The Historic Single-Seater Class That Keeps On Giving

Paul Lawrence looks at the ongoing success story of Formula Junior

Sixty years on from its creation, Formula Junior is riding high as the most successful category in historic racing. As the only single-seater class below Formula 1 in period, Junior had just six seasons as a contemporary category, yet its legacy is being cherished more strongly than ever.

In 1958 Sir Edmund Hillary reached the South Pole, the Munich air crash decimated the Manchester United football team, Elvis joined the army, Charles de Gaulle became prime minister of France and the first trans-Atlantic passenger flights started between London and New York.

Meanwhile, in Italy, Count Giovanni Lurani came up with the blueprint for a new junior single-seater category.

Lurani was a racer, journalist and automobile engineer. After fighting in the Italo-Abyssinian War in the mid1930s, he formed Scuderia Ambrosiana with Luigi Villoresi but crashed his Maserati 4CM at Crystal Palace in 1938 and the resultant hip injury halted his single-seater career.

After the Second World War Lurani worked with the FIA and towards the end of the 1950s he recognised that there was a major gap in junior single-seater racing. The 500cc Formula 3 category was popular in some countries, including the UK, but Lurani reasoned that a new global category was needed. His thinking may have been coloured by the lack of Italian presence in the steadily declining 500cc F3, but there is no doubt that his concept for Formula Junior was timely.