Reg Parnell
Nation: | United Kingdom | ||||||||
Automobile world championship | |||||||||
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First start: | Great Britain Grand Prix 1950 | ||||||||
Last start: | 1954 British Grand Prix | ||||||||
Constructors | |||||||||
1950 Alfa Romeo • 1950 Scuderia Ambrosiana • 1951 Vanwall • 1951 BRM • 1952 AHM Bryde • 1954 Scuderia Ambrosiana | |||||||||
statistics | |||||||||
World Cup balance: | World Cup ninth ( 1950 ) | ||||||||
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World Cup points : | 9 | ||||||||
Podiums : | 1 | ||||||||
Leadership laps : | - |
Reginald Harold Haslam "Reg" Parnell (born July 2, 1911 in Derby , England , † January 7, 1964 ) was a British freight forwarder , racing driver and team boss. He was active in both Formula 1 and sports car races and in the 1960s he led the Formula 1 team Reg Parnell Racing , for which u. a. Mike Hailwood and Chris Amon started.
Start of career before World War II
As early as 1939, Reg Parnell took part in sports car races in Brooklands and Goodwood in a modified MG Magnette . There he was so conspicuous by his combative driving style that the respective race management warned him about “dangerous driving” out of concern for everyone's safety . However, benevolent contemporary witnesses claimed that Parnell had little choice given the motor inferiority of his car.
The collector
As with so many other of his generation colleagues, the Second World War prevented him from continuously expanding his efforts. The racing driver soon became the collector Parnell, who enjoyed a wide range of relationships and opportunities thanks to his work as a transport company. For little money, in the times of rationed fuel, he managed to buy up racing cars from all parts of England and set them up in his workshops. He is said to have united up to two complete starting fields, i.e. 32 cars - including famous cars like the black Delage , with which Richard Seaman drove to the Mercedes factory team , or the Maserati 4CL and an ERA from Richard Wakefield, who later fell . Parnell was even presumptuous enough to try after 1945 to acquire the two legendary Mercedes-Benz W 165s from 1939 that Rudolf Caracciola had hidden in Switzerland during the war , but the Allied High Commission prevented this.
New beginning after the war
Soon after the end of the war, Reg Parnell drove a Maserati 4CL again and defeated the famous Louis Chiron in the Jersey Road Race in 1947 ; at the Grand Prix de Nîmes , he took third place.
The following year he managed a victory at Goodwood, where he was once cautioned. At the Grands Prix of Penya Rhin and Zandvoort , he achieved second and third place respectively on the Maserati 4CL. In 1949 he was back on the podium in second place behind Giuseppe Farina ( Ferrari ) at the Grand Prix of Rosario in Argentina .
formula 1
Equipped with these recommendations, it is hardly surprising that it Alfa Romeo invited the opening race of the Formula 1 season in 1950 in Silverstone as a guest a fourth model of Tipo-158 - work Armada control. Parnell thanked them for this trust with an excellent third place. In races that are not part of the world championship, such as in Goodwood and Jersey, he achieved victories in a Maserati or the BRM-V16 as well as other good placements.
At the same point, in 1951, he made the official debut of the young BRM brand with fifth place on the 16-cylinder model BRM P15 just as positive. But the result is actually sensational, as he and his team-mate Peter Walker , without having participated in training, contested the race from the last row of the grid with a special permit that would be unthinkable today. Surprisingly, they simply showed up at the track on race Sunday - but there were no further successes because the engine design with four rows of cylinders, each with two camshafts and a crankshaft consisting of two halves with a gear connection, was too prone to defects and ahead of its time.
Parnell contested further races in a Ferrari 375 with fourth place in Reims . But even with these models he achieved victories outside the dominance of the big works teams in "non-World Championship races" at Silverstone and Goodwood.
Team principal at Aston Martin and in Formula 1
Up until 1956 he was seen in a number of races that were not part of the official World Championship, but he never really gained a foothold in the actual class as a driver because he often relied on eccentric and unreliable models like the Lagonda . He was a constant driver in sports car races. After a serious accident with the Connaught Formula 1 of the racing team owner Rob Walker in Crystal Palace , he decided to become team principal at Aston Martin . He successfully led this team to the World Sports Car Championship in 1959 .
The beginning of the 1960s he was the team manager of the Yeoman Credit Formula 1 team behind the first career steps of John Surtees as a racing driver and 1963, he tried his own team owner with Lola - chassis to the promising "newbie" from New Zealand , Chris Amon , to patronize.
After a routine appendix operation, Parnell unexpectedly died of peritonitis as a result of medical complications for everyone . His son Tim Parnell (1932-2017) was later to become race director at BRM after he had previously tried to continue running his father's racing team as a temporary driver.
character
Reginald Parnell was seen by his sports colleagues as a shirt-sleeved, but always warm-hearted, cheerful person with a preference for sometimes hearty jokes, which, however, could also be expressed in violent outbursts of temperament: The anecdote is legendary that, in view of an unusually high bill in a Paris nightclub, which fulfilled the offense of usury, after a fight threw the bodyguard into the showcase of the establishment by hand .
Quote
"Reg had no special skills, but an iron will to succeed and a sparkling temper."
statistics
Statistics in the automobile world championship
general overview
season | team | chassis | engine | run | Victories | Second | Third | Poles | nice Race laps |
Points | WM-Pos. |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1950 | Alfa Romeo SpA | Alfa Romeo Tipo 158 | Alfa Romeo 1.5 L8s | 1 | - | - | 1 | - | - | 4th | 9. |
Scuderia Ambrosiana | Maserati 4CLT / 48 | Maserati 1.5 L4s | 1 | - | - | - | - | - | - | ||
1951 | GA Vandervell | Ferrari 375 Thinwall | Ferrari 4.5 V12 | 1 | - | - | - | - | - | 3 | 10. |
BRM | BRM P15 | BRM 1.5 V16s | 1 | - | - | - | - | - | 2 | ||
1952 | AHM Bryde | Cooper T20 | Bristol 2.0 L6 | 1 | - | - | - | - | - | - | NC |
1954 | Scuderia Ambrosiana | Ferrari 500 | Ferrari 2.0 L4 | 1 | - | - | - | - | - | - | NC |
total | 6th | - | - | 1 | - | - | 9 |
Single results
season | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4th | 5 | 6th | 7th | 8th | 9 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1950 | |||||||||
3 | DNA | DNF | DNA | ||||||
1951 | |||||||||
DNA | 4th | 5 | DNS | DNA | |||||
1952 | |||||||||
7th | |||||||||
1954 | |||||||||
DNF |
Legend | ||
---|---|---|
colour | abbreviation | meaning |
gold | - | victory |
silver | - | 2nd place |
bronze | - | 3rd place |
green | - | Placement in the points |
blue | - | Classified outside the point ranks |
violet | DNF | Race not finished (did not finish) |
NC | not classified | |
red | DNQ | did not qualify |
DNPQ | failed in pre-qualification (did not pre-qualify) | |
black | DSQ | disqualified |
White | DNS | not at the start (did not start) |
WD | withdrawn | |
Light Blue | PO | only participated in the training (practiced only) |
TD | Friday test driver | |
without | DNP | did not participate in the training (did not practice) |
INJ | injured or sick | |
EX | excluded | |
DNA | did not arrive | |
C. | Race canceled | |
no participation in the World Cup | ||
other | P / bold | Pole position |
SR / italic | Fastest race lap | |
* | not at the finish, but counted due to the distance covered |
|
() | Streak results | |
underlined | Leader in the overall standings |
Le Mans results
year | team | vehicle | Teammate | placement | Failure reason |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1950 | Aston Martin Ltd. | Aston Martin DB2 | Charles Brackenbury | Rank 6 | |
1951 | Aston Martin Ltd. | Aston Martin DB2 | David Hampshire | Rank 7 | |
1952 | Aston Martin Ltd. | Aston Martin DB3 Coupe | Eric Thompson | failure | Power transmission |
1953 | Aston Martin Ltd. | Aston Martin DB3S | Peter Collins | failure | accident |
1954 | Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd. | Aston Martin DB3SSC | Roy Salvadori | failure | overheated cylinder |
1955 | Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd. | Lagonda DP166 | Dennis Poore | failure | no petrol |
1956 | Aston Martin Ltd. | Aston Martin DBR1 | Tony Brooks | failure | Gearbox damage |
Sebring results
year | team | vehicle | Teammate | placement | Failure reason |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1953 | Aston Martin Ltd. | Aston Martin DB3 | George Abecassis | Rank 2 | |
1954 | Aston Martin Ltd. | Aston Martin DB3S | Roy Salvadori | failure | Engine failure |
1956 | David Brown & Sons Ltd. | Aston Martin DB3S | Tony Brooks | failure | Engine failure |
Individual results in the sports car world championship
season | team | race car | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4th | 5 | 6th | 7th |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1953 | Aston Martin | Aston Martin DB3 | SEB | MIM | LEM | SPA | ONLY | RTT | CAP |
2 | 5 | DNF | 2 | ||||||
1954 | Aston Martin | Aston Martin DB3S | BUA | SEB | MIM | LEM | RTT | CAP | |
DNF | DNF | DNF | DNF | DNF | |||||
1955 | Aston Martin Ltd. |
Lagonda DP166 Aston Martin DB3S |
BUA | SEB | MIM | LEM | RTT | TAR | |
DNF | 7th | ||||||||
1956 | David Brown & Sons Ltd. | Aston Martin DB3S | BUA | SEB | MIM | ONLY | KRI | ||
DNF |
Web links
- Profile Reg Parnell on Grandprix.com
- Career statistics Reg Parnell ( Memento from April 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- Reg Parnell. www.24h-en-piste.com, accessed on March 28, 2020 (French).
- Reg Parnell in the Internet Movie Database (English)
personal data | |
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SURNAME | Parnell, Reg |
ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Parnell, Reginald |
BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British Formula 1 racing driver |
DATE OF BIRTH | July 2, 1911 |
PLACE OF BIRTH | Derby , England |
DATE OF DEATH | January 7, 1964 |
Place of death | Derby , England |