Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One

by Charles Jennings

  The crowd were baffled and astonished. ‘At first there was deathly silence,’ according to MotorSport, ‘and then the innate sportsmanship [sic] of the Germans triumphed over their astonishment. Nuvolari was given a wonderful reception.’ Adolf Hitler was in the crowd, however, and Korpsführer Adolf Hunnlein, representing the Third Reich, tore up his speech and refused to have anything to do with Nuvolari’s victory appearance on the rostrum. Someone dug out a shabby old Italian flag and hung it up. There was no Italian national anthem to play, until Nuvolari pointed out that he always carried with him a gramophone record of the ‘Marcia Reale’ and that they were welcome to put it on. Which they did.

  Afterwards, of course, the Auto Unions and Mercedes reasserted themselves. In the years leading up to the Second World War, the Germans ruthlessly swapped titles – Auto Union taking the Championship in ’36, Mercedes in ’37 and ’38 – not only fixing new standards of team efficiency, engineering thoroughness and collective will to win, but also putting on a display at the British GP at Donington Park in 1937 that appalled and mesmerised everyone who saw it.

  It was the first time the Germans had been seen in England. Racing against a field of diminutive ERAs (English Racing Automobiles) and a few forlorn Maseratis, the Mercedes and Auto Union teams tore the place apart – not least when they fired up their engines, like fighter pilots, only seconds before the start, and revealed to the great British public that the Mercedes supercharged straight-8s alone were louder than the rest of the field put together. It was a declaration of naked intent. And while Nuvolari’s magisterial Nürburgring drive of 1935 was a piece of pure, timeless, sporting theatre, the Mercedes and Auto Union teams of the late 1930s were something else. They were the shape of things to come.

  2

  THE NEW FORMULA

  How soon after a global cataclysm such as the Second World War is it acceptable to start motor racing again? Less than a year, turns out to be the answer. There was indeed a season in 1946, won by Raymond Sommer in a Maserati, with prewar figures such as Ascari, Chiron, Wimille all seeing some quite lively action, driving an assortment of scrounged and reconstituted pre-war machines – Alfas and Maseratis, mostly. The Germans, quite apart from being financially devastated, were banned on account of their Nazi past. The British were still digging themselves out of the rubble, although a few ERAs flew the flag. The French drove some Talbots and the odd Delage.

  Inevitably things were makeshift, but some fun was had, nevertheless, over the next few years. Monaco and Reims got a fair bit of use; Jean-Pierre Wimille thrashed a field of thirty entrants at Spa-Francorchamps in 1947; ‘Toulo’ de Graffenried (a Swiss national) won the British Grand Prix at Silverstone in 1949, later making a turn as a stunt double for Kirk Douglas; there were rationing and endless shortages of material and parts; there was an element of survivors’ guilt, just as there had been in the 1920s.

  And then the modern world arrived at the beginning of 1950. It was in that year that the FIA properly reconstituted Grand Prix motor racing, putting the world’s differences to one side by means of wholesome competitive track competition. Why was the 1950 season heralded as a new dawn? Because it was the moment when the new Formula One came into being – the great-granddaddy of today’s Formula, the structure supporting and controlling motor racing at the highest level. And in 1950 the rules boiled down, essentially, to this: a car could have a normally aspirated engine of up to 4,500 cc, or a supercharged one of 1,500 cc; and there was no weight limit. At the same time, Formula Two emerged – a cheaper, aspirational Formula, for 2,000-cc unsupercharged and 500-cc supercharged cars. There was order, and there were rules.

  There was also a fairly skimpy calendar of six European Grands Prix – British, Monaco, Swiss, Belgian, French and Italian – contested by a mish-mash of thirteen teams with around thirty drivers willing to take part, the whole thing bulked out by another sixteen entirely optional non-Championship races to keep everyone’s hand in. These oddball events (the British Empire Trophy; the Grand Prix de Paris; the Gran Premio de Penya Rhin) happened at places like Albi, Goodwood, Pescara, Bari, and even Jersey, an island barely large enough to have motor traffic of any sort. Not that they were all to be sneered at. Some (especially those sponsored by a newspaper) offered good prize money; many of them drew the top drivers, however out-of-the-way they might have been. There were sixteen non-Championship events in 1950; over thirty by 1952.

  The usual suspects turned up, whether Championship contenders or not. There were Alfa Romeo (who would have taken the 1950 Constructors’ Championship had there been one), along with Maserati, the new-look Ferrari team, plus, inevitably, a few limping Talbots and a couple of wonky ERAs. Nino Farina (who took the 1950 Drivers’ Championship), plus rising stars Juan Manuel Fangio and Alberto Ascari, were the headline acts, assisted by stalwart triers such as Maurice Trintignant and Reg Parnell. Everything went about as well as it could, given the fact that much of Europe still lay in ruins, and that the Nuremberg Trials had only just finished.

  The only real oddity came, perhaps unsurprisingly, from the British – in the form of British Racing Motors (BRM), whose arrival on the scene now appears so bizarre as to be almost dream-like in its strangeness. Other British-based constructors – McLaren, Williams, Lotus – would, years later, get into the habit of picking off titles like ripe cherries. But BRM, the first of the true Brit constructors, went about things the hard way, almost as an article of faith. For them, it was all about pain and humiliation.

  The team was actually started by pre-war racer Raymond Mays, who, in the 1930s, had headed the ERA racing équipe and had even competed in the 1935 German Grand Prix, along with Tazio Nuvolari. Mays was keen on teams with three-letter names – and, allegedly, women’s clothing. It was said that he often raced in a spot of eye-liner, while relaxing at home in something fetching in polka dots. The motoring press habitually referred to him as ‘immaculately dressed’ and ‘elegant’. His mother was a formidable presence around the place, once seen disinfecting a saloon car with FLIT after Peter Berthon’s wife had just got out of it – Berthon being Mays’ long-term business partner and, possibly, more than that. According to one authority, ‘Some did suspect that he was conducting an affair with Mays himself,’ a situation which led to much barely stifled hilarity among the team mechanics.

  Lifestyle orientation notwithstanding, Mays was seething at the routine domination of Grand Prix racing by foreign teams. ERA had done its best with the modest resources at hand, but the fact remained that it was the Italians and Germans who had enjoyed two generations of near-supremacy at the highest level of competition. Now it was time to put an end to those terrible decades of British underachievement. BRM was formed in 1945 and quickly became a national prestige project, attracting the involvement of 100 engineering companies, as well as an eleven-man main committee, a production committee, a finance committee and a publicity committee. Rolls-Royce were commissioned to design a new kind of two-stage supercharger for a fabulous engine to be built under the new Formula: a 1,500-cc supercharged V16 of staggering complexity, whose pistons were the size of eggcups, which (in theory) revved up to 12,000 rpm and which (in theory) produced 600 bhp – just like the monstrous pre-war Mercedes W125, but with one-third the engine capacity.

  Well, the rival Ferrari 125 and the Maserati 4CLT both had similarly exquisite supercharged V12s, and both had achieved some racing success, so the BRM scheme was perhaps not as deranged as it might at first seem. It merely required the single-minded addition of a third as many cylinders again as the Italians had managed, into an engine of the same capacity. In everyone’s imagination it would then be equivalent to putting a Canberra bomber in a field full of old Lancasters, especially once the thing was let out onto the track and pitted against the Ferraris, Masers and, best of all, thunderous old Alfa Romeo 158s (which had been around, in one form or another, since 1938). Even Alfred Neubauer, the feared pre-war Mercedes team leader, came to the factory and called the car ‘one of
the finest designs I have ever seen’.

  It was actually being built in a big shed round the back of Raymond Mays’ home in Lincolnshire, previously a billet for the Parachute Regiment and so cold in winter that the draughtsmen had to wear special aviators’ gloves to keep their fingers moving.

  Things came together incredibly slowly. Simply making the components within the required tolerances was bad enough: ‘It nearly drove us all mad with frustration,’ said Mays. Then, when the car was driven on the track, it shredded its tyres on account of the power churning out of the V16; it badly burned its drivers, thanks to a misplaced exhaust; it sprayed them with hot oil; it broke down.

  Worse: it had been five years in the making, and now the British public wanted to see the damn thing perform. The 1950 British Grand Prix, the very start of the new Formula One, the first great race of the post-war era, was the launchpad. It took place at Silverstone, an old bomber airfield tarted up with some stands and a few prefab pits. The big names – Fangio, Louis Chiron, Farina, Philippe Étancelin – were all there. George VI and Queen Elizabeth turned up. The BRM was nursed out of its transporter. What happened? The car was so far from being ready that the mechanics ‘couldn’t even get it to run on all cylinders’. Tens of thousands of spectators saw the BRM totter onto the track, give a brief demonstration run with Mays at the wheel and go home. Amazingly, they cheered and applauded, leaving Farina to win the actual race in an Alfa. That was in May.

  By August, the Daily Express International Trophy loomed, and the car now had to do something that at least resembled racing, not merely because the Daily Express had produced an hysterical sixty-two-page booklet about what it thrillingly called ‘the £150,000 car’. The International Trophy didn’t count towards either the Drivers’ or Constructors’ championships; but it was a proper race, well attended and offering better prize money than the British Grand Prix. Two BRMs were entered, but only one made it onto the grid – and at the back, having missed practice due to technical problems. Raymond Sommer, the well-worn French ace who had been hired for the event, sat in the lime-green car, watched the flag fall, dropped the clutch. The BRM skipped forward five inches, like a fat man being jabbed with a stick, and stopped. The driveshafts had broken.

  This time, boos and jeers broke out. People tossed pennies into the cockpit. ‘Blooming Rotten Motor’, said the News Chronicle, simultaneously capitalising both on the Express’s over-investment in the project and the British love of self-flagellation. A week later, Nino Farina won the World Championship for Alfa Romeo. The old order carried on, as before.

  ‘None of us has lost faith in the car in any way,’ wrote Mays, not long after. Destiny had different ideas. Two BRMs struggled through the British GP of 1951. One actually scored a couple of points. Then the FIA changed the rules of the new Formula (not least because Alfa Romeo had dropped out of competition), deciding that the fans would see larger fields (fields of any size, indeed) if the races were run according to Formula Two rules – that is, with cars powered by unsupercharged 2-litre engines. A world entirely filled with cars running to F2 specifications in both the F1 and F2 Championships came into being; while the BRM became ineligible, overnight. And, in 1952, poor Raymond Mays, deliciously turned out as ever, found that Sir Alfred Owen, his principal backer, had finally lost patience with him and taken control of the organisation. The fact that Maserati were similarly stuffed by this rule change (Ferrari, as it turned out, had that season, and the next, almost to themselves) made no difference to the hapless Mays’ fate. And no one in their right mind would have predicted that the Brits, fifteen years later, would have become the pre-eminent car designers and builders.

  It was a terrible, spectacular dream, and, dream-like, the single most lasting thing about the V16 BRM is its most ephemeral characteristic – its sound: a furiously resonant, bowel-loosening howl, a noise so frightful in 1950 that it physically intimidated other drivers, and which has been lovingly preserved in archive recordings by GP fans ever since.

  3

  FANGIO I:

  THE RETURN OF THE GERMANS

  When Alfred Neubauer called in on Raymond Mays, back at the start of the 1950s, the new-look, rebuilt Mercedes team was still a dull rumour, a nervous anticipation of the prewar years. Mays was flattered by the association, but not necessarily scared by it.

  By 1954, however, BRM were still nowhere, whereas everyone knew what Mercedes were capable of: which was just about anything. In the space of a few years they had got to the point where they had exceptional Grand Prix cars; they had some of the best drivers – if not the best – in the world; they had money behind them (although not limitless – Mercedes were still getting back on their feet, after the war); they had organisation; and they had a team manager whose name, even today, inspires a kind of nervous awe. They were properly contemporary: and Neubauer was their man.

  He had made his reputation in the 1930s, corralling the likes of Von Brauchitsch, Carraciola, Fagioli, making sure that everything was just the way they wanted. He yelled (‘a bull-like bellow’, apparently) at people who got in the way, muscled his outsized form around the track and the pits or sometimes just stood there, immobile and huge in a tent-like raincoat, a collection of stopwatches slung round his neck. To the outside world, he was a predictable German bully; to the drivers, he was ‘like a mother hen with her chicks’, even taking it upon himself to stand out on the grid at zero hour and reassuringly perform his own version of the official starting signal ‘by counting down the last seconds – 5-4-3-2-1-OFF – on the fingers and thumb of his right hand’.

  Control, order and organisation were everything. And yet he was relatively sparing in his use of team orders. If a driver had got a job with the Mercedes team, then he was, axiomatically, good enough to race, and should be left to make his own decisions. Once a Mercedes driver – whichever driver – had secured a sufficient (i.e. one-minute) lead, his teammates were not to challenge him unless instructed specifically to do so. The exception was when there was a special title at stake, and more complex orders might apply. Then there would be much use of Neubauer’s famous red and black flag, held sternly at differing heights to tell a driver to slow down/speed up/stay put.

  The rest of his time was spent drawing up hugely complex season schedules (Mercedes were racing sports cars as well as Formula One) and eating a tremendous amount of food (breakfast alone being a strenuous mix of rye bread, Bologna sausage, tea and Jamaica rum). He had a genius for the job, and when Mercedes returned to racing, he was effectively unchanged from twenty years earlier, except for several additional centimetres around his vast waistline.

  The post-war cars? The W196s were, naturally, powerful (2½-litre straight-8s, fuel-injected, plus fancy valve gear), reliable, beautifully made and very low. They looked intensely modern then; still look it now. The team proceeded to add extra ferocity by filling these cars up with an explosive charge of benzol, methyl alcohol, high-octane petrol, acetone and nitro-benzine – a fuel so disgusting that anyone who breathed the fumes for long enough got double vision, nausea and a blinding headache.

  They also ran a mobile workshop from track to track – a Mercedes-Benz lorry, kitted out with welding gear, precision drills, grinding equipment. They built a special high-speed car transporter, which could whisk a GP car across Europe at speeds of over 100 mph. They had, eventually, over 270 people directly involved with the racing team, obeying the orders of Alfred Neubauer and engineering director Rudi Uhlenhaut. And as principal driver, they employed the Argentian Juan Manuel Fangio, who was about to take two World Championships, back to back, and who thought he was in Heaven.

  Through the long lens of history, it now all seems like a foregone conclusion: Fangio + Mercedes + Alfred Neubauer = Grand Prix supremacy. But how, actually, had Fangio got to this point? And how did he become the unquestionably dominant Grand Prix driver of the 1950s – and, in the end, one of the very greatest drivers of all time?

  On the face of it, he didn’t look l
ike much. Described at the time as ‘an extremely quiet chap, short, thickset, extremely powerful, balding, beefy’, he also spoke ‘with a surprisingly high, small voice’. His nickname was El Chueco – ‘The Knock-kneed One’. He was forty years old in 1951, which, even by the standards of the day (Farina and Chiron were older) was getting on a bit. He had learned his trade before the war, driving a succession of terrifying, stripped-out Chevvy two-doors in immensely long and gruelling South American road races – rallies, effectively, on unmade tracks and mountain passes. Stirling Moss claimed that you had to be ‘mad’ even to get into one of Fangio’s home-built specials, one of these 100 mph dustbins, let alone drive it. But he did, was Argentine National Champion in ’40 and ’41, and got national funding to take him across to Europe in 1949.

  He duly made his mark, winning five non-Grandes Épreuves in fine style. But when the Alfa Romeo team offered him a contract for 1950, Fangio, the reticent backwoodsman, was at a loss. ‘The trouble is,’ they said, ‘we don’t know how much money you want.’ Neither did Fangio. He signed the contract, left the payment section blank, handed it back to Alfa and said, ‘Fill it in however you like. You put in the noughts.’

  He loved the team, and the team loved him. At first, he had to play second fiddle to Nino Farina, both driving fairly mature, but extremely competitive, supercharged Alfetta 158s. Farina – exponent of the stylish straight-arm driving style, lounging back in the cockpit, rather than sitting conventionally hunched and straining over the wheel as if trying to snap it off the steering column – won three Championship races. Fangio won another three; but Farina took the title in 1950, much to Fangio’s irritation.