John Henry Surtees

Surtees was the son of a south-London motorcycle dealer. His father, Jack Surtees, was an accomplished grasstrack competitor and the 1948 South Eastern Centre Sidecar Champion. He had his first professional outing at the age of 14 in the sidecar of his father's Vincent — the pair won, but were disqualified when officials discovered his age. He entered his first race at 15 in a grasstrack competition, and in 1950, aged 16, he went to work for the Vincent factory as an apprentice. He first gained prominence in 1951 when he gave Norton star Geoff Duke a strong challenge in an ACU race at the Thruxton Circuit.

In 1955, Norton race chief Joe Craig gave Surtees his first factory-sponsored ride, and he ended the year by beating reigning world champion Duke at Silverstone and then at Brands Hatch. With Norton in financial trouble, Surtees accepted an offer to race for the MV Agusta factory team, where he earned the nickname figlio del vento ("son of the wind"). In 1956 he won the 500cc world championship — MV Agusta's first in the senior class — aided by the FIM's six-month ban on defending champion Geoff Duke for supporting a riders' strike. After a third-place finish in 1957, when the MV Agustas were no match for the Gileras, Gilera and Moto Guzzi withdrew from Grand Prix racing at the end of 1957. Surtees and MV Agusta then dominated the two larger displacement classes: in 1958, 1959, and 1960 he won 32 of 39 races and became the first man to win the Senior TT at the Isle of Man TT three years in succession.

While still racing motorcycles full-time, Surtees performed a test drive in Aston Martin's DBR1 sports car in front of team manager Reg Parnell, but continued on two wheels for another year. In 1960, at the age of 26, Surtees switched to cars full-time, making his Formula 1 debut in the 1960 BRDC International Trophy at Silverstone for Team Lotus. He made an immediate impact with a second-place finish in only his second Formula One World Championship race, the 1960 British Grand Prix, and a pole position at his third, the 1960 Portuguese Grand Prix.

After the 1961 season with the Yeoman Credit Racing Team driving a Cooper T53 "Lowline" and the 1962 season with the Bowmaker Racing Team in the V8 Lola Mk4 — both managed by Reg Parnell — he moved to Scuderia Ferrari in 1963 and won the World Championship for the Italian team in 1964.

On 25 September 1965, Surtees suffered a life-threatening accident at the Mosport Park Circuit in Ontario, Canada, while practising in a Lola T70 sports racing car, after a front upright casting broke. According to A.J. Baime's book Go Like Hell, Surtees came out of the crash with one side of his body four inches shorter than the other; doctors set most of the breaks nonsurgically, in part by physically stretching his shattered body until the discrepancy was under an inch.

The 1966 season saw the introduction of new 3-litre engines to Formula One. Surtees finished second behind Jack Brabham's Brabham BT19 at the BRDC International Trophy, led the Monaco Grand Prix — pulling away from Jackie Stewart's 2-litre BRM on the straights — before his engine failed, and a fortnight later won the Belgian Grand Prix after a first-lap rainstorm eliminated half the field.

At the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans, Ferrari could afford to enter only two cars. Surtees was omitted from a works line-up; team manager Eugenio Dragoni told him he was not considered fully fit for a 24-hour race after his 1965 injuries. By Surtees's own account, he was to be paired with Ludovico Scarfiotti, and as the faster driver argued he should take the first stint and "try to break" the Ford opposition by driving "flat out from the start"; Dragoni instead insisted Scarfiotti start, reportedly to please Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli, Scarfiotti's uncle. Deeply upset by the decision and the lack of support from Enzo Ferrari, Surtees immediately quit the team. The split likely cost both Ferrari and Surtees the 1966 Formula 1 Championship: Ferrari finished second to Brabham-Repco in the Constructors' Championship, and Surtees finished second to Jack Brabham in the Drivers' Championship. He completed the season with the Cooper-Maserati team, winning the final race.

Surtees competed with a T70 in the inaugural 1966 Can-Am season, winning three of six races to become champion ahead of Dan Gurney, Mark Donohue, Phil Hill, Bruce McLaren, and Chris Amon. In December 1966 he signed for Honda; after a third place in South Africa and a run of mechanical problems with the RA273, the Honda RA300 took the team's second F1 victory at the Italian Grand Prix, where Surtees slipstreamed Jack Brabham to win by 0.2 seconds. He finished fourth in the 1967 Drivers' Championship. That year he also drove in the Rex Mays 300 at Riverside, a USAC season-ending road race pitting American oval-track drivers against veteran Formula One drivers including Jim Clark and Dan Gurney.

In 1970, Surtees formed his own team, the Surtees Racing Organisation, competing for nine seasons in Formula 5000, Formula 2, and Formula 1 as a constructor. He retired from competitive driving in 1972 — the same year the team had its greatest success, when Mike Hailwood won the European Formula 2 Championship. The team was disbanded at the end of 1978.

For a while in the 1970s Surtees ran a motorcycle shop in West Wickham, Kent, and a Honda car dealership in Edenbridge, Kent. He continued participating in classic motorcycle events and held the position of chairman of A1 Team Great Britain in the A1 Grand Prix series from 2005 to 2007. His son, Henry Surtees, competed in the FIA Formula 2 Championship, Formula Renault UK, and Formula BMW UK before he was killed while racing in the F2 championship at Brands Hatch on 19 July 2009. In 2010, Surtees founded the Henry Surtees Foundation in his son's memory, to assist victims of accidental brain injuries and to promote safety in driving and motorsport.

Surtees was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1996, and the FIM honoured him as a Grand Prix "Legend" in 2003. Already a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), he was appointed an Officer (OBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours and a Commander (CBE) in the 2016 New Year Honours for services to motorsport. He was awarded the 2012 Segrave Trophy in recognition of his multiple world championships and being the only person to win world titles on two and four wheels, received an honorary Doctor of Engineering from Oxford Brookes University in 2015, and was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in 2024.

Surtees married three times: to Patricia Burke in 1962 (divorced 1979), to Janis Sheara in 1979 (divorced 1982), and to Jane Sparrow in 1987, with whom he had three children, including Henry. He died of respiratory failure on 10 March 2017 at St George's Hospital in London, at the age of 83, and was buried next to his son Henry at St Peter and St Paul's Church in Lingfield, Surrey. A tribute to Surtees was held at the Goodwood Members' Meeting on 19 March 2017.

This article is based solely on the supplied corpus. No external sources were consulted; claims that could not be substantiated against the corpus were omitted under the drop-the-claim rule. The corpus attributes the account of the 1965 Mosport accident and its physical aftermath to A.J. Baime's Go Like Hell.