Grand Prix Rejects

Hello all,

We have another new profile up, and once again it's a 1950s driver. This time the subject is Don Beauman, a highly talented English driver and great friend of Mike Hawthorn who tragically lost his life just as he was beginning to make his mark on the world stage.

Having started with an F3 Cooper like so many other members of his generation, he bought an old Riley from the Hawthorn family, before entering a partnership with Sir Jeremy Boles, a wealthy nobleman with a passion for motorsport. With Boles' A-Type Connaught Beauman was regularly in the top rank of Formula 2 drivers and did very well indeed driving it in what would turn out to be his sole world championship appearance in 1954.

Anyway, read and enjoy!

http://gprejects.com/centrale/drivers/p ... on-beauman

Cheers,

Anthony (Simtek)

Superb again. I cannot even put into words how much I value your (and Jamie & Enoch, and the others who are/have) researching on guys that raced on the era of no Internet documentation, and efforts to create a well-reading profile out of that. Thanks.

Great work!

Fantastic job, I liked this one! It's good to see these rejects of classic era F1, and the effort needed to find data and shed a light on the sport's beginnings.

Well, I must say I'm quite pleased (and thankful!) to have received such a favourable response!

I was slightly worried about how this might be received, as I'm sure you all know that part of the criteria for inclusion on this website is that the driver must not have been killed driving an F1 car. Beauman, while he was killed in a car that raced in the world championship, was killed in an F2 car, which sort of makes him eligible. In any case, I wanted to write about him because his death is basically a forgotten piece of local history where I live, and may or may not (I don't really have concrete evidence to state either way) have been the catalyst for the cessation of racing on the Wicklow Circuit, although money may also have been an issue. What is known is that Beauman's death did result in the Leinster Trophy format being changed to a heat system for 1956 to separate faster cars from slower ones, as Nixon's Lotus was, being only a lightweight sports car, a great deal slower than Beauman's Connaught.

As I progressed with the research it soon became clear that this wasn't just some unknown driver who met an early end, this was someone who may have possessed the talent to be successful in international motorsport, although, as the profile states, there is no way of answering conclusively whether or not he could have been.

As you can see, much like the Kelly profile, a long-form piece in the mould of what tommykl has produced for Johnny Claes sadly was not possible. There is nothing on his early life, and details of his immediate post-war life are also lacking. I would imagine he was called up for National Service sometime in the late 1940s, but that is at best a guess. Exactly when he purchased the Cooper F3 car and at what track he made his début remain a mystery, except that he started racing in 1950. The only reference to the Cornhill Racing Team other than a mention on his 500 Owners Association profile was a single result on Racing Sports Cars, so his relationship with John Riseley-Prichard is also a mystery. Riseley-Prichard was of course also supposed to take over Boles' Connaught before the Ferrari deal fell through and they shared the Aston Martin DB3 in the Supercortemaggiore, so there is perhaps a hint of some sort of a friendship there.

Details of his friendship with Mike Hawthorn are also scarce; I had actually purchased an old edition of Mike's autobiography (published when he was still alive!) for a bargain on Amazon in the hopes of finding details, but he only shows up a few times in the sections quoted in the profile, only referenced as a "great friend". The only section not referenced is from when Mike returned to England from Italy upon finding out that his father Leslie had died; Don was one of the handful of people waiting for him at the airport, which suggests the two were indeed very close. A quote from Norman Dewis on another website suggests they were schoolmates, but I couldn't fully trust the accuracy of his statement and figured that he merely guessed that they were based on how close they seemed to be. It does seem, though, that both Hawthorn and Beauman grew up in Surrey (Beauman lived in Walton-on-the-Hill, but when he began living there is unknown), so who knows?

I also looked into the very faint possibility of establishing contact with Sir Jeremy Boles, as he seemed to be young enough that there would be a reasonable chance of his still being alive, but alas, he passed away two years ago at the age of 82.

On a further note, I only recently learned that the other car in the picture from the 1953 Leinster Trophy is Mike Currie's Frazer Nash, probably the same one he and Don drove at the Nurburgring!

Excellent article Simtek! Really enjoyed the reading.. .Can we make Beauman a star in canon F1?

Miguel98 wrote:Excellent article Simtek! Really enjoyed the reading.. .Can we make Beauman a star in canon F1?

I'm afraid that chance has come and gone

Again, this is another profile I've only just caught up on this evening, immediately after tommykl's marathon profile of Johnny Claes. It helps I read that one first as I now recognise a lot of the races that Don competed in as being mentioned in the Johnny Claes profile. And they drove the same model of Connaught.

Sláinte!