CARS AT SPEED - Grand Prix's Golden Age

by Daley, Robert

  Andre was unknown, and even his brother's name was nearly forgotten. Andre had borrowed a car from the Peugeot factory. He was young, impetuous, romantic, vain. The car had been built in 1914 and had never been raced. Andre Boillot resolved to win with it or kill himself trying.

  The only postwar car in the race was a Ballot. Ernest Ballot had spent the war building marine engines; when it ended he determined to build an entire car, enter it under French colors, and sweep the board clean. It would be the finest racing car of all time. When it won, as it surely would, the satisfaction and profit would be Ballot's; the glory would go to his beloved France. Rene Thomas, most competent driver of the day, was signed to drive it.

  A Grand Prix Fiat, built before Italy's entry in the war, had been bought and entered by Antonio Ascari, soon to be recognized as a great driver, and whose son, Alberto, who was to win the world championships of 1953 and 1954, was born that very year.

  These were the three favorites among 23 starters:

  The reckless young Andre Boillot, brother of heroes, a boy who had grown up during the war and who held his own life cheaply; the steady, reliable Thomas in the car that Ernest Ballot had built for the honor and glory of France; and Ascari in the Grand Prix Fiat.

  November in Sicily is normally warm and sunny, but that year cold winds blew, and rain fell all day before the race. During the night, drivers were kept awake by thunder, lightning, hail, and pelting rain. In the mountains, they knew, snow was falling.

  A gray dawn came up. The rain had stopped, but dark clouds hung low and a gale-like wind howled about the start. One by one the cars lurched away from the line and sped toward the lowering clouds that hung over the mountains.

  In the mountains, rain or snow were dropping still. The roads were soft with slush. After one lap, drivers threw away their goggles and changed over to wire gauze masks that at least served to keep the flung-up slush out of their mouths. Car numbers were caked in filth and unreadable; no one could recognize drivers who were black from head to toe. The drivers were cold, wet, and dismally uncomfortable but they went on, lap after lap, pushing their cars as fast as they dared, most of them with no idea where they stood in the race.

  As for the three favorites, the Italian Ascari barreled away from the start knowing that carefully planned tactics were useless. There was only one way to race in snow, rain, and mud--go all out for as long as you could. Ascari lasted 30 miles, then went skidding off the road and crashed down into a ravine. Pinned in the wreckage, badly hurt, he was unable to free himself and so could only wait. He waited nearly 10 hours until the race was over and search parties came out to look for him.

  The steady, coldly determined Thomas was driving very fast in the car Ernest Ballot had built. He was the greatest driver of the day and knew it, and as he passed car after car that had started ahead of him, he felt confident that the race was in his pocket.

  What he could not know was that 50 miles behind him the impetuous young Andre Boillot was driving like a madman. Boillot had been off the road six times. Once, careening past the grandstand, he skidded broadside across the road and smacked into the bank. The car bounced and came down on two wheels, heeled over at such an angle that spectators were certain it would flip onto its back. For an eternity of seconds it teetered, then righted itself with a violent wrench. Imbedded in the bank, it quivered like an arrow in a target.

  In an instant Boillot and his mechanic had leaped from the car, dragged it clear, leaped back in again, and were roaring up the hill and out of sight.

  At the end of three laps Boillot had a seven-minute lead. Only then did the pit crews get word to Thomas.

  One lap to go. Seven minutes to make up.

  It was midday now. Sun had broken through the clouds and in most places the road was drying out. Boillot stopped to change to smooth-tread tires, which would give him less traction but more speed. For Thomas, pushing Ernest Ballot's car to the limit, was catching him. Boillot's car was six years old and could not match Thomas' top speed of nearly 125 miles an hour.

  Fifteen cars were out of commission by now. Some, like Ascari's, were wrecked, smashed against fountains in village squares, mired in beanfields below the roads, or had disappeared altogether into ravines or forests.

  Boillot slid around bends, thundered through villages whose walls seemed to press in upon the car, inches to spare on either side. In trouble constantly, he grazed trees and bridges, his foot heavy on the accelerator.

  He had been driving furiously for eight hours. As he rounded the final turn he was exhausted, the car began to slide wide, and then he lost control of it.

  Thirty yards from the finish line it spun three times and crashed into the grandstand.

  An emergency crew removed the injured spectators from the welter of splintered wood, then dragged out the car. Boillot and his mechanic were found unconscious beside the road. Limp, soaked, covered with mud, they were slapped awake and thrust back into the car.

  It was pointed the wrong way.

  Too dazed to turn it around, Boillot backed across the finish line in reverse. "Vive la France!" he cried, and fainted.

  No other motor race has been won by a car driven backward across the finish line.

  Anyway, post-World War I racing had begun, and France had a new hero, Andre Boillot. Boillot drove recklessly all the rest of his life, which ended in 1932 during practice for the La Chartre Hill Climb.

  In 1922, the Germans were allowed back. Mercedes entered six cars. A month before the race, the factory had 20 drivers and mechanics on the course practicing every day. At the pits the leaders of German industry waited with advice; there were ball-bearing experts, tire experts, magneto and spark-plug experts, and dozens of engineers of all kinds. The opposition was awed by Teutonic thoroughness, by the numbers of men, the stacks of tires, the depot of spare parts. What chance did a man have who had brought one car, one mechanic, and a small box of tools in case of emergency? When he wanted to change a tire he would have to jack up a wheel; it took time, and while he was working, a Mercedes would roar into an adjacent pit; the Germans did not bother with jacks. Eight beefy mechanics would lift the Mercedes off the ground and set it down on stands, four men would attack the hub nuts, four others would slip on new wheels, the hub nuts would be hammered into place, the car lifted back onto the road, its engine would thunder and the new tires would squeal with wheel-spin as the car sped away. It all took only seconds.

  The opposition was in abject surrender before the race even began. Four of the six German drivers were winners of Grand Prix races. The cars were new, enormous, and could out-race and out-accelerate anything in Sicily. The Germans were loud, arrogant, presumptuous. A victory celebration was planned in advance. It was decided how their prize money would be divided.

  But the race was won by Count Giulio Masetti, a Florentine blue-blood who loved the Targa Florio more than any race, and who drove in it every year in his own cars for his own amusement. The best of the factory Mercedes finished ignominiously in sixth place. There had been, it seems, too many experts in the German pits. They got in each other's way, discipline broke down completely, and they turned into howling fiends fighting among themselves once they found that the race was being lost. In the confusion, men poured water in oil tanks and gas all over drivers. Hub nuts and radiator caps were lost, and drivers stood screaming and cursing in their seats while the missing parts were searched for. It was a fiasco, and would have been funny with any team but the Germans. Motor racing has never been a sport to the Germans. They have always treated it like something designed specifically to show the superiority of German men, machines, and method.

  Masetti was one of the great heroes of the Targa Florio. He won it two straight years, in 1921 and 1922. He was fourth in 1919 and 1923, and second in 1924. The following year personal affairs kept him away from his beloved Targa, but he came back in 1926 at the wheel of a great 12-cylinder Delage, determined to win the Targa a third time.

  He joked on th
e starting line, a modest likeable young man. He remarked that the most serious opposition was from the new Bugattis.

  But none of their drivers knew the Targa as he did. He was far and away the favorite as the race started, but an hour later he was dead, lying on top of an embankment guarded by a solitary carabiniere.

  The car lay upside down at the edge of the road. It was not wrecked; there was not even much paint scraped off. It was simply upside down, as if flipped by a gust of wind. Masetti had missed the turn, careened up the bank, and been thrown out as the car bounded into the air. The race went on, the carabiniere standing guard over the body.

  None of the other Delages bothered to finish. One by one the factory drivers came in, raced their engines defiantly, switched them off, and climbed from the car. The pit area was plunged in gloom. Professional drivers do not have much use for amateurs, but these three men, Albert Divo, Robert Benoist, and Rene Thomas, had accepted Count Masetti as one of their own. Without him there was nothing left in the race for them, and so they quit it and started home.

  The big Ferraris race past Masetti's memorial stone today. It gives only his name and the date: April 25, 1926. Stones very like it stand beside other roads in other countries: in the mountains of Mexico, in the dark forests of the Nurburgring, and high in the Futa Pass where the Mille Miglia used to run. They are stones commemorating not so much the instant in time when a young life was snuffed out, but the machine that had flashed so gloriously in the sun, and the man who dared to race it.

  The Targa Florio. Great names have won it: Achille Varzi twice, Tazio Nuvolari twice, Antonio Brivio twice, Barto Costantini twice, Umberto Magioli twice.

  Bugatti cars won five years in a row through 1929, then Alfa Romeo broke the streak due to a fantastic drive by Varzi.

  In certain places, heavy rains during that spring of 1930 had washed the road away altogether, leaving cars to crash through gullies and ford streams. Pebbles showered up behind them as they roared down out of the harsh blue mountains over roads that had been too hastily repaired. The pounding shook loose Varzi's spare wheel, which slowly began to rub a hole in his gas tank.

  On the last lap Varzi was in the lead, but gas was sloshing out of the tank and his lead was too slight over Louis Chiron to stop to plug it.

  At the last depot in the mountains there was time only to slash the spare away and grab a can of gas. Varzi drove furiously on, his mechanic holding the can, ready to pour as soon as engine sputter indicated that the last of the gas had drained out the hole in the tank.

  The engine coughed, Varzi signaled frantically, and the mechanic leaned over the back and began pouring, the bouncing of the car nearly throwing him out, the gas splashing all over everything, including the car's red-hot exhaust. Flames spurted all over the rear of the car, licking up till they were scorching Varzi's neck.

  Did he stop? He couldn't. Chiron was too close. Chiron, too, was driving like a man insane. He had slid off the road, breaking both near wheels against the bank. Frantically he changed them alone. His mechanic was groggy and helpless, seasick from the swaying, bounding car. The wheels changed, Chiron left the broken ones beside the road, together with the tools and everything else he could tear off the car in demoniac attempts to lighten it for the final sprint. The mechanic was lolling sickly back and forth as they raced on, bumping against Chiron, hindering him, scaring him, nearly falling out a dozen times. Chiron thought of stopping and pitching the man out, but decided against it. It would cost too many seconds and he must beat Varzi.

  Both drivers were irrational by then, Chiron frantic about the menace that was his hopelessly seasick mechanic, Varzi with his car on fire, the flames rapidly consuming the last of his gasoline, the rear end of the car, and his own skin. He could feel the fire on his neck. This meant nothing to him except that it might cost him the race. He leaned as far forward as he could over the wheel in order to keep driving as long as possible, the mechanic standing up in the speeding bouncing car, trying to beat the flames out with a cushion.

  On the final straight along the blue, serenely beautiful Mediterranean, the two cars sped toward the finish at absolute peak revs. Varzi's mechanic had beat the flames out, Chiron's had pulled himself together. The lemon trees flashed by in a blur, the engines thundered. Chiron in the French Bugatti, Varzi driving the red Alfa of Italy, came around the turn up the short hill, bursting past the finish line.

  Varzi won by seconds, and the five-year reign of the blue Bugattis was over. The reign of the red Alfas had begun. It, too, was to last five years. In fact, no non-Italian was to win until the Germans came again to the Targa Florio in 1955, entrusting one of their sleek silver Mercedes to two mad young Englishmen named Stirling Moss and Peter Collins. When that race finished there was very little left of the Mercedes. Moss had driven it off a 12-foot cliff, then somehow strong-armed it back onto the road again at a lower spot. Collins' treatment was no more gentle. The car was battered, ripped, and torn. It looked nothing like the sleek silver machine that had so jauntily started out, but it was indubitably first at an average speed of 59.79 miles an hour. This remains the fastest Targa ever run.

  1959. A typical Targa. The circuit was the "small" mountain circuit, 45 miles per lap. This circuit had been in use off and on since 1932, the year Vincenzo Florio appealed to Mussolini to build a new road in the interior that would cut off the deepest thrust of the medium circuit that had been formed in 1919. The idea was to make the race more appealing to spectators by using a circuit that the cars could lap in an hour or less, rather than every 90 minutes. There had been no cut-off across the mountains at the time, but Mussolini built one for Vincenzo Florio.

  By 1959, the short circuit could be lapped in about 45 minutes. Until it got deep into the mountains it was the same as the longer circuits had been, but the cut-off allowed it to plunge across country and then back to the sea, before the higher peaks were met. Maximum altitude thus dropped to 2,000 feet, and several of the most picturesque inland villages were avoided, including the walled Polizzi with its medieval aqueduct.

  The short circuit was as twisty and difficult as the longer ones had been. It sent the cars skidding and bounding through three villages and two hamlets, and there was hardly 50 yards of straight anywhere except, as always, along the sea. Deep in the mountains there were spectacular views, including one toward snow-peaked Etna to the east. Even in May it was cold up there when, during practice laps, drivers stopped to stretch, smoke a cigarette, and talk it over.

  The year before, the Targa had torn up car after car. Then, as now, the race was 14 laps, 1,008 kilometers, 630 miles. Stirling Moss ruined the single Aston Martin within five laps. Three of four team Ferraris crashed and, though the fourth won the race, a nimble little Porsche was second.

  Now, in 1959, there were no Astons at all; the factory felt it was useless to try its car, which was unsuited to such brutal roads. There were the usual Ferraris, and there were hordes of Porsches, most of them factory sponsored. There also were dozens of cars of all sizes and shapes belonging to enthusiasts from all over Europe, 57 countries in all. First place would be worth over $9,000, with the money dwindling down to almost $400 for thirtieth place--if that many cars finished.

  Practice began a week before the race. The roads were not closed and practice was "careful." Ferrari had sent one practice car and Cliff Allison, after snaking it safely down out of the mountains, drove it into a bridge. That was the end of the practice car, and a number of Fiats were rented in Palermo to replace it. In these the six works drivers toured round and round the circuit trying to memorize the sequence of turns. Most often they would go out in pairs, taking turns at the wheel, stopping every now and then to talk over what they had learned. The teams were to be: Phil Hill-Olivier Gendebien; Tony Brooks-Jean Behra; and Dan Gurney-Cliff Allison. On the circuit the turns followed each other viciously, and the Fiat sedans swayed horribly. A single lap was enough to make a man seasick. But the Ferrari drivers kept practicing.

&nb
sp; The Porsche team also had a practice car, but did not wreck it, and so got more value from practice laps than the Ferraris. There were the stories about peasants, dogs and donkeys nearly run down, and von Trips, teamed with Jo Bonnier, recalled that the year before he had narrowly missed ramming a man on a white horse.

  On Saturday the roads were closed for three hours and each driver tore out onto the circuit in his official car to lap as fast as he could. One of these was the Italian amateur Giorgio Scarlatti, 38. Racing around a bend, Scarlatti was horrified to see one of his wheels fly off and vanish into the forest where it cut a swath through the brush. Scarlatti fought swerve after swerve and finally stopped the car before it left the road.

  Gurney, following in a works Ferrari, stopped immediately. As he ran up, Scarlatti was sitting in the car shaking with fright. At such a time a man wants only to share his terror with another, to be consoled and soothed and calmed. But Gurney was from Riverside, California, and the two had no language in common. Scarlatti, his voice quaking, tried to explain in Italian. Gurney did not understand a word, but smiled sympathetically from time to time, nodded, patted him on the back, and attempted to indicate he would send help.

  Scarlatti, still scared, sat down to wait, there being no one else within miles. Gurney completed the long lap, and a mechanic was sent out in another car.

  Meanwhile, the Ferrari drivers were complaining about their cars, which were too powerful, too difficult to handle on such narrow twisting roads. Bonnier came over and did not help matters by bragging about his own lap times in the Porsche—more than a minute faster than the fastest of the big red cars.

  Saturday night they were in bed before nine. The race started at dawn. To get there on time from Palermo, one had to be awakened at three a.m., hurry through a breakfast of coffee and rolls in the dark dining room of the hotel, and drive through the sleeping city along the coast toward the circuit. An hour or more before the first car went off, all roads would be closed; at the circuit motorcycle cops would be sent out to make sure that no flocks grazed near the roads, that shepherds were warned the race was coming through, that secondary and dirt roads entering the circuit were blocked, that no trucks or bicycles had been left in village squares.