In his words What he said, and what he never said

Through an interpreter

Nigel Roebuck of Autosport interviewed Fangio at a London club, the Steering Wheel, on Saturday 2 June 1979, with a Spanish-speaking interpreter turning his answers into English. He was 67, and the next day he was to drive a Mercedes-⁠Benz W125 of 1937 at the Gunnar Nilsson Memorial meeting at Donington Park. Roebuck asked him about fear and luck, about his rivals, his cars and his last race, and what he said that morning runs all through this chapter.

That is how most of his words reached English. He spoke Spanish and Italian, not English, and nearly every English sentence under his name is a translation, often an interpreter’s rendering that a journalist then wrote up. Roebuck’s interview exists in three printed versions: Autosport’s of 21 June 1979, a retelling in Motor Sport in 2001 and another in 2010. This chapter quotes the first.

The surest of his words are those printed at the time or taken down by the people he spoke to: his signed article in El Gráfico in 1969; Germán Sopeña’s interview for La Nación Revista in February 1989; the record the journalist Rodolfo Braceli kept of their meetings between 1975 and 1991; Popular Mechanics in New York in 1958; Roebuck in 1979 and Adam Cooper, also for Autosport, in 1989. Two books of memoirs carry his name. He said that the one written with his manager Marcello Giambertone in 1961 put words in his mouth, and that the only account of his life he had checked was the one he made with Roberto Carozzo, published in 1986. Where a quotation below rests on a later source alone, its attribution says so. Some of the most familiar lines are not his at all; they are at the end of the chapter, beside what he did say.

A being that has life

He had been a mechanic before he raced, and he never stopped thinking like one. He told Sopeña in 1989 that he had liked cars since he was very small, and that for him a car and its engine were not inert things: “They are like a being that has life and responds according to how you treat it.” So he never drove completely flat out, because at full speed he punished the machinery, and before every race he asked the engineers or the mechanics at what revs the engine made its peak power. Alfredo Alegre, writing in El Gráfico in 2000, gave the idea as a rule: “If you don’t torment the car, the car will never let you down.” (attributed)

Courage, he told an American magazine in New York in 1958, was not the point:

Courage is not the important thing. You have to know how to figure your speed and how to go safely into a curve. I don’t think of auto racing as going into a battlefield or challenging death.

The car and the driver

How much of a win belonged to the car? In the same interview with Popular Mechanics he put it plainly: “Seventy-five percent is the car, 25 percent the driver. When you become famous, the companies offer you the best car to drive so it is easier to win because 75 percent is the car.” He gave Sopeña the same share in 1989, as The machines recalls. A third formula, printed in his obituary in The Independent in 1995, is different and has no date: “There is a formula for success, and it is not difficult to analyse. It is made up of 50 per cent car, 25 per cent driver and 25 per cent luck.” (attributed)

Asked in 1958 which of all his cars he had liked best, which had had the best feel, he named “The Mercedes I raced in 1954 and 1955.” That was the W196, and the Museo Fangio records what he remembered of it: “…From the very first test with the Mercedes-⁠Benz in 1954, I had the feeling of being in a perfect car, the kind we drivers dream of racing one day….” (attributed) Other answers, on other days, named the Alfa Romeo for sentiment and the Maserati for pleasure.

Dress me slowly

In about April 1991, two months before his 80th birthday, Braceli went with him as he drove through Buenos Aires along the Avenida del Libertador, and asked how he crossed the city as fast as anyone else: “Simple, son: I accelerate a good deal less, but I also brake a good deal less. … If you want to go faster, always choose the slowest lane, the right-hand one.”

Braceli had brought up Napoleon, and Fangio had an answer ready: “Napoleon used to tell his valet: ‘Dress me slowly, I’m in a hurry.’” The Argentines, he thought, handled their cars very well and drove them very badly, and braking was an art: “In any case, son, tell me how you drive your car and I’ll tell you who you are.”

Thirty drivers died

He raced in years when drivers were killed every season, and he spoke of it without flinching. In 1979 Roebuck asked whether the death of Luigi Musso at Reims in 1958 had made him stop racing:

No, no, not at all. I saw the accident but I did not know that Musso had died. By the time I found out at the end of the race, I had already made up my mind to stop. You must remember that during my time as a grand prix driver thirty drivers died. Always I was very sad, but I could not let it influence me. When another driver dies, you always believe that he made a mistake, nothing more or less. Therefore it was necessary to concentrate on not making mistakes. If you start to think you are going to die in the next race, it is better not to race at all.

His worst accident morally, he said in the same interview, was not the crash at Monza in 1952 that broke his neck, but the crash in Peru in 1948 in which his co-driver, Daniel Urrutia, died, told in The roads of Argentina: “But morally my worst accident was in one of the long-distance races in Peru.” Both, he thought, had had the same cause, fatigue; after Urrutia he had wondered whether he could race again, and after Monza he could not wait to.

I always drove with prudence and serenity, not like an ill-tempered person going to the cemetery. I always wanted to finish first in everything, but in death I preferred to finish last.

Fear itself he did not deny. Of the Nürburgring Motor Sport quoted him in 2017: “There was always fear [there], but fear is not a stupid thing.” (attributed) Of the drivers who were killed, his obituary in The Independent printed a saying of his: “To race is to live. But those who died while racing knew, perhaps, how to live more than all the others.” (attributed)

In the Argentine Grand Prix of January 1955, run in a heat that only he and Roberto Mieres drove through without handing over their cars, his right leg burning against the hot tubes inside the bodywork, he kept going with a thought he gave Sopeña 34 years later: “I must pretend I’m lost in the snow; if I stop I die; I must go on to the end.”

On the track, enemies

He raced two generations of the best drivers in the world. His obituary in The Independent printed his verdict on the two he feared most:

Without hesitation, I would say that my fiercest rivals were Stirling Moss and Alberto Ascari. Both were highly gifted racing drivers. … It would doubtless be a good thing if friendships developed … But on the racing track we were all enemies.

What he said of Alberto Ascari, of Nino Farina on the open road and of Peter Collins, the gentleman, is in Rivals and friends, and what he said of Stirling Moss in Fangio and Moss. With Ascari he had a bet on the title of 1951: the champion would pay for a party wherever the loser chose, and Ascari chose the Savini restaurant in the Galleria in Milan. Fangio won the title, and paid, and by one recent retelling he used to say: “I never paid a bet so gladly.” (attributed)

Those who came after

He watched the next generations with a professional’s eye. Of the drivers who followed him, the one he liked best was Jim Clark: “That man gave the impression he was going slowly, but his times were records.” Jackie Stewart, he told Sopeña, could match Clark’s times, but only by risking more and asking more of the car and of himself. In 1979, seeing them race once or twice a year and the rest on television, he told Roebuck: “I have been very impressed by [Mario] Andretti, by [Niki] Lauda, and by this young man [Gilles] Villeneuve.”

Of the men he had raced on the roads of Argentina, the one who impressed him most was Ricardo Risatti, as the journalist Alfredo Parga remembered him saying: “He drove very well and he never gave up.” (attributed) Risatti could come in last on one stage of a Gran Premio and be among the leaders on the next, and he used the time after each leg to repair his car as few others did.

The Nürburgring, 4 August 1957

He never tired of saying that the Nürburgring was one of the hardest circuits in the world, and that no one could claim to know it: “not even a thousand laps are enough to boast that you know the circuit.” On 4 August 1957 he won the German Grand Prix there in a Maserati 250F, after a pit stop that left him more than three-quarters of a minute behind the two Ferraris, and the race is told lap by lap in The Nürburgring. In his signed article for El Gráfico in 1969 he called it the most important race of his career: “There I won my fifth championship and the best race of my life”.

Thirty-two years later he told Adam Cooper of Autosport:

Simply, now I can say it; I never thought I could win this race. … I risked for the first time in my life.

The sentence about that day that is printed most often under his name is not his, and it stands with the words he never said, beside what he said in London in 1979.

One more adventure

On the evening of 23 February 1958, the night before the Cuban Grand Prix, an armed man of the 26th of July Movement, Fidel Castro’s rebels, led him out of the Hotel Lincoln in Havana. He was released late the next day, about 27 hours later, and Havana tells the story. What he said to the press once he was free never changed in substance:

Me trataron muy bien. Nunca me vendaron los ojos. Cien veces me pidieron disculpas. Me parecieron macanudos. Les dije a los rebeldes que si me habían secuestrado por una buena causa, yo estaba de acuerdo

They treated me very well. They never blindfolded me. A hundred times they apologised. I thought they were great guys. I told the rebels that if they had kidnapped me for a good cause, I agreed with it.

Later he came to see it as a favour. The Maserati 450S he had been due to race was, he said years later in El Gráfico, a car he could not control: “To begin with, they saved me from racing that unmanageable contraption, in which I wouldn’t have got very far.” (attributed) And the race he missed was stopped after a Ferrari went into the crowd and killed at least six spectators; one of them, he said, could have been him.

The long straight at Reims

He had spoken of stopping before his last race. In New York, weeks before it, he told Popular Mechanics that 1958 was his last year. At Reims on 6 July, with, by his own account, a broken clutch pedal, he made up his mind on the long straights. Musso was killed in the same race, and people said that was why he stopped. Ten years later, in the Argentine weekly Primera Plana, he said again that it was not: “No, I didn’t decide to stop racing because of Musso’s death.” (attributed) Among the thoughts that came to him on the straight, he said, was how happy he could make his parents if he stopped. His memoir, looking back to the end of 1957, asked the question as he had put it to himself:

…five World Championships, so what else was I looking for? In any field – racing, singing, acting, sports – if you become a name you must know to recognise the moment when to retire. That is an essential thing.

Back in Buenos Aires that October, surrounded by journalists, he spoke instead of the men who were no longer there. The two accounts do not contradict each other: it was not one death, but the many.

En la línea de largada faltan ahora muchos hombres que conmigo fueron en busca de una meta. Esas ausencias me hicieron reflexionar y comprendí que había llegado la hora de poner punto final a mi trayectoria deportiva

Many men who went in search of a goal with me are missing from the starting line now. Those absences made me reflect, and I understood that the time had come to put an end to my sporting career.

His farewell message of 1958, as his biographer Gerald Donaldson prints it, looked back with a line that has often been quoted since: “I may have made mistakes with my head, but never with my heart.” (attributed)

A lucky man

He believed in destiny and in luck, as he told Sopeña in 1989. What he said of Perón and of politics belongs to Fangio and Argentina; what he said of his own good fortune he said often, and one version, printed by Clarín in 2020 without a date, sums up his whole career:

Fui a Europa por un año y pasé diez. Nunca pensé que iba a ganar carreras: los títulos venían solos, tenía los mejores coches … ¿Qué más puede aspirar un hombre? Hay mucha gente capaz que no tiene la oportunidad

I went to Europe for a year and stayed ten. I never thought I would win races: the titles came by themselves, I had the best cars … What more can a man aspire to? There are many capable people who don’t get the chance

At the end of his life he counted his wealth differently. He was not a rich man, he used to say, as his obituary in The Independent recorded, but he had enough to enjoy life and to leave something to his family, and if he had been really rich he would have asked himself what for: “Friendship is the greatest wealth anyone can possess.” (attributed) How he ran a business, and the company that made him its president, belong to After racing.

A great gentleman

He lived long enough to see Ayrton Senna win three titles, and the two met more than once: at Adelaide in November 1990, when the sport celebrated its 500th Grand Prix, on the podium at Interlagos in March 1993, and in Buenos Aires, in 1991 or 1992, when he was interviewed beside Senna for the television news Nuevediario:

está muy bien el joven. Tiene mucho tiempo, muchas condiciones. Le deseo lo mejor porque aparte de un gran piloto es un gran señor y eso es lo más importante

The young man is doing very well. He has a lot of time, a lot of talent. I wish him the best because, besides being a great driver, he’s a great gentleman, and that’s what matters most.

At Interlagos in 1993 Senna embraced him on the podium. That is well recorded; the words each is said to have spoken are not, and they are among the doubtful lines below.

Shortly before he died, a German magazine asked him about Michael Schumacher, and James Allen later printed his answer, which began: “There are those who keep out of mischief, and there are the adventurers.” (attributed) He counted Schumacher among the most talented of the adventurers, but thought that true greatness showed only after some years, and that a real champion did not do some of the things he had seen Schumacher do. He did not live to see Schumacher equal his five titles in 2002, as Legacy recalls.