Tyrrell Racing

Motor racing team

Ken Tyrrell's Team From the Woodshed

A timber merchant's racing team won three drivers' titles with Jackie Stewart and raced its own cars for nearly three decades.

Ken Tyrrell started racing in 1958 with Formula Three cars, soon stopped driving himself, and ran a Formula Junior team out of a woodshed belonging to his family's timber business. Through the 1960s his team worked its way up the junior formulas, and in 1963 it signed Jackie Stewart, the partnership that would define it. The team was based at Ockham in Surrey.

Tyrrell reached Formula One in 1968 running Matra cars under the name Matra International, and Stewart won the 1969 championship in a Matra. After a season with March chassis, the team built its own car, which first raced at the 1970 Canadian Grand Prix. It was an immediate success. In 1971 Stewart won the drivers' title and Tyrrell the constructors' championship, and Stewart was champion again in 1973. He won 15 races in Tyrrell cars, and François Cevert also won for the team.

Jody Scheckter took four wins for Tyrrell in the middle 1970s and Patrick Depailler one. The team never again fought for a title, but Michele Alboreto won twice in the early 1980s, the second at the 1983 Detroit Grand Prix, which was also the last win for the Ford Cosworth DFV engine. In all, Tyrrell cars won 23 World Championship races.

British American Tobacco bought the team in 1997, and after one final season it raced for the last time as Tyrrell at the 1998 Japanese Grand Prix, having started 431 races with its own cars. Its entry became British American Racing, and through later sales to Honda, Brawn GP and Mercedes the lineage continues today.

Drivers

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