1968 Formula One season

The 1968 Formula One season was the 22nd season of the FIA 's Formula One motor racing. It featured the 19th World Championship of Drivers , the 11th International Cup for F1 Manufacturers , and three non-championship races open to Formula One cars. The World Championship was contested over twelve races between 1 January and 3 November 1968.

Great Britain driver Graham Hill , driving a Lotus - Ford Cosworth , won his second Drivers' Championship, six years after his first. [ 1 ] Lotus were awarded the Manufacturers' Cup for the third time. [ 2 ] Repco produced a more powerful version of their V8 to help Brabham 's compete against Ford's new Cosworth DFV , but it proved very unreliable: Jochen Rindt qualified on pole position twice but also only finished twice. [ 3 ] Hill's main rivals were Jackie Stewart at Tyrrell Matra and 1967 ch...

The 1968 season turned out to be a turning point in terms of safety, with four Grand Prix drivers being involved in fatal crashes: two-time World Champion Jim Clark , Mike Spence , Jo Schlesser and Ludovico Scarfiotti . It was the last year where all the races were run on tracks with almost no safety modifications.

On the topic of technology, the 1968 headlines were dominated by the wings introduced by Lotus's owner Colin Chapman . He installed modest front wings and a rear spoiler on his Lotus 49 B at the 1968 Monaco Grand Prix . Brabham and Ferrari went one better at the 1968 Belgian Grand Prix with full-width wings mounted on struts high above the driver. Lotus replied with a full width wing directly connected to the rear suspension that required a re-design of the wishbones and transmission shafts . Ma...

Dan Gurney became the first driver to wear a full-face helmet at the 1968 German Grand Prix . [ 8 ] He had helped to invent it with the Bell Helmets company and had already used it at the 1968 Indianapolis 500 . Within some years, it became the obvious choice among drivers and was later deemed mandatory. [ 5 ]

All cars had to be fitted with a rollbar that stretched out to at least 5 cm (2.0 in) above the driver's helmet, an electrical circuit breaker , an oil catch tank and a reverse gear . And the cockpit had to allow easy evacuation. [ 9 ] [ 10 ] [ 11 ]

The FIA decided to permit unrestricted sponsorship on cars after the withdrawal of support from automobile related firms like BP , Shell and Firestone . Team Gunston , a South African privateer team , was the first Formula One team to paint their cars in the livery of their sponsors when they entered a private Brabham for John Love , painted in the colours of Gunston cigarettes, in the 1968 South African Grand Prix . [ 12 ] In the next round at the 1968 Spanish Grand Prix , Team Lotus , initiall...

The fast and flowing Kyalami circuit between Johannesburg and Pretoria played host to the South African Grand Prix for the second time on New Year's Day 1968. Briton Jim Clark was fastest by a second with his Lotus-Ford/Cosworth teammate Graham Hill alongside him with Jackie Stewart in the new Matra-Ford/Cosworth completing the front row. On the second row there were the two Brabham-Repcos of Austrian Jochen Rindt and Australian Jack Brabham while the third row featured Briton John Surtees in th...

Many F1 drivers in the 1960s went to compete in the Tasman series in New Zealand and Australia during the European winter and the Southern Hemisphere summer, which was a nine-week, eight-race series that started in early January and ended in late February/early March, with respective races every week in open wheel racing cars that were very similar to F1 cars of the time, with exactly the same chassis- only these variants had 2.5 litre engines, as opposed to Formula One world championship cars, ...

The non-championship Race of Champions at the English Brands Hatch circuit near London in March was won by Bruce McLaren in his own McLaren car, ahead of Mexican Pedro Rodriguez in a BRM and McLaren's teammate and countryman Denny Hulme.

On 7 April, Jim Clark, one of the most successful and popular drivers of all time, was killed at Hockenheim in West Germany at a non-championship Formula Two event. The Scotsman had gone off the track caused by what was believed to be a deflating rear tire; 90% of the Hockenheim circuit was made up of two long, slightly curving straights running through thick forests. And because there was no protection from the solid trees lining the circuit on both sides, Clark's Lotus smashed into a wall of t...

There was a four-month gap between the South African Grand Prix in January and the Spanish Grand Prix in May. Formula One had lost yet another driver: Briton Mike Spence died after a practice accident at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway while running one of Andy Granatelli's Lotus turbines when he hit the wall at Turn One and one of the wheels came back into his cockpit and hit him on the head. The first Spanish Grand Prix since 1954 was held at the brand-new, ultra-modern Jarama circuit just nor...

It was only a year since Lorenzo Bandini had been killed at Monaco, so the chicane was tightened and the race was shortened by 20 laps. Ferrari did not attend amid reports that the team was not happy with the safety standards at the circuit. Team Lotus was there, however, and Graham Hill and Jackie Oliver ran in the new red and gold livery of Gold Leaf and the cars featured the first hints of aerodynamic front and rear wings. BRM had been planning to run Briton Chris Irwin as Mike Spence's repla...

Formula One arrived at the fastest circuit of the year: the notoriously dangerous and challenging 14 km (8.7 mi) Spa-Francorchamps circuit in Belgium. Amon took pole at an average speed of more than 240 km/h (150 mph) around this unprotected rural road circuit, an incredible average speed by even today's standards. The appearance of wings on the Lotus at Monaco did not go unnoticed and for this race, various teams arrived with experimental wings on their cars. Ferrari was back in action having ...

The traditional home for the Dutch Grand Prix was the fast beach-side Zandvoort circuit near Amsterdam. The Brabham team had its new Repco V8 engine ready and was running a third car for Dan Gurney who had no Weslake engines available for his Eagle. Cooper ran only one car for Lucien Bianchi following the death of Scarfiotti and Brian Redman's accident at Spa a fortnight earlier. In qualifying Chris Amon was fastest in his Ferrari with Jochen Rindt's Brabham and Graham Hill's Lotus sharing the f...

After races at Clermont-Ferrand, Reims and the short Le Mans circuit in 1965, 1966 and 1967 respectively, the French GP returned to the spectacular and dangerous 4-mile (6.4-km) Rouen-Les-Essarts rural road circuit in a forested and hilly area of northern France. This circuit was very fast, narrow and was littered with high-speed sweepers, including a section of fast, anti-banked downhill curves; and two brick-surfaced hairpins at the ends of the track. An all-French team in the form of an Alpin...

The dreadful 1968 season continued on as Graham Hill arrived at Brands Hatch with a big lead in the World Championship and with seven other British drivers in the 20-car field, there was plenty for the fans to cheer. The only major change from the miserable French GP (where Honda driver Jo Schlesser had been killed) was the arrival in the Cooper-BRM team of Robin Widdows. The cars had sprouted increasingly dramatic rear wings in an effort to get as much downforce as possible. Qualifying showed t...

After Jo Siffert's unexpected victory for Rob Walker at Brands Hatch, the F1 teams headed off to the most challenging circuit of the year: the 14.2 mi (22.9 km) Nürburgring and more bad weather, the previous four races having all been affected by rain. The field was much as normal with the only major additions being German Kurt Ahrens, driving a third Brabham and German Hubert Hahne entered in a BMW-entered Lola-BMW Formula 2 car, the Munich manufacturer having a look at the state of competitive...

The Gold Cup non-championship race at the Oulton Park circuit near Manchester, England attracted some of the big names and victory went to Jackie Stewart in his Matra-Ford.

After the successful Canadian GP at Mosport Park near Toronto the previous year, the event was given a more reasonable date in the 1968 calendar, but the race was moved to the exciting Mont Tremblant circuit at St Jovite, in Quebec, one and a half hours northwest of Montreal. With the final three races being held in North America, traveling was also reduced. Attention now centred on the battle for the World Championship with Graham Hill still ahead after his early season successes with 30 points...

There were some additions to the usual F1 field at the small Watkins Glen circuit in up-state New York with Team Lotus running a third car for Mario Andretti (who had practiced but not raced for the team in Italy) and Bobby Unser who has suffered a similar fate at Monza in the second BRM. McLaren again ran a third car for Dan Gurney while Ferrari replaced Ickx (who had broken his leg in practice for the Canadian GP) with Derek Bell. Things did not begin well for Unser who did serious damage to h...

The final round of the championship in Mexico was moved back 2 weeks because of the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics having taken place only 3 weeks previously. When the F1 teams finally arrived at the high-altitude Magadelena Mixhuca Park circuit in Mexico City for the final round of the World Championship four weeks after Watkins Glen, Graham Hill had 39 points, Jackie Stewart had 36 and Denny Hulme had 33. All the contenders were overshadowed in qualifying by the Swiss Jo Siffert in Rob Walke...

Points were awarded to the top six classified finishers. The International Cup for F1 Manufacturers only counted the points of the highest-finishing driver for each race. For both the Championship and the Cup, the best five results from rounds 1-6 and the best five results from rounds 7-12 were counted.

Numbers without parentheses are championship points; numbers in parentheses are total points scored. Points were awarded in the following system: