What they said Rivals, bosses, reporters and the champions who came after

A wagged finger

When another driver tried to carve him up on the track, Fangio did not lose his temper. He wagged a finger at him. Stirling Moss, who raced against him for most of his Formula 1 career and drove beside him for Mercedes-⁠Benz in 1955, remembered it in Motor Sport in 1998: “He was both a sportsman, and he was a gentleman. … a wagged finger from Fangio was a pretty frightening thing.”

Moss is the richest witness of all. Neither spoke the other’s language, so they spoke Italian together, and Moss was runner-up to him in the championship three years running, from 1955 to 1957. Over more than 50 years his verdict never moved. In 1998 he put it plainly in an essay for Motor Sport:

And yet … for me there will always be one individual who stands head and shoulders above everyone else, certainly out of all the drivers I met and raced during the great post-war period. He stands out as a racer, and he stands out as a man. In my book, Juan Manuel Fangio was the greatest racing driver of all.

Fangio never ran anyone down, Moss wrote, never gossiped and never went out on the town after a race; he was always discreet: “He was never any good for a story”. Moss described him, too; the way of turning came from the crash at Monza in 1952: “His was an unmistakeable figure: stocky, rather bandy legged, and, because of that old neck injury, a way of swinging his whole body round to look at you with his very piercing eyes.”

In November 1994 Moss explained why the championship he never won had never been the thing that mattered to him: “What matters to me is that if I can beat Fangio, I reckon that’s bloody good. Because Fangio was the best driver in the world.” Their year together, the win at Aintree that Moss never knew whether he had been given, and the rest of what he said, are in Fangio and Moss. His essay of 1998 ended: “We won’t see his like again.”

The men he raced

His rivals admired him without always liking what he did to them. Mike Hawthorn described him passing Peter Collins at the Nürburgring on 4 August 1957, as Motor Sport quoted him in 2017: “As Peter drifted in, Fangio pulled onto the outside of the bend and went past with two wheels on the grass, showering the Ferrari with dirt and stones. It was an old trick from the hard school…” (attributed) Nor did Hawthorn think him the fastest of them. Of Alberto Ascari, as Nigel Roebuck quoted him in 2012, he said: “He was the fastest driver I ever saw – faster even than Fangio…” (attributed) Rivals and friends weighs the two.

Off the track they found a different man. Hans Herrmann, who drove beside him for Mercedes-⁠Benz in 1954 and 1955, remembered him this way:

Er war einfach ein Menschenfreund. Selbst eine Toilettenfrau hat Juan nicht achtlos übersehen

He was simply a friend to everyone. He never carelessly overlooked anybody, not even a toilet attendant.

Maria Teresa de Filippis, the first woman to start a World Championship Grand Prix, in 1958, remembered that Fangio told her she drove too fast and should try to go a little slower, and that she admired him because nothing had been given to him: “On the track I called him my ‘race father’ because he treated me so well, so normally”. Phil Hill, champion in 1961, said: “There is a certain presence about him that no other racing driver that I have known has had.” (attributed) And the American Carroll Shelby, in his authorised biography, is quoted: “Fangio was the nicest man” (attributed).

Two of the best-known things rivals are supposed to have said of him, Hawthorn’s at Reims in 1958 and Collins’s at Monza in 1956, are not found in print before 2009 and 1998; they are with the doubtful quotations in his own chapter.

The best car available

Of all the men he drove for, Enzo Ferrari was the least warm towards him. Fangio drove for him for one season, 1956, won the title and left; in 1961 the memoir written with his manager, which he later disowned, accused the team of working against him, and Ferrari answered in his own memoirs, published in Italian in 1962 and in English the next year as My Terrible Joys:

Fangio è stato un grandissimo pilota affetto da una curiosa mania di persecuzione. Non è infatti soltanto a mio riguardo che ha nutrito ogni sorta di sospetti

Fangio was a really great driver, but afflicted by a persecution mania. I was not the only one against whom he entertained all kinds of suspicions.

Ferrari had a second charge: “Fangio did not remain loyal to any marque” (attributed), but used every effort to drive the best car there was, and succeeded. Enzo Biagi’s book on Ferrari, in 1980, gave the other side of the account: “Fangio, the Argentine, is among the drivers Ferrari admires without reservation, from a sporting point of view.” What Fangio said in reply is in the story of 1956.

Others have made the same point more kindly. Motor Sport’s obituary in 1995 answered it: “Fangio had more the peasant sense of practicality.” Jackie Stewart, in 2017, thought it simply good sense: “when he saw who was going to be the best team, he went there.” What the team managers and engineers who worked with him said, from Alfred Neubauer to Giulio Alfieri, is in The people around him.

Until he puts on his helmet

The reporters who watched him race found their own words for him. Sports Illustrated, previewing the Mille Miglia in April 1956, wrote: “At Mille Miglia, as at Sebring, one of these front-running Ferraris will be driven by Juan Fangio, the very best driver of them all”. Its reporter at Monza that September described him:

‘Troppo forte,’ say the Italians ruefully about Fangio. Juan Manuel Fangio is a small-chinned, beak-nosed little man who looks somehow disappointing⁠—until that moment when he puts on his helmet. Precisely then, an enormous calm seems to descend on him. His icily sharp blue eyes sweep the track in keen assessment.

Denis Jenkinson of Motor Sport, weighing Moss against Fangio in September 1955, gave as his example the tunnel at Monaco, where you drive into darkness and see the exit only once you are inside: “Even using the same car in practice Fangio could go through the tunnel without lifting … I would rate him Number 1.”

After the Nürburgring in 1957 Federico Kirbus wrote in El Gráfico that another driver might have protected his place in the standings and risked nothing more: “Another, yes, but not Fangio.” Hawthorn and Collins, he thought, might have been the greatest drivers of the age if they had not had the bad luck to be his contemporaries. In January 1958 Motor Sport explained why it printed no pictures of him eating, smiling or receiving trophies: it preferred to show him “doing something no one else does as well⁠—driving fast in a G.P. car.” When he retired that year, Time wrote that “when most drivers are dead or retired, balding, round-faced Juan Manuel Fangio was still the best there was.”

The Old Boy

Nigel Roebuck, who had interviewed him in London in 1979, met him again in September 1981, at a dinner the Alfa Romeo museum at Arese gave in his honour: “‘Ciao, Niguel!’ he said when I went to shake his hand, and I felt I’d been greeted by God.” When Fangio died, in July 1995, Motor Sport put it this way:

To spend time with ‘The Old Boy’ was to experience a tangible sense of being in the Presence of greatness. Even as he aged and first became infirm, that never waned. To see the likes of Clark, Stewart, even James Hunt, Lauda or Senna silent and respectful in his presence was a mark of Fangio’s innate magnetism, of which he himself seemed entirely unaware.

The same obituary noticed that he met everyone alike: “pauper or President, he would greet them much the same.” David Tremayne, in The Independent, remembered the driver: “In the cockpit he was a tiger, but never unsporting.” In Paris, where L’Équipe gave its front page to “Fangio pour toujours”, Libération’s Lionel Froissart remembered how he kept to himself: “He fled banquets like the plague” (attributed). Michel Déon, of the Académie française, wrote in Le Figaro: “we have not forgotten this quiet man, the best driver of the post-war years.” (attributed) Both reach us in the Spanish of La Nación’s correspondent.

Four years later Motor Sport remembered an occasion in London. Shell had given him a presentation at Shell-Mex House, on the Embankment, after one of his titles, to a full house of people who were by no means all racing followers. He made a speech in Spanish that no one could follow, with no interpreter, and went back to his seat: “the whole assembly, tough oil men among them, rose without prompting to their feet.”

Those who came after

Jackie Stewart had collected his autograph at Silverstone in 1953. In his autobiography he remembered the day in 1964 when, at 25, he won his first race abroad: “being congratulated by the great Fangio, a man whom I had idolised for as long as I could remember”. In 2020 he went further:

Juan Manuel Fangio is in my mind the greatest driver that ever lived, with Jim Clark the second greatest, even ahead of [Ayrton] Senna. But those people only raced sometimes six to eight or nine races a year in Formula 1.

Ayrton Senna’s words, printed by the BBC, carry no date:

What he did in his time is something that was an example of professionalism, of courage, of style and as a man, a human being. Every year there is a winner of the championship, but not necessarily a world champion. I think Fangio is the example of a true world champion.

Jo Ramírez, who knew them both, said in 2023: “Ayrton never had any heroes except for Fangio, and Fangio said he saw himself in Ayrton. They got on really well. Fangio also gave me a reference for my first job in F1 with Maserati. He was very significant for both of us.” In October 2018, on the eve of equalling his five titles, Lewis Hamilton said: “Fangio is the Godfather of the sport and for us drivers … He is one of the greats from the beginning, so he will always be admired. It is crazy to think that I am embarking on a similar number of championships that he had.” At the same press conference Fernando Alonso gave his own list: “Michael, Fangio, Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Lewis would be my top five,” he said.

When Michael Schumacher was about to equal the five titles in July 2002, José Froilán González told Página/12 that in Fangio’s day the driver had counted for half of a win, and in Schumacher’s for a quarter: “If not, where would Schumacher be driving a Minardi?” Fangio’s nephew, Juan Manuel Fangio II, answered more calmly: “Both have crossed the line into greatness.” How Schumacher himself spoke of the record, and how Niki Lauda disagreed, is told in Legacy.

At home

When he died, Carlos Reutemann, then governor of Santa Fe and one of those who carried his coffin at Balcarce, called him “a supremely gifted man … without doubt the best driver of all time” (attributed). In the same town in November 2021, when his remains were moved into his museum, his son Rubén, recognised by the courts five years earlier, said: “there is no doubt my father was a genius of motor racing. They may beat him in the number of championships, but only that, not in his way of driving, which will never have an equal.” (attributed)

What the Argentine press, the government of the day and his compatriots made of him, from the headlines of 1951 to the arguments of his centenary, is told in Fangio and Argentina.