The first race of the season was in January, at Buenos Aires, Fangio’s home patch. Disaster loomed when his fuel pump packed up halfway through. Fangio promptly commandeered Musso’s car, got back in the race, and was gifted a win when the leading Maseratis broke down. Moss then took Monaco, in a Maserati 250F – even after Fangio had pulled rank again by taking over Collins’ car – while Collins took a quiet revenge on Fangio by winning the next two European races. This was categorically how Fangio did not want things.
He won at Silverstone and the Nürburgring, all right, but by now, the season was turning into a marathon of accusations and counter-accusations with the Ferrari team, which dragged on even after Fangio had left in disgust for Maserati. His agent, Marcello Giambertone, complained – among other things – that Ferrari had sabotaged Fangio’s Mille Miglia car, drilling holes in the bodywork to let the rain in rather than out; and that Ferrari specifically tried to stop Collins from volunteering his car at Monza – a gesture on Collins’ part which had turned out to be futile, anyway, given that Moss not only won the race (the last of the season) but also set fastest lap.
Even the Italians would start to get unhappy – less at the way Fangio was being treated, more at the rate of attrition experienced by the rest of Ferrari’s drivers. There was Alberto Ascari; there were Eugenio Castelloti and Luigi Musso – both team-mates with Fangio; and there was Fon de Portago, the loveable Portuguese nobleman: all killed between the years 1955 and 1958, all in Ferraris. And it wasn’t just the fact that they were dead, it was Ferrari’s perceived indifference to the deaths which really hurt: the well-respected Osservatore Romana going as far as to call Ferrari ‘a modern Saturn’, a Saturn who, although a thoroughly progressive captain of industry, ‘continues to devour his own sons’. The Commendatore himself did nothing to alter this view and, two decades later, would still be coolly advising his team, ‘Every time a driver takes off, we write him off in our book. When he comes back, it’s a bonus.’
Besides, he was now producing the road cars that would make him both a household name and a kind of Pole Star for the next two generations of spotty boys and yearning men. From being an expedient sideline, street-legal Ferraris were now essential to the whole Ferrari plan. The 250 was Ferrari’s first volume-production model (insofar as volume could be done in such fantastically small quantities) followed by the fabulous 410 Superamerica of 1955. Depending on the bodywork (as often as not, a minor work of art by Pinin Farina) and the level of appointments inside (radios! Upholstered seats!), these cars offered a kind of driving experience – to say nothing of kerbside presence – which even Maserati had trouble matching. Zsa Zsa Gabor got one; as did William Holden, Roger Vadim, Roberto Rossellini: that kind of person. Ferrari was getting to be big, in other words, bigger than anyone who could possibly ever work for him, bigger than anyone who might bear a grievance against him – a figure of talismanic glamour, whose stunning road cars were legitimised by the Grand Prix cars; which were, in turn, funded by the road cars.
And soon enough, Peter Collins, quick, impossibly handsome and charming, an Englishman who spoke Italian, a surrogate son to Enzo himself (whose own son, Dino, had died by degrees from muscular dystrophy), was killed, in a Ferrari 246. He delivered two Grand Prix wins in 1956, a third in ’58, at Silverstone. And then, at the Nürburgring, August 1958, he was chasing Tony Brooks’ Vanwall when his car shot off the track, throwing him into a tree. He died of head injuries, a few hours later. He was twenty-six years old.
Did Ferrari mourn? Later, he would say of Collins, ‘He was a fine driver and a fine man – a true gentleman.’ But at the time he gave every impression of being ruthlessly unconcerned. Why? Not least because Collins had just betrayed Ferrari – and all the time and energy he had invested – by marrying a pretty young actress called Louise Cordier. Ferrari’s jealously bitter assessment of the lovely bride? ‘She was the type of girl you find in the pits.’ Girls were fine (Ferrari enjoyed hearing about his drivers’ womanisings), but wives were both a distraction and a threat to his overweening centrality. From the moment that Collins married, he became a lesser person. Only Ferrari and his vaulting ambition truly mattered.
It was with all this in the air that Fangio took the ’56 Championship with three wins, two second places and four fastest laps (each of which scored an extra point) to his acolyte Moss’s two wins and one second place. The atmosphere was heavy with wounded amour-propre. Ferrari’s summation was that ‘Fangio was a really great driver, but afflicted by a persecution mania. I was not the only one against whom he entertained all kinds of suspicions.’ Worse yet, ‘Fangio did not remain loyal to any marque.’ Fangio, very earnestly, told Stirling Moss: ‘By all means drive the cars, but never, ever, sign for Ferrari.’
The thing was, though, that Ferrari was the greatest survivor of them all, the only survivor. Alfa Romeo had dropped out of Formula One. Maserati were looking sickly. If you wanted to drive Italian, pretty soon there would only be one team to choose from.
5
FANGIO III:
THE LAST WIN
The Nürburgring, some way south of Cologne and set in the Eifel Mountains, was originally built in the 1920s: a fourteen-mile-long circuit with over 170 corners, and so sprawling that a driver might start his race in bright sunshine only to find, on the far side of the circuit, that, instead of it being a pleasant summer’s day, it was actually pitch dark and pouring with rain. It came to be known as The Green Hell, and only a handful of drivers ever really mastered it, before it was finally taken out of the Formula One calendar in the 1980s. It had terrifyingly fast stretches; stomach-turning gradients of one in six; a banked section known as the Karussell; humps in the track that made cars take off; numerous blind spots; a tremendous number of pine trees to smash into; a ruined castle in the middle; and the probability that, if you did wreck your car or yourself, it would be a long time before anyone found you. Drivers respected it, feared it, loathed it. By the second half of the 1950s, it had already claimed the lives of eleven competitors, including the first death under the new Formula One regime – that of Onofre Marimón, Fangio’s compatriot, in 1954. With its terrible length and complexity, it was more dangerous even than Monza. It was the greatest leveller of men and machines in Europe.
So when Fangio took his last (and possibly greatest) race win, at the Nürburgring in August 1957, all the elements were in place for a Nuvolari-style moment of definition. He was really old by then – forty-six – against a field full of men half his age. He was known as the Old Fox, the Old Man, the Maestro, but still kept his counsel, talking only when he had to, in his high, quiet, hoarse voice. And he had shuffled back to the financially wheezy Maserati équipe for the endgame, in a much-developed 250F, the car in which he had started his ’54 Championship year.
If Alfa Romeo had been Teutonic, then Maserati were, by all accounts, authentically, chaotically Italian. The three-year-old 250F, with its unsupercharged straight-6, its conventional (but sweet-handling) chassis, and its classic good looks, was in many ways the definitive post-war front-engined machine. But the Lancia-Ferrari 801s driven in ’57 by Peter Collins and Mike Hawthorn, although equally mature, were more powerful, and had much younger men to drive them. And Vanwall, the new British hope, driven by Moss and significantly tweaked by that rising young engineer Colin Chapman, was making real, worrying, progress.
Fangio could see his rivals creeping up on him as the season progressed. After a comfortable start in Argentina and Monaco, he found a pack of Ferraris after him at the French GP (Luigi Musso taking fastest lap), while at the British GP at Aintree, an increasingly fired-up Moss took Vanwall’s first Championship win, with Musso’s Ferrari second, Hawthorn third, and Fangio out of the race with a blown engine. He was well placed in the Championship, all right; but there was a clear trend emerging, as the race calendar moved on to Germany.
Then again, there was the Nürburgring. Fangio himself claimed, back in 1951, that ‘It’s impossible to get to know it
all in a short time … It is difficult to keep fourteen miles in your head, so for that reason I tried to blot from my mind all the slow parts. What you had to keep in mind were the fast bits …’ Since then, he’d won there twice and had got a much clearer conception of it. And, in August 1957, he felt, despite his own age and the increasing venerability of the Maserati, moderately confident. As motoring journalist Rodney Walkerley put it, watching him in practice, ‘Fangio erupted from the bridge with a blast of sound which was like an explosion, his foot hard down after a quick lift 200 yards earlier, and took the curve with the car in a full slide, fighting the wheel all the way, and was gone – so much faster to the eye than anyone else that it made even Mike Hawthorn look slow.’
Which turned out to be the case for the first half of the race. When he came in for a routine pit stop on lap twelve, he was well in the lead, thirty seconds ahead of Collins and Hawthorn, who were travelling more or less as a matched pair in their Ferraris, a couple of miles behind. Moss and Brooks, in the Vanwalls, were not having good races, and seemed out of contention. It was looking promising. But the pit stop turned into a disaster – just as happened to Nuvolari in 1935. The mechanics, rigid with nerves, bungled everything. The tyre changes went to pieces. Fangio waited and waited. By the time he left the pits, he was fifty-one seconds behind the two Ferraris.
So, like Nuvolari before him, he went into a kind of controlled madness. ‘I began,’ he later explained, as if anyone would believe him, ‘to take nearly all the bends in a higher gear than I normally would have done.’ This put him – the man who liked to win ‘as slowly as possible’ – at the absolute outer edge of control. It also meant that he shattered the lap record over and over again, bringing it down to nine minutes. seventeen seconds. on lap twenty, with two laps to go and only a couple of seconds left to make up before he reached Collins and Hawthorn.
The two Ferrari drivers, meanwhile, were not entirely abreast of developments and had decided to carve the race up between them. Collins drew alongside Hawthorn on the straight, ‘Put his thumb up, then pointed to me with one finger and then back to himself with two. He wanted me to win and was prepared to come second himself, which I thought was a very sporting gesture,’ as Hawthorn subsequently confessed. A couple of minutes later and Fangio had not only chewed up both Collins and Hawthorn, but made a point of getting away from Hawthorn before reaching the straight again, ‘Because there he might have taken advantage of my slipstream and passed me.’
The Ferrari mechanics, according to Walkerley, ‘gesticulated and tore the air, they fell on their knees to their drivers’, while in the Maserati pits team manager Nello Ugolini merely ‘smiled at his watch’. Fangio won by three seconds. Hawthorn and Collins, bless them, ‘were ecstatic, as if they had been the winners. They never stopped congratulating me and shaking me by the hand. They were both very good lads.’ Pictures after the final flag show a shattered Fangio being born aloft by his team and being embraced by the two young Brits: both of whom wear the gleeful, incredulous expression of someone who has seen something astounding, a performance of scarcely plausible brilliance.
‘I believe on that day I finally managed to master it,’ Fangio said, forgivingly, of the ‘Ring. He then went and took his fifth and last World Championship. Moss, his protégé, cleaned up in the last two races for Vanwall, Fangio humbly coming second both times. At the end of ’58, he retired from the sport, alive, in reasonable health, and went to live a life of quietly virtuous industry as a national hero in Argentina, leaving the rest of the world to argue whether he was, or was not, the greatest Grand Prix driver of all time.
No, he never showed his versatility by winning Le Mans, or the Mille Miglia, or Indianapolis. And the Formula One seasons in which he raced were infinitely shorter than today’s – between seven and eight mostly European Grandes Épreuves, spread out between May and September. And the fields could be of pretty variable quality. But the fact remains that with twenty-four wins out of fifty-one starts, Fangio’s winning percentage is unlikely ever to be beaten. And there will always be the Nürburgring, 5 August 1957.
THE AGE OF BRITS 1959–76
6
HAWTHORN, MOSS AND THE BRITISH REVENGE
January 1959, and new world champion, Mike Hawthorn, was being fêted at the National Sporting Clubs Dinner, in the presence of such luminaries as Henry Cooper, Joe Davis, Donald Campbell and Tony Brooks. Charles Forte presided and presented the guest of honour with a fine cocktail cabinet, stuffed with liquor. In his acceptance speech, Mike hoped that some of the assembled company would come round in the not-too-distant future and help him empty it. A couple of days later – 22 January 1959 – and Hawthorn was dead, in his own heavily modified Jaguar saloon, having got into an asinine road race with Rob Walker’s Mercedes on the Guildford by-pass, where he lost control and smashed the car into a tree. He was twenty-nine years old. ‘Motor racing’s Gay Cavalier’ had been champion for all of three months.
It was a wretched end to a curiously tangled, disjointed twelve months. Yes, Hawthorn had become the first Brit to win the Drivers’ Championship. Yes, he was the tall, dashing, fun-loving daredevil that schoolboys worshipped: six feet two inches in height, brick-chinned, as blond as Marilyn Monroe and so very English that he raced in white trousers, a green blouson and a spotty bow tie. ‘If I can’t drive a green car,’ he said, in 1953, having taken the Ferrari seat, ‘at least I can wear a green jacket.’ And yes, he was the frontman for a sudden British efflorescence in the Grand Prix world.
After all, the 1958 season was Fangio’s last. He had retired after the French Grand Prix in July, following an indifferent spell with the outdated Maserati 250F. Suddenly, after years of watching El Chueco relentlessly adding to his silverware collection, spectators of Formula One found that the field was wide open.
And who was making the running? Well, an inspection of the top five places at the end of the 1958 Drivers’ Championship reveals, in ascending order: Peter Collins, Roy Salvadori, Tony Brooks, Stirling Moss and, at the top, Mike Hawthorn himself. This startling roll-call – 100 per cent British – is even more impressive when you consider that, back in 1950, the dawn of the new Formula, there was only one Brit in the whole of the top ten, a solid racer called Peter Whitehead, with old Reg Parnell languishing in eleventh. Stranger yet: three out of the top four car builders in the Constructors’ Championship were now also British.
A generation of drivers and constructors had been assiduously training itself up on the DIY specials and club circuits of Great Britain in the decade following the war and was now reaping the rewards. Tony Brooks, ‘The Racing Dentist’, had scored the first Formula One win by a British driver in a British car, in 1955, in a Connaught. The only pity was that it was at Syracuse, in a non-Championship race. Stirling Moss had already been driving brilliantly alongside (or inches behind) Fangio in the Mercedes team (only a matter of time before he became champion, patently) before getting Vanwall up to speed. Peter Collins was quick and successful, if not entirely dependable, in the V6-engined Ferrari 246. Roy Salvadori, driving a whacky rear-engined Cooper-Climax, had come a very respectable second in the ’58 German Grand Prix, behind Brooks.
In a way, it was fortuitous that Hawthorn became champion at all, given the competition that was stacked up behind him; and given the fact that, in his entire racing career, he only ever won three Grands Prix. In the year of his Championship, he won but one race, with Moss taking four, Tony Brooks three. But then, Hawthorn’s career was a lot less blithe, sunny and effortless than it appears at first sight.
Consider the presentation drinks cabinet, so cheerfully unveiled by Charles Forte in 1959: there is something unnerving about it, given that, for much of his young life, Mike Hawthorn was shitfaced, about to get shitfaced, or recovering from having just been shitfaced. When stationary, he liked to have a drink – usually beer – in his hand, or at least, not far away. This was despite a chronic kidney disorder which made any trip to the lavatory ‘like peeing
grit’.
The proximity of a motor race made no difference. The British Grand Prix of 1955 took place at Aintree, a 3-mile circuit built within the confines of the famous Aintree Racecourse, and using the same grandstands. Hawthorn (in a Ferrari 625) started off badly and was soon lurching round the track in such a state that he eventually got out in mid-race and simply gave up the car to team-mate Eugenio Castellotti. ‘The weather was fantastic for Aintree,’ Hawthorn – who had happily raced at summery Reims and sultry Monza – later assured the press, ‘sunny and extremely hot, and I began to feel the effects, so I handed the car over.’ Sympathetic voices announced that his kidneys were playing up again. But others reckoned that, so far from being a saintly valetudinarian, he was in fact massively hungover, having had a huge row with his then girlfriend (the stylishly-named Moi Kenward) the night before, gone out, got smashed, and then had to face the consequences at the wheel of a racing car.
It happened again, a year later, when Hawthorn was due to race at Monaco for BRM. This was their first appearance with a new machine, the P25 – and a proper green car for Hawthorn to drive. You would have thought he might have treated the event with some reverence. But no. En route to the circuit, he found himself drunk in a brothel, in Paris, with a tall, equally drunk, BRM hand called Neil McNab. According to McNab, boredom set in and, stark naked, the pair of them ‘went into some of the other rooms to see if we were missing out on any good crumpet. We’d just lift the bloke off his tart, have a good look at her and drop him back on again.’ A minor riot ensued. McNab and Hawthorn escaped and made it to Monte Carlo the next day, where Raymond Mays (now back running the team he had started, on behalf of Sir Alfred Owen) looked at the bleary wreckage that was his principal driver and said, ‘My God, Hawthorn – what are we going to do with you?’ Not much: the engine turned sour; Hawthorn was a non-starter for the race and went off to recover in the dark.
Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One Page 4
