Rivals and friends The men he raced, and the two he feared most

They met at Reims in July 1948, when Jean-Pierre Wimille introduced the Argentine newcomer to the young Milanese. By Paul Fearnley’s account the introduction was warmer than the impression, and Ascari barely noticed him. Early in 1949 Ascari came south for the Temporada, Argentina’s international season, and won its opening race, with Fangio fourth and a lap behind; in words that seem to come from the memoir published under Fangio’s name in 1961, which he later disowned, the lesson reads: “The European stars seized the occasion to give us a royal lesson. Ascari – cock of the walk – driving in a way that aroused my liveliest admiration.” (attributed)

After that they met in every season they both raced: in 1950 and 1951, when Ascari led the Ferraris against the Alfa Romeos, and from 1953 to 1955. They were never team-mates in a Grand Prix. Fangio won their decider of 1951 at Pedralbes. Ascari took the title in 1952, the year Fangio broke his neck, and again in 1953, when Fangio’s Maserati kept breaking; Fangio had the last word that year at Monza, where the lead officially changed hands 19 times before Ascari spun at the final corner.

In 1954 Lancia lent Ascari to Maserati and to Ferrari while its own new car was readied, and at Monza in September the two of them duelled for some 20 laps, Ascari’s Ferrari against Fangio’s streamlined Mercedes-⁠Benz W196, until Ascari’s engine broke. At Pedralbes in October the new Lancia took pole, 1.0 seconds clear of him.

Not everyone put Fangio first. Denis Jenkinson of Motor Sport disagreed: “Fangio was a great driver, with some qualities which have never been matched, but I always thought Ascari was better – in equal cars he could beat Fangio whenever he wanted.” (attributed) Mike Hawthorn thought Ascari the faster of the two. Enzo Ferrari, who ran them both, admired Ascari’s precision but doubted his fighting spirit when he was not in front, whereas Fangio, he wrote, “never gave in” (attributed). Fearnley counted every race between them, heats and non-championship races included: 61, in which the two men took 40 poles, 33 wins and 34 fastest laps between them. Fangio’s share was 22, 17 and 22.

On 22 May 1955 Ascari’s Lancia went into the harbour at Monaco. Four days later, trying a Ferrari sports car at Monza, he was killed. He was 36. Sports Illustrated looked back on the two of them:

Fangio wrote of him in El Gráfico 14 years afterwards:

Giuseppe Farina, Nino, was a doctor of law from Turin and a nephew of the coachbuilder Battista “Pinin” Farina. He saw himself as the Alfa Romeo team’s leader, and in 1950 he regarded the 38-year-old from Balcarce as his junior. He was the first World Champion, by 3 points, after Fangio’s car failed in the last race. In their two seasons together in the Alfa Romeo team Fangio finished ahead in 8 of 13; from 1953 to 1955 Farina drove Ferraris against him.

Stirling Moss thought Farina a dirty driver on the circuit, and Fangio, who hated driving with him in traffic on the way to a race, remembered him with a laugh and a groan, as 1950 tells. Yet when Fangio woke in hospital after his crash at Monza in 1952, it was Farina who stood by the bed, holding the winner’s laurels. Writing in 1969 about the German Grand Prix of 1953, which Farina won after Ascari lost a wheel, Fangio set out a theory: every racing driver, he wrote, suffers from a complex about some other driver, and “Farina, for example, had the ‘Ascari complex’.” Only when Ascari stopped or retired, he explained, could Farina take the lead.

Farina drove his last championship race against Fangio at Spa in 1955, third behind the two Mercedes-⁠Benz. In 1966, on his way to the French Grand Prix, his car left the road in the Savoy Alps and he was killed.

José Froilán González was born at Arrecifes in 1922, 11 years after Fangio. To his friends he was Pepe; in Europe he was the Pampas Bull. In February 1951 his private two-litre Ferrari beat the 1939 Mercedes-⁠Benz W154s (often called W163s) twice at Buenos Aires, with Fangio at the wheel of one of the silver cars, and Enzo Ferrari took him on. That summer, at Silverstone, he gave Ferrari its first World Championship win, with Fangio second.

They were compatriots, sometime team-mates at Maserati and, for most of their lives, friends. In 1951 they lodged together at Galliate, in the house of the Varzi family. When Fangio won his first title at Pedralbes in October it was González, second in the race, who embraced him at the finish; in 1954, when Fangio won his second, González was the runner-up, and that June he had won Le Mans. The friendship went further than racing. By the account in Fangio’s book with Roberto Carozzo, it was Fangio who kept asking González what he was waiting for before he married, and Fangio who stood as best man at his wedding, which gave González a saying he repeated for years: “What luck the best man has!” (attributed)

After Onofre Marimón was killed in 1954, González’s family persuaded him to give up racing in Europe, and he raced little there afterwards. In January 1955 the two of them disputed the lead of the Argentine Grand Prix, in the heat of Buenos Aires; in December the new government froze the property of both. Their friendship, Motor Sport wrote when González died in 2013, at 90, had lasted 50 years.

Mike Hawthorn, 24 and new to Ferrari, beat Fangio by 1.0 seconds at Reims on 5 July 1953, after some 30 laps in which they passed and repassed, grinning at each other; the race is told in 1953. The Englishman and the Argentine almost 18 years his senior met again and again after that: in their duel at Le Mans in 1955, in the hours before the disaster, at the Nürburgring in 1957, where Fangio caught him on the penultimate lap and won by 3.6 seconds, and at Reims in 1958, in Fangio’s last race.

The friendship had its edges. When Maserati protested that Fangio had been push-started at the Argentine Grand Prix of 1956, Hawthorn, who drove a Maserati that day, laid the blame on the crowd rather than the man:

At Reims on 6 July 1958 Hawthorn came up behind Fangio’s Maserati on the last lap and followed it home rather than lap it, and he went on to win the World Championship by a point from Moss. Fangio, by one account, gave him the news of his own retirement that afternoon, in Italian:

Peter Collins was 20 years younger, and in 1956 he was Fangio’s team-mate at Ferrari. He won the Belgian and French Grands Prix that year, and twice he gave up his car and watched Fangio drive it to second place: at Monaco, where he was called in and went off to his hotel in a temper, and at Monza, where he stepped out of his Lancia-⁠Ferrari during a tyre stop, with his own slim chance of the title still alive, and gave Fangio his car. Both races, and the argument over how freely the second car was given, are told in 1956. Enzo Ferrari called what Collins did at Monza “a gesture of real nobility” (attributed).

A year later, at the Nürburgring, Collins was one of the two young men in Ferraris whom Fangio caught and passed in his greatest drive. Collins died in the German Grand Prix at the same circuit on 3 August 1958, less than a month after Fangio’s last race. In London in 1979 Fangio remembered him: