“Formula One 1972: Fittipaldi’s Year” (DVD)

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If you thought the four-week gap between the Bahrain and Spanish Grands Prix this year was interminable, in 1972 the first two rounds were two months apart!

Emerson Fittipaldi would win the championship, becoming the youngest driver to do so until Fernando Alonso in 2005. This DVD gives a reasonably detailed account of the season with some limitations.

Unlike some of the other DVDs in this series, the 1972 video features footage from all of the season’s rounds – twelve in total.

However quite a lot of it is only from practice sessions and shows little of the crucial action points of the races – so the onus falls onto the commentary to fill in the gaps. Happily, they’ve done a superb job.

As the commentaries were recorded recently they put the seasons in historical context.

They can say, for example, that Jean-Pierre Beltoise would only ever win one Grand Prix (at Monaco in the rain that year). Or how rudimentary the electronics were on the racing cars of 1972 compared even to today’s road cars.

The season also saw some of the less common Grand Prix venues in use. The unloved Nivelles in Belgium, for example, and the mini-N??rburgring Clermont-Ferrand in France. Not forgetting the mighty N??rburgring proper, of course…

It’s also good to see the obscure drivers from the back of the field get a fair bit of coverage and not just the Emerson Fittipaldi-Jackie Stewart battle for the title. Keep an eye for the stomach turning Eifelland March of Rolf Stommelen – one of the ugliest cars ever to take to the track.

Drawbacks? As mentioned there’s not enough footage of the races but they’ve done the best they can with the material available. As mentioned on the reviews of other DVDs in the series, the music is terrible. And a brief explanation of the confusing 1972 points system would have been nice.

But this is just picking minor faults. No F1 fan’s DVD collection is complete without a thick stack of these excellent films.

F1Fanatic Verdict

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Tags: f1 / formula one / formula 1 / grand prix / motor sport

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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