1950 The three Fs

Before the King at Silverstone

On Saturday 13 May 1950 four Alfa Romeos filled the front row at Silverstone, and the drivers were presented to King George VI, Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. It was the British Grand Prix, run that year as the European Grand Prix too, and the first round of the first World Championship. The crowd was put at more than 150,000. Alfa Romeo’s mechanics wore blue Pirelli overalls, and the four cars were told apart by the colour of their radiator cowls: white for Nino Farina, blue for Luigi Fagioli, green for Reg Parnell, and yellow for Juan Manuel Fangio, who drove in a linen helmet with a coloured collar showing above his overalls.

He was 38, and he spoke no English. By his own account, given almost 40 years later, the King came up to greet him and seemed surprised when he could not reply, and he asked an interpreter to pass on a message: “Tell His Majesty to forgive me, but to drive I don’t need to talk.” He had been an Alfa Romeo driver for less than a month.

A seat at Alfa Romeo

Alfa Romeo had sat out 1949. Its return for the new championship was helped by a whip-round among its Italian dealers, organised by Pivarelli of the Como branch, which raised 200 million lire. Its plan to sign a 38-year-old Argentine was not welcomed by all of the Italian press, and when Fangio reached Europe his contract was on hold.

He still had the cars of the Automóvil Club Argentino, bought with the backing of Juan Perón’s government, with which he had won five of his six European victories in his first full season there, 1949. Before and after he signed for Alfa Romeo, he raced them whenever Alfa did not: the club’s Maserati 4CLT/48, run as the Scuderia Achille Varzi, and its Ferrari 166 F2 in Formula 2 races and in South America. On Easter Monday, 10 April, he won the Pau Grand Prix in the Maserati from pole, with the fastest lap, 30.2 seconds ahead of Luigi Villoresi’s Ferrari.

Six days after Pau, Alfa Romeo was a driver short. Farina was injured, and the team entered a single Alfa Romeo 158 for the San Remo Grand Prix at Ospedaletti, with Fangio at the wheel. By his own recollection, it was he who talked them into it:

He qualified two-tenths of a second behind Alberto Ascari’s Ferrari, made a poor start in the wet, led by lap 13 and won by 61.1 seconds from Villoresi. Ascari crashed chasing him.

A contract was produced during the celebrations, and he signed it, by one account with a golden pen. By his own, he signed before anyone had asked what he wanted to be paid, and handed it back with an invitation: “Now fill it in however you like … You put in the zeros.” (attributed) A week after San Remo he was third in the Mille Miglia, sharing an Alfa Romeo 6C 2500 with Zanardi.

The car he had signed for was not new. Gioachino Colombo had designed it in 1937, as Vittorio Jano’s deputy, sent to Scuderia Ferrari’s works at Modena to build a 1.5-⁠litre car for voiturette racing, and it had first won at Livorno in August 1938. By 1950 its supercharged straight-eight of 1,479 cc gave about 350 bhp, and the drivers kept revs in hand to spare engines that had a set life. It was the fastest car of the season. It ran on Pirelli tyres, and the team’s racing manager was Giovanni Battista Guidotti.

Farina, Fagioli, Fangio

The team was three men whose surnames began with the same letter. Farina, 43, a doctor of law from the Turin coachbuilding family, saw himself as the team’s leader. Fagioli, 51, had driven for the Mercedes-⁠Benz works team before the war. Fangio, the newcomer, was 38. In its report of the Swiss Grand Prix that summer, Motor Sport named them the three Fs. Over the season Fangio would start ahead of Farina four times in six, and ahead of Fagioli five times; Fagioli would finish second four times and third once, and never win.

At Silverstone Alfa Romeo had the pits at the top of the row and a roped-off paddock of its own, and each night the cars left the circuit in their vans. In the race the three Alfas and Parnell’s fourth car swapped the lead in close formation, and the magazine’s reporter drew his own conclusion:

Fangio led by two-tenths of a second at 15 laps, and was 0.6 seconds behind Farina when, by Motor Sport’s account, he hit a straw bale at Stowe. He retired after 62 of the 70 laps. The statistical records give an oil pipe, an oil leak or engine trouble; the magazine’s report says a broken connecting rod, after the bale. Farina won the first championship race.

The team worked as one. At Bremgarten in June Guidotti drove a lap first to check the car, then Farina, Fagioli and Fangio took turns in the same Alfa while the engineers noted tyre pressures and readings. The cars carried rev counters that kept their highest reading, a tell-tale of a driver who had over-revved; in Swiss practice Fagioli’s showed 7,700 rpm, and Fangio’s 8,000.

Farina was another matter on the public road. Asked in 1979 whether he had once called him a madman, Fangio answered: “On the track he was not too bad, but on the road … Aye, aye, aye.”

The pile-up at Tabac

The water lay at Tabac, the fast left-hander on the quay: spray, in one account, or a wave over the harbour wall, in another. Fangio led the first lap. Behind him Farina spun on the wet road and was hit by González, and the cars following ran into the wreckage. Nine were out on the spot. González’s damaged Maserati caught fire, and the burns he suffered kept him out of the Swiss Grand Prix.

The race reports say only that Fangio found the road blocked next time round and got through; accounts differ on whether he stopped short of the wreckage or picked his way between the cars. The legend later gave him a sixth sense. Asked about it in 1979, he answered through an interpreter:

The day before the race, he said, he had seen a photograph of a similar accident, at the Automobile Club; coming out of the chicane, he noticed that the crowd was looking down the road, remembered the photograph and braked as hard as he could. There had been such an accident. In the Monaco Grand Prix of 1936, run in heavy rain, five cars had piled up on the second lap at the chicane on to the quay, on oil from Mario Tadini’s Alfa Romeo, and Farina had been one of them.

Villoresi, who had stopped at the wreckage and stalled, fought back to second before his rear axle broke, which left Ascari second, a lap behind, and Louis Chiron’s Maserati third. Fangio had led all 100 laps of the 3.18 km circuit from pole, in 3h 13m 18.7s, and set the fastest lap: his first World Championship win, and one of the two grand slams, pole, win, fastest lap and every lap led, that the F1DB records credit to him. The other came at the Nürburgring in 1956. He and Farina now shared the lead of the championship, with 9 points each.

Bremgarten, Spa and Reims

At Bremgarten on 4 June Fangio took pole and led early. Farina went ahead, and after the stops the three Alfas ran first, second and third until Fangio’s car failed in the closing laps: the engine or the electrics in the records, mechanical trouble in Motor Sport. Farina won by 0.4 seconds from Fagioli.

A fortnight later, at Spa-Francorchamps, he started second on the grid with exactly the same time as Farina’s pole, 4:37.0. Raymond Sommer’s Talbot led while the Alfas refuelled, until its engine failed; Ascari led until his own stop; Farina fell to fourth with transmission trouble, and Fangio won by 14 seconds from Fagioli. The next weekend he drove at Le Mans for the first time, sharing a Simca-⁠Gordini with González. It retired.

At Reims-Gueux on 2 July, for the French Grand Prix, run as the Grand Prix de l’ACF, the works Ferraris, now with V12 engines, withdrew after practice. Fangio took pole by almost 2 seconds, set the fastest lap and won from Fagioli, after Farina’s fuel pump had failed. He led the championship: 26 points to Fagioli’s 24 and Farina’s 22.

Between the championship rounds there were other races, for Alfa Romeo and for the Argentine club. At Bari on 9 July he was second to Farina, and third came a 20-year-old Englishman in a little HWM, Stirling Moss, whom he had raced once before, in the Formula 2 race at Reims the summer before. Farina, lapping the HWM, cut across it, ran wide and was passed back, and Moss remembered what happened next:

A week later, at Albi, in the club’s Maserati, Fangio took pole and set a course record at more than 169 km/⁠h (105 mph). He led the first heat for 16 laps until the engine faltered on the last one, and Sommer’s Talbot caught him at the final corner; he did not start the second heat. In Motor Sport Denis Jenkinson wrote that he must be the fastest Grand Prix driver of the day.

For Alfa Romeo he won the Grand Prix des Nations at Geneva on 30 July from pole, by 2 laps from Emmanuel de Graffenried’s Alfa, after Ascari’s new 4.1-⁠litre Ferrari had failed and Villoresi and Farina had crashed late in the race. On 15 August he won the Pescara Grand Prix, again from pole: 16 laps of the triangular road circuit at Pescara, about 25.6 kilometres round, with straights of about six kilometres (four miles). At Silverstone in August Farina beat him to the International Trophy by 0.4 seconds.

Monza, 3 September

The title was decided at Monza. Only a driver’s four best results counted. Fangio had 26 points from three; Farina, with 22, had to win and hope that Fangio scored little. Second place would have been enough for Fangio.

Ferrari brought a new car for Ascari, the unsupercharged 4.5-⁠litre V12 375. Villoresi was missing, out after a crash at Geneva. Alfa Romeo entered five cars, and Fangio took pole, two-tenths of a second ahead of Ascari. Fangio, Farina and Ascari fought for the lead, and Fangio set the fastest lap, 2:00.0, on lap 7.

Ascari’s engine failed after 21 laps, and he took over Dorino Serafini’s car. Two laps later Fangio’s own Alfa¹ stopped: the gearbox in the records, a dropped valve in Motor Sport’s report. He took over Piero Taruffi’s 158, and its engine failed after 34 laps. Farina won, from the Ascari and Serafini Ferrari and Fagioli, and became the first World Champion, 30 points to 27.

Farina’s title rested on three wins and a fourth place. Fangio had won three times too, and retired three times. Alfa Romeo had won every championship race it entered. In May, Monza had already turned Fangio away once, when he retired from its Formula 2 race in the Argentine club’s Ferrari; it was the circuit where he had won on his first visit, in 1949.

Motor Sport blamed his old bad luck, wondered how he would do the next year if he had shaken off Alfa Romeo’s discipline, and passed on a rumour: “He is said to be quite keen on the new 4½-litre Ferrari!” Paul Fearnley has written that Ferrari had been courting him since 1949. He stayed with Alfa Romeo.

The summer at home

On 27 October an Argentine feature film about him, produced by Armando Bó, had its premiere at the Cine Ocean in Buenos Aires: Fangio, el demonio de las pistas (Fangio, the demon of the racetracks). The Asociación de Volantes de Chile gave him a gold medal for his season in Europe, and the pro-government Goles called him the moral champion.

Then he raced for the summer, in the Argentine club’s Ferrari 166 F2 again. He won at Paraná on 12 November and in Santiago de Chile in December, and on Christmas Eve, in a Talbot-⁠Lago T26C, he took the 500 Millas de Rafaela. The museum in Balcarce counts 11 wins for him in 1950.

Farina had the title. Fangio would have a second year at Alfa Romeo, and the 4½-litre Ferrari he was said to like would be the car he had to beat in 1951.