FORMULA 1 @ 70 - THE 1950s
We examine the people who helped shape F1 as it is today
FORMULA 1 CELEBRATES 70 YEARS OF THE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP IN 2020 AND GP RACING
IS PAYING OUR OWN RESPECTS WITH A MULTI-PART HOMAGE TO 70 OF THE MOST SPECIAL PEOPLE WHO MADE THESE DECADES OF GRAND PRIX RACING SO MEMORABLE. FIRST UP, THE PIONEERS OF THE 1950s
When the engine of grand prix racing was fired up again after the Second World War, the governing body reverted to a formula that it had intended to bring into effect in 1940. Designers were presented with a choice of engine configurations: 1.5 litres supercharged or 4.5 litres unsupercharged. At the time of its conception, the idea was to sabotage the supremacy of the state-sponsored German teams, Mercedes-benz and Auto Union, whose all-conquering cars had been designed to meet regulations permitting supercharged three-litre engines. But for the one grand prix run under the new formula in 1939, the lucrative Tripoli race, Mercedes had ambushed the Italians, designing and constructing a couple of 1.5-litre cars in double-quick time, their speed in a crushing victory dismaying the Alfa Romeo and Maserati outfits, in particular.
Luckily for the Italians, the German manufacturers were not ready, for obvious reasons, to resume their racing activities in 1950. So, the next-best car in Tripoli, Alfa Romeo’s Tipo 158, became the class of the field under the new regulations. Known as the Alfetta, the beautiful 158 had been designed in Modena at a time when the Alfa factory’s racing activities were entrusted to Scuderia Ferrari. The designer principally responsible for the car was Gioachino Colombo, an Alfa man who moved from the company’s Turin headquarters to join the Scuderia. Assisted by Luigi Bazzi, Alberto Massimino and Angelo Nasi, Colombo created the machine that would occupy all four places on the front row of the grid for the very first race of the inaugural world championship: the 1950 British Grand Prix at Silverstone.
Three of the cars completed the race in the top three positions, setting the tone for two years of dominance. In the hands of the three Fs – Giuseppe Farina, Luigi Fagioli and Juan Manuel Fangio – the 158, with its supercharged straight-eight engine, would win every one of that season’s six championship rounds contested by F1 cars (the seventh was the Indianapolis 500, a bizarre custom that ended in 1960). Under the team management of Gianbattista Guidotti, a former driver, Colombo supervised the technical side, updating the car for the following season. Now known as the 159, the car would win four of that year’s seven races before Alfa Corse withdrew from F1.
The champion at the end of the first season was Giuseppe “Nino” Farina, an experienced Italian whose relaxed, straight-arms stance at the wheel belied his notoriously uncompromising attitude to those who got in his way, particularly the young upstarts of the post-war generation. His successor as champion in 1951 was his Argentinian team-mate Juan Manuel Fangio, relatively new to European racing but, at 41, a veteran of the punishing long-distance road races of South America.
For most of the 1950s, and even thereafter, he set the standard. Fangio’s driving was cool and unflustered – until seriously challenged, at which point a demon took the wheel. He was also the master of a special skill: the instinct for placing himself in the right team at the right moment. When Alfa withdrew, Fangio joined Maserati for two seasons that were ruined by a serious accident at Monza, caused by fatigue after travelling back from a race in Ireland. Once recovered, he was invited to join Mercedes-benz for its return to F1 in 1954.
The performance of the W196, designed by the brilliant Rudolf Uhlenhaut, enabled the team to recapture pre-war supremacy, giving Fangio two more titles. His fourth, in 1956, came with Ferrari, in a marriage of convenience not designed to last. A return to the friendlier ambiance at Maserati enabled him to get his hands on a 250F, which was like pairing Paganini with a Stradivarius or handing Jimi Hendrix a Fender Stratocaster: Fangio’s win at the Nürburgring, where he chased down the flying Ferraris of Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins, remains in some minds the greatest comeback drive of all time.
By the end of 1957, however, Maserati had ceased to exist as a works grand prix team. It was Enzo Ferrari, Maserati’s local rival, who spent the decade establishing an ability to survive crises that would have destroyed other men. By beating the Alfas at Silverstone in 1951, Ferrari’s 4.5-litre car had intimated that the era of supercharging was over. Over the next two years, in which grand prix races were run for two-litre Formula 2 cars, his Tipo 500 was almost unbeatable. By 1955, however, his team had hit the skids: the performance of the bulbous Squalo and Supersqualo models was as disastrous as their looks.
As would often happen throughout Ferrari’s career, fortune took a hand. You make your own luck, they say, and Ferrari’s shrewdness enabled him to profit from the misfortune, the ambition
“FANGIO’S DRIVING WAS COOL AND UNFLUSTERED – UNTIL SERIOUSLY CHALLENGED, AT WHICH POINT A DEMON TOOK THE WHEEL”
“THEREAFTER, DRIVING MOSTLY COOPERS AND LOTUSES, MOSS WAS ACCEPTED AS THE MAESTRO OF HIS GENERATION AS WELL AS EVERY SCHOOLBOY’S HERO”
and the generosity of others. Midway through the 1955 season he was presented with a priceless gift: a complete set of very fast V8-engined cars built by Lancia, which was in the process of going bust. Governmental influence assisted their transfer from Turin to Maranello, where they became Lancia-ferraris: the car that would take Fangio to the 1956 title. Another championship was won in 1958, with Mike Hawthorn.
But Ferrari’s triumphs also came steeped in blood, rather disturbingly enhancing the near-mythical aura of the cars carrying the prancing horse badge. Eugenio Castellotti, Alfonso de Portago, Luigi Musso and Peter Collins were all killed in Ferraris in the 1950s. So was Alberto Ascari, the first – and so far, extraordinarily enough, the only – Italian world champion, who claimed the crown in 1952 and 1953. Ferrari’s four-cylinder, two-litre 500 fitted Ascari as well as Maserati’s 250F fitted Fangio. It was Ascari’s instrument, and over those two seasons he won nine consecutive grands prix, an unprecedented feat and one that remained unmatched until Nigel Mansell won nine in a single season in 1992.
Ascari was affectionately known in Italy as Ciccio, which means “Tubby”. He was the son of a champion of the 1920s: Antonio Ascari, who had met Enzo Ferrari soon after the end of the First World War and was killed at the Montlhéry autodrome outside Paris in 1925, when he was 36 and his son was seven. Antonio’s widow could not dissuade Alberto from following the destiny of a true figlio d’arte. Considered by many good judges to be Fangio’s equal, Ascari ignored one of his own superstitions by strapping on a friend’s helmet to go out in a Ferrari sportscar during a Monza test session in 1955; a few minutes later, on a deserted track, he was dead after an accident for which no definitive explanation was ever found. He was 36, like his father; they are buried together in Milan’s Cimiterio Monumentale.
The return of Mercedes in 1954 brought the distinctive figure of Alfred Neubauer back to the pitlane. Before the war, Neubauer had virtually invented the profession of team management, both on a technical and a human level. Born in the Austrian Republic in 1891, he joined Austro-daimler after the First World War, becoming the company’s chief tester under its designer, Dr Ferdinand Porsche, who took him to Daimler in 1923. Neubauer did a bit of racing for the Stuttgart firm, but his gifts lay elsewhere. Three years later, installed as the manager of Daimler’s Mercedes team, he introduced pit signalling; soon he would be drilling his mechanics in the art of efficient fuel and tyre stops. His mechanics wore brown overalls on practice days, and changed to white for the race. The drivers found that nothing was too much trouble if it helped them win races.
The portly, trilby-hatted, fine-dining, occasionally choleric Neubauer needed all his considerable charisma to deal with the competing egos of Rudi Caracciola, Manfred von Brauchitsch, Hermann Lang and Richard Seaman. By 1954, his authority was unquestioned and others were copying his methods. Fangio was his number one, cruising to two consecutive titles in the various versions of the mighty W196; a year later a young Englishman was added to the roster, just as Dick Seaman had been in 1937.
Stirling Moss was already the living embodiment of Britain’s rise to post-war prominence in top-level racing. As a teenage prodigy, he quickly captured the public’s imagination. His early desire to win grands prix in a British car led to unsuccessful ventures with HWM, ERA, Cooper-alta and BRM; few questioned his regretful decision first to buy a Maserati 250F – with which he almost won the 1954 Italian GP – and then to move to Mercedes, where he learnt much from Fangio and, at Aintree, became the first home driver to win the British GP.
After another season with the Maserati works team, winning at Monaco and Monza, Moss finally found a British car worthy of his talents: the Vanwall, the product of several years of development at Tony Vandervell’s factory in Acton. It was the class of the field in 1957 and brought Moss, a year later, to within a point of the title. Thereafter, driving mostly Coopers and Lotuses, Moss was accepted as the maestro of his generation as well as every schoolboy’s hero, with the bittersweet distinction of ending his career as the finest driver never to be crowned world champion.
He did have the pleasure, however, of receiving the trophy
awarded to the winner of the Monaco Grand Prix from the elegant and no doubt fragrant hands of Princess Grace. Not, however, at the first time of asking; in 1956 the former Grace Kelly and her new husband, Prince Rainier, were away on their honeymoon. But the star of High Society and Rear Window was there in 1960 and 1961 when Moss emerged triumphant from the cockpit of Rob Walker’s Lotus 18 at the end of 100 hectic laps around the houses.
Monaco had always been a glamorous race. The first winner, in 1929, was a Brit: the mysterious “Williams” – later revealed to be an Anglo-french chauffeur named William Grover, destined to be murdered by the Nazis for his Resistance activities. It was a prettier race in the early years, before elegant belle-epoque houses and hotels were razed to make way for high-rise apartments and the sweep of the straight along the harbour front was interrupted by the addition of the swimming-pool complex. But the violent left-right of Casino Square, the squeeze at Mirabeau and the tamarind trees lining the road after the chicane kept it recognisable, and the arrival of a Hollywood star added enormously to its aura of romance, which it retained despite all the unsightly harbour extensions and land reclamations, and the stench of unearned wealth.
As the influence of commercial sponsors rose, so the unique ambiance of Monaco became more valuable to Formula 1: a reminder of golden-age values and traditions. No wonder it was the only race whose organisers were not charged a fee by Bernie Ecclestone. Almost 40 years after Grace’s death, in the mind’s eye she and her prince still open the circuit on a springtime Sunday afternoon, her white-gloved hand waving from the back of an open limousine.
The man who so narrowly denied Moss the title in 1958 was
Mike Hawthorn, who thus became Britain’s first world champion. Born in 1929, the son of a garage owner and motorbike racer, Hawthorn made an early impact in an F2 Cooper-bristol, challenging the F1 Ferraris of Luigi Villoresi and Chico Landi in the unlikely surroundings of a circuit laid out on an old aerodrome at Boreham in Essex in 1952. It won him a place in the Ferrari squad, and in 1953 he outdragged Fangio’s Maserati up the finishing straight at Reims to become the first Briton to win a world championship grand prix.
Tall, blond and noted for his habit of racing in a spotted silk bow tie, he drove briefly for Vanwall and endured an unhappy season with BRM before returning to Maranello alongside his great friend Peter Collins. In terms of the human cost it was a devastating period, Hawthorn needing to recover from the blow of Collins’s fatal accident at the Nürburgring in 1958 to take the title, despite claiming only a single grand prix victory that season to Moss’s four. Collins’s death was probably as much in Hawthorn’s mind as his
own chronic and debilitating kidney condition when he announced his retirement, despite a lucrative offer from Ferrari to stay on. In January 1959, three months after his final grand prix, he died when his Jaguar Mk 1 saloon left the road on the A3 outside Guildford. Since that year the Hawthorn Memorial Trophy has been awarded to the most successful British or Commonwealth driver in F1.
When Moss moved to Vanwall in 1957, he had the power of veto over his team-mates. Hawthorn was out because he would want equal status, and Moss needed the right to commandeer whichever of the team’s cars offered the best performance. To fans, particularly schoolboys, the car looked like a space-age racing car should look: slightly futuristic, thanks to a dramatic body shape conceived by Frank Costin, clothing Colin Chapman’s chassis and a power unit based, roughly speaking, on four single-cylinder 500cc Norton motorcycle engines welded together and bored out to 2.5 litres.
The pre-war German teams had explored the idea of aerodynamic bodywork, and Mercedes had revived it in the mid-1950s, but Costin brought disciplines learnt during his employment with the De Havilland Aircraft Company – makers of the sleek Comet jet airliner – to the business of designing a car that would penetrate the air with the least possible resistance. He had already worked on the Lotus Mk VIII, the first of Chapman’s sports cars with an all-enveloping body, and on its race-winning successors. The Vanwall’s tricky handling and awkward gearbox meant it was never the favourite of its drivers, but it looked like a winner, and it was. And after Costin, aerodynamics gradually became the primary science of F1.
As if to ram home the new British supremacy, John Cooper demonstrated that all the world’s racing car manufacturers had been getting it wrong. When Enzo Ferrari saw Cooper’s little rear-engined cars on the grid for a grand prix, he scoffed that “the horse should never push the cart along with its nose”. Perhaps he was thinking of the fast but tricky pre-war Auto Unions. But Cooper and his father, Charles, and their designer, Owen “The Beard” Maddock, had worked away in their little garage in Surbiton to produce machines that dominated first Formula 3, then Formula 2, and finally Formula 1. Developed for racing on the smooth, flat asphalt tracks of disused wartime aerodromes, Coopers were lighter and nimbler than their front-engined rivals, and very driver-friendly. Moss’s shock win in Buenos Aires in 1958 with what one newspaper called “the pygmy car” had shown the way. Jack Brabham’s world titles in 1959 and 1960 made the revolution irreversible. Phil Hill’s victory for Ferrari at Monza in the Italian GP on 4 September, 1960 would be the last world championship hurrah for a front-engined car. A year later even old Enzo’s carts were being pushed by the horse.