MATRA MS120
No. 103
If you know, you know. To readers of a certain age – or those who have made the pilgrimage to historic festivals in recent years – the Matra name is synonymous with the fleeting appearance of a missile in French racing blue, accompanied by the cochlea-rattling symphony of its otherworldly V12. It’s easy to forget Matra’s only F1 constructors’ title came courtesy of Cosworth’s V8, with Jackie Stewart at the wheel, and that the V12 achieved its only world championship race victories attached to Ligier chassis.
Between one and the other the French aviation conglomerate went it alone in a three-season F1 spell during the early 1970s. While never quite hitting the heights of that 1969 campaign with JYS, it did manage to deliver the luckless Chris Amon to victory in an F1 car – though sadly in a non-championship event. It would find richer pickings in sportscar racing as it wound down its F1 operations, winning the Le Mans 24 Hours over three consecutive years.
The beginning (and the end) of the Matra F1 story is a typical one of French industry in the 1960s – ambition, expansion, consolidation, and an opportunistic eye was founded as an aircraft constructor in the 1940s by Marcel Chassagny, who in 1964 made two key moves that would bring Matra into the automobile world: hiring the entrepreneurial former engineer Jean-Luc Lagardère from Dassault Aviation as his new general manager; and acquiring friend and sometime Le Mans entrant René Bonnet’s moribund car marque. A lover of racing, both horses and cars, Lagardère identified motorsport as a means of driving sales of Bonnet’s smart little coupé, the Djet, and received sign-off from Chassagny to found Matra Sports.
