The Winfield Driving School – Where legends are born
It wasn’t until they left, having strapped me to the car, now watching them go, unable to move with the first perspiration inside my helmet, that I realised I’d never known a damned thing about racing. I had run at the playground until second grade, making all the right noises, shifting up and down, feeling the power as it came on from one gear to the next. My father and I had gone to Road America twice each year for almost ten years. We had watched the June Sprints and the Can-Am Challenge, heard the roar and felt the euphoria of speed. It was the best part of the summer. One rainy afternoon in the paddock, Gordon Smiley let me sit in his Formula B car. Even though I wasn’t old enough to drive, it felt wonderful, years before he was killed at Indianapolis.
I remembered a friend of my father who also knew the Smiley family, with the kindest of kind faces and a nearly bald head, sitting back in a soft chair with his feet up. He had driven MG’s at Elkhart Lake before there was a track. With one eyebrow raised, as if to clarify everything that had been misunderstood, he leaned forward and said quietly, “You just can’t do any- thing more enjoyable than driving a racing car, really.”This all came about when I was invited by john Peterson to attend the Winfield racing school in the south of France. Cohn has always been a racing fanatic, and began in his early twenties, against his parents’ wishes, by leaving America for England. Once there, and having bought a car, he began to fight his way up through the ranks for Formula Junior. He progressed into Formula Three in 1964 when the classes split, and became extremely well connected in the sport.
He left active racing several years later, feeling he had taken his talents as far as possible, but he remained in close contact. He later served as import/export agent for Brabham in Italy and Nova Motors in England, and managed a number of Formula Three racing teams. They included the impressive talents of people like Danny Sullivan, Arie Luyendijk, and Roberto Guerrero. Mr. Peterson now operates Franam Racing in Minnesota, and is the U.S. representative of the Winfield school. After many years in racing from many perspectives, he now has a new passion: to assist someone talented, young, and American become World Champion.
Although not well known to many in the United States, the Winfield “Ecole de Pilotage” is the oldest school of its kind in France, and has amassed an important list of graduates. The most famous include two-time Le Mans winner Jean- Pierre Jaussaud, Jackie Stewart’s Tyrrell teammates Johnny Servoz-Gavin and Francois Cevert, Patrick Depailler, Jacques Laffite, Ferrari Factory pilot René Arnoux, Patrick Tambay, and Didier Pironi, as well as World Champion Alain Prost. The school operates from two courses, Magny-Cours near Nevers, and Paul Ricard in Le Castellet. The cars are nearly identical to those used in the Formula Renault Turbo Championship-beautifully designed Martini monocoque chassis with 160 bhp Renault powerplants. For many drivers, racing in this series has been a fantastic start, a number moving from Formula Renault to Formula Three, and then directly to Formula One