CARS AT SPEED - Grand Prix's Golden Age

by Daley, Robert

  For four years the Grand Prix lapsed; then, in 1912, there arose a magnificent team of French Peugeots, led by Georges Boillot. The Peugeots were smaller, neater, finer than anything seen before. Their engine capacity was 7 1/2 liters; Fiats and other makes were 16 liters, and in a race the Peugeots looked like tigers moving among elephants. And Boillot himself seemed so right for the car, so typically French. He was short, powerful, wore big mustaches, and looked like one of the Three Musketeers. He was terribly brave.

  Everywhere the Peugeots ran they won, and so the Grand Prix was reorganized for 1912, and Georges Boillot duly won it. The circuit at Dieppe was surrounded by palisades and guarded by troops for crowd safety. Vast throngs of people arrived to watch, sitting on the banks eating lunches (the race lasted 15 hours), excited and alert to all that was happening.

  The circuit had been treated with a special tar-like liquid to keep the dust down. This treatment, a blessing for the fans, was a cross for the drivers. The sun boiled down that hot summer day, the tar swiftly melted and, having become a liquid again, was splashed up into the drivers' faces by preceding cars in all the worst corners. It burned the skin and eyeballs, sometimes temporarily blinding the drivers. After the tar melted, the dirt road gradually went to pieces under the churning wheels. The tar that had been thrown up onto the drivers was followed by chunks of dirt and broken rock. So long a race had never been run on a circuit before, and no one had reckoned with the disintegration of the road. Before the race was half over all the drivers were cut and bleeding, tires were being ripped to pieces, and stones had pierced radiators and oil pans so that the life blood of the cars ran out into the dust.

  By now, tires were detachable. They blew out 20 or more times during a race, but at least they could be changed quickly. All work had to be done by the driver and his riding mechanic. They kept their tools and spare parts in shallow pits beside the road, stopping there every few laps to struggle valiantly with their machines. Driving a Grand Prix car in 1912 was an exhausting business.

  In any case, Georges Boillot won the race. He won the next year too. By then the Grand Prix had become an affair of state. Government officials attended; there were massed bands to play the national anthem both at the start and throughout the last lap as the victorious Georges Boillot raced triumphantly towards the finish line.

  Then, in 1914, the German Mercedes factory entered the Grand Prix again. The French were worried. Here was the real test for the great Peugeot team, and for the national hero who was Georges Boillot.

  All that Boillot and the Peugeots had won before would be as nothing now, if he could not beat the German. But of course he would win. Or would he?

  The race was held at Lyon on July 4, 1914, six days after the Austrian Crown Prince and his wife had been assassinated at Sarajevo. Europe was mobilizing. There could be no doubt now that war was imminent. The Germans kept to themselves in a village outside Lyon. Their activities were cloaked in secrecy. The silver Mercedes were seen to be prepared, practiced, and worked over with military precision. A French engineer caught a glimpse under the hood of a Mercedes and remarked that their engines bore a remarkable resemblance to the powerplants of airplanes.

  Tension built up as race day neared. Cars were entered from many nations, but men had eyes only for Boillot and the five mighty Mercedes ranged against him.

  The circuit was 23 miles around, the race 467 miles, or 20 laps long. The road was rolled ballast and so bumpy that a man had to hold his steering wheel in a death grip to keep the car on the road. After a few laps his palms would be split and bleeding—and the race would last more than seven hours.

  The French were filled with anxiety. Could Boillot, with only the second Peugeot of Jules Goux to aid him, beat five perfectly tuned Mercedes?

  For four laps Max Sailer's Mercedes led the race. He was going too fast, everyone knew. No 1914 machine could stand such treatment very long. The other four Mercedes held back, breathing easily. Boillot, too, realized that Sailer's pace was too fast. But he could not allow the German to get detached. He had to follow--suppose the Mercedes did not blow up?

  In the German pits, squads of mechanics arranged tools and spare parts so that anything needed could be quickly found and fitted. Timekeepers and signalers relayed information to the German drivers. The Grand Prix had never before seen such organization, such complicated signaling, such precision. French anxiety deepened.

  For four laps Max Sailer led, then his engine exploded, and Boillot was in the lead. The French crowd laughed and cheered with relief.

  Old-timers say they could hear the sharp intake of breath as a second Mercedes, responding to signals from the pits, speeded up and moved to the attack.

  For the rest of the race Boillot was hounded by one Mercedes after another. Alone, he fought them all off. A second Mercedes broke down; it was replaced in formation by still another. Boillot could not shake off his pursuers. There were too many of them. His engine began to boil.

  Still in the lead, he started around the last lap. But the Peugeot was faltering. The suspense was agonizing—one over-strained Peugeot against the might of the invader.

  There was in 1914 no loudspeaker to give information relayed in from across the circuit. The crowd could only sit there, thinking of the war that was coming, knowing that in a few days or weeks German troops would be moving across France. The hopes and, symbolically, the lives of all of them rode with Georges Boillot, alone out there, hounded by three Mercedes that were now running second, third, and fourth.

  Finally, far down the road, the cloud of dust rose. The winner was in sight.

  Was it Boillot?

  The crowd strained forward, hoping against hope. He had stood off the Boche. He had won for La France. Vive La France!

  But the dust cloud was Christian Lautenschlager, Mercedes. Two other Mercedes followed him across the line.

  Georges Boillot's Peugeot had broken down under the unequal fight. It was stalled under a tree a few miles from the finish line.

  The Germans had won the 1914 Grand Prix.

  The silence that followed Lautenschlager's victory was hostile. There were no cheers, no band music. For a long time no one moved. Disappointment merged with hate. Lautenschlager looked up into the grim, soundless crowd and shrugged.

  The French have never accepted defeat gracefully. Acceptance at such a time, from such a foe, was beyond them.

  The crowd waited silent and unmoving until the first French car crossed the line many minutes later. Then, defiantly, the massed bands blared forth the "Marseillaise" and the crowd, as one man, sang it.

  Thirty days later German soldiers marched into France.

  As for Georges Boillot, he joined the French Flying Corps.

  Year by year, Boillot's hatred of the Boche swelled until it was beyond control. In 1916, perhaps still smarting from his defeat at Lyon two summers before, be swooped down on a formation of seven German planes. He was alone, as usual, but did not care.

  He was old enough to have known something about overwhelming odds by then. The German formations sent him crashing down out of the sky, and when French infantrymen pulled him from the wrecked plane it was noted that one of the German bullets had blown off the top of his head.

  Tradition, money, champagne. The tradition of the French Grand Prix goes back to the 1914 race and before. Money and champagne are of more recent vintage, and perhaps they go together.

  These days the race is held at Reims, a city of 120,000 that lies 100 miles east of Paris. Reims has assumed an international importance far beyond its size, because it is the capital of the champagne country. It is rich enough not only to stage a major Grand Prix, but to do so on a grand scale.

  Most years its race is the richest Grand Prix of them all, with about $20,000 going to the winning car. This is about ten times what ordinary Grands Prix (Monaco, Holland, Portugal, United States, etc.) pay.

  Starting money also is higher. Each driver is paid $3,000, provided his car is sturdy en
ough to roll past the starting line when the flag drops. It doesn't have to finish, or even complete a lap.

  A Grand Prix driver earns about $20,000 in an average year. He gets a small salary from the factory that employs him—perhaps $300 a month—plus, usually, half of all starting money and prize money. For most Grands Prix the total starting money is $2,000 per car, and first place is worth the same amount. Thus, if he enters 10 Grands Prix a year, a driver will net about $10,000 just in starting money. There is no starting money for most sports car races. The average driver will earn, in addition to $10,000 a year in starting fees, perhaps $3,500 in salary (for which he also must test cars), and should be able to add another $5,000 or $10,000 a year in prize money. A few drivers also are famous or successful enough to endorse automotive products at fat fees, and will thus double or triple their incomes—Moss and Fangio being conspicuous examples. But the average driver must be content with an income of about $20,000 a year, earned at great risk of his life.

  The French Grand Prix is thus seen as a gala day for racing drivers, as it is the only really important purse they have a chance at.

  There is also a second race at Reims on the same day for Formula II or Formula Junior cars (the same type of machine, but smaller). It often attracts the same famous drivers as the Grand Prix, simply by paying nearly as much in starting money. If any driver should win both races the same day, he would be able to afford a lot of champagne.

  Much champagne is swilled in any case. Snack bars, which at an American event would dispense soda pop, at Reims sell only champagne. At the equivalent of 29 cents a coupe, it costs less than a beer at Yankee Stadium.

  During the week before the race, the drivers try for cases of champagne that are put up by the organizers as prizes for fastest practice laps, and first lap of the day over a specified speed. Usually there are three or more such prizes of 100 bottles each.

  This makes practice interesting both for spectators and drivers. Drivers, for once, arrive at the circuit early, badger their mechanics incessantly, then leap into their cars and roar away as soon as the circuit is open for practice.

  Journalists covering the race also have champagne problems. Champagne is practically forced on them at regular intervals all during the long, hot afternoon of the race, beginning at noon and ending when their stories finally are handed over to the telegraph operator. The fact that relatively few sober words have been written about Grands Prix at Reims, accounts in part for the race's continuing tradition.

  The circuit, just west of the city, is composed of public road and is a bit more than five miles per lap. It is shaped like a triangle, except that one side is a long sweeping curve. The other two sides are dead straight, and one of them is the main road to Paris. The circuit is very fast. On the two long straights cars exceed 180 miles an hour, and the lap record is over 131. The cars go faster on parts of this circuit than anywhere else, but the average speed of the race is a bit slower than at Spa, Belgium.

  Racing at Reims demands bravery above all, not so much on the two straights, but on the third, sweeping side of the triangle. This is taken at about 130 miles per hour, the cars being driven so fast in the curve that centrifugal force makes them slide out sideways toward the outside edge of the road. It is a very delicate matter to hold a car at maximum speed in such a very long turn, and in fact there was a fatal accident there three years straight, in 1956, 1957, and 1958.

  All three drivers ran out of road width before they were entirely through the curve; that is, the car, which had been sliding toward the outside edge of the road from the moment it entered the curve, reached the edge sooner than the driver wanted it to. The driver, in each case, had miscalculated the amount of the car's sideways slide due to centrifugal force. He planned to be out of the curve before he had used up all the sliding room. But he wasn't, and beside the road there was a ditch in some places, an embankment in others that sent his car somersaulting.

  After each crash, a drivers' committee insisted to organizers that the ditch be filled in for safety. The first two drivers to die were unknowns, and the organizers ignored the pleas. The third year, the Ferrari of Luigi Musso, Italy's last remaining Grand Prix driver, left the road at almost the exact same spot. Now the ditch has been filled in and the curve named Musso Corner. Such is the irony of motor racing.

  The country around Reims is rolling farmland, most of it great blond wheatfields through which the road circuit cuts a straight black swath.

  All that country has been fought over many times. Joan of Arc skirmished there, and the First World War ravaged great areas. At one point, the Germans turned their guns on the town's magnificent thirteenth-century cathedral (some consider it the most beautiful in the world) and blew part of it away.

  There were German triumphs all about during those war years, and for a short time they held Reims itself. If you drive east out of the city you will pass some of the battlefields, terrain that is still lumpy and pock-marked after more than 40 years. You will pass the cemeteries too, the French ones still kept up, though the crosses are worn by rain and wind and very few mourners still visit them; the German graves run down and overgrown. Occasionally, there is even a small, British cemetery and one wonders how those few, long-dead Tommies got so far east of their own lines to fight here with the French.

  The Germans triumphed at Reims again in 1938 and 1939 when the Mercedes and Auto-Unions swept all before them. They were huge machines and the thunderous roar of their engines was a cacophony of power.

  Old-timers still speak with awe of the way the great silver cars looked coming over the brow of the hill in the last year before the war. The next time the Germans came over that hill it was in the other direction-toward Paris. Their color had changed from racing silver to the olive drab of war. For a while they seemed as invincible as ever.

  This time they did take Reims and they kept it. They also stole most of the champagne then aging in cellars of the great champagne houses, and sent it back to the thousand-year Reich.

  The Germans are hated at Reims as in few other areas of France. Yet they seem unaware of it. They come across the border by the thousands every year to watch the Grand Prix. While in the area they visit the cathedral, and walk through one or two of the champagne cellars open to the public. It is presumed that few of them stop to look at the cemeteries.

  Reims has only half a dozen or so hotels, most of them small, and every room is spoken for by the Automobile Club for drivers, mechanics, press, etc. So if you are planning to see the French Grand Prix there, you probably will have to stay in some other town, or go back to Paris after the race.

  The Reims circuit is not an interesting place to see a Grand Prix. To watch from the grandstand opposite the pits is to see absolutely nothing—the cars flash by so fast and so close that one can't even read their numbers. Elsewhere on the circuit, except for the Thilois hairpin, there are no vantage points high enough to see much, no embankments or strategically placed stands. There is, at the beginning of the longer straight, a steep uphill climb, followed by a steep descent, but the road is dead straight, the cars are exceeding 170 miles an hour, and one sees no tactics. There is no high place from which to watch the two hairpin turns, or the long sweeping third side of the triangle.

  However, Reims seems to have drama, excitement, and atmosphere anyway. Partly this is owing to the weather--it is hot in July in the champagne country--partly owing to the vast quantities of champagne one slakes one's thirst with, and partly because the races are so fast that accidents are likely to be fatal. If one cares anything about any of the drivers, one is likely to be nervous the whole time the race is in progress. Since there are always two races and sometimes a third--a 12-hour sports car race that begins at midnight Saturday and ends at noon Sunday--this can add up to a lot of fingernail biting. It is not a good idea to become fond of racing drivers.

  Suppose, for instance, you were a friend or relative of Mike Hawthorn at Reims for the 1953 Grand Prix.

  Hawtho
rn was then 24, in his first season on the Ferrari team, and he had only driven half a dozen Grand Prix races in his life. Against him were ranged three winners of the world championship, Fangio, Ascari and Farina, plus the ferocious Froilan Gonzalez, plus Luigi Villoresi, Marimon, Bonetto, and de Graffenried. All these men were driving Ferraris or Maseratis of more or less equal speed. All were much older and had worlds more experience than young Hawthorn.

  Gonzalez, who started with a half-empty fuel tank, shot into the lead. Behind him, Hawthorn found himself dueling with Ascari and Villoresi. Positions changed every lap. Sometimes the three cars raced abreast down an ordinary French road at 160 or more miles an hour.

  About halfway through the race Farina and Fangio caught up, and now all five cars were changing places, sometimes riding nose-to-tail to ride in another's slipstream, trying to save precious seconds.

  Soon 28 laps had passed. Gonzalez ducked into his pits for fuel and, for a moment, Hawthorn led the race, Fangio on his tail.

  Hawthorn reported later that he was not thinking of winning. He supposed his more illustrious teammates were hanging back to let him harry Fangio. They would come on at the end. But in fact the pace was too fast for them. They were too experienced to court such danger.

  For 150 miles the novice raced wheel-to-wheel with the greatest of modern drivers—while anyone who cared about him cringed with fear. Lap after lap they went screaming down the straight side by side, flat out, grinning at each other. They were so close together each could see the rev counter in the other's cockpit.

  When they came up behind a slower car, one or the other would pull over nearly onto the verge, so that they could pass it abreast.

  All this time, the crowd was insane with excitement and fear. What the crowd saw, which Hawthorn didn't, was that Ascari and Gonzalez were only a few feet behind. The race had become a four-way duel.