About this tribute An independent book about him, and how it was made

In photographs of 2005 and 2013, outside the Donington Grand Prix Collection in Leicestershire, a bronze Fangio in shirtsleeves raises his right hand to a bronze Ayrton Senna, who raises a hand in return. The research for this book could not find out who made it. This book is a tribute too, and an independent one.

It is not connected with the Fangio family, the Museo Juan Manuel Fangio in Balcarce, the Fundación Museo del Automovilismo Juan Manuel Fangio, Mercedes-⁠Benz or anyone who holds rights in his name. It is not commercial: it sells nothing and carries no advertising. It is made like a book, in three parts and a season to a page, to be read from his birth in Balcarce to the museum that now holds his remains, or opened anywhere.

Where the facts come from

Every fact in this book comes from the research gathered for it, and every piece of that research names its source. The sources come first from the time: the race reports of Motor Sport, Denis Jenkinson’s among them, El Gráfico and the Argentine press, and the interviews Fangio gave on the record, above all to Nigel Roebuck in 1979. Then come the Museo Fangio’s own history of his life and races, a careful source but not a neutral one, the books of people who were there, and the serious biographies. The results come from statistics databases, F1DB above all, checked against one another and against the official record. Encyclopaedias were used only to find sources, never as one.

Each fact was marked by what stands behind it: two independent sources that agree, one reliable source, or sources that disagree. The book uses the first freely and the second with care; when the sources disagree, it gives both versions and says who holds which, or leaves the point out. Every result, grid and points total in its tables is drawn from one set of data, taken from the book’s own record of his races, so no table can contradict another. Every page was then checked, sentence by sentence, against that research by a reader who had not written it, and each ends with its sources, the only links on the page that lead away from the book.

His words, and others’

A quotation is printed only in the words of its source, never tidied. A quotation from a recording, a transcript or an interview printed at the time is given as his; one found only in later books and articles is marked as attributed; the lines passed round without any source appear only in the section of In his words on words no source records. Where he spoke Spanish, a quotation set out on its own gives the Spanish first and the English after it. His first memoir, written in 1961 by his manager and later disowned, is quoted only with a warning; the book he checked himself, with Roberto Carozzo, is quoted as his, as Books & films explains.

The pictures

Every picture is used under a licence that has been checked: in the public domain, under a Creative Commons licence or on similar terms. Many come from open archives, the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands and Argentina’s Archivo General de la Nación among them, from the covers of El Gráfico, and from photographers who have shared their work on Wikimedia Commons. They are printed in black and white, except where colour is the point. A caption says what, where and when, and when a car on a museum floor is of his type but not his own, the caption says that too. The credit under each picture names the photographer, where known, and the licence, and the Picture credits give each source in full.

What it corrects

Seventy years of retelling have smoothed his story, and in places this book tells it differently from the versions most often printed. Among them:

• his points total, 244½ in the official record and in the period’s own arithmetic, though most books give 245 (Records);
• his European debut, at Reims on 18 July 1948, and not at San Remo the next spring, where he won for the first time in Europe (To Europe);
• Monaco in 1950, where he spoke of luck, not of a sixth sense (1950);
• his crash at Monza in 1952, on the second lap and not the third (1952);
• his third title, settled at Aintree in July 1955, not at Monza in September (1955);
• his fourth, which was not won by the points for his second place in Peter Collins’s car at Monza, since they did not count (1956);
• the car he was to drive in Havana, a Maserati 450S, not a 300S (Havana);
• the words he is so often given after the Nürburgring in 1957, which no source records, and the ones he did say (In his words).

Some questions stay open: the year he first raced, as a riding mechanic; the year of his military service; what broke on his Alfa Romeo at Silverstone in 1950; how many spectators died at Buenos Aires in 1953. The pages leave them open. If a better source settles one of them, or shows that the book is wrong elsewhere, the page will change to match it.

He disowned the first book written in his name because it gave him words he had not said. This one tries to give him only his own.