BURNING RUBBER
CHARLES JENNINGS
BURNING RUBBER
THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF FORMULA ONE
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
Quercus
21 Bloomsbury Square
London
WC1A 2NS
Copyright © 2010 Charles Jennings
The moral right of Charles Jennings to be
identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84916 092 6
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Typeset by Ellipsis Books Ltd, Glasgow
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
For Susie
CONTENTS
The Age of Men
1894–1958
1 Pre-history
2 The New Formula
3 Fangio I: The Return of the Germans
4 Fangio II: 1956 and the Nightmare of the Prancing Horse
5 Fangio III: The Last Win
The Age of Brits
1959-76
6 Hawthorn, Moss and the British Revenge
7 They Went Back to Front
8 1962; Moss, Hill, Brabham: So Very Anglo-Saxon
9 Jim Clark, Colin Chapman and Selling Your Soul
10 The Tracks
11 The Spanish Grand Prix, Jarama, 12 May 1968
12 That Little Scotsman: Stewart and the Problem of Death
13 Hair, Hotpants and the First Brazilian
14 All the World Races Formula One – but the Cars Are Made in Surrey. Or Thereabouts
15 James Hunt: Last True Brit
The Age of Brains
1977–93
16 Turbos, Side-skirts and Active Suspension: Technology Triumphant
17 Whatever Happened to the Americans?
18 Jones, Piquet and Prost: Two Gorillas and a Professor
19 Frank Williams – the Team Boss as Ruthless CEO?
20 May, 1982: Gilles Villeneuve, Ferrari, Another End
21 The Boredom, Paranoia and Outright Madness That Is McLaren, Prost and Senna
22 What Strange Names Are These? Part I
23 Mansell – You Always Hurt The Ones Who Support You Most
The Modern Age
1994–2009
24 The End of the Affair: Senna’s Death
25 The Curse of the Son
26 The Global Sport
27 Schumacher, Senna and the Art of Taking No Prisoners
28 Ecclestone, Mosley and the Rise of the Technocrats
29 What Strange Names Are These? Part II
30 The Beat Goes On
31 And On
Appendix I: Grand Prix Championships
Appendix II: Top Twenty-six Grand Prix Drivers by Races Won
Bibliography
Index
THE AGE OF MEN 1894–1958
1
PRE-HISTORY
We are back at the dawn of time, the dawn of motor racing: the nineteenth century to be specific. This is an age when motor cars are built like baronial coaches, when drivers dress like arctic explorers, and when racetracks are nothing more than the common highway: loose mixtures of mud, light aggregate, boulders, manure and splintered timber. And whether you are in the vehicle or out of it, fear stalks the land.
Fear, or bewilderment. The motor car at the turn of the last century was so new, so outlandish, that no one much knew what to do with it under normal conditions, let alone in competition. Indeed, the very idea of getting a late-Victorian horseless carriage to last more than 20 miles without a breakdown of some sort required a leap of faith of, effectively, religious intensity. We are talking about belt-drive transmission, hot-tube ignition, solid rubber tyres, tiller steering. But the new breed of motorist tried, anyway.
And where there were motor cars, there were motor races. Although Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz had first perfected the concept of the petrol-engined automobile in Germany, it was the French who really took it to their hearts. Renault, Panhard et Levassor and Peugeot all started car production within a few years of the first workable Daimlers and Benzes. And the very first formally organised motoring contest was a French affair: the Paris–Rouen Trial of 1894, offering a prize of 5,000 francs to the driver of whichever vehicle performed best over the 78 miles separating the two cities.
Straightforward in principle, the race was actually won by an enormous De Dion steam tractor, fuelled by a stoker, steered by a driver and drawing its passengers behind it in a separately articulated carriage like a railway train. This was absolutely not what the organisers had in mind. They wanted one of the go-ahead new internal combustion engines to win. So – demonstrating the kind of shameless expediency motor racing’s governing bodies were proudly to exercise on many subsequent occasions – they promptly demoted the De Dion and awarded joint first prize to a proper, petrolengined Peugeot, which had managed an average speed of 11.5 mph, and a Panhard.
Steam cars aside, this set the trend. For the next few years, motor races were all city-to-city, along unmade roads, in conditions of appalling danger and discomfort, generally starting in Paris, and watched by tens of thousands of hysterical spectators – these separated from the hurtling motor cars by nothing more than dust and thin air. They did Paris – Amsterdam; Paris–Berlin; Paris–Vienna. And, by 1903, most of the world was ready for the big one: a sprint from Paris to Madrid, boasting a field of more than 270 cars (and motorcycles) of wildly varying capabilities, several of which could reach 100 mph on the open road, and many of which weighed as much as a gun carriage.
Unsurprisingly, the French Government wanted to ban it. It was too long, they said, too dangerous, and there was no crowd control for the expected two million spectators along the route. They were absolutely right. At the end of the first day, two drivers, one riding mechanic and five spectators had been killed, while scores more were seriously injured. The race exacted a heavy toll in shattered limbs and wrecked vehicles. The event was abruptly stopped at Bordeaux, and those cars that could still be moved (only half of the original field) were towed off in shame by teams of horses. It was named ‘The Race of Death’. Marcel Renault, brother of the founder of the car company, was one of the fatalities. Clearly, a better way had to be found.
It first appeared in 1907, at Brooklands in Surrey. A rich car nut called Hugh Locke King built the world’s first dedicated racetrack, bankrupting himself in the process, but nonetheless establishing the concept of an enclosed, off-road circuit, where paying punters could enjoy an afternoon’s sport in reasonable comfort and safety. The fact that Brooklands – a kind of Home Counties Indianapolis, monstrously simple, with banked turns linked by a couple of head-down straights – would become outclassed and outdated almost as soon as it opened was neither here nor there. The real Indianapolis Speedway came soon after, in 1909, and was a huge hit. Le Mans – public roads, closed off for the duration of the race – was next to establish itself, followed, in the 1920s, by Monza, the Nürburgring and Monaco. The landscape was evolving.
As were the cars. Before anyone knew it, proper, modern
, (racing) cars were starting to appear. If the Great War achieved anything at all, it was to speed up the development of light, efficient, power units – all those aero engines which came into being and which would go on to influence automotive engine design in peace time. And the sports cars of the 1920s and 1930s testified to this: Bugattis, Alfa Romeos, Sunbeams, Fiats, and, later on, the authentically terrifying Mercedes and Auto Unions, all used the grammar and vocabulary by which we now understand the idea of the motor car. Unlike the pre-First World War horseless carriages, these machines were light, compact, low, and had a wheel at each corner. Their engines used clever, modern alloys and higher compression ratios. Camshafts multiplied, and lubrication systems got more efficient. Even their brakes worked, sometimes.
In fact, it was round about now that it started to become axiomatic that the only real competition cars were to be found in Continental Europe. Bentleys were all well and good for the Le Mans 24-hour Grand Prix d’Endurance, where their massive indestructability garnered them five wins. But for anything shorter, quicker and more sinuous than Le Mans, you really needed a machine from France or Italy, with their engineering strength-in-depth and their twisty, challenging racetracks on which to learn real lessons about performance motor cars. When the first Championship series was organised (for constructors, only) in 1925, it consisted of four races (one at Indianopolis) and was won by Alfa Romeo. The next two years, it was Bugatti which took the honours. Henry Segrave bucked the trend by becoming the first Brit to win a Grand Prix in a British car in 1923, in a Sunbeam which was really a copy of a racing Fiat. Depressingly enough, this remained the only Grand Prix win by a British driver in a British car until well after the Second World War.
But what was a Grand Prix, anyway? The first motoring event to carry the name Grand Prix was almost certainly the Grand Prix de Pau, dating back to 1901. The French, then enjoying their near-monopoly of public motor racing, gave the world the term, and it stuck. For some years after that, there was only one Grand Prix, and that was the Le Mans Grand Prix d’Endurance; but in time, Grands Prix spread across the Atlantic (to Savannah, Ga.) and over the Alps, to Italy. After which, they cropped up everywhere and anywhere. The biggest and most demanding races in the calendar also acquired the title Grandes Épreuves – the greatest tests of man and machine that human ingenuity could devise. And who co-ordinated all this activity? Initially, it was the Association Internationale des Automobile Clubs Reconnus, or AIACR, whose sporting committee regulated motor racing at Grand Prix (and other) levels, as well as imposing strict regulations concerning weight and engine size, in a responsible, Gallic, effort to bring order to this new world of competition.
The problem was that, without the active consent of the car manufacturers, there was no order. Sports car makers came and went, lost interest in competition, ran out of cash, suddenly emerged with something new, but proscribed. Race organisers couldn’t get a decent field together if they stuck to the rulebook. So, in 1928 a new, semi-spontaneous Formule Libre effectively threw out any restrictions or regulations concerning the cars, and, for a few years, a free-for-all reigned. Bugatti Type 35s thrashed hectically away with Alfa Romeo 8Cs, Talbots, Maserati Tipo 26s, 1½-litre Delages, 8-litre Mercedes SSKs, in the blood and dust of Italy, Germany and France – to say nothing of such holiday destinations as Algeria, Libya and Tunisia, before the FIA – the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, as the AIACR was now known – got a grip. After all, if the sport was to be taken at all seriously, it had at least to look like a sport: with rules, regulations and a sense of like being pitted against like. So a new Formula came in, in 1934, limiting the weight of the car (minus driver, tyres and fuel) to 750 kg but with no limit on engine capacity.
On paper, this made perfect sense. It would maintain some consistency; it would tame outright speeds; it would guarantee closer racing and more impressive fields. And, like so many bright ideas from the FIA, it was immediately used for an end quite different from that imagined by its originators.
The now-Nazi-sponsored Auto Union and Mercedes concerns had seen it all coming. By the mid-1930s, they were splitting an annual Government grant of around half a million Reichmarks between them, and were about to spend millions more on making some of the most devastating weapons of competition ever seen. And if this has a properly modern, phosphorescent glow about it, well, it should. The Germans took a Formula which was meant to keep speeds down and ensure a level playing field and instead worked around it to make cars so light, powerful and technologically mind-blowing that it would be another thirty years before anything so potent was seen again.
So, while the splendid mid-1930s Alfa Romeo P3 could turn out around 250 bhp and reach over 140 mph, Mercedes’ cars – at the height of the madness – were running on an appalling mixture of methyl alcohol and nitro-benzol, turned out nearly 600 bhp, and could reach 200 mph. They were also using ultralight alloys for the bodywork and were physically as full of holes as a string vest, in order to come in under the magic 750 kg weight limit: ‘adding lightness’, as the technicians put it, reaching for their drill bits and taking another chunk out of the rear suspension links. In 1937, Hermann Lang won a non-Championship race at the Avus racetrack, near Berlin, at an average speed of over 160 mph, clinging like one of the damned to the wheel of a Mercedes W125.
What kind of supermen – other than Lang – drove these things? There was the great Rudolf Carraciola (one leg shorter than the other as the result of an accident; his wife killed by an avalanche, for God’s sake, while he was convalescing); the nerveless and doomed Bernd Rosemeyer, one of a handful of people who could control the rear-engined Auto Unions; the hedonistic Achille Varzi; Jean-Pierre Wimille, who later joined the French Resistance; and Tazio Nuvolari.
And it’s the name Nuvolari which still stops the traffic. Anyone racing in the 1930s was, by definition, both fearless and harder than steel. Quite apart from the German team drivers, there were many others – Giuseppe Campari, Louis Chiron, Philippe Étancelin, to name but three – who were heroes, without question, in their Alfas, Maseratis and Bugattis. But the slightly built Nuvolari was not only brave, successful, terribly fast, and instantly recognisable, with his odd, lean, goblinish appearance, as if he just been cured in a tannery: he was indomitable – epically so.
Enzo Ferrari knew Nuvolari well, and spent some time riding round a succession of corners with him in the 1930s. He noticed with a mixture of horror and deep admiration that, whenever a bend presented itself, ‘Tazio did not lift his foot from the accelerator,’ and that, in fact, he kept it ‘flat on the floor.’ The point being that Nuvolari was physically incapable of slowing down; and regarded corners merely as opportunities to explore new horizons in tyre adhesion, or to run empirical tests on the physics of his car’s suspension.
Compounding this was the fact that pain was meaningless to him. He drove in one Grand Prix with his leg in plaster. He drove in another with several broken ribs. As time went by, he coughed so hard in the cockpit (his lungs racked by years of exhaust fumes and terrible weather) that he spat blood. Nothing ever stopped him, except the physical disintegration of the car. Ferdinand Porsche called him ‘the greatest driver of the past, the present, and the future’. He was known as the Flying Mantuan, and his racing mascot was a tortoise.
And, in July 1935, he beat both Mercedes and Auto Union at the Nürburgring, driving a by now hopelessly outdated Scuderia Ferrari Alfa Romeo P3 and following a botched pit stop. Giving away around 70 bhp to the German cars and performing in front of a predictably nationalistic crowd of 300,000, he nonetheless started from the front row of the grid, forced his way between Rosemeyer (Auto Union) and Carraciola (Mercedes) at around the halfway mark, and then came in for fuel, anticipating a useful scrap in the second part of the race. At this point, the fuel delivery pump in the Alfa pits broke down. Instead of the fuel coming out fast, under pressure, it had to be decanted by hand, from churns, the mechanics straining and cursing. It took over two minutes.
/> By the time Nuvolari came out again, he was down in sixth place, with the Germans long gone. So the red mist came down. He did the first ever lap round the ‘Ring in under eleven minutes. Then he started to close in on the new leader, Manfred von Brauchitsch – driving a Mercedes – chewing twenty seconds a lap out of his lead. It was a drive bordering on the maniacal; but Mercedes were pointedly relaxed about the whole thing. After all, at the start of the last lap, von Brauchitsch was well over half a minute ahead, with enough fuel to get him round and no suggestion of mechanical problems with his W25. But Nuvolari wasn’t just driving out of his skin: he was using low cunning, too, having made sure to put harder-wearing tyres on the Alfa than von Brauchitsch had put on his Mercedes, thus providing himself with an essential margin of destructibility as he thrashed the Alfa round the track.
Von Brauchitsch was now able to see the Alfa in the distance, absurd but unshakeable, like something out of a cartoon, but he kept his foot down, hanging on for the final minutes of the race. Yes, he was known with derisive indulgence as die Pechvogel – the Unlucky Bird – thanks to his capacity for losing races that he ought to have won, but this one was as near as dammit in the bag, it was his for the taking. Then he watched in horror as his rear tyres, shredded by hard racing, German engine power, a softer compound, and Nuvolari’s remorseless pressure, simply fell to pieces, leaving him in tears, rolling along on his wheel rims at 40 mph and letting Nuvolari through to what has been called The Greatest Victory Of All Time.
Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One Page 1