10 replies to this topic

[typo156]

Back in the mid-'60s I got to see Bart Martin race his BT8 powered by a 289 Ford. I saw the car at Cotati Raceway (nee-Golden Gate Int'l Raceway) and his fatal accident race at Candlestick Park races in SF.

 

I am seeking color photos of this orange Brabham and any detail shots. I am making a static model of this car and only took one lousy photo of Bart's car at Cotati.

 

Can TSR or others help me? I have talked to the Brabham Register website person and he suggested I try here.

Thanks so much.

[TSR]

Patrick,

You could not come to a better place to ask because... I own the actual full-size car. This was the first of twelve BT8s built, chassis SC-64-01. The car was originally sold by the Brabham Racing Organization to Arthur Owen, then to Robs Lamplough who ran it in the North American races in 1964. He then sold it, minus the 2-liter Coventry-Climax engine, to the late Judy Kondratieff (the future wife of Howden Ganley of BRM and Tiga fame) for Bart to drive.

The car was originally red, and Judy gave it to Grizzly Engineering in NorCal to modify and fit a Cobra 289 cid engine mated to a ZF transmission. The original gearbox, a Hewland HD5, was sold to John Morton who put it in his Lotus 23.

After the terrible accident, the parts removed from the chassis for upgraded stronger parts, mostly suspension bits and front wheels, were acquired by Yours Truly with the remains of another BT8, that of Jack Brabham, chassis SC-64-07.

This was 1986. Within a few years and throwing lots of money at it, I rebuilt the Jack Brabham car and since we had lots of duplicate bits acquired from other former BT8 owners, and since I had a spare set of body parts, I built a reproduction of the Martin car back to original spec. I had acquired over time among other bits including both the original engine and gearbox, very lucky finds. There are not that many of these things around, and the numbers matched the factory records.
In 1991, I drove the first restored car at the Monterey Historic Races, sharing the car with my guest Sir Jack Brabham, here is a picture of the completed car with Yours Truly at the helm:



In the early 1990s I completed, with Judy Ganley's authorisation, the Lamplough/Martin car and raced it quite a while before parking it. Here it is at the 2000 Monterey Historic Races:



Here is a group picture of my friend Al Nowocinski, Yours Truly and his very fast LeGrand sports racer next to the resurrected BT8, SC-64-01:



For many years, I have been searching for a picture, B&W or color, of that BT8-Ford V8 at the time when Bart drove it. The car as described to me by Judy was orange with a black and white checkered stripe in the center of the body, flared rear fenders for wider wheels and a flimsy roll bar. Poor Bart did not stand a chance when he hit that concrete berm at Candlestick Park after the heim joint attaching the lower rear wishbone broke. The inquiry by the SCCA found that this had been the cause of the accident and mandated ever since, that a metal washer larger than the ball of the heim joint be fitted on the retaining bolt so that in case one would break, it would not cause such a catastrophic failure as having a wishbone loose, rendering the car with unwanted rear steering. At the time of the accident, I am told that Bart was hustling Jim Hall in his Chaparral...

One person who may have a picture or access to one is historian and friend of mine, Jerry Entin, a former Can-Am racer in a Lola T70. I will ask him and see if he can help, he appears to find stuff that no one else can find.

A few years back, I built a slot car model of my car (the other one that was Jack's personal car) for the fun of it from a very inaccurate Shark body and a Cox brass chassis and had Sir Jack sign it for me. This was published in Model Racing Journal:



Both cars were wonderful machines to drive and fast as hell. Aerodynamics were not the best and we fixed that with added appendages, so to make sure that it would be safer to drive. With such a light weight and so much power from the 2.5-liter Climax engine, those things fly. One of my favorite racing machines over the years.

Here is a link to the car history, CLICK HERE.

Regards,

[BackAgain]

Awesome story Dokk....and what a pair of beautiful cars.

Sir Jack was quite the racer....a thorough gentleman...I had the opportunity to meet him a couple of times in Australia...both at Warwick Farm and once at Bathurst with Sterling Moss...they were a funny pair together....Jack would tell Sterling there were all sorts of things wrong with the car at high speeds so Sterling wouldn't drive it as fast as Jack....took Sterling a while to catch on to Jack's little game....

[typo156]

Ah...you are so correct. You are correct that Bart was on Hall's tail and excited me to no end! What I saw a few laps later was etched on my brain. It was my first experience of a death at a race track. Saddness.

However, when Bart was at Cotati it was a hot day!! To keep the car running cool at the start(standing start in those wonderful days!!) the team put ice cubes on the radiator. When he blew by us on the strait ice cubes were flying everywhere! LOL! So cool(pun intended). I've never been a Ford fan, but that car had me! let me know if Jerry can come up with something.( following the Regionals/Nationals during those years I feel that familarity of first names. We had some great racing in those days!!)

I was blown away at the Classics when I saw your BT8 in the pits. One of my favorite cars, too! Thanks for your respects by asking for Judy's permission. I loved watching her Mini race.

Patrick

[TSR]

Patrick,
one of the great moments I had with this car is that on the grid of the 2000 race run on Saturday, I was invited to bring the car to the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance the day after. So we did and we were selected for a special award, so I drove the car on the "bridge" with my wife next to me and Sir Stirling Moss read a tribute to Bart Martin and to Judy, that was greatly appreciated by the public. We got one of the biggest applause that day, and that was very special. If you could scan and post the picture(s) that you have in your possession, that would be greatly appreciated.
Bart Martin drove a Cooper-Monaco before getting the Brabham-Ford and was a very good driver.

[typo156]

TSR,

I received a 1/24 BT8 from Pattos and I see what makes you disappointed. The front end is horrible!!!!!!!!The front cockpit on back isn't too bad. Well, then, I'll pour and carve a new front end! Do you know who might be able to vac-form a few bodies for me then. Do you know who would do this in styrene for ease of working into a static model?

Patrick

[TSR]

Patrick, you are going to be very happy: a very nice gentleman gave me copies of old magazines showing the ill-fated Bart Martin car and the whole story. I will put it here soon.
The Patto's body is the same as I used on my model, it is a back pour of the Shark. Terribly inaccurate in every respect, but the only one that was ever made, both in 1/24 and 1/32 scale. Maybe I will be carving soon.

[Chuck Lantz]

Patrick, you are going to be very happy: a very nice gentleman gave me copies of old magazines showing the ill-fated Bart Martin car and the whole story. I will put it here soon.
The Patto's body is the same as I used on my model, it is a back pour of the Shark. Terribly inaccurate in every respect, but the only one that was ever made, both in 1/24 and 1/32 scale. Maybe I will be carving soon.

 If anyone is still following this thread, I have a couple of questions about my own memories of Bart's race at Candlestick.  I was there as part of the weekend's events, racing motorcycles with the AFM, who often ran during SCCA car events.  On this particular weekend, we had been told that due to the already full program, the bikes might not race, but to show-up anyway, just in case. 

 

What I recall about Bart Martin's accident is a bit different that what I've read here.  If my memory isn't totally shot, I think his car was painted black for that race, but I could easily be wrong.  He and the Chaparral had a friendly rivalry going into the event.  Bart was the main item on West Coast tracks at the time, and the rumor around the pits was that he would dearly love to show "the Texans" that their white car was not all that.  Bart had been beaten during the Saturday heat races by the Chaparral, so Sunday's finals were the showdown.  Though other comments said Bart was chasing the Chaparral, the way I recall it was that Bart was leading on the early laps when he crashed.  Bart was out of my view when he crashed, but we ran over when we saw the smoke.  We were separated from his car by a very tall and flimsy cyclone fence.  It appeared that he had hit one on the wooden telephone/light poles in the parking lot track, and not a concrete barrier.

 

It took a very long time for anyone from the fire/safety crews to get to the car, and a few of us tried to climb the fence, with no luck. There had been another fatal accident on Saturday.  A truly bad weekend.  The nightmare of seeing, and hearing, Bart die was prolonged for me, since later that evening I was telling my Dad about it, in detail, as he was driving us somewhere.  He got very quiet and I looked over to see him tearing-up, for only the second time in my life, the first being when his Mom died.  Until then I didn't know that Bart Martin was a work-related friend of his, and my Dad had not yet heard about the accident. I felt about two inches tall, a dumb teenager talking about all the horrible details of a crash like it was nothing.  I learned to watch my words that day.

[TSR]

Chuck,

The car was painted orange as can be seen on this picture below, taken about two minutes before the fatal crash. Hall is leading and Martin is about passing the Genie MK10-Ford ahead of him:

 

 

Again, it was no fault of Martin but a design fault in the car, as the lower rear wishbone was unsuported from the outside and very stressed, causing the Heim joint to break open. Without a piece of metal to hold it, it caused "3-wheel steering" and the fatal crash.

When I built the replica using the parts deleted from the car at the time of the accident, i made sure that there would be a metal piece retaining the joint in case something like that would happen again. Fortunately and during the time I raced it, it did not happen. Below are other pictures of the car after Bart and Grizzly Engineering had stuffed the 289 CI Ford engine in it. To this day I still have the Hewland gearbox from that car, that went from the BT8 to John Morton's Lotus 23 to a fellow in Texas, and I traded it from him as a spare for the car.

 

Bart at Cotati where he shone with the modified car:

 

 

 

And newspaper clips:

 

 

The car's owner, Judy Kondratieff, who became Mrs. Judy Ganley, the life-long love of Howden Ganley, a woman who gained huge respect in the racing community. She unfortunately succumbed to cancer a few years ago, a sad end to a beautiful life.

 

 

The black car you think of was likely the "Webster 2-litre",that used the Coventry-Climax FPF engine from... my other BT8, which I recovered in Florida in the late 1980s...

I was very lucky to be associated with some very historic racing cars, this one was very special to me because of the people involved. It brought me a lot of friendship from my youth's racing heroes.

Here is one more pic of the car after I restored/reconstructed/recreated it; I always loved that car, it was incredibly fast and a bit scary at high speed because its aerodynamics caused lots of lift, so you had to pay attention. Here at the Laguna Seca "Corkscrew", I spun it and the steering wheel spokes spun and broke the pinky on my right hand...

Certainly better than what happened to poor Bart Martin.

 

 

 

[Chuck Lantz]

TSR, 

 

I apologize for this extremely late reply, but I just saw your post and the photos and I wanted to thank you for refreshing my obviously very faulty memory about the color of the Bart Martin car, and his running position at the time of the incident.   

 

It's great to know that you restored that amazing car.  Does it still compete in vintage races?  

 

The one light moment in this thread's trip back in time is learning that the Cotati track was named Golden Gate International Raceway.  I attended a bunch of events there, and raced motorcycles there with the AFM, but I never knew that it had an "official" name, let alone an incredibly overblown name, considering that it had more weeds than track.  

[TSR]

Chuck,
I am happy that you liked what you saw.  I no longer own the car. I sold it a few years ago as it was not competitive with much modified and updated Lotus 23 cars, but it has not seen much track time since then. Actually, very few of the 12 cars built are ever seen at vintage events nowadays, which is sad as they are such beautiful cars.
A friend from North California just sent me a beautiful picture book where that car is seen. His father owned a Buick dealership in San Francisco, and had quite a racing team over the years, that were raced at Cotati as well as Candlestick Park. Cooper-Ford, Ferrari 250 SWB, Testa Rossa and GTO, plus a Lotus 19-Buick and others.
Wonderful memories.