CARS AT SPEED:
Classic Stories from Grand Prix’s Golden Age
By Robert Daley
Grand Prix racing on public roads--trees, walls, fences, houses. Racing in the 50's and 60's bore little resemblance to what is done today, some say no resemblance. The circuits, Spa, Monza, Nurburgring were deadly dangerous, and the racing was deadly dangerous. The driver who went off the road, most likely paid a heavy price. So did many spectators. It was a time of heroes, of drivers larger than life: of the Englishmen, who for a few years seemed to take over the sport: Moss, Collins, Hawthorn, Graham Hill; of the flamboyant Marquis de Portago of Spain and the nervous German, Count Von Trips; of Musso, Ascari and Castellotti, each one the pride of Italy, all of them dead at the wheel; of Phil Hill, the quiet, some said sullen, American who became world champion.
First published by J.B Lippincott Company, 1961 (seven printings).
Republished by MBI Publishing Company, St. Paul, MN. With new introduction by the author, 2007
Copyright © Robert Daley, 1961, 1989
Copyright © Riviera Productions Ltd., 2007.
All rights reserved. With the exception of quoting brief passages for the purposes of review, no part of this publication may be reproduced without prior written permission from the Publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7603-3117-0 ISBN-10: 0-7603-3117-0
Cover photo by Robert Daley/The Klemantaski Collection
ALSO BY ROBERT DALEY
Novels
Only a Game
A Priest and a Girl
Strong Wine Red as Blood
To Kill a Cop
The Fast One
Year of the Dragon
The Dangerous Edge
Hands of a Stranger
Man With a Gun
A Faint Cold Fear
Tainted Evidence
Wall of Brass
Nowhere to Run
The Innocents Within
The Enemy of God
Pictures
The Red Squad
Non-fiction
The Cruel Sport
The World Beneath the City
The Bizarre World of European Sport
The Swords of Spain
A Star in the Family
Target Blue
Treasure
Prince of the City
An American Saga
Portraits of France
Writing On The Edge
CARS AT SPEED:
Classic Stories from Grand Prix's Golden Age
By Robert Daley
Contents
Introduction tothe 2007 Edition
Prologue
Chapter 1. End of the Open Road
Chapter 2. Juan M. Fangio and Juan D. Peron
Chapter 3. Through the Streets of Monte Carlo
Chapter 4. Chapter 5. Over the Sand Dunes
Chapter 6. Through the Ardennes Forest
Chapter 7. The Twenty-Four Hours
Chapter 8. The Race for Champagne
Chapter 9. Silverstone and the Stiff Upper Lip
Chapter 10. Uncomfortable in Portugal
Chapter 11. The Ring
Chapter 12. The Death Circuit
Chapter 13. The Quiet Americans
Chapter 14. The World Championship
Introduction to the 2007 Edition
This book was written during the 1960 season, and published the following year. It covers a period when the racing of fast motor cars bore little resemblance to what is done today, some say no resemblance. There are a number of explanations for this, but only two principal ones: one being death, and the other finance.
Almost all races then took place either on public roads, or on circuits like the Nurburgring made to resemble public roads, meaning that the driver who went off, and many did go off, was almost certain to crash into something solid: an embankment perhaps, a telephone pole, a tree, even, in one case I knew of, a house. To drive that fast on those roads was very, very dangerous, incredibly dangerous. No forgiveness was possible. In lives it was very, very costly.
And there was not much money in it. Some drivers got retainers from factories—a few hundred dollars a month. Starting and prize money, as the following pages make clear, were equally paltry. There were almost no endorsements to be had. Advertising executives did not hang around drivers or circuits. Drivers' careers, meaning usually their lives, were too short, and ad campaigns too expensive.
And because only a few grand prix races were scheduled each year, some years only seven or eight, and because prize money was so small, top drivers tried to earn a bit more by racing also in the major sports car events, of which there were another seven or eight. In crowd appeal, excitement and drama, sports car races, which were contested at great speed in heavy traffic, mixing professional drivers with amateurs, became every bit as notorious as the grand prixs. Such races were long, sometimes very long—six hours, twelve, twenty-four-increasing the risk factor exponentially, each driver offered far more chances to go on his head than in any grand prix. The current earnings of the seven-time world champion Michael Schumacher, millions and millions of dollars each and every year from grand prix racing only, would have astonished everybody. His long survival, too. But then Schumacher raced only in cars much more solidly constructed than they were then and built much lower and closer to the road as well, making them unlikely to roll. And he races only on carefully razed circuits bearing little resemblance to public streets and roads. On today's modem circuits, nothing has been left standing for drivers to crash into—with the result that fifteen seasons can and have gone by without a fatality. In the years covered by this book, this was not the case. Drivers then were part of a different sport, a different world, and they paid a different price.
In the fifties and early sixties, which is the focal period of this book, motor racing in America, compared with today, was still in its infancy. Indianapolis, revered by the dirty-fingernail crowd, had existed since 1911, but there was not much else. Suddenly there began to be sports car races in California, Connecticut, and one or two places in between—road racing for the educated you might say—and these made a bit of noise, not very much yet, but enough to interest a middle-aged copy editor on the sports desk of the New York Times. His name was Frank Blunk. Five nights a week from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., Blunk sat at the copy desk in the newsroom on the third floor at 229 West 43rdStreet, one among many copy editors, his head down, his thick pencil writing corrections into other men's reports. He was bored, and he wanted to get out and see something. His eye fastened on cars and to his bosses he proposed writing a weekly car column, promising that this would draw many car ads to the paper and thereby pay for itself. The bosses said okay, Blunk started the column, and the ads did come in. In his columns he often wrote about sports cars. He even went to Florida for the Twelve Hours of Sebring, the first time a Times staffer had ever covered a European-type sports car race.
Where the Times went, the rest of the mainstream media would soon follow. Frank Blunk, I suggest, was the start of widespread American interest in road racing.
I was a still-unpublished writer at this time. Fresh out of military service, I had sailed to southern France intending to write a novel and become F. Scott Fitzgerald—better than Fitzgerald. I had almost no money. I was 23 years old. I was planning to live on $3 a day, write constantly, and as soon as my stuff started to sell-which would happen instantly, I was certain—I would become rich and famous, and live out my life as an expatriate author. But in Nice on the afternoon of my first day off the boat I met a girl. I did not get much novel writing done after that. Three months later we got married. All my money was gone, the last of it to pay fo
r her ticket to America, where I had a job waiting, my first job ever, as publicity man for the Football Giants.
Pro football was hardly better known than road racing at this time. The Giants' biggest Polo Grounds crowd my first year was 30,000. Publicity was hard to get, and my principal function seemed to be to go out and buy liquor for the so-called Five Thirty Club, the coaches' conferences after practice.
In time, pro football began to catch on, and being the publicity man got a bit easier. I loved the game and the players. It was a nice job, but I wanted to be a writer. Nights and weekends I wrote many short stories, and sent them out to magazines. They always came back by return mail. During the off seasons, I wrote two novels no publisher wanted. They came back as fast as the short stories. Eventually they went into a drawer and are still there. Was no one ever going to publish me?
Regularly each season, I took players into the Times to be interviewed. I got to know Blunk, and in time went to the same bosses he had gone to, suggesting that I go to Europe and send back stories on motor racing, also on boxing or skiing or whatever. The ten or a dozen major races would be my staple, I told whichever editors would listen to me. I had done a few freelance articles for the Times sports pages by then. There were even Americans racing in Europe now, I pointed out. There was, or soon would be, real interest in the sport in America, I promised.
It wouldn't be novel writing, but it was a way to get published regularly, I told myself. It would be a start.
When the Times balked at taking me onto the staff and paying my expenses, I agreed to work as a stringer for $50 for each article published, and to pay my own expenses. The bosses agreed to this. I saw it as an investment. It was going to be the first step up in my professional life. My wife and I had two little girls by then, but I was certain the paper would use everything I sent, and that I would pick up other money freelancing for magazines. And so we sold everything and sailed for France.
Looking back I can barely recognize that young man, and I am amazed at his gall.
In Nice, for $85 a month we rented a villa on a hill called Fabron. The furniture was shabby. The desk on which this was written was an apple crate I had found and turned onto its side so I could get my knees in. I put a pane of glass on top and my Olivetti portable on top of that. But our garden was gorgeous, for on the Cote d’Azur everything grows except weeds, and from our bedroom balcony the view over the Mediterranean extended from Italy to Spain. From this house I set out each week to one race or another. Sometimes I went by train, which meant sitting up all night in third class carriages, and I stayed in third class hotels where the bathroom was two flights down and a bath cost extra. Later I bought a Renault Dauphine, top speed with a running start 140 kilometers an hour, and drove it as fast as it would go through villages and towns, through cities, over mostly narrow roads, for in France not a mile of four lane highway had yet been built.
My beat was an entire continent, I was trying to build an audience where one did not exist, and I described, as much as is possible in a daily newspaper, especially one as august as the Times, not only what I saw but also what I felt. The races and the people in them enthralled me, the speed, the beautiful cars. In college I had worked summers as a mechanic. I had done every possible repair job, had taken cars apart and put them back together—but not cars like this. Watching mechanics take race cars apart enthralled me. The noise, the scenery, enthralled me, and I suppose I tried each day to enthrall my readers. I myself was hooked. I wasn't proselytizing exactly, but I didn't mind hooking others.
At first I hardly noticed what else was happening.
Whenever I am asked at dinner parties about those years, especially if confronted by doubters, I speak of the first Grand Prix de Monaco I ever saw. It was raced on May 18, 1958: sixteen starters of whom eight would die at the wheel, none that day, but four in the next nine months, the other four later. People's reaction usually is shock. I glance at the faces around the table and—forgive me—bask in the awe I see there.
It was awesome to me at the time as well, and when I wrote about it in the New York Times, I imagine it awed a good many readers.
In time I acquired the audience I sought, partly because there were indeed Americans racing in Europe now, and I wrote about them: Phil Hill, who was to win the 1961 world championship; and Harry Schell, who was killed; and the hair-raising Masten Gregory, who nonetheless would survive to die in bed--their stories can be read further on. I profiled others too, including Stirling Moss, now Sir Stirling, the fastest driver of his day, though he would never win the world championship; and Jack Brabham, now Sir Jack, who would win it three times, the final time in a car of his own manufacture, but who hung over so many roaring engines that he is these days almost stone deaf. Back then almost nothing was known of ear damage either.
Well, nearly every driver I wrote about in the Times paid heavily, and a letter came from an editor who had noticed my pieces suggesting that I write the book that became this one. I had been close to the cars, drivers and races for less than four seasons by then but they were intense ones. Of course I agreed. I wanted to get it all down in one place, so that I might perhaps understand it.
Already I had acquired a nasty reputation in the British motoring press, whose custom it was to confine mention of crashes, even grotesque ones, to a line or two. They did this carefully, almost religiously. The violent passing of famous drivers would be barely noted, and dead spectators were of no concern at all. The New York Times under my bylines said differently, and when Cars At Speed was published in Britain, most of the so-called motoring journalists denounced it and me. The word was out there. My reports were hurting the sport. Even so, the British edition sold briskly enough.
In America, the book was a bigger success than I had ever imagined. Several chapters were bought by magazines before publication, the reviews were good, and it went through, according to the copyright page of one of the copies I have here, seven hard cover printings. Later there were two paperback editions as well. My advance against royalties was only $2,000--not so bad for a beginning book writer at that time, but in the end my royalties exceeded that sum by plenty.
By the time Cars at Speed was published, the Times had moved us to Paris and had taken me onto its staff which meant a handsome salary (compared to $50 a story) plus a new car, the kids' schooling, plus all kinds of perks and expenses. In the future, from my books themselves and from their subsequent sales to the movies, I was to earn much, much more money than this, certain titles topping out at over a million dollars, but I have never again felt as rich as I felt the year that Cars at Speed came out.
It follows exactly as originally published. It offers a glimpse of a fascinating and hugely different era, and I hope it pleases you.
Robert Daley
New Canaan, CT
February 2007.
Prologue
"This is a cruel sport."
—Dan Gurney, after crashing and killing a spectator in the 1960 Dutch Grand Prix
WHEREVER THE fast cars run there is drama. Frequently there is death too, for motor racing is the most dangerous sport on the face of the earth. No matador-de-toros, for instance, has died on the horns in Spain since 1947; but 16 race drivers of Grand Prix stature were killed in the seasons 1957-1961 alone, out of less than 60. And so the death in this book is not put there to horrify or to shock, but because death is as much a part of motor racing as noise, and no one is more keenly aware of it than the drivers who skirt it day after day, delicately, at 170 miles an hour.
How can they race against such odds? Why do they want to?
The answers are as complicated as man. But if I have done this book as well as I hoped to, at least some of the answers are in it. So too is something of the noise and color, the violence and beauty that are to be found wherever the fast cars run.
There are in general three types of cars: the family car; the sports car; and the racing car. Theoretically all can be raced. But the family car was built to ride
comfortably rather than to stick to the road. Its weight distribution is all wrong. Raced, it would sway and slide until finally it flipped and crashed.
The sports car is basically a compromise between the family car and the outright racer. It is suitable for carrying driver, passenger, and some luggage safely and quickly from point A to point B. It can also be raced, though neither as quickly nor as safely as a racing car. In major sports car races like the Targa Florio, Le Mans, or Sebring, amateurs in sports cars bought in showrooms do race against pros. However the pros' "sports cars" have not been bought in showrooms. They are factory-owned and prepared, conform technically to sports car racing rules, but are true racing machines rather than passenger cars. By rule they must have two seats and a top, and other passenger amenities. But in fact the second seat is a thin sheet of aluminum, the top a flap of canvas. Racing sports car brakes are enormous, their engines devour gas. Driven slowly they would boil over. They look something like the MGs and Triumphs you see on the road.
The third type of car is the out-and-out racer. It has a tube of a body and wheels which support it like outriggers. It is a single-seater, stripped of everything except engine, gearbox, brakes, tanks. It may weigh less than a thousand pounds—less than a fighting bull weighs, a quarter the weight of an Oldsmobile. It is slim and low and encases the driver as tightly as a coffin. It is for racing only. It is the ultimate. It is bred for speed and glory.
In America (until the 1959 Grand Prix of America) the pure racing car was seen only on oval tracks such as Indianapolis. The inbred Indianapolis car has only one useful gear, can be steered only around left-hand turns, and would be useless on ordinary roads. The racing car which developed in Europe (called the Grand Prix car, or the Formula I car) has five or six forward gears and can do anything a sports car can do—only faster.
In Europe the fast cars have always been raced on roads or streets. Sometimes these roads or streets were normally public. Sometimes they were private and used for racing only. The term "road racing" is used to describe this type of racing, as opposed to the track racing at Indianapolis.
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