Juan Manuel Fangio

1911–⁠1995

Contents

Part One · The life

  1. IBalcarce
  2. IIThe roads of Argentina
  3. IIITo Europe
  4. IVThe seasons
  5. VThe Nürburgring
  6. VIHavana
  7. VIIAfter racing

Part Two · The man

  1. VIIIRivals and friends
  2. Fangio and Moss
  3. IXIn his words
  4. What they said
  5. XThe machines
  6. XIThe people around him
  7. XIIFangio and Argentina

Part Three · Legacy

  1. XIIILegacy

The seasons

Reference

Reference

Books & films Seventy-five years of his life in print and on screen

The books and films about Juan Manuel Fangio, from a feature film of 1950 and the two memoirs under his name to the biographies and the documentary of 2020.

Fangio, in a cloth cap and a zipped jacket, looks down as he packs a canvas kit bag with leather handles and a luggage label; a helmet lies in the corner and pit number boards reading 65 and 66 stand behind.
The cover of El Gráfico, the Argentine sports weekly, on 16 July 1954, crediting him with a part in the successful return of Mercedes-⁠Benz, 12 days after he won the French Grand Prix at Reims on the team’s first race back. El Gráfico · Public domain

Books & films

On 27 October 1950, less than two months after the Italian Grand Prix had cost him the title of 1950, an Argentine feature film about his first year in Europe had its premiere: Fangio, el demonio de las pistas (“the demon of the racetracks”), directed by Román Viñoly Barreto and produced by Armando Bó, with Fangio himself in it.

Even that was not the first work to carry his name. In 1941, after his second Turismo Carretera title, Anselmo Aieta’s tango Fangio was first played at the Café Nacional in Buenos Aires. Since then there have been memoirs, biographies, photograph albums, documentaries and a drama. This page lists those that could be confirmed in library catalogues and the press, with a note where a date or a title is in doubt. Two books sometimes listed, a biography by Christopher Hilton and another by Eduardo González Rouco, were not found in any catalogue searched, and are left out.

Books & films

The two books under his name

The first was written by his manager, Marcello Giambertone, and appeared in 1961, in English as My Twenty Years of Racing (Temple Press) and in French as Ma vie à 300 à l’heure (Plon); in Italian it was La mia vita a 300 all’ora. Fangio disowned it: he had agreed to the book but taken no part in it, he said, and it gave him words he had never spoken. This book marks every quotation it takes from Giambertone’s. A Spanish edition is sometimes cited, but none has been verified.

The second he checked himself: Fangio: cuando el hombre es más que el mito, written with the journalist Roberto Carozzo and published by Sudamericana/Planeta in 1986. The English edition, Fangio: My Racing Life (Patrick Stephens, 1990), was edited by Denis Jenkinson, with a foreword by Stirling Moss.

The figure of 300 has had a long life. It came back in the Italian title of Hugh Hudson’s film of the 1970s, and a Spanish form of it, “Fangio, una vida a 300 km/⁠h”, is sometimes taken for the title of the documentary of 2020, which it is not. Whether the Spanish phrase came from the book or from Hudson’s film is not known.

Books & films

Biographies and albums

In order of first publication. One was written by a personal friend, and one by a man who kidnapped him.

  1. Günther Molter, Juan Manuel Fangio (Stuttgart: Blüchert). In English from G. T. Foulis in 1956, translated by Charles Meisl, and in French from Gallimard in 1958.

  2. Olivier Merlin, Fangio pilote de course, by a personal friend; in English in 1961 as Fangio – Racing Driver (Batsford), translated by Louis Klemantaski.

  3. Severo Boschi, Tutto Fangio (Calderini, Bologna), with a preface in the form of a letter, presumed to be by Enzo Ferrari.

  4. Denis Jenkinson, editor, Fangio (Michael Joseph), based on the film by Hugh Hudson and Giovanni Volpi.

  5. Stirling Moss with Doug Nye, Fangio: A Pirelli Album (Pavilion), launched at the Dorchester in London and in Milan in August 1991, with a German edition from Heel the same year.

  6. Jean-Sébastien Fernandes and Bruno Quélen, Fangio (Calmann-Lévy).

  7. Karl Ludvigsen, Juan Manuel Fangio: Motor Racing’s Grand Master (Haynes); and Peter Nygaard, Juan Manuel Fangio Photo Album (Iconografix).

  8. Pierre Ménard and Jacques Vassal, Juan Manuel Fangio (Chronosports).

  9. Gerald Donaldson, Fangio: The Life Behind the Legend (Virgin), reissued in 2004, 2009 and 2012, which quotes My Racing Life with Carozzo’s permission.

  10. Arnold Rodríguez Camps, Operación Fangio (Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, Havana), by one of the men who kidnapped him in Havana in 1958; one Cuban source dates it 2006.

  11. Josefina Delgado, Juan Manuel Fangio (Aguilar Argentina).

  12. For the centenary, Siglo Fangio, from El Gráfico and the Fundación Fangio; and Hartmut Lehbrink, Fangio & Mercedes-⁠Benz: Bündnis der Besten (Heel).

  13. Roberto Borroni, Il meccanico di Fangio; then Eduardo Gesumaría, El otro Fangio (2013), and Gustavo Udry, La última hazaña de Fangio (2015).

  14. Pablo Morosi, Fangio, el hombre detrás del volante (Marea), from more than a hundred interviews, which does not leave out his relations with the governments of Perón, Videla and Menem.

Books & films

Films

Documentaries, a drama and a cameo. The dates of Hugh Hudson’s film are still argued over.

  1. Fangio, el demonio de las pistas, directed by Román Viñoly Barreto: on his first European year, with Fangio on screen.

  2. Homenaje a Fangio, a 20-minute compilation made by British Petroleum, not for sale, of newsreel and scenes filmed at Modena and the Villa d’Este.

  3. De Balcarce a la gloria (“From Balcarce to glory”), by Carlos Alberto Aguilar, in the series Argentina en este siglo, with material Fangio supplied; and Grand Prix, directed by John Frankenheimer, in which he appears briefly, in a scene with Yves Montand.

  4. Fangio, in Italian Fangio: una vita a 300 all’ora, directed by Hugh Hudson and produced by Count Giovanni Volpi di Misurata and Gualtiero Jacopetti. Filmed in 1971 and 1973, before Hudson made Chariots of Fire, it was first shown in Buenos Aires on 12 June 1976, by the museum’s account; other dates circulate, 1977, 1980 and 1981, and when London’s National Film Theatre showed it on 6 October 1984, Motor Sport said it had never been released to the public.

  5. Operación Fangio, directed by Alberto Lecchi, with Darío Grandinetti as Fangio and Imanol Arias: an Argentine, Spanish and Cuban drama of the kidnapping, filmed in Havana.

  6. Por siempre Fangio (“Fangio for ever”), shown at the centenary.

  7. Fangio: el hombre que domaba las máquinas (“the man who tamed the machines”), directed by Francisco Macri for Cinema 7 Films and released by Netflix on 20 March 2020. It is made from archive film, much of it the museum’s in Balcarce, and reconstructions at the autódromo there, and framed round the Sheffield study of 2016 that put him first among all drivers, which Legacy describes.

Books & films

Reading him

One film is missing from the list above because its date is not firm: Adrián Jaime’s documentary La Misión Argentina, on the Argentine Torino team he led at the 84 Hours of the Nürburgring in 1969, made at some time between about 2015 and 2019. Morosi’s book, the latest on the list, raises questions about his dealings with Argentina’s governments that are taken up in Fangio and Argentina.

The two books that bear his name are the ones to read with most care. One he disowned; the other he checked himself, and where this book quotes a memoir as his, it is that one.

Sources