But when Ulmann used this same line the following year, Ferrari accused him of breaking his promise. Ferrari angrily withdrew all his cars, and even barred his drivers from participating. Porsche did the same thing for the same reason.
There has also been dissatisfaction among American sports car enthusiasts with Sebring as a site. Only 7,000 (the "official" estimate) or fewer came to watch the 1959 American Grand Prix, and the 1960 Twelve Hours was a disappointment too.
By shifting the 1960 Grand Prix from Sebring to Riverside, California, Ulmann hoped to bolster the Grand Prix, to inflate it out of all resemblance to the puny maiden effort of 1959 at Sebring. Southern California was sports-car mad and seemed sure to take to Grand Prix racing with enthusiasm. The population center from which Riverside draws (including Los Angeles, about 60 miles away), numbers something like four million people.
But this race, too, was a financial flop; crowd estimates ranged from 7,000 to a rather wistful 25,000. In any case, the crowd was much smaller than other races had drawn there. Ulmann had hoped for at least 60,000. But he refused to promote in the Southern California style; thus he got no help from the Los Angeles papers, which had staged their own $20,000 sports-car race at Riverside the month before. Without high-priced press agents and press agentry, the Grand Prix never seemed much of a lure. People out there are used to hoopla, and Ulmann refused to give them any.
The race itself was brisk, without being too exciting. Moss won it going away, after Brabham had stopped twice to stanch a fuel leak. Moss won by so much that he was waving at the fans in the turn 6-7 grandstand during all the last half of the race.
The world championship having already fallen to Brabham, Ferrari had declined to send a team. This, too, detracted from the appeal of the race. Ulmann had bad luck all around.
The Riverside circuit was exciting enough, but that was all. The circuit, at the edge of the desert, is shaped something like a great h. It is 3.2 miles per lap, and on it Grand Prix cars average about 100 miles an hour. It has one mile-long straight that runs down a gentle hill, then up again, for this part of the desert is undulating. At the end of the straight there is a wide hairpin, the road being slightly banked so that cars take the hairpin fairly fast. Then the road sweeps off to the left, the curve very long and fast. The road begins to wiggle uphill into another, sharper hairpin. Here there are grandstands. Then comes a quarter-mile downhill straight, another hairpin, and a quarter-mile uphill sweeping curve back into the main straight again.
There are no trees, curbs, or buildings to hit, but one does not miss them here as one does at airport circuits. This, after all, is the desert, and the topography is normal desert topography. One does not feel that the cars have been divorced from the country, as at airports. The Grand Prix at Riverside is a race over undulating desert road, not over a transparently artificial airport runway.
It seems to be an axiom of motor racing that along the road to national supremacy the circuits come first, then the drivers, then the cars. This was seen in Britain: circuits like Silverstone and Goodwood came first, were followed by the young British drivers (Moss, Collins, Hawthorn, etc.), and then by the cars (Vanwall, Cooper, B.R.M.).
If this is so, American supremacy in international motor racing may be only a few years off. The circuits have been there quite some time now, and the drivers (Hill, Gregory, Gurney, Shelby) are among the dozen fastest in the world. Can the cars be so far behind?
The Swedish driver Jo Bonnier once stayed with Juan Manuel Fangio at Fangio's summer place at Mar del Plata, Argentina. "The popularity of the man is fantastic," reported Bonnier. "One night we went to a night club. As soon as Fangio came in, the show stopped and everybody in the place stood up and started applauding him. They applauded him all the way to his seat. It was fantastic. I can't think of any other country where a driver is so much a hero that that would happen, can you?"
Not in America at any rate. A man like Phil Hill is stared at in the street in Modena, Italy, but he can go anywhere he likes in his own country without being recognized. He is rarely even asked by ad agencies to endorse products; his name is not considered important enough.
The fact is that no one knows very much about the American drivers. Sebring, Florida, for all its faults, is far more notorious than any of the men who have driven there.
Masten Gregory is 28 years old but looks much younger. He is small, speaks very slowly and modestly, wears glasses, is the father of four children, and has survived more crashes in the last six years than any living driver of race cars.
To break down in a Grand Prix is, for Gregory, a most prosaic ending to a race. Far more normal is the exit he made at Silverstone in 1959--he jumped out of his Jaguar an instant before it crashed into a wall at 80 miles an hour. He got off without a scratch. The car was demolished. At Goodwood that same summer he bailed out again, breaking his leg this time. The car was again demolished.
Once, in Caracas, he entered a bend too fast, slid sideways across the road, struck sandbags protecting a bridge, bounced into the air, and came down upside down. That time, too, he had attempted to abandon the car in midair, but something caught and he was still in the cockpit, trapped, when the car came down on its back.
Despite the danger of fire, Gregory was calm as always. He kicked away a door panel and scrambled out.
In Gregory's scale of values, speed rates above discretion, and crashes do not slow him down. At the Nurburgring in 1958, he lost a wheel at speed and slewed into the forest, knocking down bushes and small trees. He came to no harm personally and did not appear sobered by the experience.
At the Nurburgring again for the 1960 Grand Prix, Gregory's Cooper flipped three times while making its way sideways into the forest. This did not seem to shake him either.
Gregory, who is from Kansas City, began hopping up old cars and entering them in drag races while still a teenager. At 19, having inherited a one-fifth interest in his father's insurance business, he married Louella Simpson and bought a racing Allard.
By the time their first child was born in 1952, Gregory had bought and raced four high-speed cars. One of them was a C-type Jaguar that he soon crashed; the car burned briskly for a long time. Gregory bought another the same day.
He later bought a Ferrari for something over $11,000, decided he didn't like it, and sold it for $4,000. When not buying or racing his cars, he had them flown around the country to expensive tune-up specialists. Altogether, those first two years cost him about $50,000.
In 1954 he took his growing family to Europe, settled in Rome, bought a new Ferrari, and began to race on the Continental circuits.
He seems to have been one of the best customers the Ferrari factory ever had. The next year he bought still another one, and with it began beating team drivers and team cars fairly regularly. He was third at Bari, Italy; third at the Nurburgring; first at Lisbon; and first in class in the Tourist Trophy.
By 1957, he had progressed so far that he finished fifth for the driver's world championship behind Fangio, Moss, Musso, and Hawthorn, although that year he was driving a two-year-old private Maserati against factory-tuned cars.
Gregory came up so fast that he was driving big cars without any experience in small ones. This left gaps in his technique, which he may or may not realize, and which partly explains why he enters more than his share of curves too fast.
As the years passed, he got faster and faster. He also kept on crashing.
For a while the Gregorys lived in a villa in Rome, and Louella, who looks even younger than Masten, accompanied him to most races. But in the middle of 1959, Louella abruptly took the children, left for home, and filed suit for divorce, charging mental cruelty.
"She just couldn't stand it any longer," remarked a friend. "Every day she expected to receive a telegram saying Masten was dead."
Masten Gregory has no thought that is not dedicated to driving fast. The dangers involved he simply ignores.
"Motor racing is a job, like any other job," he
says. "If you want to do well at it you've got to be single-minded. I can't afford to think about the risks."
The people around motor racing shake their heads grimly whenever they speak of him. To them it seems just a matter of time.
Harry Schell was Gregory's diametric opposite. Schell was light-hearted, debonair, a playboy. Everybody liked him. Stirling Moss once described how races start: "When the flag comes down you let in the clutch and go. Unless you are Harry Schell, in which case you let in the clutch and go about three seconds before anybody else."
It is said in racing that there are old drivers and there are bold drivers, but there are no old bold drivers.
Schell seemed proof of this. At 39, he had been racing 14 years. Most of the men he raced against just after the war were dead. But Harry was alive. He owned an expensive Mercedes sedan; two race cars of his own; a villa near Deauville, France; a 25-foot cabin cruiser on the Riviera; and a fat bank account.
It was 11 years before he had his first accident—a car spun in front of him in Venezuela and he couldn't avoid it. His only other crash up to 1960 was caused when another driver rammed him (von Trips at Monza in 1958), possibly because Harry was going too slowly.
Schell was rarely serious; one received the impression that he considered life a lark. But he sounded serious when he said feelingly:
"With me racing is a business. I don't take chances."
With Harry Schell caution came first.
Once, at Monte Carlo, engine trouble delayed him at the pits. When he rejoined the race he was miles behind and started to hurry, trying to catch up.
"Suddenly I realized what I was doing. I said to myself, ''You fool, what are you trying to do? You might break your engine. You might crash. You might kill yourself. For what? To finish fifth instead of sixth? Slow down.'"
The years passed, and Harry Schell remained healthy. He had never won a major race, though he had been second "about 40 times." Plenty of factories employed him nonetheless: Gordini, Maserati, Ferrari, Vanwall, and BRM, and he earned about $20,000 a year.
He did not go fast enough. If drivers can be divided into chargers and strokers, Schell was definitely a stroker. He never tried to dominate life, or even a single race, only to avoid the melee, to go on living well and having laughs.
He was killed at Silverstone one rainy day in May 1960, while practicing in a Cooper. No one knows quite what happened. Perhaps he tried to plow through a puddle that was deeper than he thought, the puddle wrenching the wheel out of his hands so that the car got into a skid and shot off the road. This was at Beckett's Corner. There is a brick wall there 18 inches high. The Cooper struck it and flipped. Harry was thrown out. He came down in a welter of bricks and race car and in the impact his neck was neatly broken.
Why was he driving so fast when the rain was pouring down and collecting into miniature lakes all over the circuit?
Schell loved to get a good position on the starting grid. It gave him a laugh to get a better position (positions are accorded by fastest practice laps) than faster drivers or faster cars. At Sebring during the 1959 Grand Prix, he had contrived a front-row spot by steering his car across the grass of the back part of the circuit and rejoining the road farther on. This shortened lap was clocked by unsuspecting time-keepers, and Harry was credited with third-fastest time. If another driver had done this it would have been considered cheating; but Harry did it only for laughs. He was not a contender and did not pretend to be. But when he took his place beside Moss and Brabham at the start of the race, he was happy. Brabham and Moss were laughing. Tony Brooks, who should have been in the front row, was glaring furiously. And Schell knew that his joke had been a great success.
He was a very fast driver when he chose to be, and probably at Silverstone that rainy last afternoon of his life he was driving as fast as he knew how, hoping to get a front-row position and with it another big laugh on Brooks and the rest.
But the puddle tore the wheel out of his hands, and then there were no laughs for anybody.
The death of Harry Schell was a shocking thing. The other drivers, all of them, had wanted to believe that Harry at least could not die. He was easygoing, a playboy, a stroker. If Harry Schell wasn't safe, none of them was.
Nearly a month later at Zandvoort after practice, Maurice Trintignant said: "I can't seem to accept the fact that Harry is dead. I was thinking of him out there today. I can't concentrate on my driving. I can't get Harry out of my mind."
Phil Hill is neither a breakneck nor a playboy, but one who has fulfilled himself as a man through the racing of fast cars.
Hill, from Santa Monica, California, is 33. He has been driving race cars since 1949, at first on tracks near home and, since 1956, for Ferrari.
In the last few years he has been extremely successful, co-driving sports cars to victory at Buenos Aires (twice), Sebring (three times), and Le Mans (twice). Twice he clinched the sports car world championship for Ferrari. In 1960 he won the Italian Grand Prix, the first American to win a major Grand Prix since 1921. Then, in 1961, he became the first American ever to win the driver's world championship.
Yet for a long time he was not sure that driving was what he wanted to do.
"As a child I was awful at sports," he recalls. "I was so bad that the other children cursed every time I came to bat. This did not help me to play better."
An unhappy child, he roamed alone through junkyards, looking at old cars. He read everything he could find on European racing. His grades were average, he learned to play the piano and alto horn, and he had few friends.
At the University of Southern California he still did not know what he wanted in life, and after two years he quit to become a mechanic. As soon as he began racing, he began winning, but this did not help his inferiority complex.
"I always credited the car with winning, not me," he said. He is slim, but muscularly built, 5 feet 10 inches tall, and has always been highly nervous. He was also ashamed of being a racing driver. By 1954 he had developed ulcers and had to quit for the entire season.
"But the strain of inactivity was worse than the strain of driving," he said. "I was compelled to race again."
As soon as he joined Ferrari, both ulcer and inferiority complex disappeared. "Suddenly I saw that here was a respectable way to make a living.
"I never realized until then how strongly I had felt this lack of conformity as far as my occupation was concerned. A race driver is highly respected in Europe. In the States he is often considered irrational or some kind of wild man."
Hill has had only one bad accident, having skidded off a cliff during the Pan American road race in Mexico, which he entered four times. He was unscratched. Like all drivers, he knows that death is near. Sometimes he will say that he expects to get killed sooner or later. But he has thought about all this so much that it has no further meaning for him.
"I don't believe in the law of averages," he said once. "A driver makes his own averages."
Most drivers who get the choice of a light helmet or a strong one will choose the light one every time. "The way I figure it," said Hill, "if you hit something hard enough it won't make any difference what helmet you wear." He paused, then added, "No, that's not what I figure either. If you want to know the truth, I don't think very clearly on the subject."
He is a more careful driver than most, as his accident record proves, and is gentle with his cars. But he will take a risk if the prize is worth it. At midnight, a tremendous downpour obscured the road in the 1958 Le Mans race. Hill pressed on while other drivers, unable to see, were slowing. When the storm eased, he was five miles ahead in the night, and the race was won.
He is, incidentally, one of the best wet drivers in the world. Rain does not frighten him. "I've always felt very secure in the rain," he said once. "Even when I was a little boy standing at the window looking out."
Hill is single. He is a hi-fi devotee and his favorites are Vivaldi and Beethoven. He loves Europe, and speaks competent Italian and a lit
tle French.
During the season he lives in a hotel in Modena, near the Ferrari factory. He enjoys swimming. He also likes to pedal a rented bicycle up into the hills, enjoying the scenery, occasionally coming upon crumbling old castles to explore.
He earns about $20,000 a year. He feels he has a good life, and that risk is the price he must pay for it. Death is like furniture in a familiar room. He knows it is there, but he has not looked at it in a long time.
Epilogue
THESE ARE THE THREE main types of racing drivers: (1) the man who crashes all the time, who seems to have a blank spot on his brain where fear is supposed to register, but doesn't; (2) the man who delights in playing the role of racing driver, who photographs well, who becomes a star not by winning but merely by staying alive, and who has a horror of taking chances; and (3) the dedicated man who lives with calculated risk instead of a wife (who may even believe a racing driver has no right to marry), who will not even drink a beer the night before a race, who is level-headed and intelligent and who has made a way of life for himself close to the fast cars.
Masten Gregory is one of the few crashers left, and with Harry Schell gone there are, for the moment, no playboys at all. Most drivers fit the third category and, of course, some fit none at all.
It does not matter, they all crash. This is the central fact of their existence.
Most lives are divorced from violent accident; one forgets how tenuous life really is. Racing drivers, in this sense, are closer to reality than any of us. They are not bemused by the indomitability of man. They know man for what he is—fragile.
This knowledge is always there.
"Every driver," says Count von Trips, "has a place deep inside him where he is afraid."
CARS AT SPEED - Grand Prix's Golden Age Page 26