Portugal is a poor country, but visually beautiful, very green, with red roofs and steep hills. It has no great cathedrals or castles or battle-fields or even ski resorts to pull tourists, and it exports little except port wine and sardines. It is a country detached from the holocausts that have ravaged Europe, a country cut off, largely ignored—except for one Sunday in August, one Grand Prix race.
Chapter 11.
The Ring
LATE ON A LAZY spring afternoon, when the noise of the race cars is stilled and the birds are loud again in the fields, the Nurburgring seems one of the loveliest and most peaceful drives on earth.
For nearly 15 miles, the black road winds and climbs and falls almost aimlessly through verdant, rolling country. There is an occasional low mountain, and when the road tops it a man can see halfway to France. The air is pure, the sun low and warm, and the colors more intense than the eye is willing to believe.
Then the road plunges suddenly into a corridor through the forest. When it emerges from the gloom there is a meadow, and some blond children leaning on the fence who wave. Probably they have been waving at the race cars all day, but no one, until now, has waved back.
For the Nurburgring at high speed is another thing--exacting, unforgiving, dangerous. It is said among the racers that no second-rate driver or second-rate car could possibly win on the Nurburgring. Indeed, a second-rate driver would be lucky to get around alive.
It is an old circuit, built between 1925 and 1927 by the equivalent of Depression labor at a cost of 15 million marks. The road is narrow, scarcely 26 feet wide. There are blind bends all over the place, some of them at the bottom of long, steep downhill runs. There are in all 174 curves a lap, which must be taken at an average speed of about 90 miles an hour if the driver is to have any chance of winning.
As an additional hazard, the road surface is decidedly rough. Year after year it shakes cars to pieces. Wheels break off and fuel tanks crack.
In some places the road is rumpled due to winter frost. In others, the surface has been chipped away by too much traffic. Maintenance crews resurface it regularly, but they barely manage to stay ahead of the wear and tear.
For the Nurburgring is not used solely for the Thousand Kilometers sports car race in June, and the Grand Prix of Germany in August. Only 35 miles south of Bonn, the course is one of West Germany's premier tourist attractions. For one mark anybody can try a lap—half a million cars have done so since the war. More than one enthusiast has killed himself, too, pretending to be Fangio or Moss in a car that was never meant for high speeds on the Ring.
The Nurburgring is feared and hated by the poorer drivers. The better ones curse its bumps, which send the cars flying when they most need to be going flat out. But they love it all the same, regarding it as the supreme test of driving skill.
It is a course for the virtuoso, like Fangio, who broke the lap record 10 times in the Grand Prix of Germany in 1957, dropping it, finally, more than 11 seconds. Fangio had made a pit stop and the Ferraris of Hawthorn and Coffins had assumed a seemingly unassailable lead. Fangio's assault overpowered them both. It was probably the greatest race of his career, and the greatest ever fought at Nurburgring. People still talk about it.
Inside the Ring, high on a lonely hill, the ancient castle of the counts of Nurburg seems to brood over all this speed. Except for the big cars, this part of Germany has not changed much since feudal times. Peasant women work the fields with the men, often on their hands and knees. Red deer and wild boar roam the forests. The trees grow tall and straight and the forest floor is matted with pine needles.
It is a country popular with campers and hikers, of whom there are a great number in Germany. In a 50-mile drive one passes dozens along the road, most wearing leather shorts and carrying heavy packs on their backs. During the May race week, they pitch their tents by the thousands in the forests and meadows inside the Ring. Along the road, the yellow forsythia is in bloom and once the cars have stopped for the day it is a lovely, quiet place to camp. Then, when race day dawns, they have only to step outside their tents to watch—and hear—the race cars screaming by.
Every day during race week, as the afternoon begins to fade and twilight comes on, 50 or more cars will be lined up at the entrance to the Ring, waiting impatiently for practice to end. As soon as it does, their drivers charge out onto the circuit and begin whooshing round bends in Volkswagens and Renaults at 50 or 60 miles an hour, many of them crouched over the wheel, grinning like fiends, thrilled with what they imagine to be break-neck speed.
One evening recently, one of these individuals suddenly spied a Ferrari in his rearview mirror. It was only there an instant. Then there was a loud VROOM! The Ferrari burst by and disappeared around the next turn. Minutes later a second Ferrari passed him as explosively as the first, and the air disturbance behind it left the little Volkswagen quivering. The Volkswagen driver (myself) was so shaken that he had to pull over and wait for his heart to stop pounding.
The Ferrari sports cars in this case belonged to Olivier Gendebien and Tony Brooks. They had waited all afternoon for mechanics to change unsatisfactory springing in the cars, springing being responsible for a wild spin that earlier had nearly killed teammate Phil Hill. Sweaty, dirty, they had waited and waited, while the hours of practice ticked away and the mechanics worked on. It was nearly dark when the change had been made. It did not matter that the Ring by then was littered by amateurs, nor that the two drivers longed for hot showers and dinner; the cars had to be tested.
Professional drivers, at least the current crop, are a dedicated lot. The dedication is as much to staying alive as to winning races. They work at their trade all the time, and have little time or energy left over for wine, women, and song. They are so preoccupied with the problems of their cars and the circuit that they often are dull company.
The same night that Gendebien and Brooks tested their Ferraris in the twilight, Hill contrived to do a lap in the dark in his own Porsche coupe before going off to bed at ten-thirty.
He had talked at dinner about his hair-raising spin. He had lost the Ferrari at 100 miles an hour and had spun into a thick hedge, damaging the car but not himself. "I had a guilt complex all the way back to the pits." He complained about the handling of the Ferrari that steered, he said, like a boat.
As we left the restaurant, a horde of small boys demanded his autograph.
"I'm nobody," said Hill.
"You're Phil Hill," they chorused.
"No I'm not," asserted Hill firmly. He slid into his car and drove off. Beside him, I said nothing. "Well, you can't expect me to stand there and sign a hundred autographs," said Hill guiltily.
"I didn't say anything."
"They'd only throw them away tomorrow anyway." We drove through the streets of Adenau, nearest village to the Ring.
"When this race is over I'm going off for a week by myself and forget about cars," muttered Hill.
He was staying at the Sporthotel, which faces the pits at the Nurburgring itself. It is possible to drive from Adenau to the Sporthotel by public roads, but now Hill swung the wheel around and headed for the nearest entry to the Ring.
"Might as well do a lap," he said.
As we swung out onto the Ring, Hill said, "It's a good idea to go around at night. Sometimes you can notice things you didn't notice in the daytime."
As we drove, he pointed out where Marimon had gone off in 1954, and where Peter Collins was killed in 1958.
"After Collins crashed," said Hill, "some idiot climbed down to the wreck and tried the brake pedal with his hand. According to him the pedal went right into the floor. This was supposed to prove that Collins was killed not through his own fault, but because his brakes failed. It was supposed to be consolation for his family and his wife.
"I think that kind of reasoning is horrible. He knew his brakes were fading, that soon he would have none. But he didn't slow down. He made a mistake, and it killed him. If you believe that mechanical failure causes all the
accidents, then we drivers are not taking calculated risks, we are all playing a game of Russian roulette, waiting around for something sooner or later to kill us.
"Collins made a mistake, that's all. I'd rather believe he was killed through his own mistake, rather than somebody else's, wouldn't you?"
Now he was silent, concentrating on his driving. He was moving very fast, each twist or rise long ago committed to memory, Hill was never caught by surprise, never entered a bend too fast, obviously anticipating each bend before he came to it. He was using all of the road, almost brushing the high hedges bordering one side of the road in order to point the car through the next curve on the fastest possible line.
It was skill brought to perfection through practice. Like all the others, Hill has studied the Nurburgring from every angle. He even is an expert on its surface, knowing exactly where that surface is likely to melt from sun and churning tires during the next day's race, and how much his own lap speeds must drop when it does. That afternoon someone had told him that the long straight nearing the pits was smoother on the left than the right, and now in the dark he tried it, decided the information was true, and incorporated it into his plans for tomorrow.
The Thousand Kilometers of 1959 was won by Stirling Moss and Jack Fairman, a 46-year-old amateur. Fairman drove eight laps, a total of about an hour and twenty minutes, plus the seven minutes it took him to lever the car back onto the road with the branch of a tree after making an excursion into the forest.
Moss drove 37 laps, or six hours and ten minutes. Twice he handed Fairman juicy leads, which Fairman dissipated. The third time that Moss took over the lone green Aston Martin he rode it furiously to the end, charging past car after car, blazing at last past Phil Hill. Hill, his Ferrari faster but less agile (it still steered like a boat, he said), simply was overwhelmed by Moss.
This is the sort of thing that has made Moss so popular in his own country. He is a virtuoso among drivers. And he drives British green. For as long as the car holds up, he outdrives anybody. And if the car should buckle under such strain—why, that's not Moss' fault, is it? Or so the public reasons.
In any case, at some point during this race, while Moss was blasting by slower cars, he evidently nicked a car driven by one Fausto Meyrat, a Swiss amateur.
Meyrat spun round and round, then crashed off the road into a tree. He died a few hours later.
Meyrat's wife charged Moss with "negligent killing." Coblenz police opened an inquiry.
Moss said he was "staggered" by the charge. "I drive always with some thought for the other fellow. Without that, none of us would live very long."
Then he added coldly: "If an inexperienced driver involves you in an accident and then you get sued, the whole principle is wrong. I am terribly sorry for Meyrat's widow. But if you allow your husband to drive in a race, you must expect, when he makes a mistake, to bear the consequences."
Moss ordered his lawyers to "thrash" the whole thing out. Who was Meyrat? What was he doing in such a race? How often had he raced before?
At stake, Moss asserted, were his own reputation and the future of motor racing. "I can't be blamed for this man's death."
While the charge still hung over him, Moss also lashed out at other races, such as Le Mans and Sebring, in which raw amateurs such as Meyrat are allowed, encouraged even, to race against pros.
"To my mind," Moss said, "only thirty drivers in the world are skilled enough to race at Le Mans or the Nurburgring. But one-hundred-twenty drivers turn up every time. Organizers receive them gladly."
The charge of negligent killing against Stirling Moss was dropped for lack of evidence, or perhaps squashed by the Automobile Club of Germany (the race organizer); it is difficult to say which.
In any case, the sports car races continue, amateurs against pros, 60-horsepower Renault Dauphines against 300-horsepower, 175-mile-an-hour Ferraris. It doesn't make sense, but it goes on, and more and more famous drivers quietly refuse to enter these races: Jack Brabham, Tony Brooks, Roy Salvador, Maurice Trintignant, and others avoid them whenever possible.
Few pros have been killed in them, but amateurs often are, partly because they have underestimated the physical strain of endurance races. The Thousand Kilometers at Nurburgring lasts seven and a half hours, and is the shortest of the world-championship sports-car races. A man who does not race cars for a living is not used to sitting hunched over a steering wheel for long periods, concentration at an intense pitch, feet dancing from clutch to brake to accelerator, hands gripping the wheel, eyes peering ahead, brain working frantically to relate speed and distance to the angle of the next corner. He gets tired. And when he gets tired, more often than not, he suddenly does not react fast enough, and so he crashes.
In 1956, three kilometers from the end of the Nurburgring race, an amateur crashed off the road and was killed. In 1958, one crashed and was killed after the finish—he had been overtaking another car on the finishing straight, had not seen the checkered flag and thus did not realize that the race was over. There were no skid marks where he went off, indicating that he may have fainted from heat and fatigue, or had reached such a comatose state that he simply sailed off the road without reacting fast enough to do anything about it.
"It's important," Phil Hill said once, "that your muscles be developed beyond any requirements that are apt to be made. If your shoulders get tired and you have to lunge at the wheel or at the brakes, then you must slow down."
Many race drivers, Hill and Fangio among them, train like any other athlete. They watch their diet, get plenty of sleep, perform calisthenics.
In addition to the normal fatigue of intensely fast driving, a race driver is severely jounced by the hard springing of his car. Even in the best of cars he is cooked by the engine, and inhales a certain amount of soporific fumes. The noise is appalling. All drivers use wax ear plugs; nonetheless, all that noise is tiring too. They are tossed about by centrifugal force, and pelted by stones tossed up by the cars in front.
For all of these reasons, skill aside, amateurs do not belong in races such as the Thousand Kilometers. They simply cannot be expected to be strong enough. It is a little like permitting a man who runs for a bus every morning to enter a foot race against four-minute milers. Any man can drive away in a Porsche or Ferrari, but to race it for seven hours at the Nurburgring is another matter.
The Thousand Kilometers race is of recent origin—it was born in 1953, and became a regular world-championship event only in 1956. It has been a very interesting race lately, due to Moss and to the duration itself. Seven hours is not normally long enough for one car to get detached from the pack, and there is the constant excitement of driver changes and pit stops for fuel, tires, and repairs. Pit stops are a thing of the past in most Grands Prix, which are now raced on one set of tires by a single driver. The pit stop remains, however, a thing of excitement; one compares the agility and work of the various crews; one clocks each stop in turn; one watches fumbled stops wiping out leads—it is all very exciting and the Nurburgring is one of the best places for it.
Crowds at the Thousand Kilometers sometimes exceed 200,000, who spill out all over the circuit. There are many excellent views of race cars in difficult corners where skills and tactics can be admired and compared. However, the pit straight is not one of them, as it is very, very long. By the time the cars make the U-turn to start back behind the pits, they are nearly out of sight. The second U-turn, which sends the cars away from the pits and down the hill into the circuit, is hidden by embankments. But one is permitted to wander around, happily, and with a little walking one can watch the race from the pit straight, then from various other nearby turns.
As for accommodations, the Sporthotel facing the pits is generally reserved for the drivers and teams. Adenau, the nearest town, has a hotel or two that are usually booked solid by journalists and officials. However, the race management always handles hundreds of rooms in nearby farmhouses, schools, and even inns in not-too-distant villages.
Getting away from the Ring after the race may be a problem, as there are thousands of jackbooted police standing a hundred yards apart for miles in all directions. These individuals will send you down the road in whatever direction you are pointed, regardless of where you want to go. Nothing is gained by trying to reason with them. Either ignore them completely, making as if to run down any who block your road; or else flash important-looking documents at them, look grim, and don't wait for permission, just barge on as if there were no question in your mind about their according it. The first of these methods is very effective; one receives the impression that no German ever questions a policeman, and that they are so nonplussed when disobeyed that they sputter and gape and let you get away. The second is also effective, as the German cop believes in documents very deeply. Your main trump, of course, is being a foreigner driving a car with foreign plates. It might not be wise to try this if you are German.
Inevitably, the uniforms at the Nurburgring remind one of an earlier tune. The uniforms are green now. They were brown then, and the men in them cheered lustily for the great white cars of the Fatherland, and sang "Deutschland Uber Alles" when the trophy was presented to whatever German driver finally won.
The prewar Mercedes and Auto-Unions were, in many ways, the ultimate in Grand Prix design, execution, and organization.
If times had stayed "normal," the German cars might have gone on winning forever, for no other marque has ever put as much time, energy, and soul into its Grand Prix program. One could admire the German effort without reservation if only the goal of that program had been sport—the purity and excitement of the race. Unfortunately, it was not. The cars were intended to prove the superiority of the master race. The design problems solved in their construction were to be applied to plane and tank engines, and the glory won was propaganda fodder.
CARS AT SPEED - Grand Prix's Golden Age Page 21