Doug Nye: Used and abused – How not to treat a friend’s Ferrari GTO

Mick Walsh of ‘Classic & Sportscar’ magazine and I had been invited to do a judging job for an exhibition to be presented by an enthusiast group named ‘The Independent Goodwood Photographer’s Guild’. Most of the group are GRRC Members and we’re all very keen to support them and their – as it turned out – quite remarkable body of work.

Mick and I have worked together – on and off – for very many years. Apart from being a hugely enthusiastic and immensely knowledgeable enthusiast he is a most capable photographer and designer in his own right and has a really good eye which I would trust implicitly. It has been largely under his guidance that the Festival of Speed’s annual Cartier Concours entries are selected, organised and displayed for the selection of often-celebrity judges invited – so Mick really knows his classic car onions…

Amongst my various lifetime activities, I have been an assiduous photo collector, and in conjunction with another friend, Paul Vestey, we put together The GP Library from which the vast majority of images used in these columns is usually drawn. Within the GPL archive, which neatly spans 100 years of motor sport from 1902-2002, we have something like 1.8-million different negatives, transparencies and prints. They include work from all manner of photographers but mainly from our late great friend and colleague Geoffrey Goddard, Italian photo-journalist (and Ferrari team manager 1967) Franco Lini, Nigel Snowdon, ‘Jabby’ Crombac, Edward Eves and the former Zooom Photographic agency.

So one way and another we have seen an awful lot of imagery pass through our hands, and high in a Goodwood grandstand hospitality suite – with that jaw-droppingly gorgeous panoramic view to the north of the Downs – we were asked to pick our choice of the best from the Goodwood Photographer’s Guild’s dozens of entries. They were arranged in ten or so different categories and Mick and I spent a really engrossing hour or so making our selection. When confronted by an entry of such imagination, often outstanding technical quality and interest, picking just four to head each category was far from easy.

For us both there was one real surprise. Compared with some of the most recent high-tech digital shots its quality wasn’t special. It had a wonderfully rich period colour tone which identified it very much as being an image captured back in the early-1960s on traditional celluloid and chemical film. It wasn’t quite pin-sharp in focus and it was blurry and plainly wobbly, but it was one helluva picture, because it was a mid-crash view captured during the 1963 RAC Tourist Trophy race at Goodwood from the alarmingly threatened spectator area on the exit from Madgwick Corner. The image captured the American amateur racing driver Tommy Hitchcock III airborne in an erupting shower of dirt, tuffets and debris after thumping the safety bank in his friend Prince Zourab Tchkotoua’s hapless Ferrari 250GTO which was the ex-Maranello Concessionaires 1962 car – chassis ‘3647GT’. Ironically, this was the self-same car which had met the Madgwick Bank – violently – when leading the previous year’s TT driven by John Surtees. He had collided with Jimmy Clark’s spinning Aston Martin DB4GT Zagato, and both had later been collected by Robin Benson’s Ferrari 250GT SWB…

Now the Hitchcock crash really rang bells with me because from the pit area, I saw the aftermath of that incident – the flurry of yellow flags oscillating furiously on the entry to the corner and brake lights flashing on early as the remaining runners negotiated the area. Then the cranky old ambulance being persuaded to start, and trundling out, then back, the missing race number on my scribbled lap chart – oh oh, Hitchcock’s done it again…

My long-time photographer colleague Geoff Goddard was stunned by the entire incident, because he captured much of it on film from the Madgwick infield, and normally wherever he chose to stand around a circuit nobody ever, ever, crashed there.

You see during that 1963 season the wealthy American hopeful had shown considerable aptitude – but it was for almost any activity other than driving a racing car without smearing it across the scenery.

His long-suffering buddy and entrant was the White Russian émigré Prince Zourab whose father had been Prince Nicholas, forced to flee his homeland of Georgia by the Bolshevik takeover in 1921. After some years in France and Switzerland, Nicholas Tchkotoua had settled in the USA by 1933 where he met and married Carol Marmon, the only daughter of Howard Marmon of Marmon Motor Company fame. Prince Nicholas had returned to Europe with his family to settle in Lausanne, Switzerland where he died in the 1980s. Prince Zourab was, I believe, the second – and first male – of six children, and he evidently inherited an enthusiastic appreciation of fine cars.

Tommy Hitchcock III, meanwhile, was the son of a celebrated American polo player– an inductee to the Museum of Polo and the Polo Hall of Fame – Thomas Hitchcock Jr who – as a teenager during World War I – had abandoned school to join the Lafayette Flying Corps in France. He was shot down and captured by the Germans but escaped by jumping from a train. For eight days he hid in woodland during daylight hours and walked by night, covering more than one hundred miles to reach sanctuary in neutral Switzerland.

Between the wars, Hitchcock Jr then caught up on studies at Harvard and Oxford, and in 1921, he led the US team to victory in the International Polo Cup. From 1922 to 1940, he possessed a 10-goal handicap from the United States of America Polo Association, polo’s highest ranking, and he led four teams to US National Open Championships in 1923, 1927, 1935 and 1936. It’s said that author F. Scott Fitzgerald based two of his characters on Tommy Hitchcock Jr: Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tommy Barban in Tender Is the Night (1934). Tommy Jr married New York socialite Margaret Mellon, and Thomas Hitchcock III was one the couple’s twin boys.

One of Tommy Jr’s fellow polo-playing friends was Robert Lehman, of the Lehman Brothers investment firm, and Jr became a partner in the company in 1937. Into World War 2 this remarkably vivid sportsman became a USAAF Lieutenant-Colonel posted to England as an assistant air attaché to the US Embassy. In that capacity, he played a vital role in selecting the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine to replace the feeble Allison V12 in the North American P51 Mustang aircraft – creating perhaps the finest of all the conflict’s fighter ’planes. While testing such an aircraft he was killed in a crash near Salisbury, Wiltshire, when he failed to pull out of a dive. 

So Tommy Hitchcock Jr was quite a hard act to follow. His son Tommy III then became a real motor racing enthusiast into the early 1960s. With his pal Prince Zourab he drove an Alfa Romeo Giulietta in the 1962 Paris 1,000Kms at Montlhéry, before the Prince ordered a Ferrari 250GTO for them both to race in 1963.

They actually brought the car home eighth overall in the new year’s Targa Florio mountain road race in Sicily, before tackling the ADAC 1,000Kms classic on the Nurburgring Nordschleife. Tommy III promptly got into a muddle in the famous banked Karussel turn, rode up the inside slope, spun and rolled back onto the track, to end up with the costly car inverted, blocking the dished section of the turn. The German marshals were unable to recover the car so it lay there belly up for the rest of the race with the surviving runners having to do their best on the flat section of the 180-degree turn, round the outside.

The Ferrari was returned to Modena where Scaglietti’s finest panel bashers beat out the damage, and the GTO was returned to the fray. Tommy III finished mid-field in successive GT races at Mallory Park, in the British GP meeting at Silverstone and then the Guards Trophy at Brands Hatch, before tackling the TT at Goodwood – and that date with the Madgwick bank.

There the car rolled and was extremely badly damaged, and Tommy III was knocked about but escaped without serious harm. He and Prince Zourab swallowed another hefty repair bill, and into 1964 they invested in a replacement Shelby Cobra roadster in which their active racing career continued – including a good third place for Tommy III in the Scott Brown Trophy race at Snetterton. He honed his race-driving skills in Formula 3 and also bought a lovely Brabham BT8 sports-racing car which was entered under the charming name of Celerity Inc. Driving that car in 1965 he took sixth place in the Easter Goodwood Lavant Cup, placed second at both June Crystal Palace and at Croft and won outright at the Palace that July.

So he came good in the end, but for many enthusiasts who were at Goodwood that August day in 1963, we remember the name for that expensive Ferrari 250GTO contretemps, just past the notorious hump at Madgwick Corner. But what we did not suspect at the time was that an alert young spectator should have captured the moment, so dramatically, on celluloid film…

Images courtesy of the GP Library