The Boy

by Richard Williams

  In 1956, after that airline and others had been merged into the new British Overseas Airways Corporation, he was sent to Cuba to establish an office. In Havana, the family’s temporary home was in the smart residential district of Vedado, in an apartment three streets away from the Nacional. They were installed in a permanent home, opposite the villa of Batista’s Chief of Staff, by the time the weekend of the race came around.

  The first Cuban Grand Prix had been held a year earlier over the same anti-clockwise 3.5-mile circuit. Starting on the northern carriageway of the Malecón, opposite the tall memorial to the 266 sailors killed in 1898 when the USS Maine was blown up in the incident that kicked off the Spanish-American War, the track passed the Nacional and circled the Parque Antonio Maceo before running back up the Malecón’s southern carriageway, looping around the Parque José Martí along the Avenida de los Presidentes and returning down the Avenida Calzada to the finish line.

  Slotted neatly into the calendar between the Formula 1 races in Buenos Aires and the Sebring 12 Hours, that 1957 race was quite a social event – the Hollywood actor Gary Cooper and his wife Veronica met the drivers in the pits, where Fon de Portago was accompanied by his new lover, the actress Linda Christian. The works Maseratis dominated the race: Moss led until his engine seized, leaving Fangio to take a popular victory. In a sign of political unrest behind the façade of an island presented as a paradise for gamblers and other pleasure-seekers, the European drivers were given bodyguards. Some of the drivers also attended the live sex shows that were a feature of Havana’s night life under the joint dictatorship of Batista and Lansky.

  A year later Fangio was back for the second Cuban Grand Prix, at the wheel of a Maserati entered by the Denver oil millionaire Temple Buell, and the world champion posed for photographs with Batista before the practice sessions. As for Moss, barely three months after racing a Ferrari for the first time, he was in another car from Maranello, this one entered by the North American Racing Team, Enzo Ferrari’s US representatives. Moss and Fangio traded fastest laps in practice before a flimsy footbridge over the track collapsed, injuring several spectators. There was also a fatal accident to a local driver, Diego Veguillas.

  By this time, anti-government guerrillas led by Fidel Castro were making serious headway in the fight to overthrow Batista. On the eve of the race, as Fangio chatted in the lobby of the Hotel Lincoln, a few blocks from the circuit, with Nello Ugolini, Guerino Bertocchi and Alejandro de Tomaso, he was approached by a bearded young man with a gun in his hand. Announcing himself as a member of the 26th of July Movement – one of Castro’s revolutionaries, in other words – the intruder ordered Fangio to leave the hotel with him. A second gunman instructed other guests and staff in the lobby not to attempt to follow them and to do nothing for five minutes after their departure.

  Two companions were waiting outside in a stolen Plymouth sedan. The group drove off with Fangio to the first of a series of safe houses in which he was held while the story flashed around the world, making newspaper headlines and leading TV and radio bulletins. According to Fangio’s later testimony, he told the kidnappers not to carry out a plan to take Moss as well because the Englishman and his wife were on their honeymoon – not strictly true, but it seemed to be persuasive.

  While Castro and his guerrilla army were fighting in the Sierra Maestra, the kidnap plot had been hatched by one of the 26th of July Movement’s leaders, Faustino Pérez. Some of the hotel’s staff, sympathetic to the insurgents, tipped them off about the timing of their target’s arrival in the lobby. All efforts by Batista’s police to track down the perpetrators and free their celebrity captive were to no avail. Meanwhile, Fangio, not merely unharmed by the ordeal, was making friends with his abductors.

  One of them, Arnold Rodriguez Camps, told the Swedish journalist Fredrik af Petersens many years later, ‘Our purpose was not to exchange him for money. We just wanted to prevent him from driving and to get maximum publicity for the revolution out of it – nothing else – and we certainly got it. We also wanted to ridicule Batista, and we did that in a big way. We needed to do something to show the world that we meant business but that we were not a bunch of murdering thugs, as Batista said we were. I am very proud of what we did and of the fact that Fangio was not harmed in any way. If that had happened, it would have been a catastrophe for us and the Revolution.’ But the second Cuban Grand Prix had to take place without its principal attraction.

  Manzanera and his mother were among a crowd estimated at 150,000 when the race started on the Sunday afternoon. In the early laps the lead was swapped between Moss and Masten Gregory in their Ferraris, but Roberto Mieres’s Porsche had been dropping oil around the circuit and on the sixth lap a local driver, Armando García Cifuentes, lost control of his Ferrari at a kink on the Malecón, close to the US embassy, ploughing through the crowd before coming to rest against a construction crane. Seven spectators lay dead, forty were injured and García Cifuentes himself was driven to hospital by his teammate Abelardo Carreras, lying on the bonnet of another Ferrari, before being charged with manslaughter.

  Gregory had been leading when he and Moss, in close pursuit, passed the scene of the crash, where a red flag was being shown to stop the race. But the wily Moss knew that the rules stipulated only the clerk of the course could show the red flag, and concluded that since the official was unlikely to have been where the accident took place, it was legitimate to carry on racing until they reached the finish line. Gregory, assuming the initial red flag meant the race was already over, reduced his pace, and Moss followed suit until, just 50 yards from the line, he dropped into second gear, floored the throttle and nipped ahead in time to be declared the winner. Afterwards a furious Gregory was placated by Moss’s offer of 50 per cent of their joint winnings: prizes of $10,000 for first place and $7,000 for second meant that each of them would walk away with $8,500. With characteristic financial acuity, Moss told Gregory that if he were to lodge an appeal against the result, all the prize money would be withheld by the organisers pending a verdict – by which time Castro’s revolutionaries might have taken over the country.

  Fangio and his captors in their secret location listened to the radio commentary on a race that had lasted a mere thirteen minutes. That evening they watched the television news bulletins showing footage of the terrible crash. The next day, in order to avoid contact with the local authorities, he was released into the care of the Argentinian ambassador. Fangio made no subsequent effort to help the police identify the kidnappers. ‘Although he could not have been very pleased,’ Rodriguez said, ‘he was a real gentleman.’

  On his release, the world champion asked the Argentinian ambassador to let the news agencies know about it immediately: ‘The lads [his kidnappers] had planted in my mind the idea that if Batista’s people found me, they might kill me and accuse the movement of it.’ A day or two later he left Havana and travelled to New York for an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. ‘I had won the world championship five times and I had raced and won at Sebring,’ he reflected, ‘but what made me popular in the United States was the kidnap in Cuba.’ Rodriguez and Pérez would eventually be captured, imprisoned and tortured by Batista’s police; the former became a trade minister in Castro’s government and would visit Fangio in Balcarce, his home town in Argentina.

  The young Philip Targett-Adams returned to his school on the day after the race, sharing the excitement with his classmates. But that all-too-brief spectacle was nothing compared to the events that would unfold over the next ten months as Castro and his followers swept towards their date with destiny. On 31 December 1958 Batista stunned the crowd at a New Year party by announcing his decision to leave the country; he fled with forty friends and family members and hundreds of millions of dollars on a flight from a military airfield close to the Targett-Adams’s home. The following day Phil and his family watched a gun battle between government guards and the Fidelistas: ‘I remember machine guns, people screaming, my mother pressing my face down to
the floor of the bathroom, bullets flying around everywhere, chaos, scary as hell.’

  The new Castro-controlled Cuba hosted one final race, the Grand Prix of Freedom, in February 1960 – not along the Malecón but on a far less picturesque circuit laid out around the perimeter roads of Camp Columbia, the military airfield from which Batista had made his hasty getaway. The Commandante en Jefe attended a pre-race banquet. Moss was back, this time for his first race in Lucky Casner’s ‘Birdcage’ Maserati, winning the 160-mile event ahead of the Ferrari of Pedro Rodriguez and Gregory’s Porsche.

  Phil Manzanera returned to Havana several times, visiting the landmarks of his childhood, including the grass bank where he sat with his mother on the hot weekend in 1958 when motor racing found itself caught up in events that helped shape the modern world. The impressions remain vivid. ‘Cuba was dangerous and sexy then,’ he says. ‘Sex, drugs and mambo. And those drivers truly were heroes, weren’t they? It really was life and death.’

  The team manager Nello Ugolini (left, in cap) and the panel-beating artist Medardo Fantuzzi (right), creator of the Eldorado Maserati’s bodywork, peer into the car’s cockpit during practice for the Monza 500 race (Getty Images).

  CHAPTER 38 THE ICE CREAM CAR

  On the outskirts of Modena stands a cheese and dairy farm called the Azienda Hombre, making organic Parmigiano-Reggiano from its own herd of cows. It is also the location of a museum containing a priceless collection of road and racing Maseratis, including the unique machine that brought Moss close to death when its steering failed at 165mph on Monza’s banked Pista di Alta Velocità.

  The car is the so-called Eldorado Special, a 4.2-litre Maserati single-seater painted in the colours of an ice-cream manufacturer and built to compete in the 1958 Race of Two Worlds, which pitted the European teams against the Americans who raced at Indianapolis and the other oval speedways across the United States. The museum, a shrine to Maserati’s history, was set up by Umberto Panini, a man who, with his brothers, made a fortune from humble football stickers. The tale of how these Maseratis came into Panini’s possession is the story of the rise and fall of one of Italy’s great car manufacturers.

  Alfieri, Ettore and Ernesto Maserati constructed their first car in their Bologna workshop in 1926. Joined by two more brothers, Mario and Bindo, they were soon winning big races, including the victories in 1930 of Achille Varzi in the Coppa Acerbo and the Monza Grand Prix. In 1933 Giuseppe Campari won the French Grand Prix and Tazio Nuvolari took the Belgian Grand Prix. But the commercial side was rarely stable and in 1937 the Maserati brothers sold the company to the Modenese businessman Adolfo Orsi, signing an agreement to stay on for ten years and moving with him to Modena when he relocated the factory in 1940. At the end of the arrangement in 1947 they returned to Bologna, where they founded a new company. Prevented from using their own name, they built cars for racing under the name OSCA (Officine Specializzate Costruzione Automobili). The official, Orsi-owned Maserati team continued in Formula 1, and in 1957 Juan Manuel Fangio, enjoying a family atmosphere in strong contrast to the internal tensions that tended to prevail at the Scuderia Ferrari, became their first world champion.

  The Eldorado Special was built for the second edition of the Race of Two Worlds. The first had taken place in 1957, when the Americans easily got the better of a token effort from the Europeans. Favouring the visitors was the use of the banked track, run in an anti-clockwise direction, like American ovals, and missing out the road section altogether. This suited the cars built specifically for Indianapolis, with two-speed gearboxes and offset chassis loaded for left turns only.

  In the first year, a directive from the newly formed Union des Pilotes Professionels Internationaux – which some critics derided as a ‘drivers’ trade union’ – led to an almost complete absence of top European drivers and teams to confront the ten cars and their drivers arriving from America. Having raced on the Monza banking, and believing that the event would be inherently unsafe, Moss, Fangio, Hawthorn and the rest were nowhere to be seen. Only Jean Behra broke ranks to represent the world of grand prix racing in a works F1 Maserati, but he withdrew after the first day’s practice. Bizarrely, and probably attracted by the promise of unusually substantial rewards offered to all the finishers, the Scottish sports car team Ecurie Ecosse agreed to bump up the field by sending three D-type Jaguars, two of which had finished first and second at Le Mans the previous weekend.

  Run in three heats, with the winner decided on the lowest aggregate time for the full distance, the race resulted in victory for Jimmy Bryan, from Phoenix, Arizona, who averaged more than 160mph over the 500 miles in his Dean Van Lines Special (named, like all the American cars, after its sponsor, in this case a California house removals company), making it the fastest race in history. He took away the Two Worlds Trophy and $35,000 in prize money, which was not as much as the $103,000 awarded to the winner at Indianapolis but still represented a very handsome reward by European standards.

  In Motor Sport, Denis Jenkinson had fulminated against what he saw as the grand prix drivers’ cowardice. ‘If Fangio, Moss or any of the others have the courage to say point-blank, “I am too frightened to race on the Monza banking,” then I will raise my soft-peaked cap to him for his honesty, but nothing more,’ he wrote. ‘To gather together behind the screen of an association is not only childish, it lacks guts… Every year racing becomes more and more “milk and water” and real he-man motor racing is practically extinct, so that in the end one can foresee everyone wrapped in cotton wool, and then I hope they all choke to death in their own safety.’

  Jenkinson’s remarks provoked an outcry. A month later, writing in the aftermath of a race that he described as ‘without doubt the event of the year’, he clarified his feelings. He had not been casting doubt on the courage of Fangio, Moss and the others, but on the dwindling sense of adventure engendered by a Welfare State in which ‘the tendency for the human being is to lead a safer and more secure life… I should have thought that the challenge to try a race that was faster and possibly more dangerous than anything yet run would have appealed to racing drivers, but apparently not…’

  A year later, when the race was held for a second time, the Europeans – having seen that the 1957 event was run without accidents, and probably thinking of the prize money – tried to put on a better show. Ferrari sent two specially built cars for their squad of grand prix drivers, Ecurie Ecosse came up with a single-seater Lister-Jaguar, and Fangio and Trintignant were given drives in American cars. Maserati, having ended their official involvement in racing after their entire squad of sports cars was destroyed in Caracas seven months earlier, accepted money from Gino Zanetti, the owner of the Eldorado company, to construct a car based on Indianapolis principles – offset engine, two-speed box – and painted to resemble one of his ice-cream vans. It was designed by Giulio Alfieri, the father of the much-loved 250F, and Moss was persuaded to drive it.

  In the two days of practice he indulged in a bit of psychological warfare against the visiting drivers. The weather on the first day was sunny. On the second day, however, a fine drizzle was falling. Back home, the Americans never ran in wet conditions; if it rained, the practice session or the race was postponed until the next dry day. Moss, being very used to racing in the rain, asked his mechanics to get the Eldorado Special warmed up. When the Americans told him that they wouldn’t drive in such conditions, he pointed out that they would be making it much easier for him and the other Europeans to pick up the prize money. And then, to their amazement, he went out, circulating at a safe speed but making sure, every time he came past the pits, to give the car a burst of throttle to make it snake and weave in front of their impressed eyes as the big V8 engine bellowed out its defiant song.

  To his friend and Mille Miglia co-driver Jenkinson, however, he had seemed apprehensive from the start of the weekend. ‘It was a very frightened and nervous Moss,’ the journalist wrote, ‘who got into the big car and was pushed off into the pouring rain, but onc
e under way he did his best to put aside all his inhibitions about track driving and turned some laps at about 145mph. Without exception the Americans raised their hats to the British driver, for the sight of the big white Maserati thundering down past the pits at nearly 160mph in the rain was awe-inspiring.’

  Race day, as it happened, turned out fine. Once Luigi Musso, defending Italian honour in one of the Ferraris, had been overcome by methanol fumes after taking the lead in the first heat, the Californian driver Jim Rathmann, in the Zink Leader Card Special, won all three races and the prize for the overall victory. Moss was fourth in the first heat and fifth in the second. In the third, he was dicing with two Americans for second place in a manner that elicited Jenkinson’s approval: ‘Moss discovered that in track racing it was every man for himself. You did not move over and let your rival through. If he wanted to get by he had to find a way by and you raced as close as you could… It was tough and rough, and the real Stirling Moss had suddenly realized that he could play it that way. The timid Moss of the pre-race days was pushed to one side…’

  Whether Moss’s behaviour that weekend could truthfully have been described as timid, or whether Jenkinson was indulging in a retrospective justification of his accusations of the previous year, must remain moot. What happened next was that Moss had an accident which might easily have killed him. Four years later, when the BBC interviewer John Freeman asked whether he had ever thought he was about to die in a crash, he replied: ‘Yes, I have. At Monza, my steering sheared at 165 on this banked track and my arms just shot around like this and the thing was out of control. I had virtually no brakes and I remember going up, hitting the top of the wall, closing my eyes, and then there was a whole hoo-hah and I don’t know exactly what happened because I had my eyes closed. The car came to a standstill and I jumped out and there was a lot of dust and everything. I thought to myself, “If this is heaven, why is it so hot? And if it’s hell, why is it so dusty?” ’