Ken Tyrrell was born

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Ken Tyrrell was born on 3 May 1924 in Ockham, Surrey. He never drove a Formula 1 car, never engineered one and had no formal background in motorsport. What he had was an eye for talent, a stubbornness that bordered on the architectural and a gift for running a racing team the way a good headmaster runs a school: firmly, fairly and with everyone knowing exactly where they stood. He turned a timber business into a Formula 1 dynasty, won three world titles with Jackie Stewart, and at one point sent a car with six wheels onto the grid without any apparent concern for how strange that might look. It looked very strange. It also worked.

The timber merchant’s detour

Tyrrell had started racing himself in the 1950s, competing in Formula 3 before accepting, with apparent good grace, that driving was not where his future lay. Managing and running cars was.

He set up Tyrrell Racing Organisation in 1960, initially running cars in Formula Junior and Formula 2, and built a reputation for quiet competence and sharp judgment in an era when both were rarer than they should have been.

The key decision came in 1964, when he spotted a young Scottish driver with something different about him.

Jackie Stewart had not yet won anything of significance. Tyrrell signed him anyway.

It is the kind of call that looks obvious in retrospect and takes real nerve at the time.

The Stewart years

The Tyrrell-Stewart partnership became one of the defining relationships in Formula 1 history, not just because it produced results, but because of how it produced them.

Tyrrell gave Stewart the environment to become the driver he was capable of being: disciplined, analytical, devastatingly fast.

Stewart gave Tyrrell credibility, then titles.

They won the Formula 2 championship together in 1965.

By 1968 they were in Formula 1, initially running a Matra chassis, and they immediately threatened the established order.

Stewart won the 1969 world championship with some authority. The title in 1971 followed, then a third in 1973, by which point Tyrrell was running his own chassis and had established himself as a genuine constructor rather than simply a capable entrant.

Stewart retired after the 1973 season, partly in the shadow of the death of his teammate François Cevert at Watkins Glen, a crash that brought the American Grand Prix weekend to a premature close. It was the sharpest kind of ending to what had been a remarkable chapter.

The six-wheeled car

Without Stewart, Tyrrell needed a new edge. What followed was either a stroke of lateral engineering genius or an act of spectacular eccentricity, depending on your tolerance for cars that look as though someone lost count.

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The Tyrrell P34, which appeared in 1976, had six wheels: four small ones at the front, two conventional ones at the rear. The thinking was aerodynamically coherent. Smaller front wheels meant a lower frontal area, better airflow under the nose and more rubber on the road for braking and cornering.

Jody Scheckter and Patrick Depailler drove it, and Scheckter won in Sweden. The car scored points, ran competitively and briefly looked as though it might actually be the future.

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It was not the future. Tyre development for the unusual front wheels stalled, the aerodynamic gains were harder to exploit than hoped, and by 1977 the advantage had gone. Tyrrell returned to four wheels.

The P34 became one of the most photographed and discussed cars in F1 history, the kind of object that makes the sport feel genuinely strange and inventive in a way that later regulation cycles would largely close off.

The later years and a bitter end

Through the late 1970s and into the 1980s and 1990s, Tyrrell continued running in Formula 1 with varying levels of competitiveness. There were good moments: Michele Alboreto won in Las Vegas in 1982, one of the few genuine highlights of a period when the team was increasingly outgunned by larger, better-funded operations.

The end, when it came, was ugly. In 1984 Tyrrell was excluded from the entire season and stripped of all points after the FIA found that the team had been using illegally ballasted fuel during pitstops. Tyrrell disputed the findings fiercely. The ban was enforced. It remains a contested chapter in the team’s history.

By the mid-1990s the team was struggling to attract funding or competitive machinery, and in 1998 Tyrrell sold to British American Tobacco, which used the entry as the foundation for the BAR project.

The lineage eventually became Honda, then Brawn, then Mercedes, which gives the Tyrrell name an unlikely ancestral relationship with Lewis Hamilton’s world championships, a thought that would probably have amused Ken Tyrrell enormously.

He died in August 2001, having watched the team he built pass into different hands but knowing that it had left a genuine mark on the sport.

Three world championships, a six-wheeled car and one of the cleanest reputations in Formula 1 are not a bad accounting for a man who started out selling timber.

FAQ

What championships did Ken Tyrrell win?
Tyrrell won the Formula 1 constructors’ championship in 1971 and the drivers’ championship with Jackie Stewart in 1969, 1971 and 1973.

What was the Tyrrell P34?
The P34 was a six-wheeled Formula 1 car that Tyrrell ran in 1976 and 1977. It used four small wheels at the front to reduce frontal area and improve aerodynamics. Jody Scheckter won the 1976 Swedish Grand Prix in it. The concept was eventually abandoned when tyre development for the unusual front wheels could not be sustained.

What happened to the Tyrrell team after Ken Tyrrell sold it?
The team was sold to British American Tobacco in 1998, becoming BAR. The entry was later taken over by Honda, then briefly became Brawn GP, and was purchased by Mercedes in 2010. That Mercedes team has since won multiple constructors’ and drivers’ championships.

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