As his body was laid to rest in the family tomb in Madrid, he was mourned in many parts of the world. Jean Behra, the French driver, said: "Only those who do not move, do not die; but are they not already dead?"
The Mille Miglia as a road race died with Portago, as Paris-Madrid had died with Marcel Renault 54 spring-times before. The Mille Miglia has indeed been run again, but reorganized into a rally and interesting almost no one. The Mille Miglia was a glorious name; it was sometimes a glorious race, and it would have been better forgotten completely until such time as the next race like it erupts somewhere, rocketing across a country in the sun, and men speak again of Paris-Madrid, Alfonso de Portago, and the great town-to- town road races of the past.
Chapter 2.
Juan M. Fangio and Juan D. Peron
IN ARGENTINA there is wealth. Favored persons live on great estates, keep polo ponies, yachts, fleets of cars, and spend hours sitting around swimming pools sipping cool drinks brought by servants. Servants can be hired for $30 a month, and so the wealthy class keeps a dozen, and grows more indolent day by day.
For the poor, life is another story. The poor live in shacks in sunless quarters of the city. When there is work, men earn a few pennies a day. When there is no work, they sit outside and stare straight ahead, listening to the wailing of their children, who are hungry. Eventually such men gather in groups and talk revolution.
Argentina has a name for the very poor. They are called los descamisados, the shirtless ones, and they outnumber the rich by a hundred to one.
Because they are so many, the nation is always on the verge of upheaval. The tyrant must walk a delicate line between the rich who support him, and the poor who would overthrow him. He must appease the poor without altering the social order and thus infuriating the rich.
Juan D. Peron, dictator of Argentina, decided, as in ancient Rome, to give the poor its games because it was cheaper than giving them food. The games would take the form of a temporada, a series of motor races run in the broiling summer sun of Buenos Aires in January 1953, one of which would count toward the driver's world championship.
An autodrome was designed and built in ten months. On a small, flat piece of ground outside the city, a spiderweb of road was laid down. By moving straw bales about, the circuit could be altered into eight different shapes and lengths ranging from two and a half miles to five miles. Grandstands could accommodate nearly half a million people. There was criticism of the autodrome; men who knew motor racing pointed out that the roads lacked proper drains and would be flooded in any kind of rainstorm. Also, the pits had been built in such a way that cars drifting around the turn just before them would, if control was lost even slightly, drift into the pit wall, slaughtering any mechanic or official who happened to be standing there. Also, while it was a fine thing to build facilities for half a million "shirtless ones," it would be impossible to control that many in such limited space. These objections and others were uttered, but in a whisper. One did not, in 1953, criticize what Peron approved.
Two of the races were to be called: El Gran Premio de la Nacion Juan D. Perm, and El Gran Premio de la Nacion Evita Peron. Peron planned to lower the starting flag personally in the race he named after himself, knowing that nearly half a million would cheer the gesture. Eva would start the second race for the same reasons.
The Argentine government brought the drivers over from Europe in a chartered plane. The plane arrived at Buenos Aires at ten o'clock at night and was immediately surrounded by a seething mass of wildly cheering fans. Government officials were there, as well as Fangio and Gonzalez, the two top Argentine drivers, national heroes both. Customs formalities were dispensed with; the newly arrived drivers were accorded VIP treatment and driven into the city in a cavalcade between rows of cheering fans.
The next day they were received by Peron in his great pink palace in the center of Buenos Aires; in Spanish and Italian he talked avidly of motor racing. The British drivers spoke through interpreters. That reception lasted a long time, and was followed by others given by mayors, governors, and other authorities. Peron put a private plane at the disposal of the drivers, in case they cared to go swimming at Mar del Plata.
Eva Peron had died a few days before and it was suggested that the drivers make a pilgrimage to her tomb, which they did. However, her body was not there; it was being given an extensive embalming treatment.
Meanwhile, at the junction of Avenida Corientes and Avenida July the 9th, the city's two most important thoroughfares, great portraits of the drivers and cars had been mounted. Loudspeakers harangued the people night and day:
"Come to the great motor race . . . World-championship Grand Prix Sunday afternoon . . . Fangio, Ascari, Gonzalez, Farina . . . The world's finest, fastest, most daredevil drivers ..."
Race day dawns fine and hot. The thermometer hovers near a hundred degrees, and a hot wind blows in from the pampas. Early in the morning, the mob begins trekking out to the autodromo. The Grand Prix is not scheduled to start until 4:00 p.m., but by noon the enclosures are full. A quarter of a million people await the start of the great race.
By two o'clock they are becoming impatient. The enclosures are packed solid, it is very hot, and tempers flare as more thousands try to force their way in. People begin to faint in the crush and are passed out over the heads of the mob. A few fistfights break out; police move to quell them with clubs and whips.
The crowd is hungry, thirsty, and pressed chest to back so tightly a man cannot turn around. And there is still a two-hour wait.
Outside in the streets the police are skirmishing with thousands of fans who can't get in. Small bands of shirtless ones riot and attack the police. A few men produce wire cutters and slice their way through the fence. Soon a dozen openings have been cut and hundreds of men squirm through. As there is no place for them in the enclosures, they spill down onto the track and mill about. Police force them back off the circuit. Their number keeps swelling as others find the openings and slither through.
More and more police arrive and try to throw out those who have no tickets. It is no use, there are too many. Nearly a hundred thousand persons now line the track, blocking the view of those in the enclosures who have paid to get in and who have already waited several hours in heat and dust and sweat. Many of these now hurdle the barriers and move closer to the track. Police are struggling for control as Peron arrives. An estimated hundred thousand persons still mill about in the streets, shouting their anger and dismay. They have waited all year to see the Grand Prix, which their President had promised them, and now there is no room.
Peron hesitated only a moment. The purpose of the Grand Prix was to appease the mob; it now can be appeased in only one way.
Peron spread his arms wide like a benevolent messiah.
"My children, my children," he cried, "let them in!"
An aide passed the word to withdraw the police entirely. The mob screamed its delight, swarming through gates and through the openings already cut in the fence. This was not fast enough for one enterprising chap, who hitched a truck to the fence and yanked away a hundred yards of it at a time. He kept on demolishing the fence until there were no shirtless ones left in the street.
Inside, the rioting and confusion were monumental. The mob lined the entire circuit 8 and 10 deep. In the grandstands hundreds of shirtless ones moved about like marauders, driving out those who had paid for seats by sticking lighted cigarettes into them.
The drivers refused to start until the crowd had been moved back. After a few minutes it was clear this was impossible to do, and in the hope that the spectacle of the race would calm the chaos, the signal to start was given.
The cars roared away, hurtling round and round the twisty little circuit. Lap by lap the road got narrower and narrower as the writhing, cheering, screaming mass of flesh pressed closer and closer toward the rocketing race cars. Soon there were places where the road had become an alley and men were trying to touch the cars racing by. Men, many of them
drunk, tore off their shirts and thrust them like bullfighters' capes into the road, yanking them out of the way of the onrushing "bull" only at the last second. They howled with laughter at this game, while the drivers grew more and more frightened. Some of the drivers shook fists at the crowd, some tried to signal it to please, please move back. The crowd only howled the louder, and played the game with greater disregard for danger.
A few of the drivers, knowing that catastrophe was imminent, stopped at their pits, refusing to go on.
The crowd had moved so completely onto the road that signs warning of turns were obscured. So were many other cut-off points the drivers had been using.
At lap 21 came the first accident. A Cooper shed a wheel, which whirled into the mob, shattering faces and bones. The screams of the injured mingled with the screams of the racing cars.
Two laps later a child darted into the road just in front of Nino Farina's speeding Ferrari. Farina swerved, lost control, and slid broadside into the mob. The car carved up the close-packed ranks like a giant scythe, scattering pieces of the dead and dying in all directions.
The crowd, so carefree a moment before, so full of zest, now flew into panic. Another child darted into the road and was slaughtered by a Cooper. Farina, helped out of his wrecked Ferrari, was led away in a state of shock.
The race went on. Men began to stack the bodies in a neat pile beside the road. The stack got higher and higher as the race continued, and the road ran with blood. The drivers all slowed, passing the spot with horror on their faces and no desire in their hearts to continue.
Word got through to the ambulance crews that there had been an accident. The drivers of the ambulances now decided to show the crowd some real speed as they raced to the scene of the accident-racing against each other, not in the same direction as the Grand Prix, but against it.
Inevitably, one of the drivers found himself speeding head-on at a race car, veered, lost control, and crashed into the crowd, killing two more. He stopped, threw these new victims into the ambulance, and continued on to the main accident.
The police now moved valiantly to restore order. Mounted cops galloped into the mob with bullwhips, forcing it back, back--until the mob in one spot gathered itself, rushed a policeman, jerked him off his horse, and kicked him to death. Others also were unhorsed and beaten. That was the end of the effectiveness of the mounted troop.
A Gordini lost a wheel, injuring more people. By this time there were about 30 dead, and only a few cars still in the race. Alberto Ascari, in a Ferrari, averaging 78 miles an hour, had a big lead. The crowd, terrified at last, began to move back. In the presidential box, dictator Juan D. Peron was silent. Before the race was over he moved toward the exit and headed back toward his palace. More than half a million shirtless ones followed with mixed emotions. In the city morgue, men busied themselves identifying the dead and arranged to notify next of kin.
Another race, the one that would have been named after Eva Peron, followed the next weekend. Peron armed the police with machine guns and stationed them shoulder to shoulder facing the public enclosures.
Thousands of armed troops also were on hand. There were no incidents. The race was won by Farina, who had killed so many only seven days before.
Often in the past, motor racing has been the bedfellow of politics, notably in Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. Hitler-sponsored Mercedes and Auto-Unions had shocked Europe in the years just before World War II, each firm receiving $200,000 in direct government subsidies for producing Grand Prix cars; each spent close to a million dollars in development, making up the difference by receiving munitions contracts at favorable terms. The cars themselves were about as fast as dive bombers, and as loud. Their engines produced 600 roaring horsepower (twice that of current Grand Prix cars) and the cars could reach 200 miles an hour. However, German efficiency kept them under control on and off the track. They never killed anyone, except a few drivers. If crowd control was not perfect, the cars did not run.
In Italy a few years earlier, Mussolini had pushed motor racing by allocating government funds for the building of circuits, by making state heroes of drivers, team managers, and factory owners, and by various other means. Italy, unlike Germany, did have its tragedies during this period. It was, nonetheless, a golden age of motor racing--the Mille Miglia came into existence, the Targa Florio attracted world interest, Monza became the premier European circuit, and Alfa Romeo won hundreds of races for Italian drivers like Nuvolari, Varzi, Campari, Borzacchini, Materassi, Fagioli, Bordino and Antonio Ascari.
But until, under the impetus of Juan D. Peron, the Grand Prix of the Argentine was first organized in 1947, the world had never seen motor racing pushed so openly for political advantage or with so little regard for crowd and driver safety, and with such haphazard management.
Previous to Peron's murderous temporada of 1953, drivers were killed in 1949 (Jean Pierre Wimille and Adrino Malusardi were forced off their lines by the crowd encroaching on the circuit). In 1954 Eric Forest Greene crashed but leaped out of the wreck with his clothes flaming; although there were officials all about, none knew what to do to help him, and there were no blankets for smothering fire on hand; he died the next day. Also in 1954, a pit manager, Erico Plate, was killed when a car driven by an Argentine amateur without enough experience to cope with such emergencies, skidded into the pits and crushed him against a wall; this accident was the result of the pits' having been built too close to the curve, and of the amateur's having been permitted to enter the race in the first place. By 1960 Peron was in exile; but bad habits are hard to shake. At the end of a long straight, cars were still flashing through a kind of narrow gate—it seems as narrow as the eye of a needle at racing speed— although there had been two fatal accidents there in previous years. It is a stupidly dangerous place, should have been eliminated long ago, but may never be. The driver it killed in 1960 was named Harry Blanchard.
That there have not been even more deaths seems due strictly to luck. One year during the 1,000-kilometer race for the sports car world championship, the drivers were expected to race up and down an autostrada at 170 miles an hour, with a hairpin turn at one end and nothing at all between north and southbound traffic but some straw bales. The organizers (the temporada is always organized by the Argentine Automobile Club, which formerly took its orders from Peron) also had stretched wires between the trees bordering the autostrada, which were supposed to help hold back the crowd. These wires, being head high, were perfect for decapitating any driver whose car went spinning off the road under them.
When such "oversights" were pointed out to a committee member he would often simply grin and remark that the committee could not be expected to think of everything. The committee couldn't even protect itself in ticket sales. It was quite capable of running half of the sports-car race down the autostrada (where there were no stands or fences or means to make spectators pay for tickets) and then wonder why there were so few paid admissions in the grandstand area.
The Grand Prix of Argentina exhibited Latin nonchalance with a vengeance. The circuit usually was swarming with officials, most of them friends of Peron's, none of whom knew anything at all about motor racing. Flag-signaling to drivers was either primitive or nonexistent. One year a political big shot got ready to start the race, but failed to notice that he was standing on the flag. He gave a great upward jerk on the flag handle, nearly upending himself. Half the cars started at this "signal," half didn't. It was a typical Argentina start.
The temporada was more circus than motor race. Often the Grand Prix would be the fourth or fifth event of the day, the crowd having already watched motorcycle races, stock-car races, and so on. Interest was not allowed to flag during intermissions, when there would sometimes be shows of parachute jumping or aerial acrobatics. Gliders would swoop down, and men would dangle beneath helicopters doing one-handed handstands.
Naturally, the temporada was always held during the worst weather of the year. During two races it
rained (the 1958 Grand Prix of Buenos Aires; the 1954 Argentine Grand Prix). All the rest of the time the heat was so intense that drivers could scarcely breathe. Normal daytime heat in Buenos Aires in January is 100 degrees; out on the circuit heat waves shimmered up and temperatures of 131 were recorded.
The hottest race of all probably was the 1955 Argentine Grand Prix. The lowest temperature any thermometer recorded that suffocating summer day was 104. The circuit was a furnace. Heat waves rose so thickly from the asphalt that drivers reported seeing mirages—houses in the middle of the road, cool ponds surrounded by trees. After a few laps no man dared believe his senses any longer. Vision was distorted, curves swam up toward the cars through waves of heat. Jean Behra crashed, Karl Kling crashed, Alberto Ascari crashed. Stirling Moss coasted to a stop exhausted and was taken away by ambulance. Eugenio Castellotti stopped his car just in time to faint. One car changed drivers eight times.
Meanwhile, the great Fangio drove round and round, averaging nearly 80 miles an hour, making no mistakes. The car's structural tubing got so hot it inflicted second-degree burns on his leg. At every curve his leg swung against the searing metal. He nearly fainted many times, but he kept driving, round and round and round.
When the race ended after three hours, Fangio was off by himself. It took three drivers to bring in each of the following three cars. Fangio stumbled from his, failed to recognize his wife, and mumbled, "I want a bath."
The scars of that race still mark his right leg. He bought balm for his wounds out of the $5,500 bonus the Mercedes factory paid him for winning under such conditions.
After that race, mechanics learned to carve a dozen or more holes in a car's cowling whenever they came to Argentina, and buckets of water were kept on hand in the pits (and sometimes at points on the circuit) for dousing drivers during the course of the race. The spectacle of groggy drivers pulling over to a curb where a mechanic would throw a bucket of water over them, became a common thing in Buenos Aires.
CARS AT SPEED - Grand Prix's Golden Age Page 4
