Cliff Allison

[Kicking-back]

Cliff Allison, who drove for Lotus in the late 50s and early 60s has died, aged 73.

[silver bullet]

Cliff also raced for Ferrari, winning the Bueno Aries 1000 with Phil Hill and was 2nd in 1960 Argentine GP. He had a bad crash later that year at Monaco.

He was a true gentleman.

[HiRich]

A nice obituary in the Independent today, precis'd below:

Cliff Allison was the first man to lead the soon-to-be-famous Team Lotus when they graduated to Formula 1 in 1958.
Born in Brough in 1932, the garage owner's son began racing in a Formula Three Cooper-JAP in 1952. Five years later he won the Index Of Performance at Le Mans, driving for Lotus, after Colin Chapman had spotted his talent.
On their joint debut at Monaco in 1958, Allison finished sixth, repeating the result in Holland, and then finishing fourth at Spa, where he might have won if the race had lasted one further lap. Tony Brooks' Vanwall crossed the line with fading oil pressure and a seized gearbox, while Mike Hawthorn's Ferrari blew its engine on the final corner, and Stuart Lewis-Evans' Vanwall was creeping with broke suspension. Ironically, this early promise had already delivered his best result of the year. A brilliant drive later that year at the Nürburgring went largely unnoticed in the wake of Peter Collins' fatal accident. Allison loved the 'ring, recalling "One of the reasons I enjoyed it is that a lot of the little roads in the Lake District, close to home, were very similar to it."
His performances had attracted Ferrari, whom he joined for 1959.. He showed his class against the likes of Brooks, Ginther, Gurney, Phil Hill and Wolfgang von Trips, despite regularly commuting from Brough to Maranello. Early in the season, he dragged his front-engined car to second place in Argentina, but the future was small, green and rear-engined, as Moss won in the Cooper. But a crash at Monaco during qualifying, when the gearshift pattern had been changed but nobody had told him, left him hospitalised with a broken arm and ribs and a compression of three vertebrae. When he awoke from a 16-day coma he found he could speak fluent French, which was odd since he had understood not a word of the language previously.
He returned in 1961, driving the UDT-Laystall Lotus, but another heavy crash at Spa ended his career as he suffered broken legs and spent two years recovering. It took him a long time to get over the bitter disappointment, especially as both Phil and Graham Hill, team-mates he had proven he could beat, had both become World Champions, in 1961 and 1962. He went quietly back to Brough to work in his father's Grand Prix Motors garage business, occasionally driving the local school bus in his later years.
It was only when he made occasional visits to grands prix in the nineties that he came to realise that people still remembered him with respect, and at Monaco in 1992 he admitted "I don't want to sound big-headed, but at the time of the accident in Monte Carlo, I knew I was already driving as quickly as the other drivers at Ferrari, and probably a bit quicker." He would have been perfectly suited to the Sharknose Ferrari in which Phil Hill won his 1961 crown.
Allison once shared a Lotus with historic racer Malcolm Ricketts on a re-run of the Mille Miglia. At one checkpoint he was personally sought out by Luca de Montezemolo. That, and the reception he got on his return to the Grand Prix paddock, did not compensate for the lost career, but one of the finest fellows in the sport quietly admitted that he was overcome to discover that he had not been forgotten.

Cliff Allison, racing driver: born Brough, 8th February 1932; died Brough, 7th April 2005