Surtees

Andrea de Adamich in the Ceramica Pagnossin Surtees TS9B at the 1972 Canadian GP. Copyright Andrew Scriven 2010. Used with permission.

John Surtees became a constructor almost by accident, when James Garner's motor racing team, AIR, sought Surtees' help in 1969 to build cars for the SCCA's Formula A. Surtees put Garner together with freelance designer Len Terry, who had a car on the drawing board originally intended for Roger Nathan. Terry took on the construction of these cars at his base in Surrey, where the BRM P126s had been built a year earlier, and the first two were shipped out for testing at Riverside, which went particularly badly. Garner returned the cars and Surtees then took over the project, the cars becoming TS5s and then Surtees TS5s, and racing with significant success in the US series and in the UK. After the first five cars were built by Terry, production was continued at the Team Surtees Racing and Development (TSR&D) base at Slough, and then at a new factory at Edenbridge in Kent.

After a dismal season in F1 with BRM, Surtees decided to build his own F1 car for 1970. The F1 Surtees TS7 project started as a development of the TS5, with a new front end and new rear end of John Surtees' design, but after the F5000 development car was damaged, a new monocoque was fabricated for the TS7 which was a significant evolution of Terry's ideas. The well-engineered TS7 was immediately competitive, and in only its fourth race John Surtees won the Oulton Park Gold Cup, although against a particularly small field.

Two new models were introduced for 1971, the Formula 5000 Surtees TS8 and the F1 Surtees TS9, and John repeated his victory in the 1971 Gold Cup that year before retiring from racing. Team Surtees expanded to three cars for 1972, with Mike Hailwood, Tim Schenken and Andrea de Adamich in Surtees TS9Bs, but the only success of note was Hailwood's second place at the Italian GP. However, Surtees had a very good season in other categories, with Hailwood taking the Formula 2 title in the Surtees TS10, and Gijs van Lennep winning the British F5000 title in the Surtees TS11. The Surtees TS14 was introduced for F1 in 1973, driven by Hailwood and Carlos Pace, but results remained uninspiring, punctuated only by Pace's third place in Austria.

Hailwood was replaced by Jochen Mass in the Surtees TS16 for 1974, with major new sponsor Bang & Olufsen also arriving. However, John Surtees fell out with the key sponsor over a drive in a F2 Surtees TS15 for his son, and the money was withdrawn, the whole sorry mess ending up in the courts. Mass and Pace both walked out and the team ended the season rarely qualifying for a race. The F2 operation was wound up, ending Surtees' involvement in production racing cars. John Watson helped a one-car F1 Team Surtees recover some of its reputation in 1975, and the completely new Surtees TS19 for 1976 proved effective, with Alan Jones as lead driver and Durex as a high-profile sponsor. Vittorio Brambilla led the team for 1977, but the TS19s were overdue for replacement, and when the Surtees TS20 belatedly appeared in 1978, it was really too late. A move down to the British F1 series in 1979 only delayed the inevitable. The very last official Surtees works entry was at Silverstone in October 1979 and resulted in a victory for Gordon Smiley in the ground-effect Surtees TS20+, the team's first for over eight years.