Running a successful motorsport campaign requires an exceptional level of commitment, a long-term plan and savvy choices in engineering partners to ensure that precision components, gears, engine parts and other systems are not only perfect but harmonise with each other.
Even missing slightly on any of your systems can create a machine that is at best unreliable and at worst horrifically uncompetitive, as was the case with Nissan’s unfortunate Le Mans challenger in 2015, which was half as fast as it needed to be.
Worse than that, however, was the even rarer story of a driver in one of the highest echelons of motorsport who was so infamously slow that he managed to be the only driver and car in history disqualified for being too slow.
The late Al Pease had a fascinating life, being born in Darlington, spending many of his formative years in India with the British army and living in Canada for most of his life, working as an illustrator for the Simpsons department store in Toronto amongst many other companies over the following 25 years.
He started racing in the 1950s, already in his thirties and thus somewhat of a late bloomer to the sport but would go on to be a frequent face in the Canadian motorsport scene, although whilst he was relatively competitive it wasn’t enough to win and stand out in a relatively new scene.
In 1967, at the age of 46, Castrol Canada sponsored Mr Pease to drive in the first-ever Canadian Grand Prix. He would finish the race, technically, although he was infamously 43 laps down after the battery discharged and the engine proved impossible to start.
He failed to start the GP the next year thanks to engine troubles but in 1969 his Eagle Mk1 car was so laughably outdated and slow it was 24 laps behind the leaders just 46 laps into the race.
After getting into several altercations on the track, nearly taking out Jackie Stewart during one of them, he would be disqualified, leading to his ignominious immortalisation in Formula One history.
In the end, he was highly influential in Canadian motorsport and was inducted into the country’s Motorsport Hall of Fame in 1998, passing away in 2014 at the age of 92.
He had the potential and was not unskilled but lacked the plan and precision engineering that even in the 1960s was starting to become essential for success.