On this week #10 - Remembering a fallen hero
On this week 47 years ago, Niki Lauda took his first win following his comeback after the injuries he sustained at the Nurburgring, but the 1977 South African Grand Prix –the third race of that season – will always be remembered for the horrible accident that claimed the life of up-and-coming British driver Tom Pryce, as well as a teenage marshal.
It was an accident that led to a thorough review of marshalling procedures: part of the constant drive that Formula 1 has made over the years to improve safety.
The accident occurred on lap 23 of Kyalami, when Italian driver Renzo Zorzi pulled over to the side of the track, opposite the pits, with a fire on his Shadow caused by a fuel leak. It took him some time to disconnect the oxygen pipe attaching his helmet to the cockpit, so two marshals crossed the track to assist him without permission – in a place that the drivers could not clearly see them, near a bridge just after the brow of a hill.
Hans-Joachim Stuck – directly ahead of Pryce – avoided the first person by millimetres, but the second marshal, 19-year-old Frederick Jansen Van Vuuren, was hit at full speed by the other Shadow driven by an unsighted Pryce.
Van Vuuren's fire extinguisher struck Pryce on the helmet, in an impact that was instantly fatal for both of them. In those days, the show went on, and while Lauda stated that this was probably his most hard-fought victory, once he was told of the accident on the podium, he said: “there was no joy after that”.
At the time, Pryce was only 27 and on a clear trajectory towards the top. At the fateful South African Grand Prix, he had gone fastest in free practice, and was already in talks to become Mario Andretti's team mate at Lotus for 1978.
The Shadow was far from the most competitive machine out there, yet he had already achieved two podiums with it: in Austria in 1976 and at the Brazil season-opener in 1977. Back in 1975, Pryce led the British Grand Prix, and in the same year he also won the non-championship Race of Champions at Brands Hatch (ahead of John Watson, Ronnie Peterson, Jacky Ickx, and Emerson Fittipaldi).
Watson, racing for Brabham at the time of Pryce's accident, said: “It was abundantly clear that Tom's ability was above and beyond his contemporaries.”
What makes Pryce's story so captivating is that his beginnings were as humble as it is possible to imagine. He grew up in a small corner of Wales and trained as a tractor mechanic, having given up on his dream of becoming a pilot as he thought he wasn't clever enough.
A huge fan of cars and races, his life changed in 1970 when he entered the Crusader Cup: a mini-championship for racing school pupils backed by British newspaper The Daily Express. Pryce won it comfortably and was given a Lola Formula Ford as his prize. He then rapidly rose through the ranks of Formula 3 and Formula 2 and was set to make his Formula 1 debut with the fledgling Token team at Monaco in 1974. But the organisers didn't want to let him in because of his inexperience, so they offered him a place on the Formula 3 grid instead.
The son of a Welsh policeman and a nurse won that race in the glittering Principality by 20 seconds, setting him on a path to what could have become the very top of the sport. The tragedy, as with all alternative histories, is that we will never know for sure. But the historical fact remains that Pryce was replaced by Alan Jones after the accident, who won his first race with Shadow before the end of the season, and then became world champion three years later.
That could have been Tom: certainly most people who raced against him at the time, like Watson, believed he had the talent to go all the way.
Nearly 50 years later, Pryce is often remembered more for his horrific death, on March 5, 1977, than his outstanding life. But if you go to his home town of Ruthin – not so far from the Anglesey racing circuit, where Price has a straight named after him – you'll find a memorial sculpture on Clwyd Street, close to the centre. On the plaque is written: “Quiet and unassuming, he was a Grand Prix driver of almost peerless brilliance.”
A fitting epitaph to a promising talent cut down long before his time.