CARS AT SPEED - Grand Prix's Golden Age

by Daley, Robert

  There are literally dozens of curves like this on the circuit at Francorchamps. They are not dangerous curves for lesser drivers because lesser drivers do not approach maximum permissible speeds. Say a curve can be taken at 137 miles per hour. A lesser driver, who does not know for certain where the limit is, will "feel" his way round at 120, leaving a safe margin of 17 miles per hour. But drivers like Tony Brooks or Jack Brabham, who love the Francorchamps circuit, will try to hold, say, 135, leaving themselves a margin of only two miles an hour. Mechanical failure, oil on the road, an error by the car in front, or even fatigue late in the race, can cause them to lose the fine edge of control they had maintained. When this happens they crash.

  This is why far more great drivers are killed than secondary ones. Secondary drivers drive fast only in comparison to the speeds you and I make on highways. Usually they do not drive anywhere near the limits of their cars and the circuits. There is always an ocean of margin for error all about them.

  This is not to say that to leave the road at Francorchamps means certain death. The most striking fact about motor racing is not the number of fatal accidents, but that there are 10 times as many completely fantastic escapes. In 1958 alone, the Francorchamps circuit provided three that were bizarre.

  The first occurred during the Thursday afternoon practice before the Grand Prix. Jean Behra was racing down the Masta Straight at probably 150 miles an hour. The most notable feature of the Masta Straight is that it is not straight at all. It has a long, sweeping curve right in the middle. Behra's BRM entered this too fast and went into a slide. He touched his brakes. Unknown to him, an oil pipe had broken and was spraying a fine mist of oil onto his rear tires, so that when he touched his brakes the car broke away uncontrollably. At 150 miles an hour it went into a spin. For what seemed an eternity to Behra, it spun and spun. He held opposite lock on first the right swerve, then the left, and he hurtled sideways right through the curve without striking anything. The car's snout caught a hedge and it spun like a top. Then it stopped.

  Behra wasn't hurt and the car was hardly scratched. But the incident unnerved him as none of the wild crashes he had survived had ever done. He was 37, scarred and battered, an ex-motorcycle champion with a plastic ear.

  "A crash happens and is over in an instant," he said afterward. "You don't have time to think. But that skid lasted so long that I had plenty of time to think. Too much time."

  He was frightened, and it lasted a long while. A little later he said: "I've had enough. I'm tired of being banged up all the time. Of always being scared. I'm getting out."

  He wasn't able to do a fast lap in practice after that, and his fellow drivers wondered if he ever would again on that circuit. In the race he quit on the sixth lap, complaining that the oil pressure wasn't right. Mechanics could find nothing wrong with it.

  The second escape involved Luigi Musso, who lost control of his Ferrari near the village of Stavelot when making nearly 160 miles per hour. Apparently a tire had burst. At terrific speed, Musso spun off the road. There was a drop into a field, then a house, then some tough-looking concrete posts. Musso's car clobbered them all, and when it finally came to a stop it looked as if it had been dropped off a building.

  Mike Hawthorn, racing by the spot lap after lap, was aghast. "I could not see how anyone could get away with a thing like that," Hawthorn said later. "I honestly thought he had had it, and I was in no mood to go on motor racing."

  This is a race Hawthorn might have won, for he had the fastest car that day and was in terrific form. But the sight of the skid marks, the crushed wreck, the seemingly certain knowledge that one of his friends was dead, demoralized him.

  He wanted to quit, decided not to, then slowed, wanting to quit again. Believing the car at first to be his friend Collins', he was sick with grief. And so he went through the motions for several laps, unable to concentrate on racing. Then he suddenly spied Collins' car parked at the pits. The next time round he noticed Musso standing beside the road, talking to some spectators. Musso had got off with a strained back-and even that didn't begin to bother him till the next day.

  Relief flooded over Hawthorn, then joy over the task at hand. He began to race, and he broke the lap record four times as he closed in on Brooks, the leader and eventual winner. Hawthorn just missed catching him.

  Behra and Musso had had fantastic escapes from death despite speeds of more than 150 miles an hour. One considered what those two men had got away with, and one wondered how so many motorists can manage to kill themselves at 40 miles an hour.

  But Behra and Musso both are dead today, so perhaps there is a lesson to be learned there somewhere.

  The third bizarre escape that weekend of the 1958 Belgian Grand Prix was not in any sense of the word romantic. Yet it was remarkable.

  Joakim Bonnier was rocketing along as fast as his Maserati would go, when the driveshaft snapped. The driveshaft connecting the engine and the differential passed, in that Maserati, directly under the seat of the driver. The driver straddles it, with only a thin sheet of metal and a cushion between it and his behind. The driveshaft is a solid steel rod as thick as a broomstick, which revolves hundreds of times a minute and is under terrific tension.

  Now, as Bonnier raced down the straight at maximum speed, about 165 miles per hour, the driveshaft snapped directly under the seat and the steel shaft rose up and whacked him in the posterior with terrific force.

  "Yaiai!" Bonnier screeched.

  The blow was so unexpected, so brutal that it nearly catapulted him out of the car.

  He rose high up in the seat, still hanging on to the steering wheel. It was this, plus the fact that the road was straight, that saved his life. When he came down again he was still in the cockpit.

  "I was terribly lucky," Bonnier said later. "The shaft had snapped close to the rear wheels. The rear part of it was thus short; if it had been longer it would have dropped into the road, dug in, probably, and turned the car over."

  As it was, Bonnier was in great pain for many days. Until after the race he refused to take any drugs, even aspirin, to calm the pain. He got almost no sleep the night before the race, but said he preferred that to racing while still dulled by drugs.

  Most of the persons to whom Bonnier told this story laughed about it, as if it were an undignified sort of experience. Only a few realized how nearly fatal it had been, how nearly certain a race car is to rocket out of control if the driver's concentration is ruptured, even for an instant, at such speeds as that. And for many seconds after the drive shaft whacked him, Bonnier was not concentrating at all.

  Even the great Fangio had a close call during a Belgian Grand Prix. This was in 1953, a bad year for him all around. He was trying to make a comeback after the accident that had nearly killed him the year before, but the car (Maserati) was never right, or he had bad luck—or perhaps after months in a cast he had lost his touch; he must have wondered about that often.

  In the Belgian Grand Prix he broke down early, then took over the car of Johnny Claes. Claes was a Belgian, not very fast, but always invited to enter the Belgian Grand Prix, and his car that day was far back in the pack when Fangio took it over. Fangio now began really to hurry, as if anxious to prove to himself that he could still move, provided he had a real car under him.

  Fangio rarely got emotional when driving. But when he did, sparks flew and spectators gawked at the way he threw the car around. It was that way at Monte Carlo, the day he turned a Ferrari into junk while chasing Stirling Moss. It was that way at the Nurburgring in 1957, the day he won his last and greatest German Grand Prix.

  It was that way in 1953 in Belgium, too, as he strong-armed the Claes car up among the leaders.

  Then, with the finish line almost in sight, he entered at over 150 miles an hour a turn that could not be taken faster than 145. The car spun out from under, skidded off the road sideways, jumped a ditch, and landed, miraculously, on all four wheels. Fangio, who had been thrown out, walked away with only cuts and bru
ises.

  Escapes such as this are routine. The car goes out of control, the driver becomes a passenger, and he lives or dies depending upon what he eventually hits. Mostly he lives, though it is difficult, at such speeds, to understand how.

  Sometimes a driver escapes thanks to his own courage and strength. Such was Hawthorn, also during a Belgian Grand Prix, in 1954.

  He was second behind Fangio. The shield of his exhaust pipe had shaken loose and was being lifted up in front by the wind. Hawthorn ignored it, until he began to smell exhaust fumes. Hot gas then began to squirt onto his arm; this was not normal, but did not seem to affect the running of the car. Hawthorn stuck his arm out into the slipstream from time to time to cool it, and pressed on.

  It was some time before he realized he was doing "odd things," running up on the grass verge, forgetting to accelerate out of corners. On the left-hand corner just before the downhill run to Burneville, he shot up onto the grass again, and realized that his judgment was gone, that he could no longer focus his eyes, that he was being gassed by engine fumes.

  This was only two miles past the pits; he had seven more miles to go to get back to them again. "The rest of that lap was a nightmare," he remarked later. "I was braking late, overshooting the corners, driving like a drunk."

  He was so drugged by the gasses that it never occurred to him to stop. Instead, his mind fixed itself fuzzily on getting back to the pits. It seemed to him that if he could just get back to the pits, everything would be all right. He breathed deeply on the fumes trapped in the cockpit. He could hardly keep his eyes open. Where were the pits? He must get the car there, tell them what was wrong. He felt overcome by sleep. The car raced along at 100 miles an hour. His eyes closed. After a moment he forced them open again. The car weaved down the straight at great speed, but Hawthorn did not know it. A turn swam into his clouded vision; he got round it half on the grass, nearly being rammed by another car that he did not see. He wanted only to sleep, sleep. He skidded and slid round the La Source hairpin, rolled down the hill to the pits, stopped, and passed out.

  Mineral water was poured over him, and milk forced down his throat. The veteran Froilan Gonzalez was sent out in the same car.

  "He is more experienced than you," a Ferrari official explained.

  The cobwebs had begun to clear. "More experienced at what?" Hawthorn gasped. "Breathing?"

  Probably the most fantastic escape of all was Stirling Moss' the day before the 1960 Grand Prix. On the long, long, sweeping right-hand curve going down toward Malmedy, the left rear wheel broke off Moss' Lotus. The car slewed this way and that, then shot off the road.

  Moss had been holding the car on the inside edge of the curve, immaculately controlled as always, and he must have been making 140 miles an hour at least. Now, as the wheel flew away, Moss steered the car for as long as he could. This may only have been fractions of a second, but it helped. Everything Moss did, helped. The car left the road, hurtling along the verge. There is an embankment there bordering the road, and the car bounded along it, banging it, with Moss making a fantastic effort to stay in the car. He is terribly strong, and he held that steering wheel in a death grip for as long as he was able, his knees pressing with utmost strength against the walls of the cockpit.

  He knew, had already thought it out many times in advance, that to have any chance at all in such an accident, he would have to stay with the car as long as possible.

  The twisted steering wheel of the wreck was proof of the effort he made. He stayed in the car as it slammed along the bank. Then something on the car dug into the bank. Moss felt it flipping, relaxed, and permitted himself to be hurled out.

  He landed on his hands and knees in the dirt beside the road, raised himself to a kneeling position, then fell over, unconscious.

  The three-wheeled empty car rebounded off the bank, crossed the road, and expired, half in a ditch.

  All the other drivers who had been practicing, stopped their cars to see if they could aid Moss. Phil Hill later reported:

  "He was lying in a fetal position, coughing up blood, and begging us not to move him till the doctor came."

  It was 15 minutes before the ambulance got there. At the hospital at Malmedy X-rays proved him to be suffering from broken ribs, damaged vertebrae, a broken nose, and two broken legs. But he was alive.

  The 1960 Belgian Grand Prix was the most disastrous of recent times. Mike Taylor, driving a Lotus, crashed only a few seconds after Moss, a few hundred yards farther on. Because all the other drivers stopped to aid Moss, no one noticed Taylor was missing. He lay in the woods badly hurt for a long time before anyone found him. He lived.

  The next day the Grand Prix was run. Because two Lotuses had crashed the day before, there were suggestions about barring all the Lotuses.

  "It's a bloody sprint car," said Graham Hill before the race. "It always was and it always will be. It won't stand up to hard driving." Graham Hill had been a Lotus contract driver the year before.

  "I wouldn't drive a car like that," Phil Hill said of the Lotus. "You never know what piece is going to break off next."

  The Lotus, that year, weighed about 900 pounds, nearly 100 pounds less than the very light Cooper. Even before the Belgian Grand Prix the drivers had considered it flimsy.

  However, the car was not barred. Three of them ran, and in one of them Alan Stacey, 26, crashed to his death.

  The crash was a mystery. When Stacey crashed there was no other car near him. He was not driving particularly hard.

  But his body was found in the road badly burned, and disarticulated too. The car finished up in a field 10 feet below the level of the road, having climbed a 4-foot embankment and penetrated a patch of sturdy bushes 10 feet thick. It was completely burned out.

  What killed Stacey? Colin Chapman, builder of the car, held to the idea that a bird had struck him in the face, knocking him cold.

  But why then did he burn? The car could not have started burning until it hit something.

  Unless—

  Unless a fuel tank split, spraying young Stacey with gas that then ignited, causing him to recoil from the flames and thus lose control of the car.

  This was the second fatal accident of the day.

  Chris Bristow was 22, and for four seasons had been known as the wild man of British club racing. He had crashed or spun out on nearly every circuit he ever raced, and those who knew him felt it was only a question of time.

  "It does no good to say so now," a friend of his remarked after Bristow's death, "but Chris just did not have the experience to drive that way in Grand Prix racing."

  He was driving a Cooper belonging to the Yoeman Credit Company, an auto-finance firm that had entered Grand Prix racing for publicity purposes. He crashed when in sixth place and trying desperately to stay ahead of the Ferrari of Willy Mairesse. And he died only a few feet from where Moss had lived the day before.

  At the edge of the road there was a rail fence three feet high. Rails had been nailed on top of short uprights. Bristow had entered the corner too fast, had slid off the road sideways, and the nose of his car had struck an upright, dropping the rail to the level of a Cooper's windshield. It pierced Bristow's windshield, then his throat, and then tore off his head.

  The public address announcer then announced cheerfully to the crowd that Bristow had crashed, but was perfectly all right. The race went on. When Stacey later crashed and died, no public address announcement was made at all.

  It was a horrible weekend. One lived with death during the whole race, and when it was over, days passed before one could stop thinking of it.

  The circuit was too fast, too murderous. It must be suppressed before others died—this was the first reaction, and it lasted a long time. Bruce McLaren and Jo Bonnier agreed. They didn't like the place at all. But Brabham and Phil Hill supported the circuit enthusiastically.

  Now, long after that dreadful afternoon, I don't know what to think. The circuit is so beautiful, so exciting. Anyone fascinated by G
rand Prix cars would hate to lose it. One can only wait and see. This circuit had previously had only two fatal accidents to star drivers-Dick Seaman in 1939 and Archie Scott-Brown in 1958. Perhaps the Grand Prix cars of the new Formula, the smaller, slower Grand Prix cars of the future, can race there in relative safety.

  The Belgian Grand Prix was first run in 1925. In those days it was a slow, tricky circuit, the road narrow and bumpy, the hills steep, and the curves sharp. Over the years it was smoothed and widened, and it is today a 134-mile-an-hour circuit.

  Because it was always so devilishly difficult, none but great drivers have ever won there, although hacks have won often enough elsewhere. The Belgian Grand Prix has been won by the Ascaris, father and son; by Caracciola, Lang, Chiron, Nuvolari, Fangio, Farina, Collins, Brooks, and Brabham. The Belgian Grand Prix must be skillfully raced; one cannot sit back and wait for the circuit to break up the cars as at Monte Carlo. And because it is so fast, so inherently dangerous, only the best drivers have, over the years, dared to hold their foot down.

  It is a beautiful circuit with its hills and forests and meadows. It is admired by the drivers, by racing journalists, and by fans, who have some splendid views of the cars. But it is far from population centers, and crowds are relatively small. (The Nurburgring is isolated too, but the German crowds are drawn by the memory--if not the presence--of great German cars and drivers; there has never been a Belgian car, and there is just one Belgian driver, Gendebien, worth watching.)

  And so the Belgian Grand Prix is shaky financially and is sometimes canceled, as in 1957 and 1959.

  Spa is a bright, gay town during the week of the race. It became famous as a sort of large rest home for Russian, German, and British aristocrats temporarily (or permanently) off their feed. Perhaps during some seasons of the year that elderly, decrepit clientele still fills it to the rafters, swilling religiously the mineral water the place produces.