The rain swept down on Kyalami, just as it had done countless times in November during the past 61 years. And the old hands in the John Love Room glanced knowingly at one another, no doubt recalling the countless times they had to deal with a track awash from a sudden cloudburst, just one of the aspects that has made this track so revered all across the world amongst racers and motor racing fans. With this rich history comes the latest 60 Years of memories book launch which serves as a conclusive account of the life of South Africa’s premier racing venue.
This time in November 2022, the occasion was to welcome what will surely be seen as the definitive history of Kyalami. There have been a number of books on the subject published in the past few decades, but this 504-page volume, with over 1 500 stunning photographs and perspectives from many of the stars who were there for the first race meeting on November 4, 1961, is both a record of fact and a wonderfully evocative piece of journalism.
The man behind the Kyalami Grand Prix Circuit: 60 years of Memories, is Denis Klopper, who attended his first Kyalami race meeting in 1969 and has been at every race meeting held at the track ever since! During that time he was involved in managing racing teams at the track and managing the circuit itself for several years between 2005 and 2011. But all the while, Denis was building up a huge collection of contacts, photographs, race programmes and scrapbooks that formed the basis of this huge coffee-table-sized book.
Published in superb hard-cover form, the first print run has been limited to 762 copies. The 62 Collectors Editions and 200 Publishers Editions have both been sold out. There are 250 copies of the Standard Edition on sale at a price of R1 950, plus Postage and Packaging, and can be ordered by clicking on the link below: [email protected]. A second print run has been planned.
At last week’s book launch, racing driver Graham Duxbury recalled how as a youngster still in short pants, he had ridden on the back of a tractor, with his father Bill Duxbury, one of the original members of the South African Motor Racing Club that had decided on this piece of veld, halfway between Pretoria and Johannesburg.
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“One of the big factors that made Kyalami so attractive was the undulations of the land,” said Duxbury, who started his racing career at the track in 1974 and went on to win the South African Drivers title in Formula Atlantic single-seaters in 1982. Another luminary of Kyalami who attended the book launch was Arnold Chatz, famous as an Alfa Romeo racing driver and dealership owner, who began racing a Renault Dauphine Gordini at the circuit in the early 1960s. BMW ace driver Paolo Cavalieri was also very involved with this book. Famous as a BMW saloon ace in the early 1980s, Paolo has more recently has done much behind the scenes to promote motor racing, as well as fund an extremely successful team of historic racing cars in recent years.
This book’s crowning achievement is that it details every one of the 60 years of racing, from 1961 to 2021, including Kyalami highlights, but also lists all the South African champions in the various racing classes (including motorcycles) and world champions of that year.
The writing is concise and accurately presented. But what really makes the book so stunning is the array of over 1 500 photographs that makes the passages come alive. As someone who attended his first race at Kyalami in 1965, the hair on my neck rose when I saw the rare 1964 picture of the massive Ford Galaxie run by the visiting Willment team, in company with a Ferrari GTO, the very car that had won the 1962 and 1963 Nine Hour races. The following year at the Rand Winter Trophy, I was on hand to see Bob Olthoff take that same Galaxie to a thundering win ahead of the Lotus Cortina “twins” of Basil van Rooyen and Koos Swanepoel.
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What I really enjoyed most, perhaps, were some of the rarely-seen photographs supplied by an array of lensmen such as the late Colin Watling, Malcolm Sampson, Woody Rodseth and the late Gavin Stapleton,
These pictures include an evocative shot of John Love driving a Lola T212, which he shared with Helmut Marko in the 1971 Nine Hour. Yes, the same Helmut Marko who is currently the chief driver adviser for Red Bull’s Formula One team! And then there’s a moment of great mirth, captured by Gavin Stapleton, between arch-Formula One rivals James Hunt and Niki Lauda in the Kyalami pits in the mid-1970s, illustrating the fantastic bond rival drivers shared in the golden age of Formula One.
With all these pictures, tribute should be paid to Denis Klopper for his meticulous captioning, as is evident throughout the book. Roger Houghton, the well-known journalist and former public relations manager at Toyota South Africa for many years, did a top-class job of editing. Roger was at Kyalami for that very first race on November 4, 1961. Accolades for the printing go to Camera Press’s Kevin Hellyer, who was a top production-class and 250 cc racing class motorcycle racer in the 1970s and 1980s.
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The involvement of all these die-hard Kyalami fans and racers illustrates that this book is indeed, first-and-foremost, a labour of love.
Fittingly, tribute is also paid in full to the man who rescued Kyalami from obscurity in 2014, Toby Venter. Toby and his team re-developed the ailing track into a world-class circuit capable of hosting a Formula One Grand Prix in the next few years. At the book launch, Toby said that Formula One would indeed be coming back to South Africa, possibly as early as 2024!
