Left alone in the company of notorious roister-doister ‘Drunken’ Duncan Hamilton – famed for his Jaguar exploits – Hawthorn was even more volatile. At around 4 a.m., following a party after a race in Portugal, in 1954, Hawthorn and Hamilton ‘decided we would change our bedroom furniture round’, according to Hamilton. They opened their respective bedroom windows. ‘Using knotted sheets I lowered all my furniture down to Mike’s room; he, in return, helped me pull all his up to mine. A poor drunk on the second floor who chanced to look out of his window as dawn was breaking was convinced he had the DT’s when a large armchair went by.’
Fast-forward to 1956, and Hamilton, Hawthorn and fellow drivers were in Sweden, having completed a sports car race (Hawthorn, along with Musso, Castellotti, Portago, Collins – all dead within two years) and in need of some after-track stimulation. Working as a team, the six of them stole a crate of whisky from behind the bar. Several hours later, and a plastered Hamilton had set off a fire hose in Hawthorn’s bedroom, the hose had run riot, the corridor was flooded, a similarly plastered Hawthorn had grabbed the hose, and squirted a couple (who were having sex) clean out of their bed. Hamilton only managed to turn the thing off by attacking it with a fire axe.
Well, you could get away with that, just about, back in the mid-1950s. But if all this could be glossed as mere youthful alcoholic high spirits (even Hawthorn’s dog was called Grogger), there were more intractable problems elsewhere.
There was, for instance, the National Service scandal. By 1954, Hawthorn was eligible for two years in the Armed Services, the duty of every able-bodied young Englishman in those days. He got it deferred, then had to flee to the Continent, where he skulked for fear of being pinched by the Ministry of Defence the moment he returned to England. Questions were asked in Parliament as to why a young man fit enough to race Formula One cars was not able fulfil his basic military obligations. The Daily Mirror sneered, ‘Why not come home, Mike? There is a reasonable chance you can still go on seeing the world – in a British uniform.’ It followed up this cheerless Fleet Street sarcasm with the headline ‘CATCH THIS DODGER’, causing Mike’s father, Leslie, to try and placate the press with breast-beating interviews in which he blamed himself for his son’s apparent delinquency. The thing dragged on until October, when Hawthorn had to have a kidney operation, effectively rendering him unfit for National Service once and for all.
This did nothing for his public image. At the same time, his private life was becoming just as unduly complex. Hawthorn (who ‘drives in devil-may-care style, his husky frame hunched over in the cramped cockpit’, according to Time magazine) was so far inclined to take his pleasures where he could that he fathered an illegitimate child. While hiding abroad to avoid the call-up, he had an affair with a delectable Frenchwoman, Jaqueline Delaunay. This yielded a son, Arnaud, in 1954. The child looked like Mike in every particular (apart, as it turned out, from being short and dark) and was clearly his. Hawthorn then spent two years carefully avoiding this boy and all the burdensome responsibilities he incarnated, before Mlle Delaunay cornered him at the French GP in Reims. There, she held up a toddler dressed in diminutive white trousers, green jacket and bow tie – a miniature Mike – before the errant father, who could only give in and, after that, make financial provision for him.
Then, back on the track in 1955, he was centrally involved in the catastrophic Le Mans crash. In the minutes after the disaster, he haggardly insisted to Lance Macklin – the other surviving driver caught in the maelstrom, who had set it off, indeed, by having to avoid Hawthorn’s Jaguar – ‘I killed all those people. I’m really sorry. I’m certainly never going racing again.’ Except that he did, straight away, winning the race for Jaguar, before doing a promotional film the following year, in which a camera was lashed to his D-Type and in which he drove round the track giving a commentary – while ordinary motorists used the same road. The track hadn’t been closed off, but there was Mike, hurtling past camionettes and private cars, announcing, ‘I’ve got to be a little careful today, because there’s quite a lot of traffic on the road,’ and, ‘There’s somebody in the way … cyclists everywhere … typical French!’
And so on. By the start of the 1958 season, in other words, Hawthorn was a long way removed from the cheeky twenty-one-year-old who drove a Riley Imp at the Brighton Speed Trials of 1950 and made himself One to Watch. He was now a somewhat compromised and chastened Hawthorn – having tangled with illness, controversy, injury, illegitimacy, tragedy and drink-related folly. And he was not helped by the fact that his greatest rival, Stirling Moss, was coming to the top of his form.
Hawthorn, it must be said, didn’t care for Moss. So far as he was concerned, Moss was a player, a racer who took it seriously, professionally, who went racing as a business; who even had his own manager. Hawthorn, on the other hand, saw himself as a gentleman who did it for the love of the sport, a stance which gave him, as he saw it, the moral edge. But there was no doubting who was the better driver.
Moss was, in fact, a perpetual reproach to Hawthorn. Moss had cut his racing teeth on Coopers, like Hawthorn, and by the mid-1950s was one of the very hottest properties in Formula One. Plainly, he was incredibly quick: he could sit on Fangio’s tail all day if necessary and never seem to break a sweat – except, in 1955, when he had a mild rush of blood to the head and nipped over the finishing line at the British Grand Prix, half a car’s length ahead of the Maestro. He copied Giuseppe Farina’s straight-arm driving style, not because it felt better (it didn’t, and took a lot of getting used to) but because ‘it looked cool’ – thereby unnerving his competitors as well as making himself seem special.
And he was astonishingly versatile – he could flog a very middle-class Sunbeam Talbot to victory in the Alpine Rally, demolish the 1955 Mille Miglia in a Mercedes 300 SLR, or win the Nürburgring 1,000-km three years in succession, twice in an Aston Martin, once in a Maserati Birdcage. He could drive whale-like Jaguar Mk VIIs in saloon car races, or dinky Coopers, just as they were making the break into Formula One. Nuvolari actually spotted Moss’s genius as far back as 1949. ‘Watch him,’ he said, ‘he will be one of the great ones.’
To give him his due, Hawthorn was a fine sports and saloon car driver too, and would never have got the hot seat with Ferrari if he hadn’t been able to drive. But Moss was consummate. He was trim, fit, super-adaptable, highly professional, not a great boozer (although he was a great skirt-chaser: ‘I think the pit’s all the better for a bit of crumpet’) and he knew the rules backwards – noting that it was perfectly acceptable to play as close to what was permitted as was humanly possible, but that cheating was right out. He was nerveless, too; after a big crash at Monza in 1958, he tumbled out of the wreck of his Maserati and stood there thinking, ‘Well, if this is Hell, it’s not very hot, or if it’s Heaven, why is it so dusty?’ Moss was a complete driver, and a completely modern driver.
Having Moss around was altogether imperfect, and Hawthorn, to his lasting discredit, liked to refer to him behind his back as Moses – a glancing reference to the fact that Moss’s father was Jewish. Added to which, as the season went on, it became clear that, if Hawthorn did take the title, it would be as a percentage player, a steady accumulator of points, rather than as the bow-tied swashbuckler his fans liked to paint him. Moss took two out of the first three races, while Tony Brooks took three out of the next six. Collins won at Silverstone – the race Hawthorn would have liked to have won more than any other – while at the Portuguese Grand Prix, Moss (gallingly stuffed with useful information about the rules, and acting in purely gentleman, rather than player, fashion) got Hawthorn’s points reinstated following a minor technical infringement: handing him the title, as it would turn out, by a single point.
All of which would have been just about bearable, except for this: Peter Collins had died at the Nürburgring, three weeks earlier, on 3 August. Romolo Tavoni, Ferrari team manager, escorted Hawthorn to the hospital after the race: ‘There was Peter, like he was asleep. M
ike took one look, turned and went out into the corridor, where he leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor. He just sat there, saying nothing.’ Ferrari may have scorned to show emotion at the time, but Hawthorn was now shattered, arriving back at London Airport in floods of tears. After all, Collins was Hawthorn’s special Mon Ami Mate, his better-looking, more charming alter ego, the person Hawthorn would most like to have been. They partied together. They raced in the same team. Collins had just got married to Louise Cordier, Hawthorn was about to marry the gorgeous Jean Howarth. It was all going to come right. And then Collins was dead.
So Hawthorn steeled himself, picked up some more points – useful second places – collected the title and retired. ‘He wishes to get married to a beautiful girl and dedicate himself to his promising business interests,’ said Enzo Ferrari in disgust. The Duke of Richmond and Gordon gave Hawthorn a gold medal. Stirling Moss got the OBE. ‘I’ve had eight years of racing,’ Hawthorn said at the National Sporting Club’s dinner, ‘and in eight years I’ve got to the top. So I decided – now’s the time.’ He and Duncan Hamilton were going into partnership; he had the Tourist Trophy Garage in Farnham to keep him busy; companies like Shell and Mintex were paying him handsomely to endorse their products; he was going to survive.
And then he caught sight of Rob Walker’s Mercedes, a ‘Kraut car’ and, as such, in need of a trouncing. Hawthorn hit the ton on the Guildford by-pass. And that was the end of Britain’s first champion.
7
THEY WENT BACK TO FRONT
Hawthorn’s Championship win in ’58 was a big deal for the Brits, plainly. One of their chaps had taken the title, however tragic the final chapter had been. But what happened the following year was, arguably, a bigger deal. Tough, swarthy, Aussie Jack Brabham won his first title, in a rear-engined car. And not just any rear-engined car – a smart little Cooper-Climax, the true descendant of a succession of bonkers rear-engined midget motorbike-powered 500-cc racing cars which Charles and John Cooper produced in a shed in Surbiton.
It was a close thing: Brabham took two wins – Monaco, and the British GP at Aintree – while runner-up Tony Brooks, in a conventionally front-engined Ferrari, won at Reims and the German GP at Avus. It was Brabham’s extra podium places that got the job done – especially when you consider that Stirling Moss took two wins (Portugal and Italy) in another Cooper-Climax, with Bruce McLaren nabbing a fifth (United States) at the end of the season for the Surbiton eccentrics. Brabham finished four points ahead of Brooks, however, and the rest is history …
Nowadays the only question is, why did it take them so long to turn the cars round? In the mid-1950s, conversely, the only question was, how dare they? Sticking the engine at the back was not only against nature, a perversion once attempted by the evil-handling Auto Unions, but out of the question for serious racing. Maserati’s Nello Ugolini could barely contain his dismay at ‘those dreadful horrors they are producing in England’, while Ferrari simply tried to wish them away. The Italians referred to John Cooper as a garagista, which sounded even more contemptuous and threatening than the equivalent French sneer, garagiste.
Even in Britain, turning the car back to front provoked unease. The British Vanwall team, started by engineering magnate Tony Vandervell as a response to the bureaucratic flab of BRM, was, like Cooper, a portent of things to come and a pretty good outfit, too. They had Colin Chapman and Frank Costin as designers, won the British GP in ’57, came top of the Constructors’ table in the same year (adding the Pescara and Monza GPs to the British, all courtesy of Moss). Their cars were intelligent, full of interesting thoughts on brakes, suspension, aerodynamics, and were very nicely put together. But their engines were at the front, and they were correspondingly bulky. Connaught likewise used the conventional front-engined layout. Even Colin Chapman’s first GP Lotuses had the engine ahead of the driver.
John Cooper himself, full of native self-deprecation, claimed that moving the engine to the rear was originally a virtue born of necessity: ‘When we came to make our first 500-cc racer, it was just a hell of a lot more convenient to have the engine at the back, driving a chain.’ It wasn’t until they moved up to larger machinery that they realised that the principle held good, empirically. ‘We built the bob-tailed sports car in the mid-fifties, with its engine at the rear,’ and it was then ‘that we really began to think that we might be on to something.’ The car was light, balanced, didn’t wear out its tyres: ‘It just seemed so right.’
And then, in January 1958, Stirling Moss (of course) drove an underpowered Cooper-Climax T43 to victory in the Argentine Grand Prix – while waiting, as it happened, for the Vanwall that he was supposed to drive that season, to be made ready.
The race organisers at first didn’t want to let the car start; they thought it was a joke. Quite apart from its dainty proportions, its whacky layout and its heterodox, curvy-tubed chassis, the Cooper was powered by a reinvention of a four-cylinder fire-pump power unit, blagged from Coventry Climax, instead of being propelled by a proper, thoroughbred six-cylinder racing engine. The Climax powerplant was not only a mongrel: it was nearly half a litre smaller than the Ferrari and Maserati engines, gave away as much as 100 bhp, and looked fit only to run a lawnmower. But then, what do you know, Moss drove a non-stop race, letting the little car conserve its tyres and fuel, while the suddenly obese Italians shredded their rubber and charged into the pits for more high-octane gasoline. Moss tiptoed home on canvas covers: one of his paradigm-shifting drives. ‘Moss Refutes Pessimists’, said The Times, sagely. ‘Fine Performance In British Car.
It’s tempting to see this image of Moss – clever, professional, supercompetent – at the wheel of the Cooper – small, light, intelligent – as the moment at which the modern Formula One world arrived. But one shouldn’t read too much into it. He himself didn’t see the rear-engine revolution coming, that’s for sure. The Vanwall was front-engined. And only a few years earlier, he had bought himself (helped out by money from ShellMex–BP) a Maserati 250F for the colossal sum of £5,500. Two things struck him about this purchase: it was the same price as a new Spitfire fighter plane would have been, a decade earlier; and he reckoned he could get a good couple of seasons’ use of it. Things changed all the time in Grand Prix racing, but not so fast that you couldn’t keep up, provided you had a good (front-engined) car.
Now, though, there was a strange scent of insurrection in the air. Moss won in the Argentine, the first win by a rear-engined car in Formula One. Maurice Trintignant took the next race at Monaco, also in a Cooper-Climax. The next year, Brabham and Moss gave Cooper-Climax the Constructors’ Championship, and even Ferrari had to pay attention. The world of Fangio and Farina and Gonzales, real tough guys who sat up and hurled big, brutal cars into four-wheel power-slides, their wrestlers’ arms working, banging the gearchange around as if unblocking a drain: all that was suddenly history. Moss lay back in the little Cooper, half-hidden from view, nimbly tweaking it round corners, relishing its balance, never fighting it. It was like a light being turned on: partly because it showed how all Formula One cars were going to be configured from now on; partly because it was Cooper, a small, resourceful, nimble-minded privateer, who had done it.
Because there were really two revolutions. The look and shape of the car was one. The place of origin was the other. Out of the Cooper garagiste insurrection came Lotus, based in Hornsey, then Cheshunt, then Hethel; Brabham, originally in Chessington; McLaren, of Woking; even a lightened and rejuvenated BRM, based in Bourne. All of them were small, specialist, nimble operations. All of them were based, quietly and purposefully, in England, where craft skills lingered on in odd places. And they all did well at airfields.
One line of thought argues that those Second World War airfields – Silverstone, Thruxton, Snetterton, Goodwood – which had been commandeered to make racing tracks for all the post-war DIY racers, were key to the whole thing. There was no road racing in the UK to speak of, but there were these tracks – flat, with adequ
ately smooth surfaces, useful collections of bends, all easily accessible to the British racing fraternity, all begging to be used, weekend after weekend. At the same time, while the garagistes had access to all kinds of bits and pieces of engineering, as well as freebooting engineering talent, what they didn’t have was an abundance of engines: 750 cc units scrounged out of old Austin Sevens; JAP motorbike engines coming in at 500 cc; not a lot else. So they had to learn the virtues of making light, agile, reasonably aerodynamic cars that extracted the most out of what power they had, rather than start with a big, powerful engine and work their way back from that. And the airfield circuits, unlike the tough, lumpy road circuits on the Continent (jigsaw puzzles of bumps, ridges, manhole covers, bridges, kerbs), encouraged subtle chassis and braking arrangements, rather than something that would, mainly, be built for punishment. In other words, the garagistes were working in something quite like a modern racing environment before the rest of the world had caught up: an advantage they have yet to relinquish.
It meant that, for the foreseeable future, the Age of Italy was going to have to make way for a new, compromised world. The garagistas were taking over.
8
1962; MOSS, HILL, BRABHAM: SO VERY ANGLO-SAXON
Stirling Moss was now driving as well as he had ever driven – and yet was quite unable to land that World Championship. In 1958, he lost out by a point to Mike Hawthorn; ’59, he came third behind Jack Brabham and Tony Brooks; ’60, he came third behind Brabham and Bruce McLaren; ’61, he was third again, behind Phil Hill and Wolfgang ‘Taffy’ von Trips. How did he manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory so consistently?
Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One Page 5
