CARS AT SPEED - Grand Prix's Golden Age

by Daley, Robert

  At first the European drivers liked the Argentine races well enough. They filled a dead season of the year, the starting money was better than in most places and the partying was terrific. But over the years the mismanagement, the wild crowds, the heat, the absence of certain safety factors considered normal in Europe, combined to change their minds. Soon they definitely disliked Argentina's temporada.

  The 1958 races were the last in which Fangio drove. They were not organized until a few weeks before they finally were to be held--too late for factory teams to come from Vanwall, B.R.M., or Cooper. No one knew until four months after the Grand Prix whether it was to count for the driver's championship. Only 10 cars started the race, 6 of them elderly Maseratis with no chance to win. A seventh car was the tiny Cooper of Stirling Moss. It did in fact win, but since it also was accorded no chance before the race, it did not lure crowds. The race was figured to be a walkover for one of the three Ferraris, and the Ferrari team would of course decide beforehand which driver was to win.

  So the crowd was small. The Grand Prix of Argentina was followed by the 1,000-kilometer race—which the crowd watched as always from the autostrada, rather than pay for tickets in the grandstand. The final race of the temporada was the Grand Prix of Buenos Aires—on a day when it poured with rain. Three races, two of them badly mismanaged, three financial fiascos.

  The Automobile Club of Argentina had lost about $100,000, and officials predicted gloomily that there would never be another temporada. "Good," said most of the drivers.

  But in 1960 the races were organized again, possibly because the Automobile Club thought it could lure Fangio, then 49 years old, out of retirement. This it made a mighty effort to do, but Fangio wasn't having any. The club settled instead for Froilan Gonzalez who, up to 1954, had been one of the most ferocious drivers in the world. He was a great fat man with big beefy arms and he gave the impression of manhandling a quick slight race car around the circuits of the world. He was always fighting for the lead and did not care a hoot about fear.

  But in 1954, his pal, Onofre Marimon, an Argentine like himself, was killed in a Maserati at the Nurburgring. Gonzalez wept on Fangio's shoulder, and turned his car over to another driver. Gonzalez never won another race. He soon retired from Grand Prix racing, making only an occasional appearance during the temporada. Even in these races he was never a contender. The late Mike Hawthorn remarked in 1958 that Gonzalez had "lost his enthusiasm for racing." In 1960, Gonzalez agreed again to bail the Automobile Club out with the crowd, and drove a Ferrari. But he was not interested in dicing, and the weather was terribly hot. He stopped twice to have mechanics throw water on him, and finished 10th.

  In any case, the temporada had been resumed after a one-year lapse, and probably would continue at least intermittently now for many years. It had got its start via politics and Juan D. Peron, it had won fame thanks to Juan Manuel Fangio, and the impetus the two men had left would be a long time wearing off.

  If it is clear why racing in Grand Prix machines came to Argentina in the first place, it is much less clear why that faraway land should produce so many great or near-great drivers all at once.

  In addition to Fangio, Gonzalez, and Marimon, two other Argentines also raced Grand Prix cars during this period: Carlos Menditeguy and Roberto Mieres.

  Long-distance road racing in souped-up Chevrolets and Fords had been popular in Argentina before the war, and it is these fantastically arduous, dangerous races that formed Fangio. However, the road races stopped in 1942 due to shortage of gasoline and tires, at which time Gonzalez, Marimon, and the rest were scarcely out of school.

  Fangio was the son of an Italian immigrant, a plasterer, living in Balcarce. The family was poor, and in 1922, at 11, the boy went to work as a mechanic. When he was 25, he drove his first race, on a local dirt track. Before the end of the race his converted taxi fell apart. He continued to collect and put together odd pieces of car and before long the wreckage of three homemade race cars reposed in his yard. But he had not won a race.

  He was fearless to the point of recklessness. In one dirt-track race during a drought, dust clouds rose so thick that five drivers crashed and died. Fangio charged on, accelerator flattened on the floor. He was enjoying himself hugely, but the race was stopped.

  The dirt tracks were a start. From there a man graduated, if he lived, to the 1940 Gran Premio International del Norte, a 5,932-mile open road race up the spine of the Andes to Lima, Peru, and back to Buenos Aires again.

  The race lasted 13 days, the longest day's stage being 800 miles, the shortest a mere 300-mile climb up to La Paz at an altitude of 12,000 feet. Fangio's car was a stripped-down 1939 Chevrolet that wouldn't go that high unless he kept the engine roaring. He drove for 13 days alone over roads that were paved near the cities, primitive elsewhere, sometimes diminishing to mule tracks at altitudes so high that no paving machine would ever reach them. Across the mountains Fangio roared, past Lake Titicaca, then down through the tropical rain forest to Lima.

  There the cars were gassed and greased. The drivers breathed a sigh of relief—then turned around and started back.

  For 13 days without relief, Fangio averaged nine hours' driving a day, the car always teetering on the near side of control, Fangio fixed in absolute concentration over the wheel. He never made a mistake. When he reached Buenos Aires, far in the lead, he was famous all over South America. His average speed for nearly 6,000 miles was 53.6 miles per hour.

  It was the first race he had ever won. After it he raced the modified Chevrolet all over the continent, winning the Argentine Thousand Miles, the Doble Vuelta, the Premio Primavera, all open-road races.

  Then the war in Europe cut off supplies of gasoline and rubber. Fangio went back to his garage.

  When Juan D. Peron came to power he decided to make Buenos Aires a motor-racing capital of the world by importing Europe's biggest names for a series of races; the Argentine Automobile Club, backed by government financing, would establish its own stable of drivers.

  Fangio was then 35. He studied the European drivers, talked to them, tried out their cars. The Automobile Club borrowed one for him in 1948 at Rosario. He was in second place, the crowd screaming for him, when he pressed too hard, overreved, and blew up the engine.

  Going back to his souped-up stock cars, he entered the race from Buenos Aires to Caracas. At night in the mountains of Peru he went off the road. The car tumbled down the mountainside, but when it finally lodged against a tree, Fangio climbed out unhurt. His co-driver and closest friend was dead.

  He brooded for months. He always seemed to me more conscious of death than any other driver. He said he would never race again. But in 1949 the Automobile Club gave him a Maserati and sent him to Europe. He forgot his doubts, won 6 of 10 Grands Prix and returned to Argentina a greater hero than any national except Peron himself.

  After that a stream of Spanish-speaking journalists and broadcasters followed him everywhere. In 1951, he won his first world championship, beating Farina, Ascari, Villoresi, Taruffi, Rosier, Chiron, Fagoli, and all the other great drivers left over from prewar days.

  The next year, fogbound in Paris, he drove all night to reach the starting line at Monza in time. Exhausted, he crashed on the third lap, broke his neck, and was out of racing the rest of the season.

  This was the second and last bad crash of his life. After it he became more prudent. He won--but not always. He rarely overtaxed the car. The few occasions on which he took great risks were talked about for days afterward, simply because he had acted so unlike his normally careful self:

  --In the 1953 Mille Miglia one of the front wheels broke loose from its steering arm just before Bologna. Refusing to stop, Fangio averaged over 100 miles an hour from Bologna to Brescia to finish second.

  --At Monte Carlo in 1956, he took over a teammate's car and chased Stirling Moss for an hour, bouncing off walls, skimming curbs. He stove in the nose of the car, then the tail as he charged after Moss. No one had ever seen him d
rive that way before. Moss won by six seconds, although he had led by three minutes at the start of Fangio's wild ride. "When I finished," admitted Fangio shamefacedly, "the car was junk."

  --Nurburgring, 1957. This was the race that clinched Fangio's fourth straight world championship. He broke the lap record 10 times in the race, and during the last half-dozen laps took corners more often on the shoulder than on the road. A pit stop had put the Ferraris of Hawthorn and Collins ahead, but now Fangio's hair-raising assault on the lap record caught them up one by one. It was genius, that drive. It was exquisite, and it was one mistake away from sudden death. When the chase had ended, Fangio shivered violently , as if from a chill, and said: "I will never do that again as long as I live."

  He was stocky, bald, bow-legged, stone-faced. He was 47 years old when he quit, a dollar millionaire in Argentina. No one who is around racing today knew him very well. He spoke Spanish and Italian, went to bed early, ate carefully, and seemed to avoid the company of drivers. Perhaps he feared getting too attached to others because he suffered so much when they were killed.

  There is no doubt that he was, at the end, doom-conscious in the extreme. His statements to the press took on the weight of pronouncements, he began to avoid races like Le Mans and the Mille Miglia. His final year he drove only two races, stopping in both for careful changes of tires, while younger men went on without stopping— and finished ahead of him.

  Twice that year he practiced for races he had no intention of driving—at Indianapolis and Monza--each time in an American car. And each time, when he backed down at the last moment, his till-then spotless reputation was smirched, and wise guys in the crowd cried that he was afraid, he was a "cheese champion."

  I think by then he was afraid.

  "Too many accidents," he mourned as each season ended.

  He refused to race the Mille Miglia. "All those people," he said. "No man with a conscience could drive it."

  He visited the scene of the Portago crash, walking about muttering gloomily: "Three hundred kilometers an hour. Those poor children . . . was there insurance?"

  He led the European drivers' boycott of the 1957 Monza 500. "Too dangerous," he insisted.

  He made a speech at the prize-giving ceremony after the 1958 Grand Prix of Italy. "It was a great race," he said simply. "No one was killed."

  He went back to Argentina then and when journalists came to call on him he said he would never race again. "I will never go to a race again, even to watch. They were my brothers—Fagioli, Marimon, Collins, Musso, Levegh, Ascari, Castellotti, Portago—and now they are dead, all dead, and I will not go to a race again because the association is too painful for me."

  But he did watch several races the following season, notably at Monte Carlo where I saw him walking from corner to corner observing the drivers' technique. He had come all the way to Europe to see this race and a few others. Probably he himself would never race again, but it was clear that neither would he be able to stay away from what had been for so many years his genius and his life.

  Chapter 3.

  Through the Streets of Monte Carlo

  WHEN THE FIRST Grand Prix de Monaco was raced in 1929, the cars were big and square, and the driver sat as high as if on horseback. The race took nearly four hours to run and the average speed was a breakneck 50 miles an hour.

  A lot has changed since then. On this tightest of all Grand Prix circuits average speed has climbed only to about 70 miles per hour, and a modern race will still consume almost three hours. But today the cars are as sleek as missiles, capable of 170 miles an hour, and the drivers sit so low inside that only their heads show. The cars also are beautiful—it is a curious, potent, destructive kind of beauty that could not have been imagined 30 years ago.

  The cars of those early Grands Prix are in junkyards or museums now and the men who drove them are gone, most of them dead at the wheel on faster circuits than this one, dead pursuing a private vision of life that few of us understand.

  Monte Carlo, too, has changed, grown tall with skyscrapers and an American princess, grown more crowded, less chic, bourgeois. The race has become a production designed to pack more and more tourist buses into the tiny principality's few parking places, more and more yachts into the tiny harbor.

  The drivers used to be obliged to practice at dawn because the circuit runs through some of the main streets of the town and merchants refused to be closed off during business hours. No one likes getting up to go to work at four-thirty in the morning, especially race-car drivers proud of the "lazy" life they lead. Groggy with sleep, they used to sit in the dark on the pit counter under the trees, staring out at the harbor. Far out on the Mediterranean the night was turning To gray, but around them all was dark and still, and they munched croissants and sipped hot coffee and grumbled to each other.

  Then, emerging from the dark, mechanics would push the cars up alongside the pit counter. In a few minutes one engine after another would burst into life. Soon several were roaring, and Monte Carlo's sleep was shattered by the noise. The principality is an amphitheater, entirely surrounded by steep cliffs, and the noise echoed and reverberated down the canyons of streets, bounded from one cliff to another, and the sleepy drivers could, if it was any consolation to them, watch the lights flick on indignantly all over town.

  The residents complained every year, but the merchants were adamant, and the dawn practice continued. One year, one of those elderly English ladies of whom Monte Carlo used to be so full, collared Peter Collins and said: "Are you one of those horrible young men who have been making all that noise?"

  Collins confessed that he was, and the old lady shook her head sadly.

  "You look like such a nice boy," she remarked.

  Collins is gone now, and there are not many of those dated English ladies left either—Monte Carlo is changing so fast. The dawn practice seems to be a thing of the past, too. Instead, admission is charged in the afternoons, and special excursion buses are run in from everywhere. Parked emptily, they line the roads to Nice in the west, to Italy in the east. It is to be presumed that all those passengers spill into shops and restaurants the moment the thunder of race cars dies away and the streets re-open to commerce, there to babble excitedly and buy without thought of price. In any case, you cannot see Grand Prix race cars at dawn at Monte Carlo anymore.

  The circuit at Monte Carlo is only 1.9 miles around, and no one race has ever been won at an average faster than 70 miles an hour. There is no straight longer than 500 yards. Cars barely reach 100 miles an hour on these, before having to downshift into another hairpin.

  Because the circuit is so slow and sinuous, the cars often are truncated versions of the models that race elsewhere. Ferrari, Vanwall, and other marques are inclined to lop off their long sleek snouts, making a blunt stumpy car that has always reminded me of a large-mouth bass gasping for breath. This shortened car is less likely to shunt cars ahead in the logjams at the corners. Also, more air gets to the cooling system and driver.

  The harbor at Monte Carlo is horseshoe-shaped, the three sides about 500 yards long. Looking down on the base of the horseshoe from above, the Prince's palace and other public buildings stand high on the great Rock of Monaco to the right, to the left of the harbor rises another cliff. Atop it is the Casino, flanked by the two chic hotels of Monte Carlo, the Hotel de Paris and the Metropole.

  The race begins in the middle of the horseshoe, heading right, toward the Rock. This is not a road, but the promenade along the harbor front and the surface is not asphalt but tile. The promenade is wide, but half of it is filled with large high grandstands, leaving a fairly narrow chute through which the cars hurtle past their pits.

  Separating the promenade from the parallel street, there is a fringe of palm trees and umbrella pines. The pits are in this fringe among the trees, facing the grandstand and the harbor behind it.

  From the start, the cars race to the end of the promenade base of the horseshoe, then make a U-turn and come back in the street
parallel to it. At the end of the base they make a 90-degree turn and race up the hill toward the Casino, veering slightly away from the harbor (which soon is far below) in the process.

  At the top of the hill this street turns slightly left, and cars that don't are liable to crash into the Casino wall. This is known in the trade as "trying to enter the Casino without paying," and has been attempted by several.

  At the Casino wall the cars turn 90 degrees left, scream past the windows of Cartier's jewelry store, turn 90 degrees right, and pierce those lovely, manicured gardens in front of the Casino, which are the pride of Monte Carlo and the delight of visitors.

  The Casino itself is a long Baroque edifice and the cars now race past its entire length. There are grandstands in front of the Casino on both sides of the street, and the terrace of the Caf6 de Paris also offers a splendid view.

  From the Casino the street turns and plunges down in a series of harrowing bends to the sea front, where it turns back toward the harbor and runs along the sea wall below and behind the Casino. Here there is a tunnel under the railroad station that curves slightly right. Inside the tunnel great arc lamps blaze all through the race to make the tunnel as bright as the outdoors; otherwise drivers would plunge from sunlight into darkness at 100 miles an hour.

  The arc lamps work very well, although some have been grazed and knocked down at times. But nothing can be done about the other problem of the tunnel—the noise. Inside the tunnel it is compressed and intensified. It is deafening. It takes a brave man not to feel frail and outgunned, alone in all that noise.

  It used to be said that only Fangio could roar through calmly, with confidence, that all the others lifted their foot a little, instinctively, uncontrollably. I do not know if this is true or not.

  Upon leaving the tunnel, the street curves back to the Casino side of the horseshoe harbor. Where it reaches the harbor there is a chicane, or slight wiggle, which serves to send the cars off the street and up onto the promenade that surrounds the harbor.