The epic first SA Formula One Grand Prix at Kyalami 50 years ago is still remembered for crowd favourite, John Love’s near-win. Unbeknown to many, it also led to the creation of a streetcar to commemorate the race. FERDI DE VOS arranged a unique Kyalami reunion.
The atmosphere at Kyalami on that Monday afternoon, 2 January 1967, was almost euphoric. With only eight laps remaining of the first SA Formula One Grand Prix on the Halfway House (now Midrand) racetrack, local favourite, John Love, in his sputtering four-year-old Cooper-Climax, was leading the race.
The stands were abuzz with ecstatic spectators cheering the reigning South African champion on. Sitting in the massive crowd of 80,000 plus, was a schoolboy named Ockert Tobias Venter – a young man who would ultimately acquire the Kyalami track some 43 years later.
The elation of the crowd lasted for 12 laps. Then, with only seven laps remaining, there was an audible groan from the crowd. Love had dived into the pits, and the word was that his misfiring car either ran out of petrol; or suffered from fuel starvation.
Jubilation gave way to despair as everyone watched in disbelief as Pedro Rodriquez, nursing a recalcitrant gearbox in his screaming V12 Cooper-Maserati, swept past Love’s stationary car to take the lead. Love got going again after a quick splash-n-dash, but by then Rodriquez was too far ahead to be caught, and the Mexican celebrated his first GP victory on the top step of the Kyalami podium.
It might have broken hearts at the time, but, had local boy Love won the race, the Maserati Kyalami road car commissioned nine years later to commemorate Rodriquez’s victory, would never have existed.
THE RATIONALE
The story of the Kyalami starts in 1972 when, at the Turin Motor Show, De Tomaso Automobili launched their Longchamp two-door coupé penned by American, Tom Tjaarda, chief designer at Ghia (at that time also owned by De Tomaso). The Longchamp’s conformist design had a sharply angled front grille, two large rectangular headlights and wrap-around front and rear bumpers. The four-seater coupe was powered by a 5.8-litre V8 Ford 351 Cleveland engine.
At the same time, Maserati – then a subsidiary of Citroën – was going through turbulent times. After the 1973 oil crisis, demand for sports cars shrank drastically, and Italian austerity measures hit Maserati hard.
Citroën went bankrupt and announced in 1975 that Maserati had been put into liquidation. Alejandro De Tomaso and GEPI (an Italian state organisation looking to protect Italian jobs) came to the rescue of the stricken carmaker. With the Longchamp not selling well, De Tomaso desperately needed a new flagship Maserati. Given the financial restraints, he enlisted Pietro Frua’s design studio in Turin to redesign the Longchamp; and the Kyalami was born.
Frua’s changes – lowering the car by 25 mm (mostly due to a lower waistline), making it 50 mm longer and 20 mm wider – improved Tjaarda’s design noticeably. Four traditional round headlights replaced the two rectangular ones, and the front bumper was made slimmer. The corners of the new, shallower front grill were rounded off, and two more character lines added to the bonnet.
At the rear, the wraparound chrome bumpers were slimmed down, the rear lights were redesigned, and ventilation outlets were added on either side of the rear window.
The changes enhanced the Kyalami’s classically elegant appearance – as splendidly represented by the rare red right-hand drive derivative owned by Capetonian Lance Allam.
‘HOMECOMING’
From 1976 to 1983, some 200 Kyalamis were built (some sources put the figure at 210), of which 43 were right-hand drive derivatives imported into the UK.
Initially powered by Maserati’s 4.2-litre quad overhead cam V8, delivering 195 kW at 6,000 r/min and 392 Nm at 3,000 r/min, an enlarged version with 4.9-litre displacement (209 kW at 5,800 r/min) was introduced in 1978, with a three-speed Borg-Warner automatic gearbox as standard and five-speed manual as option.
The Kyalami 4.2-litre model with five-speed ZF gearbox (the auto was optional) and LS diff reached 100 km/h in 7.2 seconds, 160 km/h in 19.3 seconds and attained an estimated top speed of 280 km/h (as tested by the UK magazine Autocar in 1978) – highly respectable performance figures for the time.
With assistance from Maserati South Africa, we managed to get Mr Allam’s pristine 4.2-litre example to Gauteng, and it was quite a sight when the red coupe drove into the revamped Kyalami complex for, as far as we can ascertain, the first time.
The sonorous V8 sound from its quivering quad exhausts reverberating against the new race control centre made it all feel so appropriate; this reunion of Kyalami car and track. With its exceptional quality Connolly leather upholstery and deep-pile carpets, the 1978 Maser looked very comfortable in its surroundings. The unique suede finished dashboard (to reduce windscreen reflection) and period instrument panel with black-rimmed Jaeger instruments stood in stark contrast to the track’s smooth grey and silver glass tower and business centre.
Its two-plus-two interior is quite spacious, with enough headroom for the occasional rear passengers, and the long rectangular instrument panel houses a large speedo and rev counter, flanked by two vertical rows of warning lights.
A small oil temperature gauge is positioned below a row of six rocker switches, plus five gauges indicating battery condition, fuel level, oil pressure, water temperature, as well an analogue clock, and the centre console houses two air vents, the air-con controls, electric window switches and the gear lever.
Interestingly, the Kyalami has two fuel tanks with separate filler caps, a full-size spare wheel, and a generous (for a 2+2 coupe) 255-litre boot.
TRACK TIME
The Kyalami took to its namesake track, at times accompanied by a yet-to-be locally released 2017 Quattroporte GTS. Selecting the dog-leg first gear, pull away is smooth enough with the curved eight’s roaring soundtrack rising with the revs. The throw to second is long, and with the rev needle steadily creeping to the red line, one needs to be accurate with the upshifts on the long-geared ZF gearbox.
By now, the Kyalami was pushing 160 km/h and, even with a dual circuit hydraulic servo-assisted braking system and ventilated discs all round, it took a persistent middle pedal shove to heave-ho for the sharp new right-hander after the main straight.
With a bespoke independent suspension – double wishbones, coils and anti-roll bar up front and upper links, lower wishbones and trailing arms with two spring/shock-absorber units (later adopted in the Quattroporte III) and anti-roll bar at the rear – the Maserati felt responsive and secure in the corners.
Yes, it had some body roll and wanted to wash away at the front (mostly due to its 15″ tyres being under-inflated for track work), and the ZF power steering (supposedly self-centring) was cumbersome and imprecise, but booting it out of a corner there was still enough V8 power to seriously light up the rear wheels.
It was a fantastic homecoming to celebrate a Kyalami milestone, and while many purists might not think of the Kyalami as a true-blue Maserati because of its De Tomaso background, it most certainly is – De Tomaso knew exactly what customers expected from the Casa del Tridente when he commissioned the changes to the Longchamp. With Frua’s restyling, the spacious, luxurious interior, the power and reliability of the Maserati V8 and, of course, the Trident badge, it is a grand tourer in the real Maserati tradition.
Report by FERDI DE VOS | Images © RYAN ABBOTT (TCB MEDIA)/CAR MAGAZINE
