To Europe The Argentine team, 1948–⁠1949

Pau, Easter Monday 1949

Before the start at Pau on 18 April 1949 the crowd stood for a minute’s silence for Robert Benoist and Jean-Pierre Wimille. Two of the three cars on the front row were Argentine Maseratis, painted blue with yellow bonnets, and the one on pole was Juan Manuel Fangio’s. He was 37, and it was his second race of the European season.

The race ran to 110 laps. Late on he stopped for oil, and since push-starts were forbidden three mechanics set to work on the starting handle, and could not get the engine going. Motor Sport’s Continental correspondent watched him wait, get out, start it himself with a single pull, get back in, and rejoin before anyone had taken in what had happened. He won by 16.8 seconds from Emmanuel “Toulo” de Graffenried, with his team-mate, Benedicto Campos, third, and he set the fastest lap. In 1922, sweeping Capettini’s garage in Balcarce, he had started a Panhard by standing on its handle.

Wimille had been dead less than three months. By one account he had been the first to point to Fangio as Argentina’s great hope; he did not live to see the spring of 1949.

The Temporada

From 1947 the government of Juan Domingo Perón paid for an international season in Argentina, the Temporada, in which the Automóvil Club Argentino ran Formula Libre races and brought the stars of Europe south. Achille Varzi and Luigi Villoresi came to the first, in the early months of 1947. At Rosario on 1 March Fangio won the Mecánica Nacional heat in his home-built special, La Negrita, which qualified him for the Grand Prix race; Varzi won it, and Fangio was sixth. The two became friends.

In January 1948 the Automóvil Club put him in a Grand Prix car for the first time: a supercharged 1.5-⁠litre Maserati 4CL that belonged to Écurie Naphtra Course, the team of the French-Argentine driver known as Raph, with Wimille, the leading driver in Europe, as his mentor. On the Palermo circuit in Buenos Aires he qualified third and retired; at Mar del Plata he was fifth. The car, he said later, “…was a disappointment.” (attributed)

At Rosario on 1 February Amédée Gordini made him Wimille’s team-mate in a Simca-⁠Gordini. He qualified second and set the fastest lap; the museum records him eighth at the finish, while other accounts have him retiring. Wimille won, and said afterwards: “Fangio should he [sic: be] given the chance in a first-class car, and then he would surely do great things” (attributed). For many years Fangio cited Wimille, with Varzi, as his masters.

Berne and Reims, 1948

In the middle of 1948 the Automóvil Club sent Fangio, Oscar Gálvez and others on a study tour of factories and circuits in the United States and Europe, with a national team for 1949 in mind. When they left is not certain.¹ By Tony Watson’s account in Motor Sport, Gálvez suggested that they go to the Swiss Grand Prix at Bremgarten, outside Berne, to see Varzi, and they went; it is the only account that puts them there.

To me, Varzi was a god. He gave me precious advice, and is probably the driver I have most admired in my life, a man who cared only for his art.

On Thursday 1 July 1948, the first day of practice, Varzi’s Alfa Romeo 158 slid on the damp track, struck a barrier and overturned, and he was killed. He was 43, born in Galliate, near Novara, to a wealthy family. His widow, Norma, asked Alfa Romeo not to withdraw its cars but to honour his name by winning, and on the Sunday Felice Trossi won.

On 18 July, 17 days later, Gordini gave Fangio his first races in Europe, at Reims-Gueux, in a 1,430 cc Simca-⁠Gordini. In the race for small cars he started from the front row, beside Sommer’s Ferrari and “B. Bira”, and retired. In the Grand Prix de l’ACF he started from the fifth row, 16th, among the supercharged Alfa Romeos and the 4.5-⁠litre Talbots, and retired after 12 laps with engine trouble. Sommer won the small-car race, and Wimille the Grand Prix, in an Alfa Romeo 158. His last race, 10 years later, would be at Reims too.

Blue and yellow

Back home, in October 1948, his co-driver, Daniel Urrutia, was killed when Fangio crashed in Peru in the road race to Caracas, a night told in the chapter on the road races. He nearly gave up racing. He went on.

The Automóvil Club, meanwhile, was buying cars. Perón’s government backed the programme and paid for them. Francisco Borgonovo, the former Olympic oarsman who ran the club’s motor-racing commission, wrote asking Fangio to choose a make; Alfa Romeos were not for sale, so he chose the Maserati 4CLT/48, a 1.5-⁠litre four with two-stage supercharging, some 260 hp by the museum’s figure. The club bought two new ones, chassis 1599 and 1600, and painted them in Argentina’s colours, blue with yellow bonnets.² By one account each cost the state about US$12,000.

At dawn on Friday 28 January 1949 Wimille was killed in practice at Palermo, when his Simca-⁠Gordini went off at the Curva de los Ombúes and struck a tree. Unnerved by the crowd on the track, he had put on a crash helmet that morning for the first time in his life.

The Temporada went on. Two days later Fangio was fourth at Palermo in the new Maserati, behind the winner, Alberto Ascari. On 6 February he won the Mecánica Nacional race named after Wimille, and was second in the Grand Prix to Oscar Gálvez’s Alfa Romeo, in the wet: the first time a local driver had beaten the visitors. On 27 February, at Mar del Plata, on the seafront circuit known as El Torreón, it was his turn. By his own account he knew how the starter, Borgonovo, counted down the last 5 seconds on his fingers, and he went as the last finger was about to come down, to reach the Cabo Corrientes bend first. With about 15 laps left the exhaust pipe broke and was left hanging: “I managed to pull it off by hand, on the move, and I won. Mind you, I was deaf for a month”.

It was his first win against the Europeans, at 111 km/⁠h (69 mph). The same day Adriano Malusardi, who had driven the club’s second Maserati in the Temporada, was killed at Mar del Plata in an Alfa Romeo.

Galliate

In March 1949 the team left for Italy: the Automóvil Club’s “Achille Varzi” team, named for the dead man, with Fangio as its captain and Campos as his team-mate. Varzi’s father, Menotti, gave them his house at Galliate as their base. The allowances were meagre; an oil company paid a bonus of 6,000 lire a win, and the team got by thanks to the Varzis’ house. With them went Amadeo Bignami, who had been Varzi’s mechanic and Villoresi’s. After the Temporada Bignami had opened Fangio’s gearbox expecting worn teeth, having warned him he would need a new car every race, and found it perfect.

The state had given more than cars. In Fangio’s own account, in 1989, the government gave him and Campos diplomatic passports and a salary of US$3,000 each, which they pooled to buy a second lorry for the team. He saw it as luck: “I believe in destiny and in luck, which are two things that go together. I have been a lucky man.” Nor did he pretend that the politics of the time had not helped him: “At that time politics helped me. But I believe I repaid it as was right.” Campos, by one account, later dropped out because he did not want to have to thank Perón in person for any success.

Six wins in 10 races

The first race was at San Remo on 3 April, on the Ospedaletti circuit, decided on the aggregate of two heats. In his own account, after practice he felt that the engine had tightened, so that night he stripped it and changed the big-end bearing shells himself; it had been about to run its bearings. He won by about a minute from “B. Bira”, whose Maserati set the fastest lap, with de Graffenried third: Maseratis filled the first four places. It was his first win in Europe. Pau followed, and on 8 May the Circuit du Roussillon at Perpignan, from pole, with Bira second. On 22 May at Marseille, in a 1,430 cc Simca-⁠Gordini, a Formula 2 car, he beat Étancelin’s Talbot by 18 seconds. Four European races in 1949, four wins.

European races won, 1949

6 of 10

The run ended at Rome on 2 June, where he retired a Maserati A6GCS, and at the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps on 19 June, where a piston broke while he was leading. A week later he was at Monza for the Formula 2 Gran Premio dell’Autodromo, in a two-litre V12 Ferrari 166 F2 that the Automóvil Club had bought on his advice and that had been delivered three days before. On their home track he beat the works Ferraris of Ascari, Villoresi and Felice Bonetto, and set the fastest lap. Enzo Ferrari first watched him that year, at the Modena autodrome, and remembered it in his memoirs: “He comes out of the turns like a shot but he holds the middle of the track.” (attributed)

At Albi on 10 July, in a heatwave, he won his qualifying race and the final, 2 minutes 39 seconds ahead of “B. Bira”, and set the fastest lap. Bira had split his induction manifold in the heat, and Fangio lent him a new one. Motor Sport was impressed:

The big race saw the legendary Fangio from the Argentine again an easy victor … Fangio richly deserved to win — on driving, preparation and pit-work and control.

A week later, on 17 July, came Reims and two retirements. In the Formula 2 race he set the fastest lap in the Ferrari and was leading comfortably when the gear lever broke. In the Grand Prix de France his Maserati retired after 25 laps, with a broken throttle control by Motor Sport’s report, or the clutch by OldRacingCars’ record; Chiron won, in a Talbot. Eighth in the Formula 2 race, in a Cooper, was a 19-year-old Stirling Moss: the earliest race in which both are known to have taken part.

Home

He landed at Morón airport, Buenos Aires, on 25 August 1949, to a state reception and a crowd, and that year Perón gave him a medal, Al Caballero del Deporte, in English “to the knight of sport”, on the balcony of the Casa Rosada. Eva Perón offered to make him and Campos a present of the Ferraris the state had bought. He declined.

Pienso que estos coches son para un equipo argentino, no para nosotros. Con ellos se podrá continuar mandando pilotos argentinos al exterior.

I think these cars are for an Argentine team, not for us. With them, Argentine drivers can go on being sent abroad.

In November he drove the Turismo Carretera for the last time, second across 11,035 km (6,857 miles) of Argentine road, and in 1950 Alfa Romeo took him on. The first season of the World Championship began at Silverstone that May; he won three of its Grands Prix, and over the nine seasons from 1950 to 1958 he won 24 of them and the championship five times.

He had come, he said later, for a year, and hoping to win a single race. In September 1983 he went back to Galliate for a tribute to the Varzi family, and a plaque was unveiled on the house where the Argentine team had lived.