Manfred Winklehock

[Dare]

Remember Spyker driver Winklehock who led a
f1 race in his first drive,here's how lucky his dad
was in a 1980 race

[Alianora La Canta]

That looked like the accident Mark Webber had at Le Mans in 1999. How Manfred Winklehock got out of that one nearly 20 years earlier takes some explaining...

[cosworth151]

Looked like a "blowover" in powerboat racing. He was certainly a lucky man to jump out and walk away.

It remined me of the Mercedes CLR-GT1 cars at Le Mans in 1999 too, Ali. Peter Dumbreck walked away from this terrible looking crash:



Mark Webber had a similar flip earlier in another CLR during warm-up:



After Webber's flip, M-B put a small fin on each side of the nose. After Dumbreck's, they withdrew the team.

[Steven Roy]

I seem to remember three back flips for Mercedes at LeMans.


http://www.motortrend.com/features/scenes/112_0509_lemans/index1.html

According to this link(bottom paragraph) Webber flipped twice then Dumbreck had his flip.

[Alianora La Canta]

You're right, Steven. There were three flips. Mark Webber withdrew after the second one. It was the event that caused him to try to escape the comfortable world of sports car racing.

[Steven Roy]

In the 70s and 80s there was a class of cars that raced in UK and Europe called super saloons.  This was a sihouette formula where the cars had to have body shells that looked like a road car but underneath you could have anything you wanted.  There were a few cars which were designated DFV VW.  These were generally formula 2 chassis with Cosworth DFVs and fibre-glassVW body shells.  Most of these were VW beetles but they was a driver called Walter Robertson who had one made with a VW fast back shell. 

He was testing at Donington one day when the young Manfred asked about the car.  I don't think they had many VW with DFVs in the back in Germany.  I think Manfred was driving F3 at the time.  Eventually he was given a few laps in the car.  Now Walter was a fine driver and won a lot in that car.  Manfred had never seen it and had no idea as to how good it was.  Inside 5 or 6 laps he was 2 seconds faster than Walter.  I remember reading Walter's comments and he was absolutely blown away by the way Manfred could get in and pretty much instantly do the time he did.

[CrazyHorse]

cant believe that was 8 years ago.  MW looks very young