John Taylor Memorial Race, Mallory Park 23rd Aug 2009

Serial  #MOWDG405
This car was originally one of the three Cooper BMC Works Team cars run by Ken Tyrrell.
It was raced by both John Love and Tony Maggs* for the 1961 Formula Junior Championship season and they were hugely successful, finishing 1st & 2nd together for the Works Team in over a dozen European races, sharing the laurels roughly equally and even staging a dead heat once at Montlhery.
Tony Maggs took eight wins, including Goodwood, Magny-Cours, Monza, Karlskoga, Zandvoort, Oulton Park and Monthlery and went on to win the European Formula Junior Championship. ~ won jointly with Jo Siffert
The car was sold to an Australian buyer by David Rishworth in 1979 and later to the Valdez collection in the US from which I bought it in 2008.
I re-imported it into the UK early in 2009 and finding it completely unraceworthy had it recommissioned.I then debuted it at the John Taylor trophy race at Mallory Park and winning the class by 6 hundredth's of a second as the engine was in the process of letting go !
*Maggs and  Love both went on to compete in contemporary F1:
The son of a wealthy farmer/businessman, Maggs shot to prominence in Formula Junior and was invited into the works Cooper Formula 1 team for 1962 and 63, partnering Bruce Mclaren and finishing second in the French Grand Prix of both years. Maggs was dropped at the end of '63 in favour of former World Champion Phil Hill,
John Love came very close to becoming the first African driver to win a World Championship Grand Prix in 1967 when driving an ex- Bruce Mclaren Cooper in the South African Grand Prix at Kylami.Love had been a leading local driver for many years and at 42 was relatively old for a Grand Prix driver. Eighteen months earlier he had acquired Cooper T79 with a Climax  four-cylinder engine, which Bruce McLaren had raced in the 1965 Tasman series, winning the Australian GP at Longford.