3/5/1949
Record updated 10-Mar-08
Boy Hayje is a former Formula One driver from the Netherlands. In 1974 he won the Dutch Formula Ford championship before racing in Formula 5000 and Formula 3. He participated in 7 GPs but only qualified three times, debuting on August 29, 1976. After F1 he found success in the European Renault 5 Turbo championship.
Johan Gerard "Boy" Hayje was born Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. A protégé of Toine Hezemans, Hayje started his career racing saloon cars on a very tight budget, he switched to single seaters in 1973 after scraping enough money together to buy an old Lotus 61. The following year he won the Dutch Formula Ford championship beating drivers in far more modern machinery.
Hayje approached Hezemans at the end of the season to ask for advice on sponsors for a move to F3 in 1975. Hezemans himself suggested running the ex-James Hunt March 731 with a Cosworth V6 in F5000. Unfortunately the car was desperately unreliable.
In 1976 he moved to Formula 3 and also made a respectable World Championship debut in a privately-entered Penske PC3 at Zandvoort in the Dutch Grand Prix. After qualifying 21st in the 25 car field, he went out on lap 63, 12 laps from the finish, with a broken half shaft.
His sponsors, F&S Properties, bought a March-Cosworth which was run for him by the RAM March team in 1977. After qualifying 21st again in South Africa in the tragic race that saw the death of Tom Price and Jansen Van Vuuren, a marshal, he retired after 33 laps with gearbox failure. It was all downhill from there, failing to qualify in Spain and Monaco before being unclassified in Belgium. After further failures to make the grid in Sweden and then Holland, he dropped out of F1.
He took his sponsorship with him into Formula 2 in 1978 with Fred Opert but again had no success.
He quit single seaters and then raced successfully in the European Renault 5 Turbo championship. In the early to mid 1980s he did a few races in sports cars competing at Le Mans and in the USA in IMSA.
He now runs a garage in Belgium, near the border with Holland, specialising in 4x4s.
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