John Surtees, the only 6-wheel world champion, has left us forever
While Kimi Raikkonen put the Ferrari in pole position for the coming season with a time of 1:18.634 on the last day of F1 testing in Barcelona, clearly the fastest of the 2017 winter tests, we received the sad news that "Big John", who won the world championship title for the Scuderia in 1964, passed away in England on March 10.
In the 66 years from Giuseppe Farina in 1950 to Nico Rosberg in 2016, a total of 33 drivers won one or more world championship titles. In the premier class of motorcycles, 26 riders shared the 67 titles from Leslie Graham in 1949 to Marc Marques in 2016. But there is only one name that appears in both lists. In the 500cc motorcycle class, the name John Surtees is listed as world champion in 1956, 58, 59 and 60, while the same name adorns the list of F1 world champions for 1964.
Surtees won a total of seven world championship titles on two wheels and one Formula 1 title after switching to four wheels. He finished second in his second GP start and was already on pole position in the third race. In 1966, he also won a CanAm title.
He later became a team boss and raced cars under his own name until 1978. Mike Hailwood's greatest success was 2nd place in the 1972 Italian GP in Monza. Hailwood also became European Formula 2 champion in the same year, also in a Surtees. Like Surtees, Mike Hailwood switched from motorcycles to monopostos and became the second extremely successful convert from two to four wheels.
John's glorious life was to be continued by his son Henry. But the final chapter in motorsport ended tragically. Henry Surtees died in a Formula 2 accident at Brands Hatch in 2009 after being hit on the head by a competitor's flying wheel. Father Surtees then set up the Henry Surtees Foundation, which raises money for victims of road accidents and driver training on two and four wheels.
He has since become the oldest living F1 world champion. But on March 10, just one month after his 83rd birthday, the exceptional talent passed away in a London hospital, where he had been admitted in February due to respiratory problems.
John Surtees will probably remain the only world champion on two and four wheels forever, and if not? "Then at least I was the first," Surtees told us in an interview in 2014 at his manor house near Lingfield in the county of Surrey, smiling with satisfaction.
40 years after his retirement as a racing driver, he looked back on his eventful career over a cup of tea and said: "Whatever I've done, I've done it with my heart and soul."
