Tom Pryce
Thomas Maldwyn Pryce was a British racing driver from Wales. He won the Brands Hatch Race of Champions, a non-championship Formula One race, in 1975. Pryce is also the only Welshman to lead a Formula One World Championship Grand Prix: two laps of the 1975 British Grand Prix. He died in a car crash at the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps in 1978.
About Tom Pryce in brief
Thomas Maldwyn Pryce was a British racing driver from Wales. He won the Brands Hatch Race of Champions, a non-championship Formula One race, in 1975. Pryce is also the only Welshman to lead a Formula One World Championship Grand Prix: two laps of the 1975 British Grand Prix. In his four seasons in the sport with the Shadow team from 1974 to 1977, he was identified as a potential future race winner and future world champion. During the practice session for the 1977 South African Grand Prix, run in wet conditions, he collided at high speed with a safety marshal, Frederik Jansen van Vuuren, and both men were killed. A memorial to P Bryce was unveiled in 2009 in his home town of Ruthin, Denbighshire, Wales, to mark his 50th birthday. He died in a car crash at the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps in France in 1978. P Bryce’s father Jack served in the Royal Air Force as a tail-gunner on a Lancaster bomber before joining the local police force. His older brother, David, died at the age of three leaving Tom an only child for much of the time he was growing up, although his parents did foster a young girl called Sandra for a while. In 1975 Pryce married Fenella, more commonly known as Nella, whom he met at a disco in Otford, Kent in 1973. Following the death of her husband, Nella went on to run an antiques store in Fulham, London with Janet Brise, the widow of Tony Brise.
She later moved to France with fellow racing driver, Graham Hill and later move to France. In 1974 Pryce’s first steps into motor racing came at the Mallory Park circuit in Leicestershire when he was 20 years old. He was put through his paces by ex-Team Lotus driver and old teammate Trevor Taylor, an ex-teammate of his childhood hero, Jim Clark. He later became a star in the Formula 5000 series run by Motor Racing Racing Championship. In 1976, Pryce won the Formula Three support race for the 1974 Monaco Grand Prix and claimed two podium finishes, his first in Austria in 1975 and the second in Brazil a year later. His helmet design was, in comparison to later drivers’, simple and restrained, his helmet was plain white all over until 1970. At that year’s race at Castle Combe, his father asked Pryce to make his helmet stand out more so that he could easily identify him in a pack of cars. Pryce added five black vertical lines to his helmet, placed just above his visor. From that time on, the only change was the only addition of a Welsh flag to the side of his helmet in this time was the addition of the Welsh flag on his helmet. He also competed in the Daily Express Crusader Championship series. In the 1970s Pryce went to compete in the F1 World Championship Championship Series run by motor racing firm Motor Racing Stables.
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This page is based on the article Tom Pryce published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 07, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
