On September 23, 1973, Formula 1 sent out a safety car for the first time. It was a yellow Porsche 914, driven by Canadian racer Eppie Wietzes around Mosport Park during the 1973 Canadian Grand Prix. It also pulled out in front of the wrong car. Race control picked up Howden Ganley’s Iso-Marlboro instead of the real leader, and by the time the 80 laps were done nobody in the paddock could agree who had won. Officials spent roughly three hours rebuilding the lap charts before naming Peter Revson and McLaren the winners. Emerson Fittipaldi and Ganley’s team had both spent that afternoon thinking the win was theirs.
That makes it one of F1’s more awkward debuts. The idea was sound and the way it was run was not, and the sport took another 20 years to write it into the rules properly.
A Title Already Settled, A Race Wide Open
Canada was the second-to-last round of 1973, and the championship was already over. Jackie Stewart had clinched his third title at Monza two weeks earlier and arrived at Mosport with 71 points. With the title gone, the race was mostly about who would win it. Revson was trying to show he belonged among the front-runners in McLaren’s new M23. Plenty of drivers in the midfield had a result to chase and not much to lose.
Ronnie Peterson put his Lotus on pole with a 1:13.697, and Revson qualified second. Then it rained. The field started on wets, apart from Jean-Pierre Beltoise, whose BRM started on intermediates. The early leader was a young Niki Lauda in the other BRM. He went past Peterson, pulled clear quickly and was lapping the tail-enders by lap 10. For a while it looked like his first grand prix win.
The Drying Track That Broke the Lap Charts
Mosport dried fast, and that caused the trouble. Carlos Pace pitted for dry tyres around lap 18, and Lauda came in soon after. The rest of the field followed over the next few laps. In 1973 pit stops weren’t normal race strategy. There were no transponders, and scoring depended on people with clipboards and stopwatches ticking off each car as it passed. Once cars were stopping at different times, the running order that race control was tracking and the order the teams were tracking started to drift apart.
At around lap 32, Jody Scheckter’s McLaren and François Cevert’s Tyrrell collided, and the Tyrrell went hard into the barrier. With debris and emergency vehicles out on the circuit, officials sent Wietzes out in the Porsche to slow the field. That was new for Formula 1. The idea was reasonable: get the cars bunched behind a pace car so marshals could work safely. The procedure was only as good as the scoring behind it, and the scoring was already a mess.
Wrong Car, Wrong Lap, Wrong Winner, Briefly
The Porsche came out ahead of Ganley, who was not leading. Contemporary reports put Beltoise at the front. Formula 1’s own history of the safety car says the pick-up left most of the field a lap down. Cars that happened to be in the right place went round and caught the back of the train, which gave them close to a free lap. Revson and Jackie Oliver’s Shadow were two of those cars. Fittipaldi was sitting right behind Ganley and lost out.
By the finish, no two lap charts agreed. Lotus believed Fittipaldi had won. Ganley’s team, which was Frank Williams’ outfit racing as Iso-Marlboro, believed Ganley had won. Fittipaldi later said he went to the podium to collect his trophy and was told by an official that he hadn’t won. Race officials worked through several sets of timing and scoring sheets, and about three hours after the flag the result was confirmed:
- Peter Revson, McLaren-Ford
- Emerson Fittipaldi, Lotus-Ford
- Jackie Oliver, Shadow-Ford
- Jean-Pierre Beltoise, BRM
- Jackie Stewart, Tyrrell-Ford
- Howden Ganley, Iso-Marlboro-Ford
Ganley still came away with a championship point, which mattered to a small team with little money. Fittipaldi set the fastest lap, 1:15.496, and finished second in a race he’d had good reason to think he’d won.
Why the Result Weighs More Than It Looks
Mosport was Revson’s second grand prix win, after Silverstone earlier that summer, and it turned out to be his last. The American was one of the most versatile drivers of his era. He won the 1971 Can-Am title with McLaren and was fastest qualifier at Indianapolis that same year. McLaren team manager Teddy Mayer rated him among the top six drivers in F1. Revson moved to Shadow for 1974 and was killed in a testing crash at Kyalami on March 22, 1974, caused by a suspension failure. His Canadian win is sometimes treated as a fluke of the scoring. It was still a win from second on the grid, in a car that could win races.
The season’s end was harder still. Two weeks after Mosport, Cevert was killed in qualifying for the United States Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, the track where he had won his only grand prix. Tyrrell withdrew both cars. Stewart, who had quietly planned to retire after that race, never started what would have been his 100th grand prix. He put much of his energy afterwards into safety campaigning, and Tyrrell had been preparing to make Cevert its lead driver for 1974.
From Mosport Mess to Mandatory Procedure
The main lesson from Mosport was about scoring. A safety car is only fair if race control knows the exact order, and in 1973 it didn’t. Formula 1 used a safety car only occasionally after that: at Monaco in 1976 with a Porsche 911, and again there from 1981 to 1983 with a Lamborghini Countach. Then it dropped the idea for most of a decade. The sport trialled it again at the 1992 French and British Grands Prix and made it a fixture at every race from 1993. Early on, each race organiser supplied its own car, which is how a Fiat Tempra, a Ford Escort Cosworth, a Honda Prelude and a Renault Clio all ended up leading F1 fields. Mercedes began supplying a standard safety car partway through 1996. Bernd Mayländer took over the driving at the 2000 Australian Grand Prix and has been a near-permanent fixture since.
Today’s safety car rules are largely a response to the problems Mosport exposed. Electronic timing means the leader is never in doubt. There are written rules for when lapped cars can pass the safety car to unlap themselves. The Virtual Safety Car, brought in for 2015, can neutralise a race without bunching the field at all. The underlying tension is still there, though. Each of those rules is really about which cars gain from a neutralisation and which lose out. The 2021 Abu Dhabi finale, where the handling of lapped cars decided the championship, was an argument over the same issue that sank Fittipaldi at Mosport.
Canadian Tire Motorsport Park, as Mosport is now called, still claims the first F1 safety car as part of its history. That’s fair enough. The track did deserve its place in the story. The procedure, and whoever was keeping score that day, didn’t come out of it nearly as well.
Related Reading on Backfire Racing
A safety car only works if every driver reads the same signal at the same time. Our explainer on how flag signals communicate with drivers mid-race covers the system race control still depends on. Lapped traffic also decided another title fight, in Villeneuve’s 1996 Estoril pass on Schumacher. For a race with no neutralisations at all, see Schumacher’s Monza sprint, F1’s fastest race. And for the story of McLaren, Revson’s team, as it heads back to Le Mans, read Norris’s 38-lap run in McLaren’s hypercar.
About the Author
