After racing 1958–⁠1995

Monte Carlo, May 1971

The day after the Monaco Grand Prix of 1971, the journalist Nigel Roebuck walked into Rampoldi’s, a restaurant in Monte Carlo, and found film lights. Juan Manuel Fangio was re-creating the pile-up of the 1950 Monaco Grand Prix with Solido model cars on a circuit of breadsticks, for the cameras of Hugh Hudson. The film, Fangio, was shot in 1971 and 1973 and first shown in Buenos Aires in June 1976, by the museum’s account.

He had stopped racing 13 years before, after the French Grand Prix at Reims on 6 July 1958, 10 years after his European debut there. He never raced seriously again, but for 35 years he drove in demonstrations. In 1979 he told Roebuck why he had never been tempted back:

The businessman

He had never been only a driver. “I was always a natural businessman”, he said in 1989. In 1951 he had an import-export, sales and car-service business at Bernardo de Irigoyen 1315, in Buenos Aires, and he became a Mercedes-⁠Benz dealer in February 1952 by the museum’s account, or in the mid-1950s by Mercedes-⁠Benz’s own.¹ Later came Automotores Fangio, on the Avenida Montes de Oca, and land and property.

Nor did he leave motor sport. In 1959 he became honorary president of the sports commission of the Automóvil Club Argentino, and began a long association with his protégé Juan Manuel Bordeu. In 1962 he helped to found the club of retired Grand Prix drivers, the Club International des Anciens Pilotes de Grand Prix F1, with Louis Chiron, Nino Farina, Paul Frère, Emmanuel de Graffenried and others, and became its honorary president. From 1968 he helped the Automóvil Club to run its Formula 2 Temporadas, and in August 1969 he devised and led the Misión Argentina, a team of IKA Torinos, in the 84 Hours of the Nürburgring. Óscar “Cacho” Espinosa, Andrea Berruet’s son, was one of its drivers.

In 1971 he had a heart attack in Buenos Aires, and months of recovery; his doctor told him, he remembered, to face his problems more calmly, but to face them. In 1972 an autodrome named after him opened at Balcarce, with an international race for sports prototypes; Clarín notes that it was paid for through Francisco Manrique, social-welfare minister in the de facto government of the day.

When Mercedes-⁠Benz asked him to run its Argentine company he said at first that he knew nothing of the work; Daimler-Benz insisted, and he went to Germany and asked for one thing only: “first-rate colleagues with three qualities: strength, ability, honesty.” In April 1974, at 62, he became president of Mercedes-⁠Benz Argentina, by Clarín’s account the first time the company, which had built its first factory outside Germany there two decades before, put a man who was not German at the head of it. Talking to Roebuck in 1979, he ran the years together:² “When I stopped racing, you know, they made me president of Mercedes-⁠Benz Argentina … Me, a lad from a small town…” His father, Loreto, had died on 17 October 1972; his mother, Herminia, died on 13 September 1975.

The years of the dictatorship

His presidency overlapped the military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983. In those years workers from the company’s plant at González Catán were kidnapped, and most of them were never seen again: 14 are still missing by the count most often given (Clarín, 2025: 17 kidnapped); the human-rights organisation CELS counted at least 20 victims and 15 still missing in 2019, when six military officers were on trial and possible civilian responsibility was still under investigation. Fangio never spoke of it in public, and none of the sources this book draws on attributes any personal part in it to him.

On 11 May 1977 he flew to Venezuela with the dictator, General Jorge Rafael Videla, in a delegation of civilian notables, Luis Federico Leloir and Roberto De Vicenzo among them, gathered to answer what the regime called an anti-Argentine campaign abroad. Clarín wrote in 2025 that after the fall of Perón in 1955 he had been accused of profiting from business with the state, and that he kept on good terms with the governments that followed, democratic or military. His place in his country’s public life is the subject of the chapter Fangio and Argentina.

The guest of honour

He had become the sport’s guest of honour. On 27 March 1976 he drove a Mercedes-⁠Benz W196 at Long Beach, and that June West Germany gave him the Commander’s Cross of its Order of Merit. In August 1977 he drove a W196 again at the Nürburgring, for the circuit’s 50th anniversary. In Australia in 1978, for the 50th Australian Grand Prix, he drove one again, and took the prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, as his riding mechanic in a Mercedes of 1921.

On 3 June 1979, aged 67, he went to Donington Park for a meeting in memory of Gunnar Nilsson, to drive a supercharged 5.6-⁠litre Mercedes-⁠Benz W125 of 1937 that he had never driven, on a circuit he did not know. Beforehand he said: “I know what these people are expecting of me. And I just hope I still have the nerve to do it.” Roebuck watched from the pit wall:

Eventually the supercharged 5.6-⁠litre engine barked into life, and Fangio – short-sleeved polo shirt, open-face helmet, as ever – got on his way. Coming out of the chicane on his first lap, he dabbed the throttle a little too early and the tail flicked out of line, but it was checked before you could blink, and then the power was on again. Close by me, also standing on the pitwall, Dan Gurney and Mario Andretti whooped like schoolboys. And when Juan Manuel finally brought the car into the pitlane, the faintest of smiles on his face, they looked at him just as I – and everyone else – did, all of us knowing we had witnessed something we would never forget.

In January 1980 the International Racing Press Association voted him the greatest driver of all time, with 278 points to Jackie Stewart’s 255 and Jim Clark’s 253. In September 1981 the Alfa Romeo museum gave a dinner for the 30th anniversary of his first title, won in 1951, and the next day he drove an Alfetta at Monza. That December, after a demonstration in a Mercedes-⁠Benz 300 SLR in Dubai, his heart gave him trouble again and he was flown home; on 8 December 1982, by the museum’s account, René Favaloro gave him five bypasses at the Sanatorio Güemes in Buenos Aires.

He led the parade that opened the new Nürburgring in 1984, in a Mercedes Grand Prix car of 1914. At Adelaide on 4 November 1990, for the 500th World Championship Grand Prix, he drove a W196 once more, and spun it to miss a lorry on the track. For his 80th birthday, in 1991, there were tributes at Pebble Beach, Laguna Seca and Stuttgart, and Balcarce cooked a paella for 1,500 people.

The museum on the square

In Balcarce, on 26 October 1979, a commission of townspeople set out to make a museum in his name. They chose the town hall of 1906, derelict by then, on the south corner of Plaza Libertad, the main square. Building began in August 1981, and on 18 March 1983 he gave trophies and cars to the municipality for it. The provincial government found about 18 per cent of the cost; companies, supporters, the commission’s own events and Fangio himself found the rest. On 17 June 1986 he and Bordeu set up the foundation that runs it, with Fangio as honorary president and Bordeu as the first president of its board.

It opened on Saturday 22 November 1986 as the Centro Tecnológico-Cultural y Museo del Automovilismo Juan Manuel Fangio, and his old rivals came: Luigi Villoresi, Phil Hill, Jack Brabham, Tony Brooks, Maria Teresa de Filippis, Maurice Trintignant, José Froilán González, Carroll Shelby and Sergio Mantovani.

In October 1987 Mercedes-⁠Benz made him honorary president for life of its Argentine company, by the museum’s account the only such distinction the company ever granted.³ In 1990 he became president of the Fundación Renault. Bordeu died on 21 November that year.

The last years

In 1992 a benign tumour was removed from one of his kidneys, and his kidneys began to fail. That year, by the museum’s account, he and Ayrton Senna met in Buenos Aires. In 1993 he drove a racing car for the last time, an Alfa Romeo 159 at a historic event in Sardinia. He was in hospital in Stuttgart that year, and on 29 December he was admitted to the Clínica Mater Dei in Buenos Aires; by then he was on dialysis three times a week.

From early 1994 he stayed mostly at home, a house in Palermo Viejo, and no longer went to Mercedes-⁠Benz on the Avenida del Libertador or to Automotores Fangio. Relatives looked after him, among them his niece Ruth Fangio. Stirling Moss flew to Argentina to see him. On 24 June 1995, his 84th birthday, family and friends gathered round him for the last time.

In mid-July he was taken back to the Mater Dei with pneumonia, and there, at ten past four in the morning on Monday 17 July 1995, he died, aged 84. Motor Sport closed its obituary with words of his:

I had not had a single fright in all my racing life that ever stayed with me. I have had too much from life and I don’t regret a single thing.

Balcarce, 18 July 1995

He lay in state in the Salón Blanco of the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace, and then at the Automóvil Club Argentino; then he was flown home, and the wake was held in the museum. Jackie Stewart heard the news on a golf course near London, flew overnight by way of Brazil and, with help arranged by the Argentine government, reached Balcarce in a small aircraft about two hours before the burial.

Stewart, Stirling Moss, Carlos Reutemann and José Froilán González carried the coffin, with Axel Arendt, the president of Mercedes-⁠Benz Argentina, and Fangio’s brother Rubén Renato, known as Toto. Stewart remembered the square, where another account puts the crowd at 15,000:

There must have been 10,000 people gathered outside in the square, standing there in total silence. Absolutely amazing. And suddenly they just started to clap – 10,000 people clapping in slow motion. They were all in tears – 10,000 people in tears – and they all just wanted to touch the coffin of Fangio… it was one of the most important things I have ever done in my life.

On the afternoon of 18 July he was buried in the family vault in the town’s cemetery, beside his parents, as he had wished. Werner Lechner of Daimler-Benz and Luis Barragán, for the museum’s foundation, spoke at the graveside.

Three sons

He never married. For some 25 years, from the mid-1930s until about 1960, his companion was Andrea Berruet, whose story The people around him tells. He once said, in an interview that Clarín quoted after his death:

Una de las pocas cosas que me quedaron pendientes en la vida fue formar una familia. Hubo una mujer con la que me podría haber casado, pero no se dio. No sé por qué nunca me casé con ella y formé una familia. Fue una estupidez.

One of the few things I left undone in life was to have a family. There was a woman I could have married, but it didn’t happen. I don’t know why I never married her and had a family. It was stupid of me.

After his death three men established in court that he was their father. Óscar Espinosa, known as Cacho, born in 1938, was Andrea Berruet’s son, registered under her husband’s name; in 1966, to renew a passport for racing in Europe, Fangio’s name was added to his with his father’s agreement, and he raced as Cacho Fangio. They were estranged from the early 1970s, shook hands at a tribute in 1994 and made their peace in 1995. Rubén Vázquez, born in Balcarce in 1942, was the son of Catalina Basili, and Fangio was his godfather. Juan Carlos Rodríguez, born in Balcarce in 1945, was the son of Susana Rodríguez.

Vázquez went to court in 2005, and Espinosa in 2013. Fangio’s body was exhumed at Balcarce on 7 August 2015, and DNA tests confirmed Espinosa as his son in December 2015 and Vázquez on 3 February 2016. A comparison with Espinosa’s DNA in May 2016 showed Rodríguez to be his half-brother, and the courts at Mar del Plata confirmed Rodríguez’s filiation in 2021. In June 2018 a civil court in Buenos Aires declared Rubén Juan Fangio, as Vázquez now is, and Óscar Alcides Espinosa Fangio his heirs. The lawyers spoke of a fortune of US$50 million or more; the sons say there was almost nothing, and that what they gained was the name. Espinosa keeps the champion and the father apart: “In sport he was exceptional, the best. But he failed me, and Rubén, and Juan.” (attributed) Rubén put it more simply:

Yo sabía que él era mi padre y él sabía que yo era su hijo.

I knew he was my father and he knew I was his son.

Home to the museum

Friends had wanted his remains in the museum as early as July 1995. The idea is credited to Stewart and to Constancio Vigil, but neither the foundation of the day nor his closest relatives agreed, and it waited 26 years. On Wednesday 10 November 2021, 70 years after his first world title, a gun-carriage with an escort of the Regimiento de Patricios carried the coffin, under the national flag, from the cemetery to the museum, past his father’s house and his primary school, and the people of Balcarce lined the streets and applauded. It was laid in a black-marble mausoleum behind glass on the museum’s ground floor, beside his cars and trophies. Stewart was the only speaker in the museum’s hall. The day before, he had told the Argentine press:

For me there can be no other racing driver who is more justified in having all of this occurring. … The fact that he is now going to be by his cars, in his museum, I think is a great, great honour to him.