1952 The lost season

The autodrome in Buenos Aires

On Sunday 9 March 1952 a new autodrome opened in Buenos Aires, before a crowd put at 120,000, with President Juan Perón and Eva Perón in the stand. Argentine drivers, Fangio among them, had asked for it, and it was named the Autódromo 17 de Octubre, after a date the Peronist government celebrated. The World Champion won its first race, the Premio Presidente Perón, in the Automóvil Club Argentino’s Ferrari 166, No. 16. A week later he won the Premio Eva Perón. El Gráfico’s pictures of the opening showed Perón raising the flag, the circuit’s 30-metre arch and its 40-metre needle.

How the circuit came about is told in more than one way. In the version José Froilán González gave on television 65 years later, the two of them called on Perón after the 1951 title, told him they needed nothing, and got up to leave: “And Juan says to him: ‘What do you think about us building an autodrome?’”

The opening came in the middle of a South American summer. He had begun the year in Brazil, with a win at Interlagos on 13 January; a week later, at Gávea in Rio de Janeiro, he took pole by nearly 14 seconds and retired after 2 laps; on 3 February he won at the Quinta da Boa Vista, also in Rio. After Buenos Aires he won both races at Piriápolis, in Uruguay, in March. That made 6 wins in 7 races, all in the Argentine club’s Ferrari 166, and the museum also credits him with an Argentine title for special cars that year. In February, by the museum’s account, he had also become a Mercedes-⁠Benz dealer.

Three contracts

Alfa Romeo had withdrawn after winning the title with him, and with BRM unreliable and no one else building Formula 1 cars, the championship of 1952 was held for Formula 2 cars. Fangio signed to drive Maserati’s new six-cylinder Formula 2 car, the A6GCM, in the championship; the BRM V16 in the remaining Formula 1 and Formula Libre races; and Alfa Romeo’s sports and touring cars.

The BRM was the supercharged 1.5-⁠litre car of Raymond Mays’s British project, designed by Peter Berthon, and the switch to Formula 2 had been, as Motor Sport put it, unfortunate for BRM. In April the magazine reported that Fangio would drive its second car if he was satisfied once he had tried it, and El Gráfico printed a photograph of him testing the BRM that year in his usual cloth cap. BRM entered him for the Gran Premio del Valentino at Turin on 6 April, and the cars did not arrive. On Easter Monday, 14 April, at Goodwood, he drove John Cooper’s own Cooper-Bristol in a 6-⁠lap Formula Libre race instead, and finished sixth, by the museum’s record. Motor Sport was not impressed by the car, but it noticed the driver:

World Champion Fangio drove John Cooper’s own Cooper-Bristol but it was less satisfactory and he was never in the picture. … Fangio was going through the corners with great elan and obviously having fun, after being baulked on the first lap.

The same afternoon a young Englishman, Mike Hawthorn, won two races in his own new Cooper-Bristol, and announced himself.

In the Mille Miglia on 4 May Fangio and Giulio Sala were 22nd in an Alfa Romeo 1900. Then came the BRM at last. At Albi on 1 June he took pole by 7.3 seconds from González in the other BRM, and retired after 15 laps with cylinder-head trouble; González set the fastest lap before a piston failed, and Louis Rosier won in a Ferrari. At Dundrod, in Northern Ireland, on Saturday 7 June, only one BRM appeared in official practice, shared by Fangio and Stirling Moss, while the second car was still being run in at an airfield, and both started from the back row. Moss stalled and soon retired. Fangio spun at the hairpin on the first lap, came round eighth, climbed to third, and was timed at 228 km/⁠h (142 mph) on the measured section before the rain came; his car stopped after 25 laps, with engine trouble, a failing fuel feed or overheating, depending on the account. Piero Taruffi won in Tony Vandervell’s Thinwall Ferrari, with Hawthorn second. Raymond Mays was reported to have said that only the date was wrong: four days later, and BRM would have won.

Dundrod to Monza

Mays had told him that BRM would run a car for him at Dundrod on the Saturday; Maserati’s team manager, Nello Ugolini, had told him that Maserati would run one for him in the Monza Grand Prix, a Formula 2 race outside the championship, on the Sunday. He had arranged to fly from Belfast to Milan straight after the Ulster Trophy with Prince Bira, who flew his own aeroplane. Bira left early, and Fangio was left behind.

By his own account, as Doug Nye later printed it, he and Louis Rosier, fourth in the race, caught a scheduled flight from Belfast to London. There was no flight to Milan and there were storms over central France, so they went on to Paris, where the flights to Italy had been cancelled too, and he missed the sleeper to Milan. Around midnight Rosier drove him in his Renault to Lyon, hoping for a flight from there; there was none. At six or seven in the morning Rosier, heading home to Clermont-Ferrand, lent him the car, and Fangio drove on alone over the Alps by the Mont Cenis pass: “I drove over Mont Cenis like a man possessed.” (attributed)

Other tellings differ on the route, and on how long before the start he reached Monza: two in the afternoon for a start at half past two, by his own account, or a scant hour, or mere hours. He had time to shower, change and take some aspirin. Having done no practice, he was allowed as World Champion to start from the back of the grid, and before the start, by one account, Alberto Ascari said to him: “You look tired” (attributed).

The grid was formed in fours, with Ascari, Nino Farina, González and Luigi Villoresi on the front row. Fangio was alone on the eighth row, in a brand-new Maserati A6GCM, No. 18, with González and Bonetto in the team’s other two. He had done 35 fast laps in one of the team’s cars some time before, but this car was new to him.

His place on the grid

29 of 29

The race was run in two heats of 35 laps, decided on aggregate. It was sunny, with a slight breeze, and the concrete grandstand was packed.

The second Lesmo

Felice Bonetto led the first lap in another Maserati. Fangio passed several cars on it: six, by his own count. On the second lap, at the second of the two Lesmo curves, he touched the barrier on the inside and let the car run wide, meaning to catch it later. It hit the last of a long line of straw bales that years of sun and rain had made rock-hard, went into the air and threw him out. Motor Sport suggested oil on the track, and reported what followed: “The driver lay unconscious at the side of the track, within a yard of following cars.” His own last memory, he told Nigel Roebuck in 1979, was of the grass: “I can clearly recall the strong smell of grass just before I passed out.”

He usually raced in a cloth cap, and he had been reluctant to wear the hard helmet that had recently become compulsory. He believed it saved his life. Farina won the race, and was among the first to visit him in hospital:

When I regained consciousness, Farina was there by my bed holding a laurel wreath. I thought he must be dead too. Eventually I began to believe that I was still alive and realised that he had won the race and had brought the laurel wreath to me in tribute.

The way back

He had crushed vertebrae in his neck: El Gráfico reported a shadow on the fourth cervical vertebra. His head was hurt, and a hand: the right hand in El Gráfico, a broken left thumb in Doug Nye’s account. At the hospital in Monza he was treated by Dr Carlos Parenti and by an Argentine traumatologist, Dr Bernardo Schajmann, who had come to the race to watch Fangio and González. On Friday 13 June two friends, Cholo Montes and Juan Carlos Guzzi, telephoned El Gráfico: he was out of danger, though still delicate, and his life had been in serious danger. In their words, “it came out cheap”.

He lay in traction, and three weeks passed before he could change position without help; he spent his 41st birthday, 24 June, immobilised. Then came a plaster cast over his torso, neck and shoulders, which he wore until 3 September. How long he spent in hospital is disputed: almost four months, says the museum, while El Gráfico, in mid-June, expected him out within weeks. On 20 June Luigi Fagioli, in whose car he had won at Reims the year before, died at Monte Carlo. El Gráfico showed Fangio convalescing in Italy with González.

The championship went on without him. Taruffi won the first round, in Switzerland, and Ascari the other six European rounds and the title, with 36 points: Ferrari won every round except the Indianapolis 500. On 7 September, four days after the cast came off, Fangio was honorary starter of the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, by Nye’s account. The museum in Balcarce later wrote that the racing world considered him finished, and that many drew away from him; he told his biographer Roberto Carozzo that the people around him began to leave, thinking his racing days were over: “I learned who my true friends were.” (attributed)

El Gráfico’s Borocotó set the crash in a run of failures at Monza since his win there in 1949, and recalled what Fangio had said in his pit the September before. Stirling Moss, who did not see the crash, wrote later: “For once, his extraordinary powers of endurance had let him down.” He put it down to fatigue, as he did the crash in Peru in 1948 that killed Daniel Urrutia. He vowed never again to start a race without proper rest, and formula1.com still calls it his only serious injury, the result of extreme fatigue.

His next race was the Argentine Grand Prix on 18 January 1953, at the autodrome where he had won on its opening day, in a Maserati A6GCM: the first race of his 1953 season. In Nye’s account the broken thumb healed at an odd angle, and Fangio said that he never again had a headache after a race. For the rest of his life he could not easily turn his head. To look round, he turned his head and shoulders together.