Trevor
Taylor

Trevor Taylor was born in Sheffield on 26 December 1936. He started out in 500 cc Formula Three, first in a Staride and then in a Cooper-Norton. Ten wins in 1958 gave him the British Formula Three Championship. In 1959 he ran his own Formula Two Cooper, and for 1960 he was invited to run his Lotus 18 as a second works car. He shared the 1960 Formula Junior title with Jim Clark and won the championship outright in 1961.

Taylor's Formula One debut came at the 1959 British Grand Prix at Aintree, where he failed to qualify a privately entered Cooper. In 1961 his only World Championship race was the Dutch Grand Prix for Lotus, in which he finished thirteenth. In 1962 he contested nine races for Lotus alongside Clark. He was second in the season opener in the Netherlands, which remained his only podium, and he ended the year tenth in the World Championship. At Spa he led early on and later collided with Willy Mairesse's Ferrari. At the end of the year he won the non-championship Mexican Grand Prix, sharing the car with Clark, who took it over during the race. In 1962 and 1963 Taylor won three Formula One races that did not count towards the World Championship.

He stayed with Lotus in 1963 and finished fifteenth in the standings. His best result that year was sixth in the opening race at Monaco. At Reims he was running second when he retired roughly two thirds of the way through the race. Taylor admitted that two serious accidents, at Spa and at Enna-Pergusa, had shaken his confidence. In 1964 he drove for BRP and Lotus and finished nineteenth in the championship. A single start for Shannon followed in 1966. His record stands at 27 starts from 29 entries, one podium and no wins.

In the years after 1964 Taylor also raced in other categories. In 1969 he tested a Cosworth Formula One car that was entered for Grands Prix but did not race. In the first year of Formula 5000 he won Guards Championship rounds in a Surtees TS5 in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Ireland, and finished runner-up to Peter Gethin. He is credited with the idea of the yellow stripe on the Lotus cars of the 1960s. Taylor died on 27 September 2010.

Source: Wikipedia, “Trevor Taylor (racing driver)”. Text licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.