Balcarce

St John’s night

Juan Manuel Fangio was born at 10 minutes past midnight on 24 June 1911, the feast of St John, on a cold night of bonfires, in the family house at Calle 13 No. 321, Balcarce, a potato town in the south-east of Buenos Aires province. The saint gave him his first name. The second came from Italy: Manuel, after Vittorio Emanuele III, the reigning King of Italy.

Later that day his father, whose Spanish was coloured by his Italian, went to the civil registry and told the clerk that the boy had been born the night before. The register of Balcarce records 23 June.

The Fangios came from the Abruzzo. The boy’s grandfather, Giuseppe, left Castiglione Messer Marino, a mountain village in the province of Chieti, in 1887. He made charcoal from the scrub around the Laguna de los Padres, near Mar del Plata, bought some 10 hectares on Provincial Route 55 outside Balcarce, and in about 1890 sent for his family. His son Loreto was seven. At about 10 Loreto was taken by ox-cart to the harvest at Tres Arroyos, and he stayed three years.

On 24 October 1903, at 19, Loreto married Herminia Déramo, who was 17 and whose family came from Tornareccio, another village of Chieti. He worked as a bricklayer and a plasterer of ornamental house fronts; she was a seamstress. On a plot in Calle 13, bought on credit, he built a single room and added others as the children came: Herminia, José and Celia; then Juan Manuel, the fourth; then Rubén Renato, known as Toto, and Carmen.

Bueno, mi padre era así. Era de esos hombres que hacían frente a la situación. En épocas en que no había radio ni televisión, él solía juntar a sus hijos para explicarles que sin sacrificio no se puede hacer nada. Aprendí así.

Well, my father was like that. He was one of those men who faced up to things. In the days before radio and television he used to gather his children together to explain that without sacrifice you can’t do anything. That’s how I learned.

The house was a casa chorizo, a “sausage house” of rooms opening one after another on to a gallery, with a windmill, a well, lemon trees and roses; in 1951 the windmill carried the family’s first television aerial, a present from Juan Manuel. As he put it later, “We were a humble family, but we never lacked anything, we never missed anything” (attributed).

Years later Juan Manuel went to see his grandfather’s village. He realised there, he said in 1989, that the old man had found the will to get out of the poverty he lived in, like many others who came to Argentina wanting to better themselves.

The two places have kept the link. Castiglione Messer Marino and Balcarce were twinned in 2010, when the village’s mayor, Massimo Mastrangelo, came to Balcarce, and since February 2017 a monolith at the entrance to the town has named the village as the cradle of the father of the five-times World Champion. The Regione Abruzzo had honoured him in 1977.

School in the morning

Juan era un chico muy callado, observador y respetuoso de sus padres. Cuando nuestra madre le servía alguna comida que no le agradaba, no decía nada. Corría el plato sin protestar.

Juan was a very quiet boy, observant and respectful to his parents. When our mother served him food he didn’t like, he said nothing. He pushed the plate away without complaining.

In 1916 he started at School No. 4, in Calle 13, and after the fourth grade he moved to School No. 1, at the corner of Avenida Uriburu and Calle 18, facing the Plaza Libertad. He was a good pupil, especially at mathematics, and finished the sixth grade at about 11½. Balcarce had no secondary school. A teacher, María Silvarinio, urged him to go on to the Escuela Industrial in Buenos Aires; he preferred to stay.

He had already started work. By the museum’s account he was nine, and by another he was 11, when he began at the smithy of Francisco Cerri, which repaired carriages. His father woke him at four to study in the cool of the morning, before school and the forge.

In the Balcarce of his boyhood, as he remembered it, people met at dances and at wakes, and on the football pitch, and whoever wanted the town’s news went to the barber’s.

The garages

Cars had caught him early. At about four he was fascinated by a neighbour’s one-cylinder car, which the boys of the street pushed to start. In 1922 Capettini’s garage took him on to sweep the floor. On Sundays he came in early, stood on the starting handle of a chain-drive Panhard et Levassor to fire it up, backed it out of the way, swept, drove it back in, and found reasons to do it again. It was the first car he ever controlled. Telling it to the magazine Corsa for his 80th birthday, in 1991, he remembered a Model T Ford taken out without anyone’s permission, and a sensation that never left him: “I had the feeling the car was alive: I turned the wheel and it turned, I accelerated and it went faster, I touched the brake and it stopped.” (attributed)

The rest of his education came in other men’s workshops. In 1923 Raimundo Carlini, the Rugby dealer, who raced himself, let him drive his truck on hunting trips, and he learned to drive properly. In 1924, at the Ford agency of Estévez, the head mechanic, Guillermo Spain, taught him the parts of an engine. Curiosity had its price: “One day I tried to assemble a magneto on my own, and when one of the mechanics found out I got a good kick up the backside for being a busybody…” (attributed)

Sobre todo si tenía que llevar un coche sin cadenas en las ruedas, como me tocó muchas veces. Aprendí que no había que tocar el freno. Que las curvas tenía que negociarlas con el cambio…

Above all if I had to drive a car without chains on the wheels, as I often did. I learned that you must not touch the brake; that corners had to be negotiated with the gears…

At 13 he moved to Miguel Viggiano’s Studebaker agency, on the corner of Calles 14 and 19, and rose there from helper to engine fitter.¹ Viggiano raced, and his shop worked on racing cars; he let the boy drive customers’ cars back from Buenos Aires along Route 2. He also taught him the roads. Round Balcarce they were dust in summer and a limy mud in winter, and Viggiano’s method was to go into the mud at no more than about 70 km/⁠h (43 mph), in first or second, work the steering and the throttle, never touch the brake, since locked wheels on mud are unmanageable, and come out at up to 110 km/⁠h (68 mph). Fangio called it the formative lesson of his youth.

In March 1926 Juan Romera, a young workmate at Viggiano’s, was killed riding as Viggiano’s mechanic in a race from Florencio Varela to Mar del Plata: the first friend Fangio lost to racing. When Juan’s brother Ángel fell ill, Fangio worked nights at the Romera family’s workshop, after his day at Viggiano’s, to clear their backlog.

His wages came late, and Viggiano paid part of them in kind: first an Indian motorcycle, which was crashed on a trial run, then a four-cylinder Overland. It was his first car, in 1927. He rebuilt it to look like a racing car and never raced it.

He told a story of the day the tango singer Carlos Gardel touched his head, in two settings a decade apart: as a boy of 12 in a crowd outside a Buenos Aires theatre, and as a conscript for whom the singer found good seats. In the first telling it ends with a promise: “When I became a racing driver and was famous, I promised myself I would always treat children well.” (attributed)

El Chueco

In 1927, at 16, he fell ill with pleurisy. The doctor, Raúl Melazo, diagnosed it as dry pleurisy, and the boy spent almost a year in bed, nursed by his mother.

When he was well he played football. In 1928 he was playing for Club Rivadavia: “I played inside-right … I was really quick, hardly any left-back could catch me.” (attributed) Later he played for Leandro Alem, Mitre and Ferroviarios and for the Balcarce town side, and for a while he boxed. The way he ran, bow-legged, gave him the name that followed him into his racing years: El Chueco, “the bandy-legged one”.

His first race was from the passenger’s seat. Manuel Ayerza, a young landowner and one of Viggiano’s customers, took him as riding mechanic in a 1928 Chevrolet from Coronel Vidal to General Guido and back, in 1928 or 1929: the sources differ.² On the muddy run of some 180 km (112 miles) Ayerza handed him the wheel, and when the band brakes overheated he disconnected the rear pair; they finished second on the front brakes alone. In 1930 he rode with his brother-in-law, José Brujas Font, in a 1929 Plymouth on La Chata, Balcarce’s dirt circuit. Ayerza was killed racing at Balcarce in 1931, in a race Fangio did not take part in.

A workshop of his own

Then came the army: about a year of compulsory service at Campo de Mayo, near Buenos Aires, in 1931 or 1932, with the 6th Cavalry Regiment or at the Artillery School, for the accounts differ.³ He came home about 10 kg heavier, and the pleurisy was gone. A fellow conscript, Pedro Noé King, remembered him:

Juan era un muchacho callado, muy tranquilo, y cumplía sus tareas disciplinadamente. Todos éramos muy pobres… Fangio siempre fue igual. Ni la fama ni la fortuna lo cambiaron.

Juan was a quiet lad, very calm, who did his duties with discipline. We were all very poor … Fangio was always the same. Neither fame nor fortune changed him.

In 1932 he and José Duffard built a workshop with a dirt floor on Loreto’s plot, beside the family house.⁴ Their friends, who did not want the two footballers to leave for a club in Mar del Plata, raised 80 pesos for tools. The roof sheets came by night from a deserted farmhouse that everyone said was haunted, and Fangio went for them with a shotgun, just in case. Francisco Cavallotti, a bookkeeper and a friend from football, joined them and brought an old truck as his share. The first paid job was a Manchester truck, for five pesos.

Pesos raised for tools, 1932

80

His first paid job, in pesos

5

In 1934 they moved to a corner of Boulevard del Valle and Calle 14, sharing the rent with a fuel seller, and Bernardo Duffard joined them. Toto joined the business around 1940, when the firm was Fangio, Duffard y Cía., and later prepared racing cars for other drivers.

Balcarce’s Conservative leaders helped the young mechanic, and he took their side: “Since I was aware of the people who were helping me, I took that line in my youth and was a poll-watcher for the Conservatives, and later a polling-station chief. Even my voting card is signed by me.” (attributed) In the mid-1930s he began a relationship with Andrea “Beba” Berruet that lasted until about 1960. She was married to another man, and the son she bore in 1938, Óscar, was shown by DNA only in 2015, 20 years after his death, to be Fangio’s; that story belongs to his last years.

Rivadavia

By October 1936 he was 25, a partner in a garage with debts, and he had yet to race a car himself. He borrowed a friend’s father’s taxi, a 1929 Ford A, and entered a race at Benito Juárez under the name of his football club, Rivadavia, so that his parents would not hear of it. How that race went, and the 13 years of dirt roads that followed, are the next chapter: the roads of Argentina.⁵

He remembered what came next at home: “But Papa found out and told me off, not for racing, but for letting him find out from someone else.” (attributed)

On 10 November 2021, when his coffin was taken from the cemetery to the museum in the old town hall, the gun-carriage that bore it passed his school and the house in Calle 13 where Loreto had built one room and then another.