Staring death in the face
NOT many people can claim that one of their earliest memories is of driving a shooting brake. But it is mine. Aged two or three, perched on my father’s tweedy lap, gripping the steering wheel, squealing “Faster faster” as we hurtled round our garden on the west coast of Ireland. (It was a large garden.)
Then, a bit older – passenger seat of the Humber Hawk – driving expertly with a plastic steering wheel stuck by a suction cap on the walnut dashboard. No seatbelts then.
If the road was quiet we’d play “motor racing”, my dad talking us through the circuit at Monaco or Silverstone, and...accelerating. Of course if Mummy was with us she’d also put her foot down, but not in a fun way.
Like fretful prima donnas, cars needed a lot of attention in those days. Dad tinkered endlessly under the bonnet (all dads did I think), enlisting my help, smoking Player’s Navy Cut, talking quietly about torque ratios and horsepower.
These days he would get top marks for conscientious gender neutrality. His presents to me were Meccano, Airfix kits, chemistry sets and once a silvery model of Stirling Moss in his car. Stirling Moss was the business. Heroic, dashing, British… and alive. But there were two other drivers who Dad had revered – Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins. By the time I was pretending to steer the Humber Hawk they were both long dead.
I was reminded of all this when I went to see Ferrari: Race to Immortality, a terrific new documentary about a shocking period of just 22 months in the late 1950s when five impossibly handsome and daring men who all drove for Ferrari were killed: Eugenio Castellotti, Alfonso de Portago (who also rode in the Grand National and flew a plane under London Bridge), Luigi Musso, Collins and Hawthorn.
WE hear from the wife of Peter Collins and the fiancée (tragically never the wife) of Mike Hawthorn – Louise King and Jean Ireland. There’s some wonderful footage of them all, so young and alive, so glamorous in their 1950s sunglasses. And all contemplating week in week out what the grand old man Enzo Ferrari chillingly called “the majestic face of death”. There were so many crashes then, such as the 1955 disaster at Le Mans when you see the driver Pierre Levegh crash and die, his body flicked from the car like a tiddlywink. Meanwhile a
I feel so disconnected with what’s going on in the news that it’s a relief to retreat to The Vietnam War series on BBC4 which I’ve been watching bit by bit. Somehow the Tet Offensive of 1968 seems more real to me than Westminster’s grope-gate.
chunk of his Mercedes skims like a burning stone across a sea. A sea of people. Eighty dead.
It’s a film that makes you ponder on the big things – life, death, courage, love, sport, masculinity, the thrill of danger. I went out with red eyes feeling painfully nostalgic for a time when our attitudes to all these things were much more straightforward.
Dad would have loved it.
Ferrari: Race to Immortality in cinemas now, and available on DVD and Blu-ray on November 6th