The people around him Family, a companion, mechanics, managers and a president

Andrea Berruet

In the paddock at Kristianstad, in the south of Sweden, on 7 August 1955, a photographer took pictures of Fangio before the Swedish sports-car Grand Prix. In three of them a dark-haired woman in a striped blouse stands at his side. The archive that keeps the negatives does not name her.¹ She was Andrea Berruet, known as Beba, and she had been with him for some 20 years.

They met in the mid-1930s. She was married to another man, Luis Alcides Espinosa, from whom she was separated, and under Argentine law of the time she could not divorce. Their son, Óscar, was born on 6 April 1938 and registered with her husband’s surname. She went with Fangio to Europe, and she is in the pictures of his great days: at Kristianstad in 1955, and in the pits at Monza in September 1958, two months after his last race. The relationship ended in about 1960. Her own dates of birth and death were not found.

Fangio never married. What she was to him is known almost entirely from their son, who told Perfil in December 2015, after the DNA result that confirmed him as Fangio’s son:

Yo tengo dos apellidos: Espinosa, de quien fue marido de mi madre Andrea ‘Beba’ Berruet, y Fangio, de mi papá. Yo nací de una relación extramatrimonial, pero normal … Ella estuvo con él desde que él usaba mameluco hasta que salió campeón. Yo me escribía con mi papá (Fangio), y él nunca negó ser mi padre ni a mí ni a nadie. Tengo cartas y cientos de pruebas.

I have two surnames: Espinosa, from the man who was my mother Andrea ‘Beba’ Berruet’s husband, and Fangio, from my dad. I was born of an extramarital relationship, but a normal one … She was with him from when he wore mechanic’s overalls until he became champion. I wrote to my dad [Fangio], and he never denied being my father, to me or to anyone. I have letters and hundreds of proofs.

The family in Balcarce

Loreto Fangio and Herminia Déramo

His parents were both of Abruzzese families. Loreto came to Argentina as a boy of seven, worked the harvests from the age of 10, and became a bricklayer; in 1903 he married Herminia Déramo, whose family came from Tornareccio, and on a plot in Calle 13 in Balcarce he built a house one room at a time. Juan Manuel was the fourth of their six children. The story of the house, and of the boy’s schooling and his first garages, is told in Balcarce. When his son first raced, under a false name, Loreto found out and scolded him, by Fangio’s account less for the racing than for letting him hear of it from someone else.

Rubén Renato “Toto” Fangio

Toto, the younger brother, joined him in the garage in about 1940 and in time built racing cars for other men to drive. A nephew, Juan Manuel Fangio II, became a racing driver too. Toto appears again in the family’s later story: in Balcarce people took the boy Juan Carlos Rodríguez for Toto’s son, because he went everywhere with him, and it was Toto who told Óscar, near the end, that Fangio was dying.

The sons

After his death three men went to court to be recognised as his sons; who they were, and the exhumation, the tests and the rulings, are told in his last years. Óscar Espinosa raced in Formula 3 in Europe against Fangio’s wishes. Rubén Vázquez, his godson, now uses the name Rubén Juan Fangio. Juan Carlos Rodríguez had always known, he said: as a boy he greeted old Loreto Fangio as his grandfather when he passed the house. The three met only as adults, through the courts.

The masters

For many years Fangio named two drivers as his masters, and both were dead before he won a race in Europe.

Achille Varzi

Varzi came to Argentina for the Temporadas of 1947 and 1948, won at Rosario in 1947 with Fangio sixth, and became his friend; Fangio later called him the driver he had most admired. He was killed in practice for the Swiss Grand Prix at Bremgarten on 1 July 1948. When the Automóvil Club Argentino sent its team to Europe in 1949 it raced in his name, and his father, Menotti, gave it his house at Galliate for a base. In 1983 Fangio went back there for a plaque on the house. The story is told in To Europe.

Jean-Pierre Wimille

Wimille was Fangio’s team-mate in Amédée Gordini’s cars at Rosario in February 1948, when Fangio set the fastest lap, and he said that the Argentine should be given his chance in a first-class car. At Reims that July he introduced him to Alberto Ascari. On 28 January 1949 he was killed in practice in Buenos Aires, weeks before Fangio left for Europe.

Juan Domingo Perón

Perón’s government made motor racing a national cause: it paid for the team that took him to Europe in 1949, decorated him and named races after the President and his wife, and Fangio dedicated his first title to them both. José Froilán González, years later, did not pretend otherwise: “Everything we did, we owe to the Automóvil Club Argentino and to the Government of that time.”

After the coup of September 1955 the connection cost him, as Fangio and Argentina tells. His public line never varied: he had done nothing political, for or against any government. Asked on Spanish television in 1977 whether Perón had been his best friend, he answered carefully:

Perón fue un hombre al que le gustó mucho el deporte. En este sentido pienso también que yo cumplí con él. Y él ayudó en un momento dado. Así que no puedo decir si él era amigo. He tenido ocasión de almorzar con él más de una vez

Perón was a man who liked sport very much. In that sense I think I also did my duty by him. And he helped at a given moment. So I can’t say whether he was a friend. I have had occasion to lunch with him more than once.

How Argentina used him, and how he has been remembered there since, is the subject of Fangio and Argentina.

Alfred Neubauer

Neubauer, born in Bohemia in 1891, had run the Daimler-Benz racing team since 1926. He first dealt with Fangio at Buenos Aires in February 1951, when the Argentine organisers made his team put Fangio in one of its three pre-war cars, and in 1954 and 1955 he managed him to two World Championships. He was a stout man, loved by his drivers, Motor Sport’s Bill Boddy wrote, as much as they sometimes feared him, and he ran his team by the pit board: the slow signal that Fangio obeyed and Kling ignored at the Nürburgring in 1954, the sign to hold places at Aintree in 1955. His diary of Le Mans that year survives, and his memoir, Speed Was My Life, came out in English in 1960, introduced by Stirling Moss. Of the Argentine Grand Prix of 1955, which Fangio drove alone in the heat, Neubauer is quoted as saying: “Fangio was like a bull on the racetrack, a bull with a mass of troubles in his head, and with enormous strength … You could throw bottles at him and he’d still drive cheerfully through.” (attributed) The racing department closed after 1955, and Neubauer died in 1980. Fangio’s regard for him, as Gerald Donaldson quotes it from one of his memoirs, was as high: “Neubauer was the best team director that existed, and Mercedes was the most complete team.” (attributed)

Rudolf Uhlenhaut

Uhlenhaut was born in England in 1906, to a German father who worked for the Deutsche Bank in London and an English mother, and grew up in Germany from 1914. Under the technical director, Fritz Nallinger, he ran the racing department that developed the W196 and the 300 SLR, and he tested the cars himself. The story that he lapped the Nürburgring faster than Fangio is wrong, but he was only seconds away, and he had his own explanation for how close he came: “…Fangio never drove faster than he had to and he only tried hard when someone else was faster than he was. So if we’d been in competition he would have won. I’m quite sure about that.” (attributed) Moss remembered that no driver complained lightly of a car to a man who could climb in and show him it was fine. Uhlenhaut stayed at Mercedes-⁠Benz, in charge of passenger-car research, until 1972, and died in 1989.

Maserati

Guerino Bertocchi

Bertocchi joined Maserati in 1921 and stayed until it left racing: chief mechanic, tester and, for the 250F, the head of the crew. He ran Fangio’s cars in Argentina in January 1954, the month of the castor oil told in 1954, and through the championship of 1957, and at Reims in 1958 it was he who begged Fangio to go on with, by Fangio’s own account, a broken clutch pedal. He was proud of his own speed, and would tell visitors that the Modena lap record had once been his. In 1979 he arranged for Fangio’s Maserati 3500 GT, which had stood at Modena for years, to be collected, and filled its boot with spare parts to make up for the wait. He gave Doug Nye his memories of Fangio in 1981, two weeks before he was killed as the passenger in a test drive, and they were not flattery: Fangio, he said, was no technician, and told the engineers little (The machines gives his words).

Giulio Alfieri

Alfieri, an engineer from the Milan Polytechnic, took over Maserati’s design work when Gioachino Colombo left in November 1953, finished the 250F and built the lighter cars of 1957 that won Fangio his fifth title. After Onofre Marimón’s death he could no longer bear to watch his drivers race. He was the witness who explained what the mechanic in Fangio did at the wheel: he was gentle with the car, and used less fuel and wore his brakes less than anyone else, as The machines tells.

The Orsis

Maserati belonged to the Orsi family of Modena, and in 1957 it was Omer Orsi’s team. The Orsis gave Fangio the 250F in 1954 and in 1957; Orsi himself went round the pharmacies of Buenos Aires with him and Bertocchi the night before the car’s first race. There was one quarrel, over the gold trophy from Caracas in 1955, which may have helped to send Fangio to Ferrari for a season. The Orsis’ fortunes were bound up with his country: a deal to supply machine tools to Perón’s Argentina went unpaid after 1955, and Maserati left racing at the end of the year it won the title with him.

Enzo Ferrari

Ferrari first watched Fangio drive at Modena in 1949 and could not take his eyes off the car, as the chapter To Europe tells. The man was another matter. When Fangio came to see him at the Scuderia, with an official of the Automóvil Club Argentino, Ferrari remembered, “Actually Fangio didn’t say more than ten words. I couldn’t figure him out.” (attributed)

They came together only once, in 1956, after Mercedes-⁠Benz had withdrawn and Ferrari had lost Ascari. The season brought a fourth title and a lasting grievance, which 1956 tells. Moss remembered the advice Fangio once gave him: “When Ferrari offered me a drive, I asked Fangio’s advice. Should I take it? Drive for them, he said, but don’t sign. Never sign for Ferrari.”

One of Ferrari’s verdicts, printed by Enzo Biagi in 1980, appeared again in 1988, the year he died:

Manuel Fangio è rimasto, per me, un personaggio indecifrabile. La sua statura agonistica era invece indiscutibile. Possedeva una visione della corsa decisamente superiore e un equilibrio, un’intelligenza agonistica, una sicurezza nella condotta di gara davvero singolari.

Manuel Fangio has remained, for me, an indecipherable figure. His stature as a competitor, on the other hand, was beyond dispute. He had a decidedly superior vision of the race, and a balance, a racing intelligence and a sureness in the conduct of a race that were truly singular.

The men behind the books

Marcello Giambertone

Giambertone, an Italian race promoter, became Fangio’s manager for 1956 and negotiated his contract with Ferrari. He also wrote the first book presented as Fangio’s own story, in 1961. It accused Ferrari of favouring Peter Collins in 1956 and claimed that Fangio had arranged Collins’s handing over of his car at Monza. Fangio said he had agreed to the book without taking part in it, that it put words in his mouth: “I didn’t receive a peso for that book and had nothing to do with it.” (attributed) Wherever this book quotes it, it says so.

Roberto Carozzo

The one book he checked himself, he said, was the journalist Roberto Carozzo’s, of 1986. Both are described in Books and films.

Seventy-five per cent

He had been a mechanic before he was a driver, and in every team, as 1953 tells, he promised the mechanics a share of his winnings. His answer to how much of a win was the car’s, three-quarters with the people who worked on it, is in The machines. Most of the people in this chapter belong to the three-quarters.