Career Summary	Picture Index
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Last updated: 8-June-2001

Before Formula One Formula One After Formula One
1973-75 Formula Abarth Champion	OK, hands up. Who's heard of an F1 team called Kauhsen? More to the point, name the driver who was behind the wheel in their two pathetic little attempts to qualify for a Grand Prix. What chance that more than a handful out there can tell you that that poor soul was none other than Gianfranco Brancatelli, an Italian hailing from Turin? In 1973, Brancatelli started off his career in Formula Abarth in Italy, and he became the national champion the next year. He then moved up into Italian F3 in 1975, losing out on the title to Luciano Pavesi by 33 points to 32.
1975-76 Impressive performances against quality drivers	The same year he came joint 10th in the European F3 championship, which was won by Australian Larry Perkins. Brancatelli scored 6 points in his March 753 Novamotor. Making a full assault on the latter in 1976, driving a Scuderia Everest March 763 with a Toyota Novamotor engine, he scored two wins at Mantorp and Vallelunga against the likes of Riccardo Patrese and Piercarlo Ghinzani. Also recording two 2nd places at Croix-en-Ternois and Kassel-Calden, with 36 points, Brancatelli eventually came 3rd behind equal-winners Patrese and Corry Anderson, who had both scored 52.
1977-78 Results take a dive with Minardi; gets a sportscar berth	For 1977, he joined Giancarlo Minardi's team for Formula 2, using Ralt RT1 chassis with a Dino Ferrari engine, but things turned sour very quickly, a 4th place at Rouen the best he could manage. With only 3 points he was equal 17th in the championship. He started off 1978 in the same team, but very soon became disillusioned. Looking for something else to do, he did a European Sportscar Championship race at Monza in a Lola T286 Ford, but retired from a clutch failure after only 11 laps having started 2nd on the grid. He then got an opportunity to race the rest of the F2 season in a March/BMW, but failed to score any points.
1979 Kauhsen Have a break. Drive a Kit-Car	The late-1970s were of course the period of the kit-car, when many ambitious team bosses sought to use Ford DFV 3.0 litre V8 engines in the back of kit chassis. Willi Kauhsen was no exception, and Brancatelli was signed to drive the German's WK004 car in the newly-formed team, ingeniously titled Kauhsen. But right from the outset it was clear the effort was a disaster. At the Spanish GP at Jarama, round 5 of the 1979 season, Brancatelli was the by far the slowest of the 27 entrants. His time of 1:23.24 was 8.74 seconds slower than Jacques Laffite's Ligier on pole. Furthermore, he was 2.78 seconds behind Arturo Merzario who was 26th, and 3.94 behind Derek Daly's Ensign in 25th, neither of whom qualified either. Not an auspicious beginning.
	The kit-car experiment that didn't work ­ Brancatelli heads toward the slowest qualifying time 8.74 seconds off the pace in his first outing for Kauhsen at Jarama in 1979. Picture from 8w.
1979 Something of a bigger joke at Zolder	The situation was even worse at Zolder for the Belgian GP. There, with a modified WK005, the Italian was 13.35 seconds behind Laffite, once again on pole. He was 6.65 seconds behind Daly, 8.56 behind Merzario and 8.79 behind Patrick Tambay's McLaren, all of whom failed to qualify. It goes without saying that he was bottom of the 28-entrant pile. But it was also in this practice session that Merzario, in his position of driver/manager of his own imaginatively named Merzario team, crashed his equally diabolical car badly, and broke his arm. As a result, Merzario had to sit out the Monaco GP.
1979 Merzario Such a disaster, they couldn't set a time	What's more, his Merzario team swallowed up the now-doomed Kauhsen project (one of the least impressive team buy-outs in F1 history), and they took on Brancatelli for the race at the principality to drive the A3 chassis. But for Gianfranco this would be an even worse meet than the previous ones. He failed to record a time, and as a result he is entered in the record books as having failed to pre-qualify. This was despite the fact that there were only 25 entrants for the race, but such was the lack of space that the organisers had to eliminate the slowest cars early in the piece. And who better to eliminate than someone who couldn't enter a time? Anyway, Merzario returned for the French GP, and that was that for Brancatelli's F1 career.
	Arturo Merzario (in cowboy hat and with cast on) talks to Brancatelli, his stand-in driver, at Monaco, but to no avail, as Gianfranco would fail to record a time and end up with a DNPQ next to his name. Picture from 8w.
1979-83 Cements reputation as touring car stalwart	Having found the single-seater scene too hard to crack, Brancatelli took to racing with a roof over his head to good effect. By Le Mans of 1979, he had found himself a drive in Carlo Pietromarchi's sports car team, sharing a De Tomaso Pantera with Pietromarchi and Maurizio Micangeli. The combination was also meant to participate in the 6hr race at Brands Hatch, but failed to do so. For the next few years, Gianfranco then established himself as one of the best exponents of touring car racing in Europe. In 1982-3 he began to race touring cars for Alfa Romeo, recording his first win at the Salzburgring.
	Volvo's Group A 240 Turbo was revolutionary at the time, taking touring car speeds up to new levels. Brancatelli, sharing his car with Thomas Lindstrom, won the 1985 European Touring Car Championship.
1984-85 Wins with Eggenberger. Fries with that?	In 1984 he joined the legendary Eggenberger Motorsports stable, and driving a BMW was 3rd in the European Touring Car Championship, before walking off with the crown the next year driving an Eggenberger Volvo 240 Turbo. This included a rousing victory at Anderstorp with Thomas Lindström, plus a win in the Macau F3 support race, where he held off none other than Gerhard Berger. 1985 had also seen Brancatelli return to sports cars, joining the Cheetah Automobiles Switzerland team to drive a Cheetah G604 Aston Martin. He teamed up with Bernard de Dryver, but retired at both Mugello and Monza. But before the year was out, he had joined forces with Tom Walkinshaw, and drove a TWR Jaguar XJR-6 in the final round of the World Sportscar Championship at Shah Alam in Malaysia, alongside Jan Lammers.
1986-87 Stints with TWR Jaguar, Brun Motorsports and BMW	Staying with TWR in 1986 gave Brancatelli the chance to drive both Walkinshaw's Group A Jaguars in touring car racing, and also the Silk Cut Jaguar XJR-6s in the WSC. But teaming up with the likes of Jean-Louis Schlesser, Win Percy, Eddie Cheever and Derek Warwick, it would prove to be a tough year in the WSC for Gianfranco, his best being 6th at Brands Hatch with Cheever. For 1987, he left TWR and firstly joined Brun Motorsports in sports cars. With Oscar Larrauri and Massimo Sigala, he came 2nd in the Daytona 24hr race in a Porsche 962, and with Sigala recorded some solid results in the WSC. But for the World Touring Car Championship, Brancatelli returned to the works BMW stable, driving a BMW M3, coming 5th in the ETCC with 3 wins.
	Had he switched to TWR Jaguar a year or so down the track, Brancatelli may have had more success. As it was, his 1986 World Sportscar Championship campaign was a bit of a shambles. Picture thanks to Pure Racing.
1987-88 Gets his Jollies from winning Italian Touring Cars	This included a trip down to Australia for the Bathurst 1000, sharing his car with Venezuelan Johnny Cecotto. They were up as high as 3rd before a rainstorm hit and Cecotto slammed the wall at infamous Reid Park. But the pair struggled home, finishing 9th after a late puncture, but were promoted to 7th when the Eggenberger Sierras were disqualified. With the gradual demise of larger-scale touring car championships in favour of local ones, in 1988 Brancatelli drove an Alfa 75 for the Jolly Club team in the Italian Touring Car Championship and, not surprisingly, took the title. He also raced at Daytona again, once more with Brun, Larrauri and Sigala, but they could not repeat their 1987 result.
1988-89 Globetrotting to Germany, Spa, Le Mans, Bathurst, New Zealand	Ever the journeyman, in 1989 Brancatelli moved again to the German Touring Car Championship, but he could only manage 9th in his Ford Sierra RS500. In the same type of car he won the Spa 24hr classic and was third in the Nurburgring 24hr race. In a Sauber-Mercedes C9 he was also 2nd at Le Mans with Mauro Baldi and Kenny Acheson. After such success in 24-hour events, Bathurst must have seemed a breeze in a Mark Petch Peanut Slab Sierra shared with Robbie Francevic, but his car was out early after losing a wheel, despite being in contention. Towards the end of 1989, he also joined Francevic for the end-of-year endurance races in New Zealand, and was battling for the lead with Tony Longhurst early on at the tight Wellington street circuit before crashing whilst lapping backmarkers.
	Brancatelli in car 42, shared with Venezuelan Johnny Cecotto, leads a gaggle of cars through the dipper in his Bathurst outing in 1987. The pair would end up classified 7th, despite Cecotto having a nasty accident.
1990-93 Takes to Superbikes in the early nineties	1990 turned out to be a bit of a downer. In sports cars, he firstly drove at Suzuka in an Alba AR20 Subaru with Marco Brand, but was then picked up by the works Nissan team to drive in the WSC in a Nissan R90CK, with the likes of Mark Blundell, Julian Bailey and Acheson again, with his best results two 4ths at Donington and Mexico City. With 6 points, he was 19th overall. Continuing his fantastically unstable career, he then returned to Italian tourers in an Alfa in 1991, with only a single win at Misano. And to top things off, in 1992-3 apparently - and don't ask us to explain this - he took to two wheels and raced in Italian superbikes in 1992-3, riding a Ducati 888. Certainly a versatile motorsport practitioner, our Gianfranco!
1994-95 Moves to Malaysia; fired at Daytona?	After that he made the move east to Malaysia, where he has since been driving in the Malaysian Super Touring Championship, starting in 1994-5 when he drove an ex-BTCC Toyota Carina. In 1995, he also returned to the Daytona 24hr race, where he teamed up with Elton Julian, Massimo Sigala and Fabrizio Barbazza in a Euromotorsports Ferrari 333SP. But Alex Bassi tells us a conceivably apocryphal story that in the middle of the night Gianfranco was fired when he couldn't start the engine properly, and the team wasted precious time trying to push-start him. A little bit drastic, don't you think?
	Brancatelli gets strapped in for another stint in the middle of the night in the 1995 Daytona 24hr race. We hear that when Brancatelli could not get the car started, he was apparently promptly fired by the team!
1996-99 Team Petronas midfield at best in ASTCC after success in Malaysia	In 1996-7, in Malaysia he joined Team Petronas, driving a Ford Mondeo with engineering input from Rudi Eggenberger once more, winning at least 6 races in those two years. But 1997 also saw Team Petronas make forays into the Australian Super Touring championship, where Brancatelli was unfortunately less than successful. In 1997 he went to Daytona once again with fellow Italian Renato Mastropietro and Swiss drivers Luigino Pagotto and Charles Margueron, driving a Porsche 911. Completing 387 laps they were classified 45th. The last we have heard of Brancatelli is in 1999, where he was still driving for Team Petronas, this time in the Johor Super Saloon Race Series, taking a win in a Mazda RX-7 at Pasir Gudang.

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