1953 The way back, in a two-litre Maserati

Buenos Aires, 18 January

On 18 January 1953 Fangio sat on the front row at Buenos Aires beside the reigning World Champion, Alberto Ascari, seven months after he had broken his neck at Monza in June 1952. It was the Argentine Grand Prix, the first round of a championship that had never before opened in Argentina, and it was run at the autodrome inaugurated the previous March as the Autódromo 17 de Octubre.

Maserati brought four A6GCMs: for Fangio, for José Froilán González, for Felice Bonetto and for the local hero, Oscar Gálvez. Fangio qualified second, 0.7 seconds slower than Ascari, and chased the Ferrari until his transmission failed after 36 laps.

President Perón was at the race, and he had ordered that the public be let in free. There were far more people than anyone could control, and they stood along the edge of the road. Nino Farina, running third, swerved to miss a spectator who crossed the circuit, and his Ferrari went into the crowd. Spectators were killed. How many has never been settled.¹

A Ferrari year

For 1952 and 1953 the World Championship was run to Formula 2 rules, for unsupercharged engines of two litres. Maserati’s answer was the A6GCM, a two-litre straight-six on Pirelli tyres. From the Naples race in May it had a new body and new rear springs, and for the European season its engines had 12 plugs. The Maseratis were often as fast as the four-cylinder Ferraris, and at Spa, Reims and Monza they were faster. But they broke. In the first three rounds he started, his car failed with its transmission, then its rear axle, then its engine.

Ascari won five of the eight rounds the European teams contested, and the title, with 34½ points. Fangio had not scored a point by the end of June. He was fourth equal after Silverstone in July and third after the Nürburgring and Bremgarten, and he rose to second only with the last round. He finished the season runner-up, with 27½ points.²

Brescia, Albi and Zandvoort

Between the Grands Prix he drove sports cars for Alfa Romeo, Maserati and Lancia, and the BRM V16 in Formula Libre races. In the Mille Miglia on 26 April he had one of Alfa Romeo’s new 6C 3000 CM coupés, No. 602, with the mechanic Giulio Sala beside him. He led at Florence. Then a track rod broke, and after that only one front wheel was steering. He still averaged more than 160 km/⁠h (100 mph) from Bologna to Brescia, and only Giannino Marzotto’s Ferrari beat him: he was second, nearly 12 minutes behind. The car was later rebodied by Boano and presented to President Perón.

On 10 May he was second in the Naples Grand Prix for Formula 2 cars, and on 14 May third in the Targa Florio, sharing a Maserati A6GCS with Sergio Mantovani. At Albi on 31 May he drove the BRM V16, and was fastest in practice by 3 seconds. In the heat for Formula 1 cars he led from the first lap, with Ascari two feet behind him, set a new lap record and won; Motor Sport noted that the two biggest names in the sport had fought in the open, and that Fangio’s car was British. In the final the BRMs threw the treads off their tyres. On lap 10 Fangio came in with the rubber jammed in his disc brakes, took off his helmet and goggles and walked away.

The championship reached Europe at Zandvoort on 7 June; none of the European teams had gone to the Indianapolis 500, the second round. At the first corner he was squeezed almost to a standstill between Luigi Villoresi and Farina. He ran a lonely fourth on a new surface that was breaking up, until his rear axle broke out on the circuit after 36 laps. Ascari led from flag to flag. In practice for the sports-car race that weekend Fangio lapped a customer’s new Maserati A6GCS consistently in 2 minutes 4 seconds, then drove its owner round in the passenger seat to show him how.

The next weekend, at Le Mans, he shared an Alfa Romeo with Onofre Marimón, the son of Domingo Marimón, a rival from the Argentine road races. A piston failed. Motor Sport reported that Fangio thought his young co-driver had the makings of a first-class driver.

Spa, 21 June

At Spa-Francorchamps he took pole with 4:30.1, 2 seconds faster than Ascari, and Motor Sport judged the Maseratis quicker than the Ferraris on sheer speed. González led him away, and after 2 laps the two Maseratis were 14 seconds clear. Then González’s throttle pedal broke. Fangio led for a lap, and at the end of the 13th his engine failed at the pits.

Johnny Claes was called in to give up his car. The Belgian jumped out without hesitating and patted Fangio on the back, and Fangio shook his hand as he drove off: eighth, with 23 laps to go. He passed Trintignant and de Graffenried, and he was third on the last lap when the car spun on the straight after Stavelot and went round through 180 degrees. The steering column had come apart from the drop-arm. An ambulance took him to the finish with nothing worse than bruises and grazes, and Marimón, new to the team, was third.

Reims, 5 July

The French Grand Prix meeting began at midnight with a 12-hour race for sports cars, which the officials ran in some confusion. The Grand Prix followed on a Reims-Gueux circuit lengthened to 8.347 km (5.187 miles), with a longer run down to the Thillois hairpin. The programme said 56 laps and the press sheets 60, and the two loudspeaker announcers gave both. The Maseratis had taken off their grilles. Fangio raced in a blue and yellow jersey.

González started on a light load of fuel and led. Fangio, fourth on the grid, worked past Farina just before half-distance and joined the leaders: Ascari, Villoresi and Mike Hawthorn, who was 24 and driving his fourth Grand Prix for Ferrari. From lap 33 Hawthorn and Fangio shared the lead between them. They came out of Thillois so close together that, past the pits, they looked like one car dividing into two.

They ran side by side down the long straights, and the positions changed several times a lap. Once, braking into Thillois, Hawthorn dented Fangio’s tail; of Fangio, he wrote later, “he showed no resentment at all.” (attributed) As they drew level, the Englishman of 24 and the Argentine of 42 were seen grinning and waving at each other. At the end of the 58th lap they crossed the line in a dead heat, with González and Ascari, also level, just behind them. Motor Sport’s reporter wrote that “not only was this the motor race of the age, but an English driver was leading.”

At the end Fangio’s Maserati had lost first gear, or by another account its clutch, and with it the drive out of Thillois. Hawthorn won by a second after 60 laps. González was 0.4 seconds further back, and Ascari was fourth, 4.6 seconds behind the winner. Fangio and Ascari had set the same fastest lap, 2:41.1, and shared its point. Autosport’s Gregor Grant thought it the race of the century; in the press box, he wrote, one journalist tore up his notes, stood on his hat and fell over his desk.

Silverstone, the Nürburgring and Bremgarten

At Silverstone on 18 July he raced twice in a day. In the Formula Libre race before the Grand Prix he took the BRM V16 to second place, 11.2 seconds behind Farina’s Thinwall Ferrari. In the Grand Prix he made the best start and led into Copse, drifted wide, and Ascari went through and led the rest of the way. Fangio was second, a minute behind.³ Six days earlier he had won the Vue des Alpes hill-climb in Switzerland in an A6GCM, and at the end of July he shared an Alfa Romeo with Consalvo Sanesi in the Spa 24 Hours, until Sanesi went off the road.

At the Nürburgring the mechanics lifted the whole engine and gearbox out of his car with a portable crane on the Saturday afternoon and put in the unit from the spare car, González’s, since González had been hurt in a sports-car crash at Lisbon. On 2 August Fangio led away and fought Hawthorn as he had at Reims. Ascari lost a wheel, Farina came through to win, and Fangio, who lost both his tailpipes on lap 14, was second again, 1 minute 4 seconds behind.

At Bremgarten, outside Bern, he took pole on 23 August, but his gearbox was failing, and at the end of lap 10 he swapped cars with Bonetto. Bonetto’s car needed a new front wheel on the next lap; Fangio took it back up to fourth before its engine blew in a cloud of smoke. Bonetto brought Fangio’s car home fourth, and they shared its 3 points. Motor Sport judged that had Fangio stayed in his own car he would surely have been fourth and perhaps third, and that Bonetto was easier on a car than the Argentine. Ascari won the race, and with it his second title. A week later, in the Nürburgring 1000 km, Fangio was fastest in practice in a Lancia D24 he shared with Bonetto, and its fuel pump failed.

The next spring Motor Sport ranked Fangio with Ascari and Farina as the three masters of the sport. He had lost the title by 7 points, it observed, in cars that until well into the season were hardly a match for the works Ferraris. The same survey passed on a story about his past, only to doubt it:

He had in fact been a garage mechanic since he was a boy in Balcarce, although his first race, in 1936, had been in a borrowed taxi.

Monza: the last round

Enzo Ferrari announced that the Italian Grand Prix, on 13 September, would be his team’s last official race; there was a prize of 7,000,000 lire for any Italian maker that started two new cars, and Ferrari entered two new “space-frame” cars for Maglioli and Carini. Motor Sport read the announcement as a lever for money, and noticed Mercedes-⁠Benz’s team manager, Alfred Neubauer, busy in the paddock at Monza discussing prospects with the Ferrari drivers. The company’s interest in Fangio went back to February 1951, when he drove one of its 1939 W154s, often called the W163, in the races at Buenos Aires, early in the year of his first title. By 1954 he had signed to drive its new Grand Prix car, the W196; when he signed is not known.

In practice Fangio had a brand-new Maserati with twin radius rods. On the last day, at speed in Bonetto’s car, he lost a rear tyre, and he was shaken for a while. For the race the team shuffled its cars, giving Bonetto the latest and Fangio and Mantovani earlier ones.

In 1979 Fangio told the weekend his own way. His car had vibrated all through practice, and nobody could cure it. In every team, he said, he made sure of the mechanics by promising them 10 per cent of whatever he won, and on the eve of the race he complained about the vibration once more: “on Sunday it was miraculously cured, and I won!” He had no idea how they had done it, but he remembered that Bonetto’s teeth fell out. The contemporary report and his story fit together: the car that shook seems to have gone to Bonetto.

Merano, Modena and Mexico

A week before Monza he had won the Supercortemaggiore at Merano in an open three-litre Alfa Romeo, letting Bonetto’s Lancia by and then winning unchallenged: the only victory of the 6C 3000 CM. A week after Monza, on 20 September, he won the Modena Grand Prix for Formula 2 cars. He had been fastest in practice. In the race he and Marimón ran together, Fangio showing his protégé how to lap slower cars and Marimón going through every gap behind him, until Marimón’s car faded from lap 80 and Fangio won the 100 laps alone. Marimón was still second.

The year ended in Mexico, in the fourth Carrera Panamericana: 3,077 km (1,912 miles) in eight stages from Tuxtla Gutiérrez to Ciudad Juárez, from 19 to 23 November. Lancia sent five cars, three 3.3-⁠litre D24s for Fangio, Piero Taruffi and Bonetto and two 2.9-⁠litre D23s for Bracco and Eugenio Castellotti, with a huge transporter and more than 20 mechanics. At first the cars carried no passengers. There were 172 starters, and 62 finished.

Bonetto, who was 50, crashed in the village of Silao and was killed. At León, at the start of the next stage, a small boy came up to Fangio’s car and told him that Bonetto was dead. Fangio thought of withdrawing; Lancia persuaded him to go on, and he barely eased his pace.

From then on the Lancias carried mechanics, so that the team’s drivers would not race each other, and beside Fangio sat Gino Bronzoni. Fangio led overall. Maglioli’s Ferrari won four of the stages, and with the race in hand the Lancias took the last days easily.

Fangio and Bronzoni won in 18 hours 11 minutes, at an average of 169.221 km/⁠h (105.1 mph), 7 minutes 51 seconds ahead of Taruffi, with Castellotti third: Lancia first, second and third, in the last round of the first World Sports Car Championship.

Bonetto, who had brought Fangio’s car home at Bremgarten, was dead. Marimón, who had followed him through every gap at Modena, was on his way to becoming Maserati’s first driver, once Fangio had gone to Mercedes-⁠Benz in 1954.