CARS AT SPEED - Grand Prix's Golden Age

by Daley, Robert

  It was cold, and just beginning to be light, when the first car went off, the starter leaning forward, flag upraised, holding a watch before his eyes and straining to see it in the dim light, the driver gunning his motor, then the official snapping the flag down and the car lurching forward. After that, the waiting cars formed a long, bumper-to-bumper line down the road, the official staring at his watch, the flag coming down, the cars going off one after the other, the line getting shorter as the sun began to illuminate the lemon groves along the sea, and the new day came to Sicily. The Ferraris, being the biggest cars, went off last.

  Within an hour Gendebien coasted into the pits with a curious jumble of noise emanating from the car's rear end. It was jacked up, the gears engaged, and the noise from the broken differential this time was really loud. Scratch one Ferrari.

  A few minutes later, the Scarlatti-Guilio Cabianca car came in, scorched and black. It had caught fire. Cabianca, a rosy-cheeked, pudgy man, was pale and frightened and wanted to quit. Instead he was tossed a new fire extinguisher and ordered out again. He went, not liking it much, came round again an hour later and said the car was not handling. It was pushed into the dead-car park.

  There had been the four Ferraris (counting the semiofficial Scarlatti-Cabianca car) and half a dozen Porsches. After three hours, the pesky Porsches were proving very fast, though not as fast as the two Ferraris still in, one being driven by Gurney, the other by Behra. But the von Trips-Bonnier Porsche was dangerously close, as was the Hans Hermann-Umberto Maglioli car, Maglioli being a two-time winner of the Targa.

  Then Hermann broke down way out in the country and parked in a field. In a few minutes, his Porsche was surrounded by curious peasants. Hermann was a little afraid of them. They babbled at him, but he understood nothing. A teammate stopped, offering Hermann a ride back to the pits. Hermann regarded the crowd of peasants and imagined them alone all day with his car. There would be nothing left of it, he decided. He determined to stick with the car---stick he did for 12 more hours; from time to time his friends slowed down as they passed to toss him food and bottles of beer.

  Gurney was due in for fuel, and Gendebien had been alerted to replace him, substituting for Allison, who had wrecked the practice car and was not a bit eager to race the Targa Florio. The Gurney Ferrari was late. Gendebien was looking impatiently at his watch. When the car finally rolled up the slope into the pits it, too, was making strange noises.

  "What is it, Dan?" Gendebien demanded.

  “I don't know."

  Gendebien, irresolute, started out. After more than an hour he came back slowly. Differential trouble again. Scratch the third Ferrari.

  It was a bright sunny day, hot and windless, but cool enough in the shade of the pits where the Ferrari team, all but Brooks without drives now, waited for the appearance of Behra, who had been leading the race. The minutes went by, Brooks pacing up and down with his helmet on and his hands clasped behind his back.

  The cannon went off down on the sea front, announcing that another car had entered the straight and was speeding toward the pits. It was Behra, but the Ferrari he drove had been brutally torn. Behra himself looked shocked and dazed as mechanics swarmed about the car.

  "Turned over," he gasped.

  The crowd pressed tight around him for details. He said he had skidded on some oil when making nearly 100 miles an hour round a bend. The car had slid sideways across the road, smashed against the curb and flipped. Behra had been pinned inside.

  Kicking away the door panel, he had scrambled out. The car was upside down. There was no one around. Running down the road he had come upon half a dozen peasants who agreed to help him. They ran back to the car and righted it. Behra thanked them, waved, and sped off.

  Mechanics now refueled the wreck, ripped away the torn windscreen, banged out the fenders, changed the tires. Nothing organic seemed wrong with it. Brooks, looking like a worried schoolteacher, kept walking round and round the wreck, occasionally going down on his knees to look under it.

  "I don't much like the idea of going motor racing in a car that's been rolled," he muttered. "No telling what might be wrong with it."

  He spent several minutes questioning Behra about just how the car had flipped, and how many times. Behra, sweaty and dirty, with grass and hayseed stuck to his clothes, was guzzling soda pop. He assured Brooks the car was fine. At last Brooks got in and drove away.

  Behra had removed his helmet. Someone noticed that his right ear was chipped--it was plastic; his own had been torn off in a wreck in 1955. Behra remarked that that wreck had been just like this one, and not to worry about his newly chipped ear. He had plenty of others like it at home. He did not appear upset at all. Phil Hill, who had not yet driven a lap, remarked that the crash had unnerved Behra; the reaction had just not set in yet. Behra was lucky to be alive. He had been going too fast as usual. There was probably no oil, as no one else had complained of it. Behra had just tried to find an excuse for wrecking the car.

  All waited for Brooks to come back. They waited a long time. Finally, Brooks motored up into the pits, a wheel wobbling and one front fender torn away.

  "I motored slowly for quite a while," Brooks said, "To be perfectly frank I was trying to find some reason for not racing the car. But it seemed all right. So finally I said to myself, 'We're so far behind now that it's either have a go, or pack up.'" So he had decided to have a go, and in doing so had slid "very gently" into a bridge.

  Scratch the fourth and final Ferrari.

  This so upset Romulo Tavoni, the Ferrari pit manager, that he decided to send Gendebien out one more time in the car that had been Gurney's, to see if it really and truly was unraceable. Gendebien drove it as far as a village in the mountains, parked it, and spent several hours drinking wine with the people of the village. He was in a gay mood when he finally drove back to the pits in late afternoon.

  So now the von Trips-Bonnier Porsche was far in the lead, and everything behind it was a Porsche too. As for the amateur cars, some continued to circulate, some lay wedged in ditches and forests all around the circuit. A few were burning briskly. Reports came back of a brand-new Ferrari (a Pinin-Farina body rather than a racer) that had crashed in the mountains and burst into flames. Worth nearly $15,000 before the race, it was worth exactly nothing after it. Lap by lap, drivers watched the blazing hulk diminish. At the end nothing was left but a smoking engine.

  As the afternoon wore on, the race became boring. No one cared about the local drivers, and the Porsches were not fighting it out among themselves with the race already won. The Ferrari drivers, their private cars parked inside the circuit, were trapped and could only wait for the race to finish.

  They stretched out in a meadow behind the pits, ate a picnic lunch, stripped to the waist, and sunbathed. One or two even fell asleep. They would receive not one cent for the week's work, and they were enclosed by the race for another five or six hours, but there was nothing they could do about it. Only Brooks muttered, "I'm really out of pocket this race."

  It was nearly sundown when the von Trips Porsche began its final lap with a 10-minute lead. One more lap to win a neat $9,000. But poor Trips never made it. Nine miles from the finish, the money, and the end of a weary day, Trips' rear suspension cracked and his race was over.

  That last lap was agony for Trips, as he listened to the noises and wondered if the car could make it. It was worse for Bonnier at the pits, watching the minutes tick by, straining for the sight of the car far down the road, his heart sinking as time passed and still no car appeared. Was Trips limping in, or not coming at all?

  The second Porsche won. It was driven by Edgar Barth and Wolfgang Siedel. Average speed: 57 miles an hour. Only 21 of 57 cars finished. No one was hurt. The 43rd running of the late Vincenzo Florio's own private race, the Targa Florio, was over.

  Chapter 5.

  Over the Sand Dunes

  CENTURIES AGO, when even tulips were unknown in Holland, the North Sea punched and pummeled and shoved
at the shore of the continent, its relentless agitation creating, in some places, towering hummocks of dunes, some of them six stories or more high. Then the sea receded, leaving great wide flat beaches between itself and the sheer cliff face of the dunes. In some places, when the tide is out, it is a quarter-mile walk from the road atop the dunes, to the place where the sea laps quietly at the edge of the beach.

  Such expansive beaches drew bathers, and in time a resort was built that was called Zandvoort. The town is on top of the dunes facing the sea, which is dark and cold-looking and down which ships move toward England beyond the horizon. Below the town on the beach are the bathing establishments: cafes, cabins for changing, and agencies who rent out those wraparound, stiffly upright, straw beach chairs so popular with the Dutch. In back of the town the roads drop down onto incredibly flat, low Holland and lead inland toward Amsterdam, 20 miles away.

  But, for a few hundred yards north of the town, the high dunes lie tumbled about in great and restless confusion, all covered with coarse wild grass, a kind of wilderness not good for anything.

  Here, just after the Second World War, a two-and-a-half-mile road circuit was laid out, which wound in and out and up and down. In shape it was basically a circle, but battered and lopsided by the irregularity of the dunes, and deliberately flattened on one side to form a half-mile straight down between the pits and the main grandstand. At the end of this straight the circle shoots off on a short spur which ends in an abrupt hairpin and then scoots back into the circle again.

  The circuit nowadays is lapped at over 90 miles an hour. It is full of sharp rises and steep dips, and on the far side where the dunes become something more than just sand and begin to be capable of supporting plant life, there is a wood of scrub pines that the black road pierces.

  The Grand Prix of Holland is organized by the Automobile Club of the Netherlands and is usually held Whitsuntide weekend, a week or two after the Monte Carlo race. This precedes the swimming season by about a month, but Zandvoort is in a festive mood anyway. The hotels are full, an amusement park is set up in a field, and music blares from loudspeakers all day. About 60,000 people arrive all day by car, scooter, and bike, most bringing lunches. Some buy the best tickets and watch from the main grandstand, but more prefer to set up their gear on the high dunes inside the circuit. The day thus becomes a family outing. They picnic, listen to the radio, take a nap, watch the preliminary race or races. Then the main event begins, and even the sea booming below is drowned out by the thunder of the big cars.

  Except for the hazard of wind, the Grand Prix at Zandvoort is nearly the ultimate in driver safety. The circuit is relatively slow, the road surface is uniform, but wide enough through the pit area, and there are no trees to bash or rock cliffs to soar over. The driver who loses control will most likely slide off into a dune, which should absorb most of the shock. No driver has yet been killed there in a Grand Prix, although in 1960 Dan Gurney's BRM shot off the road and killed a spectator, an 18-year-old boy who had eluded police and was dashing across the dune to a better vantage point.

  But the wind is something else. The North Sea, so black and cold in late May or early June, often sends in brisk gusts. Racing drivers, like bullfighters, dread wind. Race cars are light, considering their power, and they are driven so fast that there is very little road adhesion. Every time they top a rise—and there are many at Zandvoort—they are momentarily airborne. At such speeds the shock of smacking a wall of wind is capable of deflecting the car; the driver does not know until the car lands again just how much it has been deflected, and he may not then have time enough to make corrections.

  At Zandvoort, in addition, there is loose sand lying about that the wind tends to blow onto dangerous corners; it has often been demonstrated that a race car will skid almost as briskly on a patch of sand as on a patch of oil.

  There is another special hazard, at present: one Dutch driver, a tall, heavy, jolly, flabby individual named Carel Godin de Beaufort. De Beaufort is not good enough to drive in any other Grand Prix, but he never misses the Dutch one where organizers permit him to enter in his own Porsche sports car, or, in 1960, his own Formula II Cooper, strictly because they are thus given the excuse to fly a Dutch flag and play the Dutch anthem. De Beaufort, in his Porsche or Cooper, is 10 seconds a lap slower at Zandvoort than other cars, so slow that he is perpetually blocking corners, and he causes drivers like Stirling Moss to walk about muttering to anyone who will listen, "Bloody silly, that."

  De Beaufort very nearly killed himself in a sports car race at the Avus track in Berlin on August 1, 1959. It was raining and he lost control of his Porsche at perhaps 110 miles an hour while negotiating the 30-foot-high, steeply banked brick loop at one end of the circuit. The car shot straight up the banking into the sky, then crashed down among trees and bushes on the other side. De Beaufort, finding himself sitting, unharmed, right-side up in his car in the street outside the circuit, the car apparently undamaged, drove back through the paddock, onto the track, and into the race. Officials later flagged him off, since it was obvious to all except de Beaufort that a car that had hurdled a 30-foot-high wall could no longer be counted mechanically reliable.

  A few laps later, Jean Behra, the Frenchman, was killed leaving the road in exactly the same place and manner as de Beaufort, proof incontrovertible that the Dutchman had had miraculous luck. The paddock, where most of the Grand Prix drivers were standing around, was silent, sobered by Behra's death, when de Beaufort barged in there an hour later, accompanied by a camera, and someone to photograph him grinning at the base of the wall that he and Behra had just shot over. Being big and imposing, he muscled his way past the German guards who had roped off the area, was photographed, then strode around bragging about his escape alternately in German, English, and Dutch. He gave no evidence of fright, nerves, or even interest in the fate of Behra—and the Grand Prix drivers turned away from him.

  De Beaufort keeps trying. Uninvited to the 1960 Belgian Grand Prix, he turned up anyway, towing his Formula II Cooper behind the family sedan. He had no tickets or passes, but when he came to the roadblock barring entrance to the circuit, he honked importantly, and the guards scurried to open the road for him. After all, he was towing a race car, was he not? Obviously he was a driver entered in the Grand Prix.

  Once inside the circuit, de Beaufort merely unloaded his small Cooper, waited till no one was looking, then drove it out onto the track and began practicing with the other entries. He made several laps before anyone noticed him. Each time the black Cooper sped by, men would wonder who it was, and search for the number in their programs. It looked like de Beaufort, but obviously this could not be—the man was not entered, and would never have tried to bluff his way in.

  But it was de Beaufort, and finally an enraged Jack Brabham, champion of the world, screeched to a stop at the judges' stand and ordered these startled gentlemen to get that blankety-blank de Beaufort off the road before there was an accident.

  Whereupon the Dutchman got the black flag. He received this with a large laugh, seemingly very pleased with himself, did one more complete lap as if to prove that he could ignore the black flag, too, if he chose, then drove into the paddock. He was very amused.

  A committee of furious drivers then voted to demand sanctions against de Beaufort; they wanted him barred from racing for a long time. But he drove at Le Mans the next week, so I suppose nothing was ever done.

  The Grand Prix of Holland at Zandvoort cannot be counted a cornerstone of motor racing. There have been only nine races in 12 years, and at times the event has seemed shaky financially—no races were held in 1956 or 1957 because of a shortage of guilders. For all that, a race was held in 1955, a week after the Le Mans disaster, though nearly every other race in Europe succumbed to what was presumed to be public opinion, and piously canceled out. The 1960 race drew an estimated 100,000 persons— the short ride out from Amsterdam took me three hours of inching along, bumper to bumper. So perhaps the race is now on a solid fina
ncial footing.

  To my mind, Holland is a wonderful place to go to see a motor race at that time of the year. I do not know about the tulips; I never went looking for any. But I do know about the rhododendron and mountain laurel blooming along the canals in Amsterdam, the colors reflected in the still water. Amsterdam in the spring is a quiet place, colorful, peaceful, lovely. There is usually an opera company performing in the wondrously modern opera house, and the Rembrandts in the big museum are quite out of this world; it struck me, on seeing them for the first time, that when you are new to Rembrandts you must see a roomful to be fully impressed, but that the impression then is colossal. And from Amsterdam it is normally less than half an hour to the sea, the curious high sand dunes, the race. On the circuit at Zandvoort it is possible you will be more impressed by the odor of motor racing than anywhere else. Perhaps it is the way the salt breath of the sea blows in and mingles with the scorched rubber and burnt castor-based oil the cars use. Strong biting smells hang over the circuit all through the race. The wind makes all the flags stand out straight, and if it is bitter enough it clears the crowds off the dune tops; they crouch on the lee sides instead, leaving the summits to mounted policemen, lonely figures huddled into their greatcoats on horseback, looking like sentinels or statues, figures out of some past century. They look cold and uncomfortable and you hope that at least their view of the race is good.