NOTICE OF DEATH - ALAN REES (1938 - 2024)
It is with very great regret that we inform Members of the passing last Friday 6 September of BRDC Life Member Alan Rees. He was 86 years of age and had been bravely and valiantly battling an illness for the past couple of years.
Alan is probably better known to later generations of BRDC Members and motor racing enthusiasts as one of the founding fathers (in 1969) of the March racing car company, the name of which was derived from the names of the founders – Max Mosley, Alan Rees, Graham Coaker and Robin Herd. Later he gave his initials to another new Formula 1 team – Arrows – which he set up with Jackie Oliver, Tony Southgate, Franco Ambrosio and Dave Wass in 1978. However, before turning to team management and ownership, Alan had enjoyed a notable career as a driver.
The son of a prosperous haulage contractor from South Wales, Alan attended Monmouth School followed by three years at the University of Wales, Swansea from where he graduated with a degree in Economics and History. At school he had been in the same class as Robin Herd, the pair both eager to make their way in the motor racing world, and soon becoming firm friends. Alan started racing in 1959 while still at university, initially with a Lotus Eleven which, before the year was out, had been replaced by a ‘state-of-the-art’ Lola Mk 1. By the end of the 1950s, the 1100 cc sports car class, in which Alan had been competing with the Lotus and the Lola, was taking second place for promising young drivers to Formula Junior, an Italian concept which by 1960 had become established as the last step before Formula 1.
Through 1960 Alan concentrated on his Lola Mk 1, securing several wins and podium places in national events. He was also able to show his abilities in a Formula Junior Lola Mk 2 borrowed from the factory. Considering that, as in Formula 1 so in Formula Junior car design was abandoning the front-engined concept, the little Lola Mk 2 was becoming uncompetitive against the mid-engined Lotus 18s and Coopers, it was a noteworthy achievement for Alan, in one of his first single-seater races, to qualify on the four car front row of the grid at Goodwood alongside the 18s of Trevor Taylor and Peter Arundell and the Gemini Mk 3 of Tony Maggs, three of the very best FJ drivers of the time.
Armed with a new Lotus Type 20 and works-support in 1961 Alan almost immediately established himself as a young driver to watch. He won the Anerley Trophy at Crystal Palace and the BARC Formula Junior Championship, a two-heats-and-a-final affair supporting the RAC Tourist Trophy at Goodwood which attracted a top-quality entry. Alan won both his heat and the final. He was second to the peerless Peter Arundell in the Eastern Counties 100 at Snetterton and to Peter Procter’s Lotus Type 18 at Brands Hatch. There were other encouraging places through the year so that for 1962 Alan was invited to join the official Team Lotus as team-mate to Peter and former motor-cycle racer Bob Anderson. It was a year of almost total dominance by Peter Arundell in his Type 22 so that there were slim pickings for even his Team Lotus team mates but Alan did win the Anerley Trophy at Crystal Palace for a second time and was second in the Monza Lotteria, at Rouen and in his heat at Monaco.
Alan was also unwittingly the cause of Lotus being libelled by the German magazine auto motor und sport which published the unfounded allegation that Team Lotus had been using 1460 cc engines, well above the 1100 cc limit for Formula Junior. This was based on comments allegedly made by Alan while being interviewed in hospital by German journalists after an accident during the Nurburgring 1000 Ks. Colin Chapman offered a wager of £1000 that Peter Arundell could match his race-winning speed at the Monza Lotteria earlier in the year and, on a frosty Autumn day, Peter did just that, his car then passed a thorough compliance check, the magazine published an apology and handed over the money.
Alan moved on at the end of 1962 to form a team with Roy Winkelmann for the last year of FJ using a Lola Mk 5A and, for some sports car racing, a Lotus 23B. The Lola took a while to sort out and, as a one-driver team, Alan had no team mates to assist. Once again Crystal Palace provided some of Alan’s best results with a heat win and a couple of third places in finals. There was a third place in the Vanwall Trophy at Snetterton and a mighty impressive seventh behind factory cars in a very strong entry for the Anglo-European Trophy at Brands Hatch at the end of the year.
For the first year of 1-litre Formula 2, in which graded drivers were permitted to compete, Roy Winkelmann Racing ran a Brabham BT10 for Alan who was almost invariably mixing it with the F1 brigade. He did so to greatest effect at Reims when he just outfumbled Jack Brabham’s BT10 as they crossed the line side by side after over 90 minutes of fast and furious racing. Later in the season Alan came within a lap of winning at Albi after two hours racing in the searing heat of the south of France only to have engine failure on the last lap when well ahead of Jack and the rest. Alan was so far ahead that he was still able to limp home in third place, passed only by Jack and by Richard Attwood’s Lola T55. Together with other strong performances, including a dead heat for first place in his heat at Crystal Palace with Jochen Rindt’s BT10, the Austrian going on to win the final ahead of Graham Hill’s Cooper T71 with Alan third, less than two seconds behind the winner. Such had been Alan’s results during the season that he was classified third in the French F2 Championship behind only the works BT10s of Jack Brabham and Denny Hulme.
Alan and Jochen joined forces for 1965 under the Roy Winkelmann Racing banner using Brabham BT16s powered by the Cosworth SCA engine. Alan and Jochen had a mighty scrap round the lake at Enna-Pergusa, each winning their heat while the final went to Alan by a fifth of a second. A couple of weeks earlier Alan had been a most impressive second only to Chris Amon’s MRP Lola T60 at the challenging Solitude road circuit. In the British F2 Championship backed by Autocar magazine and open only to British and Commonwealth drivers, Alan was placed fourth behind Jim Clark, Graham Hill and Denny Hulme. The last year of 1-litre F2 was dominated by the Brabham-Honda BT18s of Jack and Denny. Apart from them, only Jochen in the very last race of the year was a winner. Jochen and Alan were generally best of the rest with Alan being classified second at both Reims and Rouen and third at Crystal Palace. A calculation of a ‘virtual’ championship across the three seasons shows Alan in fourth place behind three world champions – Jack Brabham, Denny Hulme and Jim Clark – and ahead of his team mate Jochen Rindt.
By now Alan’s Formula 2 results against such strong opposition were giving him the chance to return to sports car racing. In 1966 he was invited by Matra to share a MS620 with Johnny Servoz-Gavin in the Spa 1000 Ks and in the Le Mans 24 Hours although both races ended in retirement. He drove a Ferrari 250LM for Team Chamaco Collect in the 1966 RAC Tourist Trophy at Oulton Park and a Ford GT40 in the British Eagle Trophy at Brands Hatch later in the year. He was also invited to join JW Automotive for 1967 with the intention of sharing a Mirage M1 with Jacky Ickx but fell foul of Jacky’s Fan Club element of the team and walked away after abortive ventures to Monza and Spa.
Alan’s first taste of Formula 1 came in the F2 class of the 1966 German Grand Prix on the Nurburgring Nordschleife when he retired his regular F2 BT18 with engine problems. Another outing in the F2 class of the German Grand Prix came a year later, now with the new 1600 cc Cosworth FVA-powered BT23. Alan brought his car home seventh overall and second in the F2 class to the Lotus 48 of Jackie Oliver. A couple of weeks earlier Alan had had his only outing in a World Championship Grand Prix when he was given the third Cooper-Maserati T81for the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, finishing ninth.
In 1967 Winkelmann Racing ran a pair of Brabham BT23s for Alan and Jochen in all the major Formula 2 races. Alan’s results continued to be strong with a third place behind Jochen Rindt and Graham Hill in the opening race for the new formula at Snetterton, followed a few days later by second to Jochen at Silverstone. Third places at Pau and Zandvoort, and fourths at Crystal Palace and Keimola in Finland, rewarded Alan with fifth place in the European F2 Championship behind Jacky Ickx, Frank Gardner, Jean-Pierre Beltoise and Piers Courage.
For his final year as a driver, Alan continued to manage Roy Winkelmann Racing, running Brabham BT23Cs for himself and Jochen. His best result was a very close second to Jonathan Williams in Frank Williams’s BT23C in the Monza Lotteria but overall the edge seemed to have gone from his performances. The Winkelmann team took its two cars to the Argentine Temporada Series in which Jochen finished second across the four races whilst Alan quietly rounded off his career as a racing driver.
Alan was far from finished with motor racing, however, and through 1969 while running a pair of Lotus 59Bs in Formula 2 for Jochen Rindt and Graham Hill, who were now F1 team mates at Lotus, Alan had been working away to establish his brainchild of a multi category racing car manufacturer ranging from Formula 1 to Formula Ford. Together with Max Mosley, Robin Herd and Graham Coaker March Engineering was created during 1969, the first product of which was the 1-litre Formula 3 March 693 which made its debut at Cadwell Park in the hands of Ronnie Peterson in a very strong field of teams and drivers from home and abroad. Ronnie brought the brand new car home in third place behind the Brabham BT28 of Tim Schenken and Howden Ganley’s Chevron B15. Alan had been impressed by Ronnie’s efforts in one of the Winkelmann team’s Lotus 59Bs at Albi a few weeks earlier and, from his driver’s perspective, could see that the Swede was something special.
Once March Engineering was up and running for the 1970 season, it was Alan’s role to run the Formula 1 team of Chris Amon and Jo Siffert with Ronnie learning the F1 ropes in Colin Crabbe’s delightfully named Antique Automobiles outfit. Alan stayed with March Engineering until the end of 1971 when he moved to Shadow as F1 team manager enjoying a particularly strong working relationship with fellow Welshman Tom Pryce. At the end of 1976, frustrated by the shenanigans of Shadow team founder Don Nichols, Alan accompanied Jackie Oliver, Tony Southgate and Dave Wass to set up the new Arrows F1 team with Riccardo Patrese, another of Alan’s super-talented young stars, as one of the drivers. This was the third F1 team in the formation of which Alan had been instrumental. In 1991 Arrows was sold to Footwork from whom Alan and Jackie bought the company back a couple of years later before finally selling it to Tom Walkinshaw.
In September 1976 Autosport magazine carried an interview with Tom Pryce by Pete Lyons who invited Tom’s thoughts on Alan Rees as a team manager:
Oh, he’s good. He’s taught me a lot. He pushes the important things forward until you are sick of hearing about them, but that’s terrific and he’s perfectly right about all of them. Every time I used to drive sideways and had a good laugh, I was told off roundly. I refused to believe what he was saying for a while, but now it’s got through I realise he’s been right all the time. So he’s got determination. And he works very coolly under pressure and can take the right decisions calmly. These sort of things go to make up the ideal manager, and of course he’s been a very fast race driver himself. That’s a help, but Alan can also keep pace with the changes in racing and the different demands on driving. We talk about the car, and it’s as though he’s been out there too, he understands everything I say about it.
Tragically Tom was to lose his life six months later in the South African Grand Prix so the full potential of the two Welshmen’s relationship was never to be realised.
Alan was married twice. His second wife, Angela, died nine years ago but he is survived by his first wife Debbie and by son Paul, himself a BRDC Full Member, and daughter Anna from his first marriage and by stepson Nick, grandchildren Oscar and James and sister Lorna. The BRDC offers its deepest condolences to Alan’s family and many friends and acquaintances.
BRDC Members are welcome to attend Alan's funeral on Monday 7 October. A church service will be held at 2.00pm at St Michael & All Angels Church, Church Lane, Sunninghill, Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7DD. A reception will be held afterwards at the The Royal Berkshire Hotel, London Road, Sunninghill, Ascot, Berkshire SL5 0PP. Please RSVP to Paul Rees to give the family an idea of numbers. The Club office will be able to provide contact details.
