Fangio and Argentina A national hero, and what the nation made of him

The record man

On 2 November 1951, five days after the Spanish Grand Prix at Pedralbes made him world champion for the first time, El Gráfico ran its editor’s report under the headline “El hombre record es campeón mundial”, the record man is world champion. Borocotó began it with a sentence of wonder, “It seems like a dream.” He told the season as a personal adventure: a man from Balcarce who had set out for the circuits of the Old World at the start of 1949 wishing for one win, and come home with the title of 1951.

The day before, Mundo Deportivo, the sports weekly that spoke for Perón’s government, had told the same story another way:

Alcanzan al general Perón las flamantes conquistas … gracias a la contribución permanente del presidente de la nación … cuando dedican sus triunfos a Perón y a Eva Perón, la gentil impulsora de más de una hazaña

The brand-new conquests reach General Perón … thanks to the constant contribution of the President of the Nation … when they dedicate their triumphs to Perón and to Eva Perón, the gracious promoter of more than one feat.

Both were true. El Gráfico had followed him since his years on the roads, and gave a quarter of its covers in 1951 to motor racing; Mundo Deportivo put him on the cover of its annual for 1951. The historian Mariano Gruschetsky reads El Gráfico as belonging, politically, to the other side, and as telling the European venture as Fangio’s own decision. Later, in a passage the historian dates to February 1952, Borocotó himself allowed the government its share: “Then he had a two-litre Ferrari thanks to the indisputable and highly effective support of our superior Government headed by General Perón…”

The state had its reasons. The historian Raanan Rein writes that “Perón tried to capitalise on the achievements of individual athletes”, Fangio among them, presenting their wins as victories for the whole of Argentine society, above its divisions of class, and using them as diplomacy abroad. In October 1954 Mundo Deportivo did the sums: before Perón, it said, Argentine sport had won “seven titles in thirty-five years; afterwards, thanks to the growing support General Perón gave it, it won twenty-two in eight years.”

Long before the state took him up, the road races of the Turismo Carretera had made him a hero of the interior, followed on the radio in villages across the country, and the rivalry of his Chevrolet with the Fords of the Gálvez brothers had divided it as football does. That story is told in The roads of Argentina.

A national project

From 1947 the government and the Automóvil Club Argentino ran the country’s international racing between them; to Gruschetsky, the European successes of Fangio and of José Froilán González were clearly a joint action of the two. Juan Domingo Perón gave the starting signal at the club’s first international Grand Prix in Buenos Aires in 1947. In 1951 the club ran a Gran Premio Reelección in his honour, and the Gálvez brothers drove 14,000 km (8,700 miles) round the country gathering signatures for his re-election.

The state sent Fangio abroad. In 1948, after the international season at home, it sent him to Europe with Oscar Gálvez and Clemar Bucci as diplomatic attachés, to study the sport; in 1949 the team the club sent there travelled, by his own account, on diplomatic passports with a government salary, and the government bought two Ferraris for it, one of which won him the Gran Premio dell’Autodromo at Monza. Whether the diplomatic status of 1948 and that of 1949 were one arrangement is not clear. How the Maseratis ran in Argentina’s blue and yellow, and how he won six of his 10 races there, is told in To Europe. When he came home that August the state gave him a reception at Morón airport, and later that year he received a medal from Perón on the Casa Rosada’s balcony.

The races bore the Peróns’ names. On 9 March 1952 the Autódromo 17 de Octubre opened in Buenos Aires, with a parabolic arch of 30 metres at its entrance and a concrete needle of 40 metres meant as a symbol of speed, and Fangio won the Premio Presidente Perón on its opening day and the Premio Eva Perón a week later. How the circuit came to be built is told four ways: Fangio asked Perón for it himself, by the circuit’s official account; he and González asked together in 1951, by González’s account 65 years later; both answered a question of Perón’s with the same words, by a newspaper’s in 2013; or a wider group of enthusiasts pressed for it.

He dedicated his first title to Perón and Evita. How close he was to them is harder to say. In Mundo Deportivo’s photographs, Gruschetsky notes, he usually shakes the President’s hand with a sterner face, while the Gálvez brothers are shown in effusive embraces; historians often point out that he never fully took up the Peronist banner. His biographer Pablo Morosi says that he had long sympathised with the Conservatives, like his friends and partners in Balcarce, and never declared himself a Peronist. In later life, Morosi writes, he used to answer the question like this:

El apoyo del gobierno lo devolví con triunfos, o sea que cumplí con la Argentina de la que Perón era presidente, pero de ahí a decir que estuve afiliado e hice propaganda en favor del Partido Peronista hay siglos de distancia

I repaid the government’s support with victories; that is, I did my duty to the Argentina of which Perón was president. But from there to saying I was a party member and made propaganda for the Peronist Party is centuries away.

When Spanish television put the question to him in 1977, whether Perón had been his friend, his answer was just as careful; it is quoted in The people around him.

The home Grand Prix

The Argentine Grand Prix of 18 January 1953, at the new autodrome, was the first World Championship race run in South America. Perón attended and had decreed free entry; the crowd stood along the edge of the track, and when Nino Farina swerved to miss a spectator crossing it, his Ferrari went into them. Several spectators were killed; how many is still uncertain. Fangio, in a Maserati A6GCM, retired with a broken transmission, and the day is told in 1953.

Then he won his home race four years running. He won it in 1954 in the rain, in 1955 in extreme heat, in 1956 in Luigi Musso’s car, while the crowd chanted his name, and in 1957 at the head of four Maseratis. It was, he said, the hardest race of every year, because everyone expected him to win. Asked by El Gráfico for his favourite photograph, he chose one of the race of 1954, taken after he had stopped for rain tyres and a visor on his helmet: “And there I am, in the rain”. In 1958, in his last, he started from pole and finished fourth.

After September 1955

In September 1955 a military coup overthrew Perón, and the new regime drew up a list of sportsmen to be investigated for their links with him. When the news reached Fangio in Caracas that his name was on it, he answered: “If I’ve done something, let them arrest me.” (attributed) In December the provisional government froze the property of 586 people and 172 firms, González and Fangio included, and gave them 150 days to show that it had been legally acquired. At the end of the year, at Ezeiza airport, customs searched his cases for the first time since he had become famous: trophies, magazines and a length of Italian cloth for his mother. Whenever he told the story, Morosi writes, he added: “Who knows, maybe they thought I was bringing a letter from Perón!” (attributed)

The investigators looked hardest at his car dealership in Buenos Aires, and while he was under investigation he could not travel abroad. He saw the Foreign Minister, Luis Podestá Costa, privately, and warned him that he would announce his retirement and denounce an unjust and baseless persecution. He was allowed to go, and drove for Ferrari that year. In public he kept to one line, as Karl Ludvigsen quotes it: “Politics, I think, are handled from behind a desk, not the wheel of a racing car.” (attributed) Clearing his name took years, not months, by Ludvigsen’s account, and one history says four; how long it lasted is not settled. The daughter of Balcarce’s Peronist mayor remembers her father saying that after the coup Fangio denied links with Perón that were plain to see; hers is one family’s account.

The purge reached well beyond him: the Olympic marathon champion Delfo Cabrera, the athlete Osvaldo Suárez, the tennis player Mary Terán de Weiss and the basketball team were caught up in it. The autodrome lost its Peronist name and became the Autódromo Municipal. Eugenio Castellotti, his team-mate at Ferrari, joked that it should have been called the Fangiódromo.

Mercedes-Benz Argentina

He had sold Mercedes-⁠Benz cars since February 1952, by the museum’s account, when he became the make’s concessionaire. In April 1974 he became president of Mercedes-⁠Benz Argentina, the first man who was not German, Morosi says, to hold such a post in the company, and in October 1987 its honorary president for life; he went to his office on the Avenida del Libertador until early in 1994. Morosi writes that he kept good relations with successive governments, democratic or military.

Under the dictatorship of 1976 to 1983, 14 workers of its González Catán plant were disappeared; Morosi counts 17 taken, of whom 14 never returned, and writes that Fangio never spoke of it. The years themselves are told in After racing. When the Buenos Aires city legislature debated homages for his centenary in 2011, former workers told the newspaper Tiempo Argentino what they thought. Hugo Crosatto said: “We won’t deny the man knew about everything. He had no real say, but at the very least he looked the other way. … he always kept his mouth shut, and silence gives consent.” Eduardo Fachal said that after the first disappearances the workers had asked Fangio to intercede for their comrades, and that he never received them, though he did intercede when the Montoneros guerrillas kidnapped the plant’s production chief, Enrique Metz. The families’ lawyer weighed it this way:

No nos consta que en el expediente hubiera algún tipo de reclamo que él haya desoído. Sí nos consta que Fangio no podía no saber. Porque lo sabía todo el mundo. Tampoco hay que demonizarlo.

There’s nothing in the case file to show he ignored any complaint. What we do know is that Fangio could not not have known, because everybody knew. Nor should he be demonised.

A city legislator, Fernando de Andreis, defended him: “It saddens me very much that Fangio’s memory should be sullied by unfounded accusations.” No court is reported to have found against him. He had travelled to Venezuela in the delegation of the dictator, Jorge Rafael Videla, and appeared on the cover of the magazine Gente; the actress Graciela Borges took his side: “Fangio wasn’t in favour of the dictatorship; he was in favour of Argentina. He did it as he would have done with any other government, without thinking of favouring anyone but the country.” On 8 July 1995 President Carlos Menem named him and Roberto De Vicenzo honorary advisers to the Presidency. In Buenos Aires his statue now stands on a boulevard that bears the name of one of the women who founded the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, across the way from a plaque to the 14 workers, as Legacy describes.

Three wakes

He died in Buenos Aires at ten past four in the morning of 17 July 1995, aged 84, nine days after that appointment, and the country mourned him in three places. At President Menem’s request the coffin was first placed in the presidential palace, in its Salón Blanco, open to the public for four hours, with a constant queue; then at the Automóvil Club Argentino, where the President of Italy, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, then visiting Argentina, came to pay his respects; then at his museum in Balcarce. A decree joined the national government to the mourning. He had asked for no wreaths, and they filled the Salón Blanco and the club all the same; one came from the men of the 26th of July Movement who had kidnapped him in Havana in 1958. At the museum, where the flowers would have stood, stood a Mercedes-⁠Benz in which he had been champion.

Europe mourned with Argentina. In Paris L’Équipe gave him its front page, and La Nación’s correspondent wrote: “Never has the death of a sportsman, much less a foreigner, made such an impact on public opinion in Europe.” (attributed) Stirling Moss and Jackie Stewart flew from England for the burial at Balcarce the next afternoon, and carried his coffin with González and Carlos Reutemann; that day, with thousands in the square in silence, is told in After racing. He never married. Andrea Berruet was his companion for some 25 years, until about 1960, and after his death the courts found that three men were his sons; After racing gives the record.

¿Quién te creés que sos, Fangio?

Drive too fast in Argentina and someone will ask you who you think you are: “¿Quién te creés que sos? ¿Fangio?” The magazine Corsa made the question a headline in 2009. The French have their own, “Tu te prends pour Fangio?”, noted by La Nación in 1995, and in English “thinks he is Fangio” was a stock phrase by 1957. Where it began is not known. His names stayed with him too: El Chueco, “the bandy-legged one”, from the football pitch at Balcarce; El Maestro; and in the Argentine papers el Quíntuple, the five-times champion, and el Balcarceño, the man from Balcarce.

In 2007, when viewers of the television channel Telefe voted for the greatest Argentine of all, they put him third, behind José de San Martín, the Liberator, and René Favaloro, the heart surgeon who had operated on Fangio himself. Two years later Corsa tried to name what he stood for:

La palabra que se puede asociar más fácilmente es respeto. A diferencia de otros deportistas de fanatismo popular, como Diego Maradona, José María Gatica o Carlos Monzón, el Chueco ha sabido ganarse la valoración de la gente al margen de sus destacados éxitos deportivos, y supo mantener un perfil alejado de polémicas o excesos, sin saludos demagógicos ni gestos ampulosos

The word most easily associated with him is respect. Unlike other sportsmen of popular fervour, such as Diego Maradona, José María Gatica or Carlos Monzón, el Chueco earned people’s esteem beyond his outstanding sporting successes, and kept a profile far from controversy or excess, without demagogic waves or pompous gestures.

The law gave him a day, 17 July, and the road to Mar del Plata his name, as Legacy tells. In 2025, on the 30th anniversary of his death, an Argentine television station set him at the top table of the country’s sporting Olympus, beside Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi. In August 1969, 11 years after his last race, he saw off three IKA Torinos to the 84 Hours of the Nürburgring, marked with only two words.