CARS AT SPEED - Grand Prix's Golden Age

by Daley, Robert

  The Grand Prix was moved there in 1959, apparently because of the political status of the city—to show West Berliners in a sporting way that they are truly a part of the Federal Republic, and to show off the glories of the West in front of presumably envious East Berliners.

  Such motives may be noble, but racing on the Avus is not. The Avus is a travesty of a road-racing circuit. Its use for the 1959 German Grand Prix indicates only that motor racing and politics are not only strange bedfellows, but probably permanent ones. Whatever the political crisis, motor racing seems destined to be bent to serve it.

  Chapter 12.

  The Death Circuit

  COLLINS WAS DEAD, but the Grand Prix season went on. Thanks to the chap who climbed down and tested the brakes by sticking his hand into the wreck and pushing the pedal, it began to be widely circulated that Collins bad died because his brakes failed. It was probably true that his brakes had faded to practically nothing, for the accident happened late in the race, and all the other Ferraris suffered brake failure that day.

  The more hysterical in the crowd wanted to blame Enzo Ferrari. He had sent Collins out in a car with inferior brakes. Every other marque had gone over to disc brakes, and it was now accepted in racing that they gave superior stopping power. But disc brakes were British in origin. Ferrari had refused them for his cars. Year after year he had conducted expensive experiments on drum brakes, certain that they gave more braking area, and that the problem of overheating and fading could be got round if he could just find some way….

  It does not seem fair to blame Ferrari for rejecting disc brakes for his cars, or for Collins' death. Collins had probably had ample warning that his brakes were going, or gone. And Ferrari, convinced that his own concept would be proved right, cannot be blamed for pushing his experiments to the limit, for believing that his own instinct was right, though the world believed him wrong. Had he not encountered such opposition dozens of times in the past? Had he not persevered in the face of it and, eventually, succeeded? How could he be expected to back off in this matter of brakes? If he had been the type of man who had backed off, the world would never have heard of him.

  Nonetheless, Hawthorn, now five points in the lead for the driver's world championship, wanted disc brakes fitted to his car in time for the Grand Prix of Italy at Monza. He phoned Ferrari. Collins had owned a Ferrari coupe. It was blue, beautiful, and expensive. Collins had driven it to England to have disc brakes installed, then had driven it back to Modena, just before his death, to let Ferrari and his engineers have a look at the new brakes.

  The car was still there. Hawthorn begged Ferrari to put its disc brakes on Hawthorn's Grand Prix car, in time for the Grand Prix of Italy. Ferrari agreed.

  Louise Collins, a widow at 25, came down to Modena. She believed she had found a buyer and was about to sell the car. Hawthorn, embarrassed, had to explain to her that he had borrowed its brakes.

  Louise, wan and in mourning, said she understood, that it was what Peter would have wanted.

  Collins was the fifth Ferrari contract driver to be killed since 1955. If Ferrari could not be blamed for Collins' brake failure, or for citizens cut down by his cars in Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, and the Mille Miglia (he had argued for better crowd control as loudly as anyone), there was lots he could be blamed for.

  He could be blamed for filling his team with men who, for one reason or another, obeyed an urge to drive faster than was safe. If Collins drove that way out of a desire to please, Portago had had another reason: "I like the feeling of fear," he said once. "After a while you get to be an addict and have to have it." Castellotti, called by Moss "really one of the most daring drivers," would pass other cars on the verge in a shower of stones, grinning like a fiend. And Musso drove fast because he was the last of the Italians and believed that national honor rested on him alone.

  Ferrari chose these men and others like them because such drivers were most likely to win races (or kill themselves trying). Each year he hired six drivers for three, or at the most four cars, then sat back and watched the regulars pushing to the limit to stay ahead of the reserves. "I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of those boys," said Harry Schell. "Too much competition." Moss was in essential agreement: "Ferrari has too many drivers." And Schell added, "When you drive for Ferrari you are headed one way only: for that little box under the ground."

  Ferrari's life is his cars. He works 12 to 15 hours a day, Sundays included. "A man has no need of entertainment, which only distracts him from his duty," he told me. "Better to concentrate on that duty. If a man has his duty, that is enough."

  He lives only for the perfection of the racing automobile, the perfection of the breed. He is happiest when losing, faced by an immediate challenge, a problem to get round. When it is suggested that there is nothing further to win, he replies coldly: "There is always something to learn. One never stops learning. Particularly when one is losing. When one loses one knows what has to be done. When one wins one is never sure."

  Why does he race? For glory, money, prestige?

  "I race because it amuses me," he says. "Why else would a man dispute with race organizers, sponsors, drivers, the press? Why else would a man work 12, 15 hours a day? But if a man loves something enough, no sacrifice is too great."

  Ferrari never goes to races. Hawthorn once said: "He does not go because he is afraid for us." But it was not a fatal crash that caused Ferrari to quit going to races. It was a driver with an unassailable lead in the 1936 Grand Prix de France, who ignored Ferrari's frantic signals to slow down, went for the lap record instead, broke the engine, and lost the race.

  "When a man has taken something," Ferrari says, "some material and, with his own two hands, transformed it into something else, he has made not a machine out of it, but a soul, a living breathing soul. Well, then, he goes to a race and he hears this soul which he has created, hears it being mistreated, hears that it is not going right—" Ferrari places his hand over his heart and says, "It makes a man suffer, here. A man cannot bear such things. And so I do not go to races because I suffer too much there."

  He is a tall, heavy man, 61 years old, with iron-gray hair, a long nose, a thin ascetic mouth, and a limp handshake. His manner is austere.

  I asked: "You mean you suffer too much for the car, not the driver?" And the answer came: "The driver, too, of course."

  One of Ferrari's drivers, Phil Hill, had been present at the interview. As we left the office, Hill said soberly: "I never thought he would say such a thing in front of a driver. I guess we like to think he loves us because we are all so brave and drive so fast. But deep down I suppose all of us knew he cares more about his cars than he does about us."

  The Ferrari legend persists. He is a speed-bewitched recluse who loves his drivers like sons. When they die he often declares publicly, in a voice husky with grief, that he is abandoning racing. Sometimes he calls in all his cars to prove it.

  When Louise Collins came to Modena after Peter's death, Ferrari began to tell her how much he had loved Peter. Peter had been his favorite.

  Louise started to weep. Ferrari began weeping himself. The Grand Prix of Italy (for which Peter's disc brakes had been transferred to Hawthorn's car) would be his last race. He would run it in honor of Peter Collins. He would end his long absence from races and Louise should sit beside him in a box at Monza and all the world would know he was abandoning racing because of the death of Peter Collins.

  Here the legend begins to run afoul of the facts. Despite all the public grief, Ferrari continues to choose the same type of driver as, for instance, the late Jean Behra (the world's foremost survivor of crashes), in 1959. The implacable pressuring of drivers goes on and on. When they die he may call in all his cars and publicly abandon racing, but he does not bother to go to their funerals, even when the funerals are nearby, such as Musso's in Rome, and the decision about abandoning is always reconsidered in time for the next race.

  As for the 1958 Grand Prix of Italy, which he had told Louise Col
lins would be his last race (there were real tears in his eyes as he told her), and to which he had invited her as his guest—Ferrari never turned up for that race at all.

  The First World War seemed to have ended motor racing once and for all; it was even believed that the coming sport was airplane racing.

  But out of the ruin of the Great War, two motor racing circuits were built, and perhaps it may be claimed that they saved the sport for modem times. The year was 1921. The circuits were Montlhery near Paris, and Monza, near Milan. If it is true that the sport of motor racing has often tried to shoot itself in the head in the years since, it is also true that never was it so shaky as in those years following 1918.

  Montlhery still exists, with its speed banking, its tricky road circuit leading off the banking, and then back onto it again. But major races do not go there anymore; no one seems to know why. Nowadays Montlhery is in use almost every day of the week, the scene of rallies, motorcycle races, bike races, and assaults on meaningless records like "most miles motored in 17 hours in the rain by a family saloon car." The type of car changes, also the distance, or the time limits, which may be a week, a month, or a year. The inevitable result does not change: a full-page ad in motoring journals by whichever car or fuel company sponsored the nonsense in the first place.

  On the other hand, almost every year since 1922, Monza has been the scene of the Italian Grand Prix. Monza helped save the sport in the early days, then many times nearly killed it again.

  It looks like the least ominous circuit in Europe. The circuit, shaped roughly like a boomerang, is 3.6 miles around, and the lap record for Grand Prix cars is nearly 130 miles an hour. It is a very fast circuit. The road is wide, and is flanked on either side by wide verges. There are no curbs or telegraph poles to whack into if you leave the road. There is, in many places, a steel-banded guard rail set way back from the road that looks capable of stopping a runaway car without slaughtering its driver. The circuit is completely flat. Crowd control is excellent. Nor has there been any need (up to now, at least) for organizers to insinuate the danger of an unskilled Italian into the lineup in order to stimulate crowd interest; the best drivers in the race were usually Italian, and the fastest cars too. Furthermore, the weather in northern Italy in September is usually perfect; no rain, cool, clear.

  Monza, however, lacks atmosphere. The turns at the ends of the boomerang are slow, and you can't see either one from the grandstand fronting the pits. The outside curve in the middle of the boomerang (called the Curva Grande) is very fast and tricky, but from the main grandstand you can see none of it, because that is where the road disappears into the forest. The forest also conceals completely the inside curve of the boomerang, called Curva Ascari.

  All you can see is a hundred yards of straight behind the pits, and the long, 10-lane-wide straight in front of the pits. The cars may be going very fast indeed, but speed is not exciting unless there is something to compare it to. At Monza in a Grand Prix, all cars are circulating at nearly the same speed, and even when 10 of them go by you at 150 miles per hour it is not very thrilling.

  Considering the pit area as the hub of the race, it is too far to walk to other corners and there would be no real vantage point once you got there, the circuit being flat. Nor is there any point from which you can see several curves at once.

  Monza today lacks a sense of danger, of men doing something with courage and skill that is very difficult to do. I am not by any means arguing for unsafe circuits, but rather for circuits like Zandvoort or Monte Carlo, which give spectators a feeling for what a delicate and strenuous job it is to keep a racing car on the road. In my opinion, this Monza lacks.

  Few racing circuits anywhere can match Monza's record in blood. One could compile a representative who-was-who in motor racing, just by cataloging the famous drivers who crashed and died there: Enrico Giaccone, Ugo Sivocci, Count Zborowski, and Emilio Materassi, who plowed into the crowd in 1928 and wiped out 28 persons, including himself. The death of Luigi Arcangeli, an Alfa Romeo driver, in 1931, added nothing to Monza's reputation. It was already known as the "Circuit of Death."

  Worse was to come. Two races were scheduled for September 10, 1933. In the morning, the weather being warm and clear, Luigi Fagioli won the Grand Prix of Italy for Alfa Romeo, at an average speed of 108 miles an hour. Lunchtime came. The big crowd, excited and gay, broke out picnic lunches and waited for the Grand Prix of Monza to be run that afternoon. Then it began to rain.

  There were to be three heats and a final. Before the second heat, the drivers were warned that there was a pool of oil on the long curve. Officials had tried to dean it up and now it was partially covered by sand. The second heat began, the rain still coming down over the dark forests of Monza. Probably the oil streak, partially covered with sand, was invisible as the drivers came round the bend, on the first lap in the rain.

  Giuseppe Campari, fat, jolly, 42 years old, was fighting it out with Mario Borzacchini. Campari had been around a long time and had won dozens of races. Borzacchini was young, small, and shy.

  The two of them came into the long curve wheel-to-wheel, going at terrific speed. Perhaps in the heat of the struggle they forgot about the oil, perhaps they were looking for it but did not see it. One car touched the other, ever so slightly, and both plunged off the road out of control. Campari and Borzacchini were killed instantly.

  In spite of this, the rest of the race was to be run. There was not a sound as cars were pushed into place for the final. A deathly silence hung over Monza. Graf Czaykowski had won the first heat, Marcel Lehoux the third. These were the favorites.

  Everyone waited nervously for the final to start. Lehoux came over to Czaykowski's car.

  "There has been enough tragedy," he said. "No one can push us now except ourselves. I suggest we drive carefully until the final laps. I suggest we race only the final laps. I feel that something terrible is going to happen."

  But Czaykowski was hungry for victory. Lehoux had won often on many circuits. Czaykowski's victories numbered only two or three, and never had he won a race as important as this one. He shook his head.

  "Well then—" said Lehoux, licking his lips. He turned and went back to his car.

  The race started, a dogfight between the two Bugattis of Czaykowski and Lehoux, first one, then the other in the lead. The strain was too much for Czaykowski's engine, which suddenly blew up, spewing flaming gasoline over the cockpit. Blinded by flames, Czaykowski flew off the road on the same turn where Campari and Borzacchini had already crashed. He was dead before rescuers got to him.

  Lehoux went on to win the race. No one noticed. That night Campari, Borzacchini, and Czaykowski lay in state in the Fascio house. There were branches of silver fir trees on the walls and the room was stuffed with flowers. The crowd flowed slowly past the three coffins. Borzacchini, so small and timid, was a poor boy who had found in the fast cars an escape from the squalor that would have been his life. He had won the Mille Miglia. He had won at Tripoli. He was often highly placed now, and the other drivers kidded him about the satchel he always carried with him. Did it hold his money? Going along with the joke, Borzacchini declared it did. His great pleasure, he said, was to lock himself in his room, close the shutters, count his money, and then, when it was all stacked neatly in front of him, turn on the fan and dance amid thousand-lire notes.

  Campari, big and fat, had wedged himself with difficulty into the cockpit of the P.3 Alfa Romeo that was to kill him. The prize was an elaborate stopwatch donated by Pirelli tires. Campari had told his mechanic he wanted two of the watches at least, and to have a whole chicken ready for him when the race was over, he was going to finish it powerful hungry.

  And Czaykowski, determined to win if he could, who had refused Lehoux's offer.

  The Second World War ended. Out of the shambles of ravaged Italy rose the new Alfa Romeos, new Maseratis, and—noticed by hardly anyone at first—a new marque called Ferrari. The Monza course was revamped once more, and its present shape
(first arranged in 1938) was settled.

  Most of the Italian drivers of the epoch were those who had raced before the war—some of them long before the war. There were Villoresi, Farina, Taruffi, and the elderly Fagioli. Taruffi and Fagioli had white hair. Farina won the first "world championship" in 1950; Villoresi had a pupil named Alberto Ascari, and was never seen without him.

  The young Ascari filled the burning need of an Italy hungry for a hero. He was national champion as early as 1949, and world champion twice in 1952 and 1953. He had a fat face and a long salami of a nose and the fans who idolized him called him "Ciccio," which means "Chubby." He was a cold, analytical racing machine; he won everywhere, and he paid for such concentration with stomach trouble that ended in ulcers. How they loved Ciccio in Italy, how they admired him!

  Ascari, too, was killed at Monza, inexplicably, in practice in 1955, at the curve that now carries his name. This curve, the inside bend of the boomerang, is so mild it can be taken flat out under normal conditions—certainly on a sunny May afternoon in the sports Ferrari Ascari was driving.

  It was an eerie accident. Ascari came up from his home at Milan, 10 miles south, just to see what was going on. It was Thursday, four days after he had crashed into the harbor at Monte Carlo. He joked with Eugenio Castellotti and the crew testing the Ferrari, then remarked that he would like to take the car out, wanted to see if his nerve had been affected. He joked that he was not wearing his lucky blue T-shirt, or his regular blue helmet. Castellotti laughed and handed Ascari his own helmet. It fit, and Ascari started the engine and motored off.

  He was alone on the circuit. He was not even driving very fast when he came into a simple bend and the car skidded out of control, rolled over, and crushed him. No one knows how or why, and most drivers prefer not to think about it at all. Men traveling at 170 miles an hour want to believe in the steel and power under them. They do not want to know about the mysterious and the bizarre.