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Policar CAR04e - March 701 - South African Grand Prix 1971 - John Love. RRP £59.95. Available 10 February 2021.

This is the fourth livery on the Policar March 701 - and it is a cracker. These Team Gunston colours were familiar in South African motor racing series from the late 60s and through the 1970s...

       

John Love dominated motor racing in southern Africa through the 1960s. A promising start to his European racing career saw him win the 1962 British Saloon Car Championship in a Mini Cooper and put in some superb performances in Formula Junior at the wheel of a Ken Tyrrell-prepared Cooper-Austin. A big crash at Albi brought a halt to a meteoric rise that almost certainly would have put him in a competitive F1 car for 1963. Instead, Love had to make do with ten appearances at his local World Championship Grand Prix. In 1967 he nearly won it. Leading the race at Kyalami, his Cooper Climax developed a misfire and a pit stop dropped him behind the works Cooper of Pedro Rodríguez.

       

Love won the South African Formula One Championship six times between 1964 and 1969. He also won his home race - the Rhodesian Grand Prix - six times. In the 1971 South African Grand Prix, he qualified this March 701 in twenty-first place, retiring from the race on lap 30 with a broken differential. His final South African Grand Prix outing would be the following year. Love owned and ran a Jaguar dealership in his home town and had his own stock car racing team in the 1980s. He died in 2005, aged 80.

       

As with all their classic Grand Prix cars, this Policar March is full of fabulous detail, as well as being a beautiful car to driver with the smooth Policar gearbox handling the power of the slim-can FF motor.

       

The car comes with plastic rear wheels, but replacement aluminium hubs and matching wheel inserts are also available.

   

The car is due for delivery to distributors next week and is available now for pre-order from all your usual Slot.it and Policar retailers.

A big thank you to Jo at Galileo Engineering for sending us these fabulous pictures of the new car.