Drivers

Alan Rees

Born in Newport in south Wales, Alan Rees was the son of a well-to-do haulage contractor. This enabled him to buy and run a number of cars early in his career. Beginning with a Lotus 11 sports car he moved on to Formula Junior and became one of the leading lights of the FJ scene in the early 1960s, winning the British title in 1961 and driving for the Lotus factory team in 1962 and 1963. For the1964 season he joined Roy Winkelmann Racing as driver/team manager and raced a Brabham in Formula 2 with increasing success, his first victory coming at Reims in July that year - ahead of Jack Brabham, Mike Spence, Jim Clark and Denny Hulme. In 1965 he hired Jochen Rindt to be his team mate and the Winkelmann Brabhams enjoyed great success in F2 until the end of the 1968 season. During that period he started in three Grands Prix but always in F2 cars.

For the 1969 season the team switched to Lotus and Rees decided that at 30 he would stop racing and concentrate on the business of the sport. That year he joined forces with Robin Herd, Max Mosley and Graham Coaker to establish March Engineering. He ran the March F1 team for a couple of years before being recruited by the Shadow team where he stayed until the end of 1976 at which point he, Jackie Oliver and others walked out and established the Arrows F1 team.

He would remain the team manager of Arrows until 1991 when the company was sold to Footwork's Wataru Ohashi. He became finance director of the team and then a couple of years later Ohashi sold the shares back to Oliver and Rees and they remained in charge until they sold their shares to Tom Walkinshaw in 1996.