Looking back: Jochen Rindt's greatest day

There are lots of reasons to dislike the Monaco Grand Prix. The wealth on show is ostentatious. The poseur occupants of the yachts in the harbour in all probability have little interest in the sport in the rest of the year. And for large part of the race's history the contemporary F1 car had long since outgrown the circuit. Nelson Piquet once likened driving there to trying to ride a motor cycle in your front room.

But even with all this, for many F1 fans there's nothing quite like the Monaco Grand Prix. Monaco has an intangible quality, what you would call 'magic'. Just watching racing cars around Monaco is an enchanting experience. The backdrop is one of the very most iconic of any sporting event, let alone in motorsport. Wherever you turn in Monaco when the racing is on you invariably see something eye-catching. And when you've got Monaco you've got F1.

The Monaco Grand Prix has a long history.
This is Station Hairpin in 1932.

Its magic is also no doubt related to its heritage. The first Grand Prix around the principality was held in 1929, and the layout of streets that cars race around today isn't much different. All of the sport's greats have graced the place.

But in my view one of the most endearing aspects of the Monaco Grand Prix is that in terms of driving challenge and the ability of an individual driver to make a difference over and above their car, Monaco is probably unparallelled among F1 races, and has been that way for many a year. Almost all of F1's greatest drivers can point to an occasion around the principality streets in which they transcended their machinery, in which all watching on could hardly comprehend what they had witnessed.

Additionally, while we may instinctively associate races here with a scarcity of overtaking, things happen at Monaco, the Grand Prix there somehow attracts drama and incident. Throughout history many such examples can be cited, such as Stirling Moss in the outdated Lotus 18 holding off the more powerful Ferraris for the entire distance in 1961, the extraordinary late laps in 1982 where a succession of leading cars faltered and the likely winner changed continuously like the display of a fruit machine, Ayrton Senna's celebrated 'star is born' drive in the rains in the Toleman in 1984 (cut short by a red flag, just as he was posed to take the lead), and Nigel Mansell's desperate but ultimately futile attempts to usurp Senna in 1992. And there are a multitude more that could be mentioned.

My personal favourite Monaco Grand Prix was that in 1970, however. This is for a number of reasons, all of which are linked to the things that I believe lend the magic to a Monaco Grand Prix. Partly it is because much of Monaco's heritage was on show: it was on a Monaco layout still in its original configuration, virtually identical to that used all the way back in 1929 (the 1973 race witnessed the first significant divergence from it with the introduction of the 'swimming pool section', fatuously to allow more grandstands but ensuring Monaco races from then on were usually a case of follow-my-leader). Also the architectural backdrop was still classic and elegant, Monaco not quite yet all the way to becoming the tightly packed cluster of high rises that it was to become.

Looking back: 1968 - Chris Amon's unluckiest year

Chris Amon. Mention of his name to a historically-minded F1 fan invariably brings up the association of 'the best F1 driver never to win a Grand Prix'. His ill-luck was legendary, and was only equalled by his astonishing natural talent and artistry behind the wheel.

Chris Amon in 1973
Credit: Lothar Spurzem / CC

Many argue that Amon didn't help himself in many ways: he was guilty of a number of bad career moves, had a far from disciplined life off the track and his relative lack of selfishness didn't serve him well in the warped world of F1. But it was also the case that time and again Amon would dominate F1 races with considerable elan and flair (summed up by one of the most iconic photographs in the history of the sport, of Amon attacking Oulton Park in his Ferrari 312 in 1968), only to crawl to a halt through no fault of his own. 183 laps, and 851 km, led in 95 F1 starts didn't add up to a single victory. Mario Andretti once commented that had Amon become an undertaker people would have stopped dying!

The tag of 'best F1 driver never to win a Grand Prix' sells Amon short however. This is partly because his talent is such that he should be remembered as being among the best of all time, regardless of the lack of wins. Ferrari designer Mauro Forghieri rated Amon as highly as they come: 'it's a fact that we never gave him a car worthy of him. As far as I'm concerned he was as good as Clark', while Jochen Rindt considered Jackie Stewart and Amon as his only true rivals. But the tag also sells him short because there was one season that the drivers' world championship should have been his. This year was 1968.