Walter Hayes interview
by Mark Stewart
November 10th 1998
courtesy and copyright of Mark Stewart
http://www.markstewartproductions.com
“The idea was that the Ford Cosworth engine and Lotus would get together, and we raced the Lotus 49 for the first time at the Zandvoort Dutch Grand Prix in June ’67. It won first time out and it just went on winning and winning. It was perfectly clearly such a superior engine that nobody else was ever going to win, at least it seemed that way to me and it seemed that way to a lot of others. Our original plan was to just to restrict the engine to Lotus, but I said to Colin at the Nurburgring race that year that I thought we’d destroy the sport if we didn’t have an engine that would be available to everybody. So I asked Keith Duckworth how many more engines he thought he could make, and he said he thought he could do one or two other teams, and so I looked around for which other team and of course Tyrrell was my number one, partly because they seemed to me an amazing combination, Jackie and Ken. But also I knew them and they were sort of friends by then. Jackie I’d had under contract for Cortinas. We were good friends, it seemed a natural extension of what we were doing.”