Grand Prix
LIFE HASN’T ALWAYS BEEN EASY FOR F1’S LONGEST-ESTABLISHED AND MOST SUCCESSFUL TEAM, SAYS DAVID TREMAYNE
‘I HAVE KILLED MY MOTHER!’
Enzo Ferrari’s work with Alfa Romeo in the inter-war years, from 1929 to 1938, is the stuff of motor sport legend. And that made the acrimonious fall-out over future policy with Alfa director Ugo Gobbato and his protégé, the Spanish engineer Wifredo Ricart, and their wish that he should hand back their racing operation, only harder to stomach.
Ferrari did not accept defeat lightly. After a four-year non-competition clause had expired, and Ferrari’s wartime work on machine tools was over, the first car that bore his name – the Ferrari 125 – appeared in Raymond Sommer’s hands at the 1948 Italian GP in Turin’s Valentino Park. But it was not until the 1950 inauguration of the Formula 1 World Championship that Ferrari cars began to leave their mark, victory at Le Mans in 1949 notwithstanding. Boldly, Ferrari pursued a 4.5-litre normally aspirated engine, in V12 configuration, while Alfa Romeo continued with its supercharged 1.5-litre straight-eights. The Alfas ruled the roost that season, but at Silverstone in 1951 José Froilán González routed the supercharged cars with an emphatic first victory for Ferrari that sounded the death knell for Alfa’s continued involvement.
Ferrari, though privately delighted to beat Alfa, proclaimed: ‘I have killed my mother!’ The Milanese company withdrew at the end of the season, its driver Juan Manuel Fangio crowned for the first time, and such was the dearth of competition that F2 regulations were adapted for F1, with 2.0-litre engines, for 1952 and ’53. This played into Ferrari’s hands, too, as upcoming Alberto Ascari wiped the floor with frequently weak opposition.
GRIMNESS AND GRIEF
One of Enzo Ferrari’s favourite mottos was ‘Divide and reign’, and he liked his drivers to compete with each other for his favour. No year more than 1958 underlined the folly of such sentiments. Ferrari was unhappy in the late 1950s. His son Dino died of muscular dystrophy in 1956, a season that saw a title-winning collaboration with Fangio before the great Argentinian decamped for deadly rival Maserati. Prodigal son Mike Hawthorn took his place for 1957.
In 1958 the Englishman’s close friendship with fellow countryman Peter Collins – ‘Mon Ami Mate’ – frequently led them to taunt teammate Luigi Musso, the Italian’s fiancée Fiamma Breschi alleged. Troubled by gambling debts, he was not quite in their class, and died after over-reaching himself in the lucrative French GP at Reims, which eventually fell to Hawthorn. Two races later, British GP winner Collins died as he and Hawthorn chased after the victorious Tony Brooks’ Vanwall in the German GP on the daunting old Nürburgring.
Rarely open about his sentiment, Ferrari later offered more than avuncular consolation to Breschi and to Collins’s widow Louise. Hawthorn was crowned champion as the season saw the inauguration of the World Championship for Constructors. Fittingly it went to Ferrari’s main rival Vanwall, which would have won the Drivers’ title too had Moss not sportingly stood up for Hawthorn when he faced disqualification in Portugal.
Months later, in January 1959, there was an unwelcome postscript to a grim and griefstricken season when the retired Hawthorn died after crashing his Jaguar on the Hog’s Back, near Guildford in Surrey.
FACING UP TO FACTS
In October 1958, the CSI (forerunner of the FIA) announced its intention to revise the regulations for F1 from 1961 onwards. The 2.5-litre engines were to be downgraded to 1.5 litres. British manufacturers, led by Vanwall since 1956, had begun to turn the red tide, and the arrival of the ‘garagistes’ Cooper and Lotus, with their rear-engined machines, had sounded the death knell from 1958 for the front-engined cars that Ferrari swore by. By 1960, the red cars were also-rans.
But the British refused to believe until the very last moment that the 1.5-litre F1 really would happen, and even proposed an Intercontinental Formula of their own. It was stillborn and, by the time they accepted what Ferrari had long taken on board as inevitable, the British teams were having to make do with bitsa four-cylinder Coventry Climax engines, while that manufacturer and BRM belatedly set to work designing new V8 powerplants.
The result was that Ferrari’s elegant 156 – its first rear-engined Grand Prix car – had the advantage in 1961. With its twin-nostril nose design, it was nicknamed ‘the sharknose’.
Drivers Phil Hill and Count Wolfgang von Trips vied for the title, which fell to the American at Monza as the German died in an accident early in the race, and were beaten only twice by the genius of Stirling Moss in Rob Walker’s Dunlop-shod Lotus.
But the success proved shortlived. As the British V8s hit their stride, and because of the Ferrari ‘Palace Revolt’ discussed elsewhere, everything fell apart for Ferrari in 1962. By 1964 it had recovered, however, and its own V8 took John Surtees to the World Championship.
LOSING THE 1966 TITLE
When F1 underwent a welcome ‘Return to Power’ for 1966, Ferrari started as the favourite. Things began well, with John Surtees winning the non-title race in Syracuse, but then he was beaten by Jack Brabham’s unfancied Brabham Repco at Silverstone. Jackie Stewart and BRM won the first Grand Prix in Monaco before Surtees triumphed in the rain at Spa.
But things went wrong when nationalistic team manager Eugenio Dragoni engineered a confrontation at Le Mans. He had favoured young Italian Lorenzo Bandini at Monaco, where he let him drive the nimble 2.4-litre V6 car and left Surtees to haul the heavy 3.0-litre V12 around the streets of the Principality; and again at the famous 24-Hour sports car race, where he impugned Surtees’ fitness after a crash in Canada in 1965 and criticised him for letting Jochen Rindt lead him at times in a Maserati-engined Cooper at Spa. Surtees quit on the spot, and joined Rindt at Cooper. Ferrari won only one more race, as Brabham scored four victories to steal the title.
‘Mr Ferrari and I both believed in later years that we had thrown a World Championship away,’ Surtees admitted.
The other truth was that Enzo Ferrari’s beloved V12 engine, which had started life in sports cars, lacked horsepower. And that remained true for the rest of the decade, especially once the Ford Cosworth V8 had rewritten the rule book in 1967.