GIANCARLO BAGHETTI
1961 FRENCH GP Started 12th | Result 1st
Non-championship F1 races used to provide another arena for drivers to gain some experience. And armed with Ferrari’s 156 Sharknose, Baghetti won the Syracuse and Naples GPS before making his world championship debut at the 1961 French GP. A race in Modena being cancelled and a reversal of the suggestion that Baghetti was supposedly not permitted to run ‘Formula races’ outside of Italy meant he joined the entry list.
Although the fast Reims circuit played to the strengths of the powerful V6, Baghetti was limited to the older-specification unit. He qualified 12th, while Phil Hill, Wolfgang von Trips and Richie Ginther locked out the top three with the newer powerplant.
Baghetti lost a spot on the opening lap but the Italian made swift progress thereafter. After 10 of the 52 tours, Baghetti was fifth, behind Hill, von Trips, Ginther and Stirling Moss’s Lotus. Now at the front of a gaggle of cars, Baghetti soon hauled in Moss and made it a Ferrari 1-2-3-4.
Then the Sharknose effort started to crack. Von Trips retired with a holed radiator, Hill spun out of the lead, and Ginther ran out of oil.
Baghetti thus hit the front for the first time on lap 41. Many of the British frontrunners had also wilted in the blistering heat, leaving the Ferrari to fight the Porsches of Dan Gurney and Jo Bonnier. And they slipstreamed past each other constantly.
Autosport likened the contest to the epic 1953 French GP encounter: “A battle reminiscent of the unforgettable Hawthorn v Fangio duel. For lap after lap they swapped places, often travelling abreast.
“No one could possibly have blamed the young Italian for making an error, but he drove an inspired race, countering every move of the Porsche pilots.”
Bonnier hit engine problems in the closing stages, and Baghetti outdragged Gurney’s Porsche on the run to the line to win by
0.1s in a “truly magnificent finish”.
“Bravo, Baghetti!” shouted Autosport’s headline, but it would be as good as Baghetti’s career would get. He would never again stand on a world championship podium, despite Ferrari outings in 1962, and his switch to the breakaway ATS team in 1963 took the sting out of much of the potential his career might still have had.