Not until 10 laps from the finish did it dawn on Hawthorn that he had a chance to win, to beat the great Fangio and all the rest. He began trying to work out a scheme. Where could he wring a few vital seconds out of the lap? One by one he discarded the obvious tricks—for instance, to slipstream Fangio down the final straight, zooming out from behind at the final instant and using the sudden extra power to cross the line first. Fangio, he decided, was too experienced to be caught by any obvious tricks.
His only hope was simply to get into the final turn first, and get out of it first—perfect timing, perfect gear changes—and perhaps the hope that Fangio would flub something. Wheel-to-wheel they roared into the final turn. They were inches apart as Hawthorn cut round the turn as close as possible, upshifted, and stomped on the gas. The engine screamed, the car leaped forward, and was leading by one second when it crossed the finish.
Gonzalez was another second farther back, and Ascari 3.2 seconds behind him.
Farina was fifth and Villoresi sixth. All had finished, and Mike Hawthorn, age 24, had beaten them all.
Hawthorn raced five more seasons, won two major sports car races (Sebring, 1954, in which victory was first accorded to a Ferrari, and only disputedly to Hawthorn after long checking of lap charts; and the unfortunate 1955 Le Mans), and two more Grands Prix (the 1954 Grand Prix of Spain, and the 1958 French Grand Prix .
He should have been one of the very greatest drivers, for he started young, broke into a factory team at an early age, and had great talent.
But circumstances combined against him. He was very fast when he really wanted to hurry, but there were too many races that simply did not interest him (Targa Florio, Le Mans, Mille Miglia, Monza 500) and in that case he either would get out of driving altogether, or drive halfheartedly. He liked being a star, a celebrity, and if he had been accepted as a hero in his own country he might have been willing to devote himself to being a great driver.
But somehow Stirling Moss was adopted by the English instead. Hawthorn never caught popular fancy the way Moss did, although Moss was still racing tiny 500cc cars while Hawthorn was winning the French Grand Prix in a Ferrari.
Hawthorn and Moss were never close friends. Moss was too dedicated. Moss went to bed early. Hawthorn stayed out drinking with pals. Hawthorn never matured as a driver, and he never had another great moment like that victory in the 1953 French Grand Prix. Perhaps, after a while, he stopped believing in great moments, and quit trying for them.
Hawthorn's victory at Le Mans was nothing but a heartache. So many had been killed, the Mercedes team had withdrawn, and he was being blamed for Levegh's fatal crash.
Then, in 1958 at Reims again, Hawthorn won the French Grand Prix a second time. There wasn't much thrill in this either. In the first place, he led from the start, and simply had too fast a car for all the others. No one ever threatened him. Then, too, he had the misfortune to be glancing in his rearview mirror on lap 10 when turning onto what is now known as Musso Corner. To Hawthorn's horror he saw Musso's car travel sideways across the road. Then Musso disappeared backward and out of view. A great cloud of dust went up, and that was all Hawthorn saw. The next time round, a helicopter was settling down on the spot. Hawthorn knew, somehow, that Musso had not got away with it this time.
At the hospital afterward they told him Musso was dead. Everyone was grim and depressed, and Hawthorn had no joy in remembering his victory.
He went on to win the world championship that year, by one point over Moss. Moss won four Grands Prix, Hawthorn only the French one. But Hawthorn got lots of seconds, and in the final two races of the season, Phil Hill, his teammate, had to slow up to let Hawthorn into second place to win vital points. It was a team effort that made Hawthorn world champion. He had lucked into it. He was too sensible not to realize this, and the championship could not have meant much to him.
A few weeks after he had won it, he announced his retirement from racing, and a few weeks after that, while drag racing for fun against his friend Rob Walker, he crashed to his death on a highway near London. No one, least of all the shaken Walker, knew how or why, but Hawthorn was dead at 29 in the stupidest accident of them all.
There has been a Grand Prix at Reims nearly every year since 1925, but the Grand Prix de l’A.C.F. was raced there for the first time in 1932. In the years between the two wars, the major French circuit was not Reims but Montlhery near Paris. Montlhery still exists. Bicycle and motorcycle races are held there often. It has simply passed out of fashion for cars. No one knows why.
It was at Montlhery in 1925 that Antonio Ascari crashed to his death in the Grand Prix de l’A.C.F. He was leading the race at the time. He got his wheels on the grass verge in a simple bend, lost control, flipped over, and crashed upside down in a ditch. He was killed instantly. The rest of the Alfa Romeo team then withdrew from the race. Their cars were faced toward the grandstand, the engines wound up to full pitch in a kind of defiant grief, then abruptly cut off. The Alfas were then wheeled away.
This race was won by Robert Benoist, driving a Delage. When it was over, he stood silently while the French National Anthem was played in his honor, then took the huge bouquet of flowers and started his Tour d'Honneur, his victory lap. As he drove slowly round, the great crowd roared its joy and congratulations.
When Benoist reached the place where Ascari had crashed, he stopped, climbed out, and placed his victory bouquet on the twisted wreckage of the Alfa that Ascari had raced so proudly against him.
There was not a sound from the crowd as Benoist solemnly completed his victory lap.
Robert Benoist was tortured to death by the Gestapo during World War II for refusing to reveal the names of fellow members of the French Resistance. Part of the grandstand at Reims has been named in his honor.
Cars seldom withdraw due to fatal accidents these days. It is a kind of chivalry for which the modern world and the business that motor racing has become, have no time.
Also, organizers have a growing tendency to conceal death from the crowd. When there is a fatal crash, it is usually followed by a brisk public-address announcement to the effect that the driver has only been "shaken up." What purpose this lie is supposed to serve is beyond me. Its sole effect, as I see it, is to undermine all confidence in public-address announcements. Nowadays one fears the worst every time a car goes off the road, whatever the public address might say. One suffers needlessly a dozen times a season.
The Grand Prix de l’A.C.F. is no longer raced at Montlhery, but occasionally it will be raced at the Les Essarts circuit near Rouen, as in 1952, 1957, and 1962.
Les Essarts is a much slower circuit, the average speed being about 100 miles an hour for the roughly four-mile lap. Twisting up and down both sides of a wooded valley it provides interesting views for the spectators who can watch the cornering from the safety of high, earthen embankments flanking the roads.
When the Grand Prix de l’A.C.F. is raced at Rouen, other races are organized at Reims nonetheless, and sometimes one of these other races goes by the name of the Grand Prix de France. This is confusing; the Grand Prix de France, which does not count for the world championship, is a much lesser race. In 1952, Alberto Ascari won the Grand Prix de l’A.C.F. at Rouen, but was defeated at Reims in the Grand Prix de France by a young French motorcycle champion named Jean Behra. This was a more or less meaningless victory, but the vast majority of Frenchmen did not know it.
All they saw was that a Frenchman, driving a French Gordini, had defeated the world champion (Ascari) in a race bearing the name of France.
This was enough to make Behra a national hero.
It was a strange phenomenon. Is it peculiar to France?
To the Frenchman, nothing counts, by and large, except what is French. No other culture, language, or heritage is as fine. This narrow patriotism fuses into fierce national pride and, to a great extent, excludes interest in any other culture, language, or heritage.
If France loses, the French tend to belittle the win
ner, put forth a dozen alibis for their own defeat, and intimate that the prize wasn't worth winning anyway.
If France wins, the instrument of victory is likely to be applauded beyond all proportion, to be hoisted to giddy heights in the popular imagination—and to be a flop all the rest of his life as a result.
Such was the case of Behra.
In 1952, the great French drivers of the past were either dead or retired. The Gordini, the only French Grand Prix car, could not win a race. The only other French driver (then as now) was Maurice Trintignant. He was quiet, unassuming, and careful.
And suddenly Behra arrived, out of nowhere, so it seemed. Five times he had been motorcycle champion of France, and now he made the Gordini work, he beat the great Ascari, he won the Grand Prix de France . . . de France . . . de France. The word rattled round and round in French heads like an echo.
The public there and then adopted Jean Behra. He would be the greatest driver ever. He would resume the glorious French victories of the past.
Unfortunately, Behra couldn't win for crashing. He crashed all over the world. He crashed down into a ravine in the Pan American in Mexico, breaking seven ribs. The car was wedged in the ravine; Behra was wedged in the car in terrible pain and it was hours before they got him out.
Somehow the French public never got the idea that he was a bad or reckless driver. They accepted these crashes as proof instead of his colossal bravery. Once Behra posed for a French picture magazine, which used the photo full-page, with arrows pointing to all the various bones Behra had broken in his "pursuit of a world championship for La France." Each arrow told where and how and in what car Behra had crashed. There were so many arrows you could hardly see Behra.
Year after year, having only Trintignant to beat, he won the championship of France. He won more than a dozen minor races, but never a world-championship Grand Prix, and only twice did he co-drive to victory in important sports car races.
As he grew more and more famous in France he became more and more obnoxious to French journalists, who were obliged to write about him anyway. Once, I heard him tell off Andre Bozon of L'Equipe, after Behra had broken down at the Nurburgring. Bozon merely asked if Behra had over-revved his engine. Behra launched into a tirade against Bozon, who took it with good grace, remarking later that he was obliged to go on writing about Behra. The French public did not want to read about Moss or Hawthorn. It wanted to read about its own Jean Behra.
Behra never came close to winning the world championship. He drove factory Gordinis, Maseratis, BRMs, and Ferraris. He was considered an able mechanic who had contributed much to the development of the BRM, but he drove as if he had no notion of what a race car would or would not stand. He murdered his cars.
As each season ended, all of France shook its head sadly. If they would only give Jean a good car.
In 1959 he signed to drive for Ferrari and won his first race in the big red cars, the 200 Miles at Aintree.
A long series of crashes and breakdowns followed. He crashed at Pau. He turned over and was pinned inside the car at the Targa Florio. It was the same kind of crash that had torn off his ear in 1955, he remarked blithely. But this time only some veneer was chipped off the plastic ear he wore in its place, and that didn't matter as he had plenty of other ears at home.
When he came to Reims for the 1959 Grand Prix de l’A.C.F, he had only two world-championship points, for a fifth place in Holland. But France still insisted be would win the world championship, and the program devoted a full page to "Two Great Hopes for the World Championship: Stirling Moss and Jean Behra."
The Ferrari team by this time was sick of him. He was the only one who spoke Italian; he used it to secure better cars for himself, to put forth eloquent alibis for his breakdowns, and to undermine his teammates with the management.
At Reims, where his career can be said to have started seven years before, it now, to all intents and purposes, came to an end.
The great crowd cheered Behra in practice, it cheered the announcement of his name before the race, it cheered him as his car was rolled to the starting line.
The crowd was in love with Jean Behra, because he was French.
But Behra muffed his start. By the time he got under way he was last.
This happens to the best of drivers at times. But Behra felt himself shamed before the hometown crowd, and now he felt that the most important thing was not to win the race, not to save his car, but to put on a show that would redeem his honor.
So he drove furiously. He simply stomped the accelerator into the floor on those long, long Reims straights, and held it there. Lap by lap he gained on the pack, until finally he began passing stragglers, and he moved back among the leaders—and the crowd cheered and cheered.
A Grand Prix race car will stand just so much of such treatment. If the engine is built to turn at 7,500 revs per minute, it will stand 8,500 or 9,000 for a few laps perhaps, not much more. Behra, holding the pedal on the floor, exceeded even that. He simply drove the car until it began smoking. Even then he did not stop. The essential thing to Behra was to sail past the stands smoking, so his fans could see that the car had let him down again.
With smoke pouring out, the engine might still have been saved if Behra had stopped at once. But he had to go by the grandstand first, and by the time he did stop the engine was ruined beyond repair.
Behra, of course, was out of the race. The crowd cheered him as he stood in front of the pits, and he waved back.
When the race ended, Romulo Tavoni, the Ferrari pit manager, accused Behra of over-revving his engine. They argued.
Behra, his honor impugned, slapped Tavoni.
—And was summarily fired by Enzo Ferrari.
Behra tried to explain, then to buy a car from Ferrari to race privately. Ferrari wouldn't see him. Behra wrote a contrite open letter to the French and Italian press. Ferrari still wouldn't see him, or sell him a car.
Behra went to Berlin for the German Grand Prix with two cars of his own, a Porsche sports car for the preliminary Grand Prix of Berlin, and a "Porsche-Behra," a single-seater Porsche that he had altered himself and painted blue, the French racing color. In practice for the German Grand Prix, the Porsche-Behra proved disappointingly slow. But no other factory wanted him. Only France still believed him capable of winning the world championship. Most observers felt that he was now through as a front-line driver.
He was killed August 1, 1959, on the fourth lap of the meaningless Grand Prix of Berlin, a race he had won the year before. Someone later figured out that this was the 13th serious crash of his career. It was certainly more serious than the others. His skull was fractured. So were his neck and most of his ribs.
It was raining. He lost control of the Porsche sports car on the 30-foot-high, bricked banking at one end of the Avus circuit. He had raced onto the banking at about 110 miles an hour. The car had started skidding, and then centrifugal force carried it right up the banking and threw it into the air.
The car went over the banking with its nose pointing toward the sky. It came down heavily on its side on top of the banking and lay there, wrecked, while the race screamed by underneath.
Behra had been thrown out. For an instant he could be seen against the sky with his arms outstretched like a man trying to fly. There were flagpoles ranged along the top of the banking, bearing the flags of the competing nations. One was the French tricolor for Behra. Behra was flung against one of the poles about halfway up. It broke him like a doll, then toppled over.
Behra crashed down among the bushes on the opposite side of the banking, and rolled into the street outside. This area is the paddock, and fellow drivers, waiting to practice for the Grand Prix of Germany, were among the first to reach his side. He was dead.
He was 38, a stubby little man with broad shoulders and a scarred face. He stood about 5 feet 4 inches. He was married and had a 19-year-old son. Mme. Behra and a poodle accompanied him to races.
Six days and three funeral services later
he was finally buried at Nice, his checkered helmet fastened to his coffin. A crowd of 3,000 saw him to his grave.
His first funeral had been at Berlin. The hearse then made its way across to Paris, where a second funeral was held.
The final service in Nice, where he had been born but had not lived for a number of years, surpassed all the others. The little church of St. Barthelemy was filled with flowers that overflowed into the streets and were ranged against the walls all the way to the cemetery. They had come from many parts of the world--from Juan Fangio; from Aston Martin, Porsche, and Maserati; from every automobile, motorcycle, and scooter club in France. There was nothing from Enzo Ferrari.
Every dignitary in Nice was present at the solemn high funeral mass, at which a massed choir sang the requiem. There were five eulogies--by the bishop vicar-general of Nice, by the pastor of the parish, by the presidents of the Nice motorcycle and automobile clubs, and by Jean Medecin, the mayor. In all of these, Behra was seen as a national hero who had given himself up to be sacrificed "pour La France."
Mayor Medecin spoke with tears in his eyes. At the end, he broke down and wept and embraced Behra's son, Jean-Paul, who also wept. Almost everybody wept.
Only one fellow driver followed Behra to the end, Trintignant, who was again the last of the French drivers. Trintignant had passed all the night of Behra's death trying to comfort his widow. Then, without sleep, he had finished fourth in the German Grand Prix the next day.
The day of Behra's final funeral service, Trintignant published an appeal in the sporting newspaper L'Equipe.
He asked the young men of France to defend the colors of their country in international motor races. Only a few of us old-timers are still competing, he wrote, and behind us no youngsters coming up.
Trintignant, then 42, was the owner of a small vineyard and the mayor of the town of Vergeze. He was a busy man, but nonetheless agreed to direct the Club des Mille, the Club of the Thousand, whose object was to find and train future French champions.
CARS AT SPEED - Grand Prix's Golden Age Page 16