The miracle of Gonfaron

Few teams in Formula 1 history were as improbable as AGS — Automobiles Gonfaronnaises Sportives, named for the tiny village of Gonfaron in the hills of the Var, in Provence, where founder Henri Julien built racing cars almost by hand ¹². After years in Formula 2, AGS arrived in F1 in 1986 and contested its first full season in 1987. The JH23, unveiled for 1988, was the team's second full-season Grand Prix car and, by common consent, its technical high-water mark ¹³.

A clean car for a clever formula

1988 was the last year of the turbo era, and a deliberately transitional one. Turbo engines were strangled to 2.5 bar of boost and a tight race fuel ration, while the naturally-aspirated 3.5-litre 'atmo' cars were handed a 40 kg lower minimum weight — 500 kg against 540 — and no fuel limit at all, nudging the grid toward the all-atmo future of 1989 ⁴. AGS leaned straight into that opening. The JH23 used the customer Ford-Cosworth DFZ, a 3,494 cc naturally-aspirated 90° V8 of roughly 580–590 bhp, fed through a six-speed Hewland manual gearbox, on Goodyear tyres and Elf fuel ²⁵.

“For 1988 AGS ran a single car for the experienced Frenchman Philippe Streiff, who carried race number 14.”

Designed by technical director Christian Vanderpleyn with chief designer Michel Costa, the JH23 was an unusually clean and pretty machine for a backmarker — a slim cigar nose, low flat front wing, exposed pushrod suspension and neatly waisted sidepods unencumbered by the bulky intercooler ducts the turbo teams had to package ¹⁶. It looked, and often went, like a far better-funded car than it was.

Streiff, alone, against the world

For 1988 AGS ran a single car for the experienced Frenchman Philippe Streiff, who carried race number 14 ⁵⁶. (Streiff had spent 1987 at Tyrrell, not AGS; the team's solitary 1987 point had come from Roberto Moreno in the JH22.) With one car, one driver and a handful of staff in a village workshop, AGS was arguably the smallest genuine operation on the grid — and yet Streiff qualified the JH23 for all sixteen Grands Prix, frequently slotting it ahead of throttled turbo cars ¹².

The pace was real; the points never came. Time and again the little blue car ran respectably only to break. The clearest near-miss came in Canada, where Streiff sat 10th and was hounding reigning World Champion Nelson Piquet's ill-handling Lotus — only the Honda turbo's straight-line shove keeping Streiff from snatching fourth — when the suspension let go on lap 41 ¹. His best finish was an 8th at Suzuka, backed by a 9th in Portugal and 10ths at Imola and Spa, but the JH23 took the chequered flag only a handful of times all year ²⁵. AGS ended 1988 with zero points, not classified in the Constructors' Championship — a season of moral victories in a year McLaren-Honda won fifteen of sixteen races and Ayrton Senna took his first title ⁴⁵.

A livery that drained away

The JH23's colours told the team's financial story. It opened the season in white with orange ovals from title backer Bouygues, the French construction giant; from Imola it turned a deep navy blue so dark it reads as black in most photographs, with orange Bouygues panels ³. By Spa the Bouygues branding had largely vanished, leaving an almost plain deep-blue car carrying only the orange number 14 and a few small sidepod logos ³. Bouygues' withdrawal mid-season — just as Julien had committed to a new factory — pushed AGS into the crisis that would soon force the sale of the team ¹.

The JH23's story has a tragic coda: in pre-season testing for 1989, at Jacarepaguá in Rio, Streiff crashed a developed JH23B and was left a quadriplegic, ending his career ⁶. Only three JH23 chassis were ever built; two remain with AGS and one is preserved at the Lohéac automobile museum — relics of one of F1's most romantic underdogs ¹.