CARS AT SPEED - Grand Prix's Golden Age

by Daley, Robert

  But not during race week. A younger, gayer crowd takes over then, flags blow in the wind and bands play, and the Spa mineral water washes harder stuff down healthier throats.

  It is June and warm and a good place to be, and because there are so many hotels there is room enough for everybody. From Spa the circuit is only five miles away. There the crowd is big and happy, music blares from the loudspeakers, flags and bunting catch the eye, and the King will be arriving soon. From the paddock comes the harsh note of engines rising to a wail, then abruptly cut off.

  The start, the cars plunging downhill away from the pits, is more exciting than anywhere else because, as they scramble up the steep hill opposite they are in sight a long time, and you can watch them jockeying for position. And that frightening agility as they climb!

  The engine roar disappears over the hill, and you wait eagerly for the sound to swell again on the other side of the circuit. It does, and the cars slide around the La Source hairpin, upshifting as they race downhill past the pits. Then that mad scramble begins again, up the hill opposite, the cars clawing toward the sky.

  It occurs to you for a moment that the star of motor racing is not the driver at all, but the car scrambling up the hill—that beautiful, murderous, frighteningly agile Grand Prix car.

  This is a concept that strikes you nowhere else. The star of Grand Prix racing is not the machine, but the man. If you feel otherwise, as you are likely to at Spa-Francorchamps, then perhaps there is something wrong with the circuit. Perhaps it is too spectacular, too dangerous. It is not enough that a circuit be grandiose. The driver who makes a mistake must also have a chance to leave it alive.

  But the serpentine straightaways, the long sweeping curves of the Ardennes are too fast, too deadly. When something goes wrong, the driver is helpless.

  Other circuits elsewhere are more punishing to cars, more difficult for drivers, but are, at the same time, much slower and thus inherently less dangerous.

  Grand Prix racing is a deadly game. It always was and it always will be. But four terrible crashes in one weekend is too much, and perhaps there is no longer room for the Spa-Francorchamps circuit in the Grand Prix world.

  Chapter 7.

  The Twenty Four Hours

  Le MANS LIES amid the sprawling farmlands of the midwest, 120 miles from Paris. Hogs and cattle are brought here to be sold, as are wheat and other produce. Le Mans is, as it were, capital of the state, or county seat. Its population numbers 112,000. They are country people: hardworking, tightfisted, and suspicious of strangers, new ideas, and the outside world in general.

  The big event of the year in a midwestern town is the state fair. But the Le Mans state fair is special. It includes the most famous sports car race in the world: The Twenty-Four Hours.

  The Twenty-Four Hours begins at four p.m. on the middle Saturday in June in a carnival atmosphere. The race counts for the factory world championship. There are usually 55 cars, 110 drivers, and probably a quarter million spectators, most of them more interested in the carnival and its exhibits than in the race.

  The area inside the circuit is like a gigantic midway. The music and dancing go on all night. There are shops, restaurants, an amusement park, and thousands upon thousands of milling people. It is a carnival that offers one attraction no other carnival in the world offers—The Twenty-Four Hours.

  All the week before, practice is held at night, from six p.m. to midnight, drawing more than 50,000 people. The noise of the engines and the flashing headlights lend a special excitement to an evening at an amusement park.

  And, of course, there is an element of danger, never long forgotten at Le Mans. A simple plaque marks the spot where Pierre Levegh's Mercedes plowed into the crowd, killing 83 people. The plaque is black and bears only the date: June 11, 1955. Flowers are placed there each year before the start. The music is stopped, men bare their heads, and, for a moment, Le Mans is silent.

  The course, composed of public roads, is flat and, except for a few wrinkles, nearly a rectangle. At just over eight miles per lap, the winning car circles 300 times at an average speed of about 110 miles an hour, a total distance of about 2,500 miles.

  When the race ends Sunday afternoon, fewer than half the cars are still running. A dozen are wrecked, and usually at least one driver is dead.

  Potential rewards are comparatively small. The winning car earns $10,000, half of which goes to the factory. The two drivers split the rest.

  Le Mans is always a dramatic race, and sometimes a gripping one, but 24 hours is a long time. Grandstands 400 yards long opposite the pits are full at the start, and again at the finish. So are eight miles of dirt embankments bordering both sides of the road.

  On and on the race goes, the cars stopping every three hours for gas, oil, and a change of drivers, the loudspeakers interrupting the blaring music to blare out the latest standing.

  About midnight the crowd begins to thin out. At the disposal of drivers are trailers behind the pits. Very few drivers can sleep between turns at the wheel, although most try to.

  "It isn't the noise of the cars that keeps me awake," Stirling Moss said once. "It's that bloody music."

  Most drivers are simply too nervous and alert to sleep. They are hungry. They swill a gallon of liquid. They lie on cots. But most hurry nervously back to the pits an hour before their next turn to drive, wondering how the car is going. Has their co-driver gained ground or lost?

  At dawn a mist rises from the road, and lap speeds drop suddenly. The drivers are very, very tired, the mist is capricious, and they warn themselves to slow down a little, don't crash now, the sun will be up soon.

  The sun, peeping over the trees, finds the midway subdued, but still crowded with milling spectators. Many other thousands are asleep, sprawled in cars in the parking lots, tucked neatly into tents in the pine groves along the Mulsanne Straight, or simply lying on the ground with newspapers over their faces. Bleary-eyed gendarmes sit in their trucks sipping coffee, fortifying themselves against the return of the crowds. Church bells begin to peal from the Catholic chapel, announcing the first of three masses. The cars still are screaming past the stands every few seconds (though fewer of them now) in the race the French call "La Ronde Infernale" The morning drags wearily by. The afternoon begins to pass. Usually, by this time, one car is laps ahead of the rest. As four o'clock nears, only the leader is still circulating at high speed. When he passes there is a long gap, for numerous other cars are loitering down at White House Corner. When it is finally four, the others hurry across the line to receive the checkered flag, having avoided driving an extra lap or two. They are all very tired men, and it is a great relief to them that the race is over.

  The Twenty-Four Hours is a race hated by all professional drivers, who consider the race too long and the circuit completely uninteresting.

  "So you turn onto the Mulsanne Straight," Peter Collins remarked once. "You push the accelerator into the floor and then you just sit there and don't do anything for two whole minutes." The Mulsanne Straight is more than three miles long.

  All of the drivers complain bitterly also about the terrible discrepancies in speeds of the cars. On the Mulsanne in 1960 Masten Gregory's Birdcage Maserati was clocked at 178 miles an hour. A Ferrari will exceed 170 miles an hour there, Porsches 130 or more, Oscas perhaps 110. The various small touring sedans that are entered every year reach perhaps 90. So for 24 hours, in the glare of the low, late afternoon sunshine, in the dark of night, in the midst of dawn, in the rain or fog of the next day--for 24 hours high-powered sports cars must overtake and plow through groups of slower machines moving at half their speed.

  This is deadly dangerous. It led Harry Schell (a man who delighted in extreme statements) to call the Le Mans organizers "murderers."

  The organizers are the Automobile Club of the West. Accepting machines of all sizes and speeds is not the club's worst fault. Like most semi-political organizations, the club owes favors to various persons, which it sometimes pays off by acc
epting entries not on the basis of competence, but according to who knows whom.

  Every year approximately a dozen of the drivers entered are making their virgin appearance in a race car. They are men of all ages and nationalities. All they have in common is pull with the Automobile Club. They are in the race strictly for the glory, provided one doesn't kill oneself trying, of earning the right to boast at cocktail parties for the rest of their lives that: "I drove the Twenty-Four Hours at Le Mans."

  In other walks of life, enthusiasm can substitute adequately enough for experience. Not behind the wheel of a race car. These individuals are a distinct menace, and professional race drivers are terrified of them.

  The 1958 race, which Phil Hill won, teamed with Olivier Gendebien in a Ferrari, was Le Mans at its worst. The rain began to fall a little before seven, just as the first change of drivers was due. The new drivers went out wearing rubber suits and visors on their helmets instead of goggles. By ten o'clock, there were nine wrecks piled up at various corners of the circuit. Already, 24 cars were hors de combat.

  More than 100,000, a small crowd for Le Mans, had watched the start under lowering skies. The first cloudburst sent a number of them back to homes and hotels. The rest packed into restaurants and dance halls, waiting hopefully for the rain to let up.

  Darkness fell, and the cars' lights came on, the noise of the race muffled by the rain. For the drivers, the worst turn seemed to be the long right-hander under the Dunlop Bridge. Car after car slid off the road there and plowed into the earth embankment. One driver died. Some of the wrecks caught fire, burning brightly in the rain. Flag marshals, hunched up against the rain, stood in the glare of flares, waving approaching cars to slow down.

  The race went on. It was still raining.

  More and more cars crashed, or broke down. Occasionally, what looked like the blaze of a bonfire lit some far corner of the circuit, and one knew that another car was burning.

  The Ferrari driver, Count von Trips, described screeching to a stop inches in front of a body lying in the road. Trips jumped out and dragged the man away. Pieces of machinery littered the road, and Trips began to drag wreckage aside, his work illuminated by the main hulk of the car, which was burning fiercely. Trips stayed with the injured driver until an ambulance came to take over, then jumped back into his Ferrari and rejoined the race. His co-driver, Wolfgang Siedel, later drove the car into a sandbank.

  Through all this Hill and Gendebien drove carefully, determined to conserve their car's gearbox and brakes. "We can win this race," Hill had said earlier, "if only we have the guts to go slow the first part of the race."

  Almost against their will, they found themselves in the lead long before midnight. An Aston Martin dogged them all through the night, then broke down just as a cold wet dawn was breaking.

  That left only the Hill-Gendebien Ferrari and a single Jaguar far in the lead, the Ferrari slowly gaining.

  At ten a.m. the rain stopped, the sun came out briefly, and the sound of church bells mingled with the jazz music of the carnival midway behind the pits. The morning crowds began to arrive, tramping about in thick mud.

  Then the clouds burst again, and in the heavy rain the Jaguar skidded off the road, turned over, and ended up in a ditch. Hill signaled that the Jag was out as he went past his pits. After that he began to lap even more slowly, needing only to finish to win the biggest victory of his career.

  There was pale sunlight again as he took the checkered flag at four p.m.

  "If you are in the lead at four p.m.," an official had told him during the final pitstop, "don't stop. Drive right up to the official stand."

  Hill had waited till the official left, then said to Gendebien:

  "If we win, Olivier, the first place I stop is here, to pick you up. We will do the victory tour together."

  And they did, with floral wreaths around their necks, Hill driving, Gendebien sitting on the spine of the car, waving at the crowd. The tour took them past the tiers of cheering thousands, past the wrecks that had been cars. Under the Dunlop Bridge alone there were half a dozen crumpled hulks, one or two of them telescoped to a length of less than six feet. It sobered them for a moment. But the crowd was cheering and laughing; the feeling of grief passed as the wrecks diminished behind them, and pride and triumph filled them again. They waved back at the crowd, both grinning now. They were very, very tired, but fatigue weighed lightly. It was a big moment for both of them. They had just won the Twenty-Four Hours.

  Le Mans in many ways is Des Moines. It is flat, surrounded by wheat fields, and the people are Midwesterners. They don't seem to understand how or why the Twenty-Four Hours came among them, and they have no conception of its impact on the rest of the world. Their race is the world's best known and most famous. It sells thousands of cars for whatever marque is lucky enough to win. But the people of Le Mans go on talking about crops and the weather. Over the roads where Jaguars, Ferraris, and Aston Martins have raced to victory, horses drag loads of hay all the rest of the year, and bicycles roll along, pedaled by farmers who do not care about speed.

  Le Mans is staid and incurious. It has only one good hotel and three or four second-rate restaurants. When the mob hits it every mid-June, the country people of Le Mans offer rooms to the Automobile Club to be rented to visitors. Half the city rushes away to visit relatives, leaving Ma or Pa behind to rent out every room in the house. There are always rooms to be found at Le Mans during race week, but they are not deluxe. In the town there are dozens of shops where one can buy boots and rough clothing, but I once walked about for an hour trying to find a barber shop, before concluding that at Le Mans most of the barbering is done by Ma.

  Unlike Des Moines, it is a very old town and contains, among other relics of antiquity, a twelfth-century Gothic cathedral that is one of the glories of the world.

  (The next race on the calendar usually is the Grand Prix de France at Reims, 300 miles east, and if you go there from Le Mans, you can see four of the great French cathedrals in close succession as you drive through: Le Mans, Chartres, Notre Dame de Paris, and Reims.)

  Le Mans is unsophisticated in the extreme. Nonetheless, it was the scene of the first French Grand Prix in 1906, of innumerable balloon experiments by Leon Bollee during that same period, and was in 1908 the site of a demonstration by Wilbur Wright of his extraordinary flying machine.

  A few car enthusiasts had just happened to come together there, shortly after the Paris-Madrid calamity of 1903. They laid out a circuit approximately where the circuit is today, and staged a successful 1906 Grand Prix. Bollee himself was one of the officials of this brand-new Automobile Club, and now the club backed his huge cumbersome balloons and tried to collect money so he could continue his experiments.

  By this time, news of the Wright brothers and Kitty Hawk had reached Europe. Europe disbelieved. Wilbur came over with his machine, searched around for a plot of land to serve as an airfield, and finally was persuaded by Bollee and the others to come to Le Mans. And so the first European airplane flight took place there on August 8, 1908.

  Le Mans went on staging Grands Prix from time to time, including the 1921 Grand Prix de France, which was won by Jimmy Murphy, an American driving an American Duesenberg. No American won at Le Mans after that until Hill in 1958.

  The Twenty-Four Hours came into being in 1923, and was supposed to be an endurance race strictly for un-souped-up cars bought by amateurs out of ordinary showrooms, tuned by amateurs, and raced by amateurs. The rules written to ensure all this were so complicated no one could understand them.

  Nowadays, the cars that win at Le Mans are pure-bred sports racing machines that bear only a distant family relationship to production models. The first step in this direction was made in the second year of the race, when the Chenard-Walcker factory saved weight by paneling its car bodies in calico. That year there were 41 entries, 27 of which crashed or broke down. The winning car was a British Bentley driven by John Duff and F. C. Clement.

  Le Mans th
ese days is the most British of all European races. Private planes arrive from Britain throughout the week before the race. Thousands of members of various British motoring clubs come on excursions. So do thousands of those very old, famous marque cars that the British so love to drive. Half of the Le Mans program is in English. There are English announcements on the public address every hour. One hears nearly as much English spoken in the streets of Le Mans during race week as French.

  Le Mans is the most British of European races because of the Bentley that won in 1924, and the other Bentleys that won four straight years from 1927 through 1930. Until the war, only Alfa Romeo came close to matching that record, with four victories. But Alfa was a racing factory; its drivers were professionals like Nuvolari, Sommer, and Chinetti.

  The Bentleys were owned sometimes by individuals, sometimes by the factory, but the cars raced nowhere else, and all of the drivers were amateurs. And in Britain the important thing is not so much that you win, but that you win without appearing to have tried too hard. The amateur ideal seems to be planted in Britain more firmly than anywhere else.

  In any case, all of Britain was bursting with pride about the huge, square, unbelievably tough Bentleys.

  "The great green cars," sighed the adoring British.

  "Fastest motor lorries in Europe," said the disgusted Ettore Bugatti, whose cars often failed to beat them.

  The 1927 race-and its aftermath-was the prewar Le Mans classic.

  The Bentley factory, faced with a financial crisis, found itself too poor to enter a team.

  Dr. J. Dudley Benjafield offered his personal car as the nucleus of a team. His co-driver would be a journalist named S.C.H. (Sammy) Davis.

  Such faith in the marque brought tears to the eyes of W. O. Bentley. If Benjafield was willing to sacrifice his own machine, the factory would find the money somewhere to enter two other cars.