caption years death_date championships races nationality points birth_date poles wins image article_title name podiums
ken wharton in 1953 . 1952 -- 1955 12 january 1957 0 16 -lrb- 15 starts -rrb- gbr british 3 21 march 1916 0 0 ken wharton motor sport 1953.jpg ken wharton
 ken wharton 0
ken wharton

ken wharton -lrb- 21 march 1916 , smethwick -- 12 january 1957 , ardmore , auckland , new zealand -rrb- was a british racing driver from england .
he competed in off-road trials , hillclimbs , and rallying , and also raced sports cars and single-seaters .
he began racing in the new national 500cc formula in his own special , and later acquired a cooper .
his world championship grand prix debut was at the 1952 swiss event , run to formula 2 regulations , where he started from 13th position on the grid and finished 4th .
he participated in a total of 15 world championship grands prix , from which he scored 3 championship points .
in 1951 he `` travelled abroad , with peter bell 's 2-litre e.r.a. , to finish 3rd overall in the susa/mont cenis hill-climb and 4th overall in the aosta/grand saint bernard hill-climb .
with a cooper 500 he also competed in the german freiburg hill-climb where he was runner-up in the 500 cc class to stirling moss . ''
wharton won the freiburg event outright in the e.r.a. on 5 august , climbing the 7.4 miles of the schauinsland pass , in 8 minutes 5.33 seconds .
on 19 august he was fastest at the vue des alpes hill-climb , with a time of 3 minutes 57.8 seconds .
he won the british hill climb championship every year from 1951 to 1954 , and remains the only driver to have won four successive bhcc titles .
other successes with era r4d included winning the brighton speed trials in 1954 , 1955 and 1956 .
success in rallies included winning the tulip rally in 1949 , 1950 and 1952 , driving fords .
he also became british trials champion .
on 4 july 1954 , he and peter whitehead won the reims 12-hour race in a jaguar d-type .
in 1957 wharton was fatally injured when his ferrari monza crashed in a sports car race at the ardmore circuit in new zealand .
