Neerpasch soon found himself accidentally waiting for a bus back to the pits.... (LAT)

Another wet race I’ll never forget the race was at Spa in 1968 in the Gulf Ford GT40. This was the old Spa of course, 9 miles long. Instead of stopping at Les Combes and then heading back towards the pits as you do now, you used to head straight on down towards the village of Stavelot.

I’d been following the Porsche 908 of Jochen Neerpasch for about three laps and the spray was absolutely incredible, you just couldn’t see anything. I had really made up my mind that on this lap, I was going to pass him. We came down to Burneville, which was a long right-hander, with the buildings on the inside literally being the apex point. Then on the exit you had a good long look down the Masta straight.

Eventually I thought “Right, I’m gonna get this bugger”. Pulling out to overtake in these long-distance races was always difficult, because there were 40 or 50 cars in the field, some of which had tremendous speed differentials. Quite apart from the class differences, you’re always running up on somebody going 25mph with a broken suspension or a flat tire or whatever.

On this occasion I had a clear track and had Neerpasch lined up, but I was a bit loathe to pass him in all this spray, but the whole thing was rendered academic when Jochen spun.

The road was on what looked like a ledge, with the railway line above it running alongside, then the racetrack (aka the public highway), then a two-strand barb wire fence, so obviously you didn’t want to hit that in an open-wheel car. Behind that were all these cows, mooching around and watching the race cars flashing past.

Old Jochen spun this Porsche, and it went round and round and eventually he backed it into a bus shelter, which I suppose was made of concrete and plastic, and it absolutely exploded in debris along with the Porsche, I have a clear recollection of seeing the windscreen pop out, with the wiper still attached. It ended up completely clearing the road for me, and I went onto finish fourth, in this race that was wet for the duration of its six and a half hours.

You just didn’t fancy Spa in the wet back then. The cars were so unsafe, our blue uniforms had very little fire protection, and even in the rain we were doing 180mph down the Masta straight.

Of course the open-wheel cars back then were insane in the wet, and Jackie Stewart had the biggest scare of his life there when he crashed in the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix, getting stick in a ditch with the monocoque started filling with petrol.

Denny Hulme used to sum it up in his very laconic way, saying simply: “Rain at Spa? Park it.”

The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEEDtv.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or Speed Channel

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The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED