1974 Was a Fine Year for Motorsport – video

Image: The Cahier Archive

Motorsport in the 1970s was a knife-edge balance of speed, excitement, colour and danger. It was a brilliant, if unsustainable time, and there was plenty going on as the sport in its various forms developed at great pace.

There was so much going on, in fact, that you could fill a whole documentary with just a single year!

The Racing Years is a series of short films which takes a single year in motorsport and then goes in depth into the races, the drivers, the cars and the action.

This episode gets up close and personal with the 1974 Formula 1 season, and stops by Maine, France along the way to see what everyone got up to during the 1974 24 Hours of Le Mans.

On the Formula 1 side, Jackie Stewart had just won the 1973 World Drivers’ Championship, and then promptly retired following François Cevert’s fatal accident during the United States Grand Prix. Hesketh finally had their own car, and in it was James Hunt.

Drivers had fifteen championship races ahead of them, and at the end of it all there would be just three points separating World Champion and number two.

Going in to Le Mans Matra had won the previous two races and was looking for a third, Ferrari had retired from endurance racing and a road-derived Porsche was about to have a very good day.

The Racing Years: 1974 tackles the year in order and gives a brilliant race-by-race rundown of the action backed by glorious period footage and set to a soundtrack straight from the exhausts of the year’s finest racing cars.

Put the kettle on, relax and enjoy the sweet sights and sounds of 1974.

MORE: Video: A Pit Stop with Lauda in 1974