The mysterious Jolly Club

[Julien]

The Jolly Club name appears on three totally different occasion in F1, but still I can't find any concrete information about them.
First they sponsored Silvio Moser in his attempt to create his own car. As far as I knwo they financed the Bellasi F1 car and Moser even renamed his team to Jolly Club Switzerland for the 1971 Italian GP.

Then there was Loris Kessel's sorry attempt with the ex Willams FW04 rebranded as the "Apollon Fly", which was entered once again under the name of Jolly Club Switzerland. The name suggest that they are the same Jolly Club, but instead of funding, this time they seem to gave manpower support, as they were the ones who prepared the car for its sole entry for the 1977 Italian GP.

And finally there is the AGS involvement, but I can't decide if this Jolly Club is identical to the Jolly Club Switzerland that supported Moser and Kessel. If they are, what happened to the "Switzerland" part? If they aren't what happened to Jolly Club Switzerland?

[CarloSpace]

This is actually new information for me that Jolly Club was involved in F1 as well. For me the name is more familiar from rallying where it was a very succesful independent team that served as a kind of a satellite team to the factory Lancia team in the 80's and early 90's.

According to Wikipedia the F1 and WRC Jolly Clubs are indeed the same team but there is very little information about their F1 campaing(s).

[mario]

The Jolly Club name appears on three totally different occasion in F1, but still I can't find any concrete information about them.
First they sponsored Silvio Moser in his attempt to create his own car. As far as I knwo they financed the Bellasi F1 car and Moser even renamed his team to Jolly Club Switzerland for the 1971 Italian GP.

Then there was Loris Kessel's sorry attempt with the ex Willams FW04 rebranded as the "Apollon Fly", which was entered once again under the name of Jolly Club Switzerland. The name suggest that they are the same Jolly Club, but instead of funding, this time they seem to gave manpower support, as they were the ones who prepared the car for its sole entry for the 1977 Italian GP.

And finally there is the AGS involvement, but I can't decide if this Jolly Club is identical to the Jolly Club Switzerland that supported Moser and Kessel. If they are, what happened to the "Switzerland" part? If they aren't what happened to Jolly Club Switzerland?

There is, in fact, a fourth entry listed for Scuderia Jolly Club - they are listed as entering a Lotus 18 at the 1962 Italian Grand Prix, which was driven by Ernesto Prinoth.

Unfortunately, the cut off time for qualifying was set as a 1m50.4s lap time (110% of pole), and Ernesto could only manage a 1m57.7s lap time, which was the 27th best time out of 30 (the cut off time meant only 21 drivers qualified in the end).

It probably did not help all that much that the car he was driving was still fitted with the four cylinder Coventry Climax FPF engine - given that the Mark II FPF was producing about 150bhp, whereas the latest FWMV V8 was producing nearly 190bhp, it's perhaps not surprising that he was a long way off the pace.

There is a short thread on the Nostalgia Forum on Autosport which does touch on the Jolly Club, but you are right that there does seem to be a bit of confusion. https://forums.autosport.com/topic/22958-jolly-club/

That thread links the Jolly Club with the Angiolini family, and suggests that the team was a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs and semi-professional individuals - the original team seems to have been 18 strong - which started off in rallying, but seems to have then branched out into Formula 2, with those brief bits of involvement in F1 as well.

That thread suggests the "Jolly Club of Switzerland" was an offshoot of the original Milanese Jolly Club, so it seems to have been connected with, but not the same as, the original Milanese outfit.

There is also a website for the modern Jolly Club - the original outfit collapsed in the 1990s, but it seems that somebody has revived the name and ideals of the team - which gives a little bit of information about it. http://www.jollyclub.it/
That said, it looks like the modern "Jolly Club" might have gone the same was as the historic one, as it seems the last event they took part in was back in 2015...

Anyway, the history there is also brief, but it indicates that the "Jolly Club" started off with that small group of semi-professional rally enthusiasts. However, as they became more professional, it seems that they ended up setting up a series of smaller local teams that used the same "Jolly Club" name and were subsidiaries of the main "Jolly Club" back in Milan.

In the case of AGS, it looks like it was the main parent company in Milan that helped them out, whilst in the case of Moser and Kessel, the "Jolly Club of Switzerland" seems to have been one of those smaller local branches of the original parent team from Milan.

[UncreativeUsername37]

Unfortunately, the cut off time for qualifying was set as a 1m50.4s lap time (110% of pole), and Ernesto could only manage a 1m57.7s lap time, which was the 27th best time out of 30 (the cut off time meant only 21 drivers qualified in the end).

It was the second fastest, not pole! At least according to A Second A Lap, which also mentions that they were so close it didn't really matter....

The Automobile Club of Milan ruled that up to 22 cars could start the race, providing they could lap within 110% of the second fastest driver on the grid, which turned out to be Graham Hill - officially he had dead-heated Jim Clark for fastest time but the timekeepers investigated and used their times the hundredth of a second

[novitopoli]

As the forum's resident Italian, I can add...absolutely nothing, sorry. I can't seem to find any further information in Italian either, barring the mention of the Angiolini family (father Mario, mother Renata, son Roberto) and the fact that their first noteworthy win was at the 1964 San Martino di Castrozza rally at the hands of a young Sandro Munari. From the impression I could gather, Jolly Club weren't even strict-sense garagistes, at least in their early days, but more of a "gentleman's (and gentlewomen's) club" of drivers gathered around the Angiolini family, which scouted talents and offered them some sort of financial backing and connection to manufacturers and sponsors. The 1971 "Silvio Moser Racing Team/Jolly Club of Switzerland" (with Moser also entering the Zeltweg 1000 km in 1972 and 1973 under the Jolly Club banner, with a "logo" akin to what Jolly Club rally cars were sporting at that time, as well as the 1977 Apollon foray by Loris Kessel, were most probably independent projects which saw some form of pro bono financial support by the Jolly Club, or a mysterious Swiss-Ticinese offspring thereof... No information whatsoever about the Prinoth entry; my guess is that it was a similar operation, with Prinoth entrying his own car and Jolly Club offering some backing and probably handling bureaucratic matters.

All in all not unlike what happened with AGS in 1986.