on the occasion of FF’s 20th anniversary in 1989. “Here was a nice racecar – a genuine race chassis – with a reliable motor in it. And an impressive number of cars came in, all at one time.”Williams would win the very first official SCCA “National” Formula Ford race, the Southern Pacific Division season-opener at Willow Springs Raceway on March 23, 1969. By then he had been racing the Lotus 51B bought new from a Texas-based importer for almost a year in the SCCA’s Formula B class.“The FB guys had mixed feelings about the FFs,” Jules recalled. “We were ‘low technology interlopers’ – looked down upon. But, gradually, the attitude of most of the FB drivers changed, becoming more a matter of ‘benign indifference.'”In 1968, the quality of the Formula B fields at many events was spotty. By the end of the summer, FFs made up more than half the FB fields in many areas, and what Jules termed a “quiet clamor” began within the ranks for a separate class.The SCCA, with an abundance of single-seater classes in its club racing repertoire including FA, FB, FC, a healthy and popular Formula Vee, and plans for Super Vee on the drawing board, moved cautiously.Over the winter of 1968-’69, however, with more 100 made-in-England FF chassis already in the country, and three of the four top American Vee constructors – Gene Beach, Jerry Mong (Bobsy), and Ray Caldwell – building FFs, the SCCA Board took action. In winter 1968-’69, Formula Ford – a standalone class featuring 1,599cc Ford crossflow engines with very limited modifications – was added to the approved classes list.

And the fun began!Formula Ford was an English invention, unveiled in June 1967, created to meet a critical need on the part of one of the biggest race-driving schools – Motor Racing Stables – for reliable engines.

History points to a massive sea-change in the racing culture through the late 1960s, as a sport once reserved for only the wealthiest few became increasingly accessible to every man, and every man, who had seen the 1966 movie hit Grand Prix, wanted to race a single-seater.

The SCCA with its expansive class structure was at the forefront of this trend in the U.S., providing an opportunity to race, and do so affordably. Almost overnight, Formula Ford shoved Vee aside at the leading edge of the sport-for-all-with-dreams. The FF ranks swelled quickly, all seven SCCA divisions sending drivers to the 1969 American Road Racing Championships (what is now called the National Championship Runoffs) held that year on the Daytona high banks where experienced, 33-year-old Harvard University graduate John “Skip” Barber, racing a factory-supported Caldwell D-9, was crowned the first SCCA FF National Champion.

Barber was also the second FF National Champion, following up in 1970 with a dramatic win at Road Atlanta, then driving a quite unique Italian-made Tecno.Interestingly, while Britain dominated the U.S. FF market in sales straight through to the middle 1980s, homegrown chassis from Caldwell, ADF, Zink, Eagle, Citation, and Viking took 17 of the 24 National Championship wins at Road Atlanta.

Through its first 20 years, Formula Ford was the spawning ground for virtually all the drivers graduating to Formula 1, including many who would claim world championships: Emerson Fittipaldi, James Hunt, Jody Scheckter, Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher, Damon Hill, and Jacques Villeneuve all had FF racing on their resumes.

In the U.S., there were several pro racing pinnacles – IndyCar, SCCA Can-Am and Trans Am, Prototypes – but as in Europe, for nearly two decades, the drivers reaching the top could look back on SCCA Formula Ford beginnings: David Loring, Gordon Smiley, Bob Earl, Danny Sullivan, Willy T. Ribbs, Phil Krueger, Bob Lobenberg, Chip Ganassi, Dennis Firestone, Ed Pimm, Kevin Cogan, Scott Brayton, Davy Jones, Jon Beekhuis, Dominic Dobson, Jimmy Vasser, Bryan Herta, Scott Atchison, Dean Hall, Michael, John and Jeff Andretti. The list goes on and on – an endless parade of talent through SCCA Driver’s Schools, Regionals, and Nationals.

In 1993, just ahead of Formula Ford’s U.S. 25th anniversary, I wrote: “Ayrton Senna and Chip Ganassi were terrific Formula Ford drivers who passed right through [this class], Ayrton en route to the F1 world championship, Chip on his way to becoming an IndyCar [driver and] team owner. Today they have little in common but, as fiercely determined, winning FF drivers, they are bound together in the motorsports fabric.