CARS AT SPEED - Grand Prix's Golden Age

by Daley, Robert

  This book is about two kinds of cars, the racing sports car, and the Grand Prix car-and the men who drive them. It is personal. It is an expression of one man's awe and admiration.

  This book is about the arenas where the fast cars run: the chic and haughty streets of Monte Carlo, the muffling sand dunes of Holland, the soundless forests of West Germany, the hills above the Tagus River at Lisbon, it is about the races themselves. The Grand Prix of Argentina is partly the tale of a dictatorship, a tyrant currying favor with the mob, and the slaughter of many persons by a race car; the Targa Florio was all its founder lived for; he impoverished his family for it, and it is, year after year, not so much a race as a bitter struggle between machines and the wild Sicilian country; the Twenty-Four Hours at Le Mans is a carnival— a carnival tempered by disaster; the Grand Prix de France is tempered too, but by champagne.

  This book is about the men: about Rudi Caracciola, who drove the fastest cars of all time faster than anyone else; about Jean Behra, for whom a nation wept; about Juan Fangio, who thought always of death; about Jack Brabham, the champion who excites no one; about Stirling Moss, who loves racing above all things and says: "I will race as long as I live—however long that may be."

  Motor racing is unique. There is no other sport so noisy, so violent. There is none so cruel.

  Chapter 1.

  End of the Open Road

  AT GUIDIZZOLLO in the Po Valley the country is flat and the narrow road pierces the gray stone village like a spear. All day the villagers have stood outside their houses, gaping tensely at the speeding cars, shaken by the roar of the Mille Miglia. The Mille Miglia: a thousand-mile race over the ordinary roads of Italy. Beginning before dawn at Brescia in the north, the cars have plunged south along the Adriatic coast, crossed to Rome, and sped up the spine of the Apennines toward Brescia again. It is late afternoon now, and only a few cars remain to come by. Guidizzollo is thirty miles from the finish. A boy is the first to spy the dot in the distance which swiftly looms larger and larger. “Ferrari!" he cries. The people of the village strain forward from both sides of the road. Now the Ferrari screams down upon them. Its speed must be at least 150 miles an hour. Suddenly, incomprehensibly, the Ferrari swerves. Its tail wallops the left bank of the road, uprooting a milestone. It guillotines a telegraph pole, leaps into the air and snaps the wires overhead. A murderous projectile out of control, it careens into the crowd on the right, bounds across the road and mows down others on the left. Only an instant has passed, but eleven are dead or dying and the air is rent by screams of the horrified and the hurt. The shattered car is caught like a line drive by a drainage ditch and lies half buried beside the road. Nearby, men come upon the bodies of the twenty-eight-year-old Spanish nobleman, Alfonso de Portago, who had driven the car, and his friend Gurner Nelson, who had gone along for the ride. It remained only to be remarked bitterly in the press that probably the Mille Miglia had killed for the last time, that world indignation would not permit the race to be run again. The day of the open-road race was over.

  Open-road races had begun almost as soon as cars. The first was in 1894, seventy-nine miles, from Paris to Rouen. The cars actually were horseless carriages--except for the high square box over the axle which contained the engine, and the long stick of a tiller which was used to steer, they resembled exactly the carriage which ol' Dobbin used to pull.

  The driver sat high up--high enough to see over the horse in front, if there had been one. The wheels were wooden, a yard in diameter, the tires bicycle narrow, of solid rubber. The driver attempted to steer with the tiller, which was long, wobbly, and liable to be jerked out of his hands if the wheels struck a rut or rock. Even on a smooth road, he found it difficult to steer accurately.

  Brakes were equally primitive. They could not stop a car quickly. A block of wood was jammed down on the solid rubber tire, the driver pulled on the lever with all his might, the rubber burned, and the car gradually—if the driver's strength held out—came to a stop.

  The unpaved road from Paris to Rouen was long, white and dusty. The cars were of French manufacture, and the race was staged to prove the manufacturers' claims—that they could cover the distance faster than any horse or team of horses, that there was in fact nothing so fantastically fast in all the world.

  The cars started out of the capital, De Dions, Panhards, Peugeots, some running on gasoline, some on steam, all racing along flat out— about fifteen miles an hour. In some places swarms of spectators watched avidly. In others horsemen sprinted alongside, stopped to watch, then sprinted ahead again, with derisive catcalls.

  Occasionally the cars had to leave the road to skirt herds of cattle which wouldn't. Individual cars were attacked by dogs, and one at least succeeded in causing a car to turn over.

  Great clouds of dust arose, so that sometimes all cars but the first were invisible. Drivers coughed and cursed, held scarves over their faces, and attempted to pass, swinging the tiller wide and hoping that the car would place itself in the correct position, that no stones or potholes would throw it into the car ahead which, in the thick dust, could hardly be seen.

  After seven hours some of the cars actually reached Rouen, and the news was received with excitement everywhere. The winner's average speed had been a fabulous 11.6 miles an hour. As a sport, road racing seemed to have a glorious future, for it was tense, thrilling, romantic—it was travel.

  Now more and more road races began to be organized; Paris-Dieppe; Paris-Bordeaux; Paris-Berlin. And then: from Paris clear across the continent to Vienna.

  Roads remained unimproved; only the cars changed. They became lower and slightly more manageable. The jerky tiller was replaced by a steering wheel big as a ship's helm. Pneumatic tires were invented; they blew out every few miles and had to be carved off the rims with knives, but they permitted a car to be placed, and held, in a corner. Engines swelled from one, to two, to four cylinders, increasing speeds until the newer cars thundered along at nearly thirty miles an hour, and motor racing's first fatality became simply a question of time.

  It happened in 1898 near Perigueux, France. The Marquis of Montaignac lost control of his rickety machine in a bend and was pitched out. Women screamed and men ran to his side, but the Marquis was dead of injuries which included a fractured skull. People did not get over the horror of it for several days.

  The open-road races continued. Soon the cars were great, belching juggernauts, awkward and unwieldy but bigger and faster than man had dreamed possible scant months before.

  Races at the turn of the new century began at dawn, the drivers waiting beside their cars in the gray light, hordes of people cycling out from town with lanterns dangling from their bikes, anxious to be part of the drama and excitement of the start.

  The lanterns gave forth an eerie glow as the crowds swarmed closer and closer to the machines, peering, gawking, whispering, talking about the driver behind their hands as if he were a celebrity or a god.

  Then the start: the driver stared straight ahead down the long white road which led to some exotic, incredibly distant city. The crowd watched him with awe. He sat proudly, concentrated on the road ahead, and the mob believed him unaware of them. This was not true; then as now the driver basked in their attention. The crowd saw only the romance of the race ahead; the driver, warmed by the image of himself as reflected in their rapt faces, saw the romance too, and was thrilled by it.

  And the cars roared away. There was no romance now. The drivers knew little or nothing about the roads ahead, had only a vague idea of the country to be crossed and the distance to be made. The object was simply to get to Berlin or Vienna as fast as possible.

  The driver wore a leather coat and peaked cap, and sat high up. His mechanic sat on the floor, legs dangling over the side in stirrups, his fingers busy with hand-operated pumps and tubes, feeding lubricant to moving parts en route.

  The dirt roads were narrow and bumpy, but sometimes the cars bounded along at nearly 70 miles an hour, and the dust rose so thick
and choking that men steered by the lines of treetops flanking the road. Passing, in blinding dust on high-spine dirt roads, provided as dangerous a moment as racing ever would.

  After each day's run the cars were locked in a paddock at some intermediate city and the drivers, exhausted, covered with filth and oil, were dismissed to hotels. At dawn the next day away they would go again.

  There were depots all along the route. The race had to provide its own fuel, its own tires. The gas station did not yet exist and there were towns which had never seen a car before, whose first view was a dozen or more thundering racers bounding through, the noise shaking the buildings, terrifying the children and the stock; and then the silence, and the colossal cloud of dust settling down over everything.

  It was difficult even to find the depots, for few of the drivers had ever been over the road before, or knew what the terrain was like around the next bend. There were no signs warning of curves, hills or narrow bridges. Sometimes there was little difference between main and side roads, and a racer who got detached from the pack could shoot off into the back country by mistake and stay lost for days.

  The depots were fine for repairs, provided you could find one and happened to break down at precisely that spot. But few drivers were that lucky. The most exasperating trouble was blowouts. Cars raced along with great piles of tires strapped to the platform behind the driver. In sun and dust, two men sweating over a burst tire required twenty minutes to change it, pump it up, then crank the engine back into life, and after a day on the road a race driver's fingers were mangled and bleeding beyond belief.

  Busy as the driver was, the mechanic was busier. Oil pumps, grease cups and air-pressure pumps were all hand operated. The mechanic also had to keep a constant watch to the rear to warn the driver of cars attempting to pass—no one had yet thought of mirrors, and in such filth and dust they would have had limited value anyway. The clutch was secured with a strap; the mechanic had to be ready any instant to let up enough to permit the driver to change gears. A tire might last no more than a mile, but fuel lines dogged nearly as often, the mechanic jumping out to locate the trouble, repair it, then crank the engine up again. Spark plugs blew clean out of the engine head, wooden wheel spokes loosened and mechanics would run to find a pail of water, soak the wheel, and hope the wood would swell enough to last to the next depot.

  Every time the car's speed rose over 30 miles an hour, driver and mechanic knew their lives were in danger. A hole in the road could throw them both out, a wheel might break or the car catch fire. In a skid the car was practically unmanageable. Worst of all, man was used to speeds a horse might run; anything faster was beyond his experience. He had had no practice coping with emergencies at speed; his eyes did not adjust fast enough, his hand might not react in time. He was in over his head and knew it, but he pressed the throttle into the floor and sped on, reaching the frontier of the unknown in speed, crossing it, and gazing about in wonder. He was a passenger, no longer a driver now, and death sped along at his elbow. Excited, exhilarated beyond belief, he momentarily did not care. Or perhaps he realized dimly that this was something worth offering his life to, that some day men would control such speed with ease, because he had come first and shown the way. Perhaps he wanted to laugh or cry at what he had achieved, while the trees blurred by and the pounding made his jaw ache.

  Then, later, he reined in, gathering control once more, and was thrilled and amazed to be still alive. He felt like a god. He had reached the horizon of human experience and looked beyond. He had seen a future that was glorious, dazzling, without limit.

  Only at night perhaps, tired, elated, waiting for sleep, did the full realization of what he had risked weigh upon him. And he shivered and wondered if, in the morning, he would have the courage to go on.

  But when morning came the crowd was there in the dawn light, holding lanterns high to see his face, while he pretended to be aloof and unaware of the admiration all around him. He took that day's courage from the crowd, as he had taken yesterday's and would take tomorrow's, reading in the crowd his own real importance. Polite society might shun him for he was a rough man, dirty, ill-mannered, a hireling of the rich. Sometimes he doubted himself. Without the crowd he might not have been able to go on, the risk was so great. But the admiration of the crowd could not be feigned, it was absolutely genuine, and he knew or sensed that there was greatness in what he did, even if he could not have told where or why. Probably he was never able to think it out, but he was an explorer like Columbus. Behind him were the doubters, ahead was the discovery to be made; a man might never find it, but it was there. For every man who succeeded, as Columbus did, a hundred, looking in the wrong place, would fail. He himself might crash tomorrow and, doused in gasoline, light up the sky; only the romantic would call this going out in a blaze of glory. But he had been part of the search, that was the important thing, part of the exploration, and the glory would be his whether it was he who came to the new country, or another. For the man who knew that the new country was there--whatever other men said--must look for it, though it cost him his life.

  For nine years the search was carried out upon the open roads of Europe, and wherever the races went the gospel of the automobile was spread. There is no overestimating the work the town-to-town races did. The cars of those days were not nearly as reliable as a horse; the roads were totally unsuited to them; and the cars were, furthermore, new, revolutionary, complex, incomprehensible, unsafe.

  Sales resistance to them was overpowering—or would have been except for the town-to-town races. But the races cloaked the new machines in romance. The few who won got glory too, but principally the automobile itself became looked upon as romantic. The glamour of the dawn starts, the stamina and heroism of the men who raced such incredible distances, the exotic places the cars went to, all combined to sugar-coat an ugly, fragile, uncomfortable, unreliable contraption. Because of the races all of Europe was talking about cars. Because of the races a large part of Europe had actually seen them. Without races the sale and dissemination of the automobile would have been so slow, so restricted to the very rich and idle, that decades might have passed before ordinary men knew more than the word.

  Then, in 1903, came disaster. The races had grown too big. They were out of control, and all must have known what would happen.

  The Automobile Club of France organized a race to Madrid, about 750 miles southeast of Paris. Could the cars do it in two days? Could they do it at all? All Europe waited to know. Beginning the night of May 23, a Saturday, an estimated 100,000 persons moved out of Paris to take up positions on the road south from Versailles, where the race was to start at dawn. Police had been mobilized. They stood a hundred yards apart all the way to Bordeaux. Behind them, straining forward, bowing the police line even now in the night, hours before the cars would come through, massed more than 3,000,000 people.

  Even to start such a race meant hundreds of extra sales to manufacturers. Panhard entered 17 cars, Mors 14, Mercedes 12, De Dietrich 10. In all, the road behind the starting line was stuffed with probably 175 cars, 350 drivers and mechanics, and the line stretched back more than a mile.

  There were so many cars that harried organizers decided to send them off beginning at 3:30 a.m. But the start had to be postponed for it was too dark, and none of the great rickety cars had lights. By quarter to four that chill Sunday morning, officials judged that it was light enough. Police cleared a path through the thousands of spectators milling about the start, and the first car lurched off, the crowd immediately filling in behind it for a better look. One by one the cars roared away, the dust settling down upon the crowd until it was gray with it.

  The first car off had been the De Dietrich of the Englishman Charles Jarrott. The route led south through Chartres, Tours, Poitiers and Angouleme to Bordeaux. As the sun rose, Jarrott could make out the giant cathedral of Chartres squatting high on its hill perhaps 20 miles way, and he shouted down to his mechanic on the floor that they must be making goo
d time, over 70 miles an hour, probably. There were no speedometers, but Jarrott had made a good start and no car had passed him so far.

  Jarrott's car broke down twice, but his mechanic got it running again. Two cars passed, a big Mercedes, and the small, fast machine of Louis Renault.

  Across the plain Jarrott raced toward Tours.

  "We're really moving," his mechanic shouted.

  Jarrott nodded, but, he recounted later, he was beginning to worry. Where were all the other cars which he knew to be faster than his? Why had no others overtaken him? He was going well, but not that well.

  There was a control at Tours, from which Jarrott was dispatched a minute after the big Mercedes.

  He raced after it, began to gain. Then suddenly the Mercedes ahead simply disintegrated before his astonished eyes. He braked to a stop. Mechanic and driver were sitting groggily in a field amidst the junk which had been a car. They looked all right. Jumping back into his car, Jarrott raced on down the corridor of people which seemed to stretch unbroken from Paris to the Spanish frontier.

  Towards noon Jarrott made out the rooftops of Bordeaux far ahead. Still no one had passed him, and with the Mercedes wrecked, there was only Louis Renault ahead. What had happened behind?

  Renault raced under the banner in Bordeaux at 12:15, Jarrott arriving 16 minutes later. They were engulfed by the delighted, uncontrollable crowd. They were cheered, posed for photos, received garlands of flowers, food and drink. The city had seldom been in so festive a mood.

  Time began to pass, but no more cars arrived. The crowd commenced to stir and murmur. A telephone call came through from Paris, and officials looked grim. Rumors began to circulate through the crowd. Something terrible had happened, it was whispered. A car had gone into the crowd. Some drivers were dead.