Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One

by Charles Jennings

  The next year, though, he asserted himself and became champion for the first time. Farina’s best driving years had been squandered during the Second World War, and the field was open to Fangio, all of five years younger. He won the Swiss, French and Spanish Grands Prix, finishing each one nearly a minute ahead of the second-placed driver. Tony Rudd, of the BRM team, reckoned that Alfa Romeo in the early 1950s, were ‘quite Teutonic, actually, no Italian excitement – they were calm and efficient’, which suited the Argentinian down to the ground. More so, in fact, than BRM and their crazed device: when he tried out the V16 in some non-Championship races, all he did was complain about the impossibility of controlling its power (‘You had to keep it over 7,000 rpm all the time, and like a lot of gear-changing’) and the autodestructiveness which resulted (‘You could strip the tyres in the course of a single lap’).

  The problem was that in ’52 Alfa dropped out of Grand Prix racing. Fangio, driveless, twiddled his thumbs for half the season, then made his big mistake. At the start of September, Maserati unexpectedly agreed to loan him a car for the Italian GP at Monza. Desperate to race in a proper Grande Épreuve (he was, after all, in danger of finishing the season having scored no points at all), Fangio found himself having to travel from London to Italy across a fog-bound Europe, in twenty-four hours, in order to get to the track. Having made it as far as Clermont-Ferrand in the middle of France (and in the middle of the night), he got up before 7 a.m. on the day of the race, frenziedly drove a borrowed saloon car all the way across the Alps and northern Italy and finally arrived at Monza at 2 p.m. This gave him just time to shower, change into his racing clothes (yellow top, old blue trousers, no fancy overalls for him) and be racing by 2.30.

  By 3 p.m., he was in intensive care, having wrecked the car – the result of exhaustion, traversing Europe in a day – and having very nearly killed himself. He suffered multiple injuries, not least of which was a broken neck. The only good news, so far as he was concerned, was that, from the start of 1952 on, drivers had to wear hard crash helmets as opposed to the old-fashioned linen (or silk) hair protectors of pre-war times. ‘Before it became compulsory,’ Fangio noted, drily, ‘we used to say that people only wore helmets because they were scared.’ It was the crash helmet which stopped his head being opened up like a hard-boiled egg.

  The rest of the season went by with Fangio sitting about with a cast round his neck, wondering who his real friends were. From then on, he could only turn from one side or the other by moving his entire torso, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. The crippling headaches which used to beset him had mysteriously gone; but everything else was looking bad. Ageing, squeaky, crocked-up, and managing only second-best in 1953 with Maserati – a single GP win, back at Monza – the Old Man looked to be in fairly terminal shape. But then he snatched his second World Championship in 1954 – and everything started off again.

  It was a champion’s ruthlessness at work. Fangio started ’54 in a Maserati; but the moment Neubauer offered him a drive with Mercedes, he took it. However lovely the 1954 Maserati 250Fs were, they were awfully new, and not entirely dependable. Fangio’s first allegiance was unquestionably to himself, and the prospect of a weapons-grade Mercedes W196 was too good to pass up.

  It wasn’t just the car that was good. Fangio was still a truly great driver: adaptable, intelligent, very precise, capable of incredible turns of speed. Stirling Moss, his team-mate at Mercedes, liked to say that ‘The best classroom of all time … was the spot about two car-lengths behind Juan Manuel Fangio. I learned more there than anywhere else.’ Peter Collins, a rising star in the second half of the 1950s, similarly claimed that Fangio could ‘size up a circuit and its hazards with almost slide-rule accuracy’.

  He was also deeply and meaningfully unsentimental, driving for four teams (Alfa, Maserati, Mercedes and Ferrari) in the space of eight years. He used his authority on and off the track (old enough to be father to some of the other drivers, and he knew it) to get what he wanted. Poor young Collins got stuffed by Fangio’s autocratic needs in 1956, at Monaco, when he was ordered to hand over his Ferrari to the Maestro, who had broken his own car; and then committed self-immolation in the same year by volunteering his car at Monza, thus depriving himself of a win and a possible Championship, ceding the title to Fangio. ‘I was astounded when he handed over his car,’ Fangio later said, disingenuously, ‘but I did not stop to argue.’ He even temporarily thieved Moss’s then-girlfriend, Sally Weston, at some point in 1955, eliciting only the mildest response from the super-competitive Moss: ‘Rather him, I suppose, than anyone else.’

  How much of his success was down to this kind of sheer exertion of willpower over nicer people, such as Collins or Stirling Moss (Enzo Ferrari, a comparably sized ego in sunglasses, couldn’t stand Fangio and ‘that inscrutable expression marked by the shadow of an indefinable squinting smile’)? How much of it was down to the fact that – in the days when Grands Prix routinely lasted the best part of three hours – Fangio, battle-hardened by 1,000-km slogs across the Pampas, twenty years earlier, could simply keep his stamina and concentration longer than anyone else? (Froilán Gonzales, another hard-nut 1950s Argentinian – The Pampas Bull to his fans, Fat Head to his colleagues – was huge and similarly tough, but nowhere near as consistently quick.) How much was down to Fangio’s legendary ‘Little Pills’ – which wicked tongues claimed were full of cocaine, while the more respectful reckoned were made from that native Argentinian booster, Yerba Maté? How much of it was simply down to the fact that he didn’t spread himself around in rallying and sports car racing as much as some drivers, but kept his main energies for single-seaters, which he knew he was best at driving?

  Fangio helped the enigma along by being almost excessively polite, affable, reserved. His reminiscences are passionately anodyne. Of his first GP win, for example, at Barcelona in 1950: ‘When I left the pits I was still in the lead, and won.’ After one successful season, ‘Once back in my garage, with my hands covered in grease and oil, I felt relieved … I had risked letting the glory go to my head, but I was still really myself.’ Even being kidnapped by Cuban rebels in 1958 – by Castro’s July 26th Movement, in fact – was a bit of a thrill, but not too much. He spent a well-mannered two days with his captors, was released, then went on to appear on US television, the best bit of which was the fee generated by his new, additional, celebrity: ‘They were going to pay me a thousand dollars for a ten-minute appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show – along with Jack Dempsey.’

  His private life was, on the surface, just as undemonstrative, side-affairs notwithstanding. He may have had a fling with Evita Perón (yes), but for twenty fairly monogamous years he lived with ‘Beba’ Espinosa, a buxom, raven-tressed divorcee (her ex had been a potato farmer), with whom he had an illegitimate son. ‘In my life,’ he said, ‘I had beside me a very strong woman.’ But when things got awkward, he walked away from her just as he walked away from Alfa Romeo and Ferrari: ‘She said if I didn’t like being with her I could leave. So I left.’ There you go. The only things which wholly engaged his passions were being in a racing car and winning. And it was the mid-1950s, the Mercedes years, that represented an ideal state for him. He won six of the nine Championship races of 1954 (four for the German team), then took four out of the seven races for 1955.

  Moss likewise reckoned that Mercedes were about as good as a team could possibly get. Indeed, he never quite recovered from an early dream-like encounter with a Mercedes mechanic who came up to him where he had just stopped his car in the infield of a test track, in the middle of nowhere, and held out a bowl of hot water, a bar of soap and a small towel, just so that Moss could wash away the grime and brake dust. The mechanic even politely clicked his heels at the same time. Similarly, when he expressed a preference for a three-spoke steering wheel instead of the standard four-spoke, the next day, soundlessly and as if by magic, a three-spoke wheel had been fitted to his car.

  This was also the period when Moss dedicated himself to haring ro
und in Fangio’s wheeltracks, getting a free education from the Old Man. One observer commented, ‘So closely did he track Fangio that from some angles, the Stuttgart team appeared to have entered an eight-wheeler.’ Otherwise known as ‘The Train’, this nose-to-tail Mercedes combo caused Neubauer endless heartburn. Quite apart from the fact that Moss collected stones and bits of track flung up by Fangio’s rear wheels, what if Fangio made a mistake and took them both off the track? ‘Juan Manuel simply did not make mistakes,’ was Moss’s answer. And again: ‘No one who ever sat in a racing car made fewer mistakes than Fangio.’

  Quite often, Fangio and Moss were the only two drivers on the same lap, yoked together by the brilliance of their driving and the supercompetence of their cars, while Gonzales and Hawthorn in the Ferrari Tipo 625s ploughed on, somewhere else on the track, getting lucky once in a while. Oh, and Maserati and Connaught (another early green shoot in the British flowering) similarly cobbled together some wins in the non-Championship races.

  Otherwise, the world simply bowed before the might of the Germans, and the genius of Fangio. At the German GP in ’54, he finished a minute and a half ahead of the joint second-place drivers – Gonzales and Hawthorn, indeed, who had taken over Gonzales’ car halfway through the race. At Monza, the same year, he was a whole lap ahead of Hawthorn by the end. At the Argentine GP, 1955, Fangio was again a minute and a half ahead of the second placer, Gonzales. At the British GP, that year, Mercedes managed a 1-2-3-4, coming in three laps ahead of Hawthorn, in fifth.

  How long would it have gone on like this? It was claimed that in 1954, no fewer than 4,000 applicants wrote in to Mercedes, asking for a place in the team. The équipe was glazed with the impossible sheen of victory: everyone wanted to be part of it. And as long as the parent company wanted to bankroll Neubauer and Uhlenhaut, it seemed that they could have gone on indefinitely.

  Except for Le Mans, June 1955.

  Mercedes was, of course, a two-headed monster at this time, with interests in both Grand Prix and Sport Car racing. Its sports cars had already won at Le Mans (in 1952), at the Nürburgring, the Mille Miglia, the Carrera Panamericana, the Targa Florio, and would duly take the Constructors’ Championship in 1955. Sports cars – the legendary 300 SLR – were more than just trophy-winners, they were good commercial publicity, feeding straight back into the road-going Mercedes sports models.

  For Le Mans ’55, the German team were fielding the well-worn Pierre Levegh and Fangio himself, as well as Moss and Karl Kling, with their eyes on a big showdown with Jaguar, Aston Martin, Ferrari and Maserati. And it was there that Levegh’s 300 SLR clipped Lance Macklin’s Healey, going past the pits. Levegh was driving hard at the time. His car took off, hurled itself into the crowd, exploded. More than eighty people were killed: the worst accident in motor-racing history. The French, German and Spanish Grands Prix were called off; the Swiss banned motor racing outright. At the end of the season, Mercedes called a halt to their racing programme. All the titles were won; but the price was too high.

  Thus, for 1955, Fangio took the Argentine, Belgian, Dutch and Italian Grands Prix, plus the Drivers’ Championship, and then found himself wandering into Ferrari’s embrace. Moss won the British GP at Aintree and went, in a roundabout way, to Maserati. Mercedes’ Silver Arrows were mothballed. It was a terrible way to end.

  But the legacy was this: in those two seasons, Mercedes had shown what a modern Grand Prix team could look like: well resourced, highly motivated, thorough, disciplined, properly structured, boasting two stellar drivers, and wholly intimidating. Just as in the late 1930s, they had turned out to be a glimpse of the future.

  4

  FANGIO II:

  1956 AND THE NIGHTMARE OF THE PRANCING HORSE

  Ah, but Ferrari. How did Fangio ever win the ’56 Championship, given the truly terrible relationship between him and the Ferrari team? How, for that matter, did Ferrari get to be in a position where Fangio wanted to drive for them?

  In Formula One, everything heads back, sooner or later, to the figure of Enzo Ferrari, a figure out of Grand Opera; or a John Grisham novel; or the Middle Ages. Ferrari was scary: not only was he never seen without his Mafia Don sunglasses, he gave the impression that he might even wear them in bed, just to intimidate the dark. Indeed, the image of the seigneurial Enzo, bulky, unsmiling, hyper-moody, capaciously suited, is still so familiar – to say nothing of the ubiquitous Prancing Horse trademark that he filched off an Italian Air Force ace in the 1920s – that it’s hard to believe that there was a time before Ferrari existed.

  In fact, just as with Fangio, it took him a while to become Ferrari. Before the war, he ran Alfa Romeo’s racing team – as Scuderia Ferrari – engineering components for them and acquiring a useful knowledge of car design. He managed to carry on his engineering business during the war, then, in 1947, produced the first proper Ferrari – the 125S, a V12 sports-racing car of considerable pace and flair. The pattern was set. He would make and sell sports cars for the general public, and plough the profits back into the racing team, establishing a tidy synergy which neither Alfa Romeo nor Maserati (to say nothing of Lotus) could ever quite match. Indeed, this balancing of pure racing with commercial enterprise is a properly impressive achievement. Jaguar and Mercedes, far larger concerns, went racing in the 1950s, like Ford in the 1960s, mainly so that they could sell more of their day-to-day production cars; it was Ferrari who really managed to keep the connection between track and showroom alive.

  So, in 1948, Nuvolari, who knew Ferrari from way back, drove a 166S – both a racer and, differently fettled, a customer sports car – in the Mille Miglia, building a savage lead over the rest of the field, even as the Ferrari disintegrated around him. At one point, the driver’s seat collapsed, and he commandeered a bag of oranges to sit on. The suspension gave way, the mudguards and bonnet fell off. At last, the thing simply ground to a halt. ‘We’ll do it again, next year,’ Ferrari said. But while Ferrari’s career was just getting going – the Mille being great publicity, despite the chaos – Nuvolari’s was all but finished. They never did race together again.

  What did Ferrari care? He was off, now. In 1949, a 166M won Le Mans; Froilán Gonzales gave the team its first GP win at the British GP of 1951; in 1952 and 1953, the fairly frantic Alberto Ascari won back-to-back Formula One World Championships in a Ferrari at the same time as the team was gearing up to win two more back-to-back titles in the World Sportscar Championship.

  Enzo’s role in all this? More inspirational than strictly mechanical. According to the great engineer Aurelio Lampredi, ‘Ferrari is a man who instils enthusiasm in those around him, but he is no technician.’ Then again, he didn’t even bother to instil enthusiasm if he didn’t particularly feel like it. In 1951, Ferrari indicated to a very young Stirling Moss that he wanted him to drive for the team, the following season. It was still early days, but both Ferrari and Moss were names to conjure with. Stirling went all the way to the circuit at Bari, in southern Italy, where the meeting had been set up, only to be told (by a mechanic, even) that the car was earmarked for Piero Taruffi and that Stirling was surplus to requirements. ‘I did not forget,’ seethed Moss, ‘and I would not forgive.’ When Luigi Villoresi (whose brother had been killed in a Ferrari) won the Modena GP in ’52, ‘Ferrari actually said thank you.’ Villoresi then added, grimly, ‘That didn’t happen very often.’ Ferrari and his Scuderia sailed implacably on.

  And then, suddenly, by the mid-1950s, the team was in a slump. The Formula had been tweaked again – from the makeshift Formula Two-style 2-litre regs to a new 2½-litreunsupercharged formulation. Firstly, this caught Ferrari on the hop with their four-cylinder Tipo 625, which just wouldn’t perform properly; secondly, Mercedes-Benz had arrived. Having been comfortably in charge, Ferrari now were lucky to pick up three more GP wins, two in ’54 (at Silverstone and Pedralbes, in Spain), the third in ’55, at Monaco. Scuderia Ferrari was now marked by what one motor-racing historian has called ‘the atmosphere of barely suppressed paran
oia and the fear of taking responsibility that tended to envelop the team in times of failure’. The Commendatore went into a sulk, threatening to give up racing entirely. The cars remained unsatisfactory. In 1955, Ascari died at the wheel of a 750, testing it at Monza. The only way forward was to take over the remnants of the short-lived Lancia F1 team, fit the cars with Ferrari engines and acquire the problematic Fangio.

  Luckily for Ferrari, Fangio himself was feeling the pinch. The Perón Government had just fallen in Argentina – and with it, patronage for the Old Man. His business interests were compromised, and his personal finances were being investigated by the incoming military regime. Mercedes had dropped out. He needed a drive as badly as Ferrari needed him to drive for them. The car Ferrari offered him was actually the rather interesting Lancia-Ferrari D50, which had quite a lot going for it, including pannier side fuel tanks for better weight distribution and an offset engine to help keep the height down; it also had some things going against it, among them an unhealthy and vicious tendency for the back end to overtake the front on corners.

  The biggest problem, however, was the complete, intense, and mutual antipathy which existed between Ferrari and Fangio. The year 1956 got off to a tricky start when Ferrari refused – as was his habit – to name a number one driver in the team. This disgusted Fangio. However good his fun-loving teammates Peter Collins, Luigi Musso and Eugenio Castellotti might have been, they were not world champions, nor was any of them likely to become champion in the next twelve months. Still less was this an echo of the Mercedes’ team rules concerning basic race tactics and equality among drivers. There, Fangio was always the presumptive number one, and it worked very nicely for him. Ferrari, on the other hand, simply liked to see his drivers slug it out.