1955 Mercedes-Benz, Moss, and the year of Le Mans

Buenos Aires, 16 January

The weather station of the Buenos Aires autodrome stood at the circuit itself, and on 16 January 1955, the day of the Argentine Grand Prix, it recorded 35°C in the air and 52°C at the level of the track. The grandstands had been full for six hours before the start.

In the air, °C

35

On the track, °C

52

Five works teams had come: Mercedes-⁠Benz, Ferrari, Lancia, Maserati and Gordini. Mercedes-⁠Benz fitted its W196s with deflectors to carry the heat of the exhausts away from the drivers and with ducts to blow air through the cockpits, but Stirling Moss, who had joined the team for 1955 as Fangio’s team-mate, found that even the air coming in was hotter than 50°C.

Fangio qualified third, behind González and Ascari. He led the first lap on a low first gear, and by the end of the second five cars had crashed or retired, among them Kling’s, Behra’s and Villoresi’s. He let Ascari and González go by. On lap 22 Ascari crashed at the fast right-hander opposite the pits, the corner that was later named after him.

Then the heat took its toll. Farina, González, Schell, Castellotti, Mantovani, Trintignant and Bucci all needed relief, and the cars that finished second, third and fourth each had three drivers. Moss’s own car stopped after 29 laps with its fuel vaporising; he was put into an ambulance, talked his way out of it, and took his turn in the car Hans Herrmann had started, which finished fourth.

Fangio made a single stop, of 3 minutes, for fuel and to have buckets of water poured over him. Harry Schell led, then Roberto Mieres, until a fuel pump cost Mieres 8 minutes, and from there Fangio led to the finish. He won by 1 minute 29.6 seconds from the Ferrari that González, Farina and Trintignant had shared, and he set the fastest lap. He and Mieres were the only drivers to go the whole distance without a relief driver. When President Perón came down to greet the drivers at the finish, Fangio could not at first lift himself out of his chair.

In 1979 he said it was the hardest race of his life, harder than the Nürburgring in 1957, because the heat of the front-engined cars came back at the driver, and he told how he had survived it: “I got through it by trying to imagine I was waist-deep in snow”. A fortnight later, on 30 January, he took the Buenos Aires Grand Prix, a Formula Libre race, on aggregate, second in both of its heats.

The Mille Miglia and Monaco

In the Mille Miglia, on 30 April and 1 May, he drove the 300 SLR No. 658, the sports-car version of the W196, alone: the passenger’s seat was covered over, and a Perspex screen surrounded the driver. Motor Sport thought that early on he was not in the true spirit of the race. After Rome an injection pipe split, and he ran on seven cylinders to Florence. He was second, behind Moss and his navigator, Denis Jenkinson.

At Monaco he took pole with 1:41.1, a time Ascari equalled later. In practice Moss tried the short-wheelbase car prepared for Fangio and got within 0.1 seconds of his time, where in his own car he was more than 2 seconds slower, and Rudolf Uhlenhaut, the engineer, drove a fourth W196 to find out what the circuit was like. Hans Herrmann was hurt in practice, and André Simon took his place. On 22 May Fangio led from the first corner, was 7 seconds clear after 5 laps and set the fastest lap, and at half-distance, after 49 laps, his transmission failed.¹ Moss led until his engine failed, Ascari went off into the harbour, and Maurice Trintignant won.

That summer Denis Jenkinson set down the smallest of differences between the two team-mates: at Monaco, in the same car, Fangio went through the tunnel without lifting his foot, while Moss admitted that he always eased the throttle a fraction, and through the Gasworks hairpin Fangio was a fifth or two faster than Moss on every lap. Four days after Monaco, on 26 May, Ascari was killed at Monza, testing a Ferrari sports car.

On 29 May he won the Eifelrennen for sports cars at the Nürburgring in a 300 SLR, with Moss half a car’s length behind. At Spa-Francorchamps on 5 June he started second, half a second slower than Castellotti, in a long-chassis car he had chosen in practice as the best for the circuit. At the start he flicked his car sideways into the left-hand corner over the Eau Rouge bridge, so that Castellotti could not come through on the inside, and pressed on hard on the first lap. He led every lap, with Moss second, broke the lap record, eased off after 20 laps, and won by 8.1 seconds. Years later, in a foreword for a book of Moss’s, he wrote that from Spa onwards the two of them fought only until they had a lead over the rest; then Alfred Neubauer, the team manager, showed them the slow signal, and “whoever was in front stayed in front, and whoever was second stayed second.” (attributed)

Le Mans

Mercedes-⁠Benz entered three 300 SLRs for the 24 Hours of Le Mans on 11 and 12 June: Fangio and Moss in No. 19, Pierre Levegh and John Fitch in No. 20, and Kling and André Simon in No. 21. Behind each driver the cars now had an air brake, a hinged panel raised by hydraulic rams. Levegh, a Frenchman a few months short of his 50th birthday, had driven the 1952 race alone in a Talbot and led it for 23 hours.

At the four o’clock start Fangio was hemmed in near the middle of the field, and he was fourth by the third lap. By five he and Mike Hawthorn, in a Jaguar, were racing a few feet apart as if it were a Grand Prix, breaking the lap record again and again; to Motor Sport they seemed to be living their duel at Reims in 1953 over again. Neubauer’s diary put it in a line: “Four o’clock: start. Fight between Fangio and Hawthorn.” At six o’clock 2 seconds separated them, a minute ahead of Castellotti’s Ferrari, and Hawthorn had lapped in 4:06.6, at 196.963 km/⁠h (122.4 mph).

Zandvoort, 19 June

Eight days after Le Mans, the Dutch Grand Prix was run at Zandvoort. Fangio took pole in a short-wheelbase car and at the start he anticipated the flag just enough to gain a length, but not enough for anyone to complain. He led from start to finish with Moss on his tail, through rain late in the race, and won by 0.3 seconds.

In the Grands Prix, Moss remembered, the two silver cars were called “the train”, because he followed so closely, three or four feet behind. Only Neubauer worried, afraid at Zandvoort that Moss’s engine would swallow the sand thrown up by Fangio’s car. Moss remembered his answer: “I told him, ‘Fangio never goes off and I’m sticking with him’.”

After Le Mans the French, German, Swiss and Spanish Grands Prix were cancelled. The championship was left with seven rounds, one of them the Indianapolis 500, where the European teams did not race. The French government banned road racing until its safety had been reviewed, and Switzerland banned circuit racing. By July, Motor Sport reported, Fangio had eight of Daimler-Benz’s diamond-set Mercedes-star pins for Grand Prix wins, a gold one for the Eifelrennen and one of diamonds and emeralds for his title of 1954.

Aintree, 16 July

The Royal Automobile Club had moved the British Grand Prix from Silverstone to Aintree, the racecourse circuit outside Liverpool. Moss took pole by 0.2 seconds from Fangio, with Behra’s Maserati beside them on the front row. Before the race Jenkinson wrote of the possibility that the team might let Moss set the pace, in his first appearance at home in one of the German cars.

How the lead changed is told two ways. By Jenkinson’s account Fangio shot into the lead, let Moss by on lap 3, took the lead back on lap 17 and was passed again on lap 26; Moss’s diary says that Moss led from the start, let Fangio lead later, and took the lead for good at 18 laps. At half-distance both were shown the sign to hold their places. Moss led by as much as 12 seconds, Fangio closed in the last laps, and at the line he was half a car’s length behind: 0.2 seconds. Mercedes-⁠Benz finished first, second, third and fourth, with Moss, Fangio, Kling and Piero Taruffi.

It was Moss’s first championship win, and the first by a British driver in the British Grand Prix; whether Fangio let him have it is weighed in Fangio and Moss.

The result settled the championship. With one round left Fangio had 33 counted points and Moss 22, and Monza could give Moss 9 at most: Fangio was World Champion for the third time.³

Monza, 11 September

The Autodromo at Monza had been rebuilt with two high-banked curves, and the Grand Prix was run on the combined road and banked circuit, 10 km (6.2 miles) round. Tyres failed on the banking in practice, and Ferrari withdrew the Lancia D50s it had taken over. Mercedes-⁠Benz came knowing that its Grand Prix adventure was over. In practice, Motor Sport noticed, Fangio rested in the shade of Neubauer’s huge shadow, the team manager standing over him like a hen over her favourite chick.

Fangio took pole in a new long-chassis streamliner with its brakes mounted inboard. Moss led the first half-lap, and then, as Motor Sport’s correspondent saw it: “However, orders are orders if you want to stay in the team, and at the end of the lap Fangio was in his usual position, followed by the rest of his team and Castellotti.” The four Mercedes-⁠Benz ran as a train, 4 seconds covering them all. On the long straight inside the circuit, slower Ferraris and Maseratis coming round the outside of the banking passed the leaders, and Motor Sport noted that it gave many drivers their only chance to overtake a Mercedes-⁠Benz. Moss’s windscreen was broken on lap 19 and his engine failed on lap 28, and Kling’s gearbox broke. Fangio won by 0.7 seconds from Taruffi, at an average of more than 200 km/⁠h, tired and bruised by the new circuit. It was the last race of the W196.

In 1979 he could still recite its record with him, race by race, as Records quotes.

Kristianstad, Dundrod and the Targa Florio

In the sports cars the two shared the victories: the Targa Florio, the Mille Miglia and the Tourist Trophy went to Moss, each time ahead of Fangio, and the Eifelrennen and the Swedish race to Fangio, each time ahead of Moss. At Kristianstad, on 7 August, Moss was faster in practice, as he had been before in the sports cars. In the race he led the first lap and then waved Fangio by, and the two settled into team order, Moss following so closely that he took a face full of stones from the leader’s rear wheels. Fangio won.

For the Tourist Trophy at Dundrod, on 17 September, he and Kling learned the circuit from the comfort of the team’s 300 SL coupé, to the protests of Jaguar. In the race he fought Hawthorn’s Jaguar for second place, found he could not shake it off, let it by and eased up; the car he shared with Kling was second at the finish, behind Moss and Fitch. Three drivers were killed in the race, in two accidents.

In the Targa Florio on 16 October Moss and Peter Collins won, and Fangio and Kling were second, their car with only one slight graze and a dented wheel. The result gave Mercedes-⁠Benz the World Sports Car Championship.

The end of the adventure

Daimler-Benz had announced in the summer that it would leave Grand Prix racing at the end of 1955: the programme had occupied some 500 people, Jenkinson reported, and had held back work on the company’s production cars. On 22 October, at a celebration for its drivers in Stuttgart, Fritz Nallinger announced that it was leaving sports-car racing too. The popular story is that Le Mans drove Mercedes-⁠Benz out of racing; the company’s statement gave engineering reasons, and it has even been claimed that the decision came before Le Mans.

At home, in September, officers of the armed forces gave Perón the choice between resigning and civil war, and he resigned. On 6 November, in his first race after Mercedes-⁠Benz, Fangio won the Venezuelan Grand Prix at Caracas in a Maserati 300S; there was a dispute with Maserati’s management over the winner’s trophy, a gold cup of five kilograms. The Italian press gave him the Tazio Nuvolari prize, a gold tortoise, at Mantua. After Christmas the provisional government in Buenos Aires froze the assets of 586 individuals and 172 companies, which had 150 days to prove that they had come by them lawfully. Fangio and González were on the list.

Things in Argentina were going badly, he said later, and he put off retiring for another year. Instead of going home, he signed for Ferrari, for 1956.