This year’s Grand Prix de France Historique at the Paul Ricard circuit was even more about the stars rather than the sport. However, organiser HVM made the right financial bet, as no fewer than 90,000 French spectators forked out a considerable sum of money to catch a glimpse of a parade of celebrities from Formula 1 past and present. It was instantly the most well-attended historic event of the year, apart from the Goodwood Revival that’s still coming up and where the same adage is so successfully exploited.

Despite being held on the Südschleife (and not on the dreaded Nordschleife), the 1967 edition of the Eifelrennen deserves the title of having been, to date, the only major race held at the Nürburgring under snowy conditions. Furthermore, the entry list, full of well-known names from the 1960s motorsport, leaves no doubt about the importance of the event in the context of the time.

Certainly, one of the decades that contributed most to this myth of F1 being a category that crushes those who fail in it was the sixties. ATS, De Tomaso, Shannon and Scirocco were just some of the names that had short-lived stints in the category, and that contributed to the ever-growing list of Formula 1 fiascos. One of the most forgotten efforts of that decade was, however, the one undertaken by the brothers Claude and Georges Gachnang, who, in 1965, would found the Scuderia Cegga. Despite the official birth of the team in the middle of the decade, this did not mean that it was only from that point on that both would start to think about F1 – incredible as it may seem, the brothers' involvement with the category had begun at the end of 1961, when the the Scuderia's precursor, ETS Cegga, had been established in partnership by the brothers.