Jackie Stewart and Apollo 11
01/12/2013
The two men who made 1969 an unforgettable year appeared together on the grid at the US GP in Austin, Texas.
Jackie Stewart became F1 world champion in a Matra and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin became the second man after Neil Armstrong to set foot on the moon, or - as some would have it - the movie set in the Arizona desert, at exactly 3:15 on July 21, 1969, 20 minutes after Armstrong! The skeptics will probably learn just as little about the real truth of the moon landing as they will about the doping sins of seven-time non-Tour winner Lance Armstrong.
Jackie Stewart perhaps explained to the interested 82-year-old Aldrin his personal connection to space travel in addition to the news about current F1. In fact, the Matra in which Jackie won his first Formula 1 title was not built by a car manufacturer, as is usually the case, but by a company that was otherwise involved in the development of aircraft. The Matra also featured some extremely interesting technical innovations, first and foremost the extremely rigid and previously unknown monocoque construction.
Matra, the abbreviation for Mecanique Avion TRAction, was a French company founded in 1941 and made a name for itself in aircraft and armaments construction as well as in plastics processing.
After the merger with Aérospatiale and Matra Haute Technologie to form Aerospatiale-Matra, Groupe Lagardère was created by merging with Matra Marconi Space. Matra itself has belonged to EADS (European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company) since 2004, in which the Lagardère Group holds a fifteen percent share.
