Leo Leonard

The first F5000 car: This post has appeared on the F5000 Facebook page, but we figure it deserves a place here too.

In May 1967 George Begg designed and knocked up, in six weeks, a single seater racing car powered by a standard Chev V8 motor with upturned “BRM” style stub exhausts. It was a conventional spaceframe car with a Brabham BT18 nose cone and heavy, fabricated steel wheels! It was driven by Begg’s regular “team” driver Barry Keene.

But it was a flight of fancy for George who soon built a sports car using the engine and gearbox from the single seater. Keene also drove this sports car for the single season it was campaigned by Begg. Famously, Keene passed Spencer Martin in the 250LM Ferrari around the outside of the loop at Teretonga. Meawhile the single seater had been rebuilt and powered by a Daimler SP250 V8 motor and sold to local driver Lindsay Tosh who ran it in South Island Specials races for a couple of years.

The sports car was sold to Timaruvian Brent Hawes.

Brent Hawes and Leo Leonard were mates, business partners and very successful long-distance racers, but Leo was content to let Brent take the limelight. Brent made no secret of the fact that when F5000 was announced he wanted a car for that. But he was killed when he crashed the Begg sports car race at Ruapuna.

Meanwhile, George Begg had returned from a spell in Britain working for Bruce McLaren and had brought back a heap of stuff — enough to build several cars including the McBegg “CanAm” car. George also made it known he wanted to build and race F5000 cars.
So he bought the Begg Daimler back from Lindsay Tosh and repowered it with a a Chev engine and Hewland transaxle he had brought back from the UK. This was to be a rolling “test bed” for his planned F5000 cars.

Begg had now contracted Laurence Brownlie to be the Begg works driver, but the first outing of the repowered Begg single seater almost killed him. A half-shaft broke when the car was under full power on the main straight and Brownlie emulated the incident completed by Jim Clark in the 1967 international and speared off into the infield at high speed. But where Clark survived and only wiped the nose off on the Lotus 49, the Begg went into a series of spectacular loops, rolls and crashes and a shaken Brownlie announced his retirement from the Begg outfit immediately.

Begg gave up this old single seater and started planning the series of FM designated cars.

After the death of his mate, Leo Leonard decided to fulfil Brent’s dream of competing in the first season of F5000 and he bought both the damaged Begg sports car in which Brent had had his crash and the now engineless Begg single seater. He used the engine gearbox of some other parts from the sports car to repower the old single seater — still on its heavy fabricated steel wheels. It was not a modern car but for those who knew the inside story and the motivation, it was a romantic fulfilment of a dream for Leo’s mate Brent Hawes.
The car wasn’t a winner, but Leo drove the pants off it. He was hospitalised after a rubber water hose burst at the Baypark International and filled the cockpit with boiling water and steam. Out of hospital Leo campaigned the car for a season, mostly at lower-key national meetings and he well and truly stepped out from the shadow previously cast by Brent. His abilities as a driver, a developer and a strategist were shown to be truly amazing and he went on to dominate NZ saloon car racing — long distance, production and as the driver of both PDL Mustangs.

The Begg F5000 car was not pretty, not advanced and it was dubbed “the cast-iron Begg” by critics, but it gave us Leo Leonard, the driver, in his own right.

The car still exists after a Grandpa’s axe history.