As the head of his small Formula 1 team, Colin Crabbe, who has died aged 82, was the man who gave Ronnie Peterson his big break.
It was just before Crabbe’s 27th birthday when his Antique Automobiles team made its F1 debut in 1969, in the non-championship Madrid Grand Prix at the brand-new Jarama circuit, with a Maserati-powered Cooper T86B. Crabbe was unable to fit in the car, so it was his pal Neil Corner who drove it to fourth place among a small field.
The legendarily versatile Vic Elford took over in the Cooper for Antique Automobiles’ world championship debut at the Monaco Grand Prix. Crabbe then acquired a McLaren M7B and Cosworth DFV engine, and Elford raced this combination to fifth place in the French GP and sixth in the British GP, before a crash at the German GP caused a shoulder injury that ended his single-seater career.
With a surplus of drivers for 1970, new constructor March needed a berth in F1 for its protege Peterson. Co-founder Max Mosley therefore worked out a deal with Crabbe to run an additional 701, and the Swede finished seventh on his debut in Monaco. He did a sterling job to qualify in the top 10 at both Spa and Clermont-Ferrand, but unreliability scuppered any chances of points.
From this launchpad, Peterson graduated to the works March team for 1971, when he finished runner-up to Jackie Stewart in the world championship.
Crabbe, meanwhile, returned to his world of exotic cars, where he was becoming famed for the lengths he would go to in order to track down the most fabled of machinery.
As a young man in the 1960s, he had bought a Maserati 250F during a visit to Australia – its seller was successful racer Stan Jones, whose son Alan would go on to win the 1980 F1 title.
Crabbe campaigned the 250F in the UK at VSCC events and moved into contemporary sportscar racing, sharing a Ford GT40 to good results in the southern African Springbok series.
Meanwhile, his network of contacts had heard of a 1937 Mercedes-Benz W125 grand prix car hidden in the East German city of Leipzig since the war. Crabbe tracked it down and, in 1968, brought it back to the UK where he raced it energetically, twice winning the VSCC’s Richard Seaman Trophy at Oulton Park.
Crabbe completed the set of ‘Silver Arrows’ hidden behind the Iron Curtain when, in 1977, he managed to find and retrieve an 1938 Auto Union D-type in Czechoslovakia.
Hugely valuable Alfa Romeo, Ferrari and Jaguar machinery were all discovered by Crabbe in the unlikeliest of Latin American or African locations, allowing them to be brought back to life and used again.
Crabbe’s own racing exploits came to a dramatic end in 1988 when, at Oulton Park, his Talbot-Lago T25C made contact with an out-of-control ERA, and the resulting accident left him with rib and nerve injuries and in an induced coma.
