obituary: Ken Tyrell
The world of Formula One is mourning the death of Ken Tyrrell, the one-time timber merchant who became one of the sport’s major team owners. Tyrrell, who has died of cancer at his home in Surrey, was 77.
With Bernie Ecclestone, the late Lotus founder Colin Chapman and Frank Williams, Tyrrell was one of a generation of team principals who were in on the ground floor when the Formula One Constructors’ Association (Foca) was formed in the early Seventies.
Foca was the power base by which the competing teams earned a bigger slice of income from expanding television coverage and commercial rights during the Eighties. That led to the Concorde agreement that today controls every aspect of Formula One’s administration.
Tyrrell and his family would eventually profit enormously from selling the team to British American Racing for 10-million in 1998, a far cry from the 22500 it cost to build the first Tyrrell-Ford 001 in 1970.
His team won its last grand prix in 1983. Yet it was as Jackie Stewart’s mentor during the Scottish driver’s heyday from 1968 to 1973 that the quiet, but firmly spoken Tyrrell will be remembered.
Stewart won his three world championships and 25 of his 27 grand prix victories driving for Tyrrell. In 1969 he was at the wheel of a French Matra-Ford, then in 1971 and 1973 in cars built in a workshop in the corner of Tyrrell’s timber yard near Woking.
“Ken played a more important part in my professional life than any other single person,” said Stewart. “He made a great contribution to British motorsport and was a man of the highest standards of integrity and ethics.
“We never had a written contract in all the time I drove for him, just a handshake. I would never have achieved everything I have done in my life without Ken’s influence.”
After Stewart’s retirement in 1973, Tyrrell fielded Jody Scheckter as his team leader for three seasons, nurturing the young South African’s talent which would eventually earn him the 1979 world championship in a Ferrari.
In 1983 Tyrrell gave Martin Brundle his Formula One chance and six years later introduced Jean Alesi to grand prix racing. Jonathan Palmer, then Alesi’s team-mate, remembers how direct Tyrrell could be, when he asked him candidly, “Isn’t it about time you stopped racing?” after the young Frenchman outpaced him in his first few races.
Alan Henry