1957 The fifth title

Back to Maserati

Pirelli had stopped making racing tyres in 1956, but it made a stock for Maserati, and the season of his fifth and last title was run on it. By the summer Maserati and Vanwall were both running their stocks down.

For 1957 Maserati built three new Maserati 250Fs. Giulio Alfieri, the engineer who had finished Gioachino Colombo’s design, made their frames from smaller tubes and more of them, about 40 per cent stiffer than before, with more of the weight over the rear wheels. Denis Jenkinson later identified the three works cars as 2527, 2528 and 2529; it was 2529 that carried Fangio to his wins at Rouen-les-Essarts and the Nürburgring.

He had left Ferrari after a single season, the Lancia-⁠Ferrari year of 1956, and gone back to the Orsi family’s firm, for which he had driven in 1953 and at the start of 1954. Stirling Moss was his team-mate only in Argentina, before he left for Vanwall; after that Fangio led the team unchallenged. Nello Ugolini managed it, and the chief mechanic was his friend Guerino Bertocchi. The 250F kept its 2.5-⁠litre straight six in every race he drove; a V12 was tried in practice at five of them, but he raced only the six.

Summer in Buenos Aires

In practice at the Buenos Aires Autodrome the Maseratis were far the fastest cars, although Moss beat Fangio to pole on his home ground, 1:42.6 to 1:43.7. As the cars left the grid on 13 January Moss’s throttle linkage broke, and he lost 9 laps in the pits. Jean Behra, then Eugenio Castellotti and Peter Collins led. The Lancia-Ferraris’ clutches gave out one by one, on Collins’s car, Luigi Musso’s and Mike Hawthorn’s, and a hub shaft broke on Castellotti’s, shedding a rear wheel. Fangio won from Behra, Carlos Menditeguy and Harry Schell: Maseratis in the first four places. It was Castellotti’s last Grand Prix. Two months later he was killed testing a Lancia-⁠Ferrari at Modena.

A week after the Grand Prix Fangio shared a Maserati 450S with Moss in the Buenos Aires 1000 km; Moss built a lead of more than 2 minutes in 33 laps, handed over, and the transmission failed. On 27 January the Buenos Aires Grand Prix was run in two heats in a heatwave that left drivers lying exhausted in the pits between them. He won the first heat, was third in the second, and took the aggregate by 24.5 seconds from Behra.

In February, on the Malecón in Havana, he won the first Cuban Grand Prix in a Maserati 300S entered by the Brazilian Scuderia Madunina; he would be back a year later, and it would end very differently, in 1958. In March he won the Sebring 12 Hours with Behra in a 450S. Sports Illustrated reported that “Behra and The Master gave a demonstration of coldly efficient driving.” The mechanics had sloshed petrol into the cockpit when he took over for the last three hours, and he drove them sitting in it.

On 12 May Alfonso de Portago was killed in the Mille Miglia with his co-driver and spectators, and Italy turned against racing on its public roads. The Belgian and Dutch Grands Prix were cancelled over money.

Monaco and Lisbon

At Monaco Moss, now in a Vanwall, won the £100 prize for Thursday’s fastest practice lap with 1:44.4, a tenth quicker than Fangio. On Friday, with Ferraris, Vanwalls and Maseratis trading times, Fangio went round in 1:42.7, the fastest lap anyone had driven on the circuit in its present form, and the younger drivers gave up for the day. He also tried the V12 car, taking the Gasworks hairpin with the clutch disengaged and the revs high and then letting it in with a jolt: sometimes the car leapt away, and sometimes it all but spun. The front row held three makes, his Maserati, Collins’s Lancia-⁠Ferrari and Moss’s Vanwall.

Moss led, and Collins passed Fangio for second. Near the end of lap 4 Moss went straight on into the barriers at the chicane. Collins, avoiding him, hit the barricade by the harbour; Tony Brooks slowed almost to a stop, and Hawthorn clipped Brooks’s wheel and rode up onto Collins’s car. Fangio went through the gap between the wrecks and was never headed again. He lapped at about 1:50 without a slip, set the fastest lap, 1:45.6, and won by 25.2 seconds from Brooks. Jack Brabham pushed his Cooper to the line to finish sixth.

In June he won the Portuguese Grand Prix for sports cars at Lisbon in a 300S. Then came the French Grand Prix, at a circuit he had never seen.

Reims and Aintree

A week later the organisers at Reims-Gueux ran a Grand Prix of their own, outside the championship, over 61 laps. Fangio was fastest in practice on all three days, with a best of 2:22.9, throwing the Maserati into long slides through the bend beyond the pits, by Jenkinson’s account for the fun of it. The start was chaos: the organiser, M. Roche, stood in the middle of the road waving a yellow flag, the field took it for the start and nearly ran him down. Stuart Lewis-Evans led in a Vanwall.

Fangio fought Hawthorn wheel to wheel, as they had fought at Reims in 1953, spun at the Muizon hairpin on lap 8, caught Hawthorn again within 7 laps and ran with Behra after Hawthorn’s engine failed on lap 27. On lap 57, running with Behra behind the leader, Musso, he went off at the Thillois hairpin: his brakes locked, by Motor Sport’s account, and he steered onto the grass towards some straw bales he took to be harmless. There was a wall behind them. Musso won. Fangio said later that he had hit oil; others blamed the brakes. A crash by Fangio was so rare, Paul Fearnley wrote, that it raised eyebrows.²

At Aintree on 20 July, for the British Grand Prix, he found himself on the second row of the grid, fourth, which Motor Sport thought a most unusual sight. He was passed early by Musso and Lewis-Evans, then by Moss, who had taken over Brooks’s Vanwall, and was never in the fight. After 49 laps the valve gear of his engine broke. Moss and Brooks gave Vanwall the first World Championship win for a British car.

The Nürburgring, 4 August

At the Nürburgring on 4 August he started on half tanks, lost the lead in a 52-second stop and won it back on the penultimate lap, after a lap of 9:17.4. It was his 24th and last World Championship win, and with two rounds left no one could catch him: he was champion for the fifth time, at 46 years and 41 days. The race has a chapter of its own.

The Vanwall’s turn

Two rounds remained, and in both of them Moss’s Vanwall was the faster car. The Pescara Grand Prix of 18 August was run in the heat on 25.6 kilometres of everyday roads in the Abruzzi, the region his father had left for Argentina as a boy of seven; it was the only championship race ever held there. Ferrari stayed away, except for Musso’s car, entered privately, partly in protest at the Italian moves against road racing that had followed de Portago’s death. Fangio took pole with 9:44.6. Moss led early and set the fastest lap. On lap 10 Musso’s oil tank split; Fangio’s Maserati slid on the oil, struck a kerb and bent its left rear wheel, and he had to stop to change it. Motor Sport was clear about the result: “Fangio arrived in second place more than 3min behind, having for once been unable to overcome the handicap of being up against a superior machine, driven by a not so inferior driver.”

At Monza on 8 September, on the road circuit alone, three Vanwalls filled the front row with his Maserati on the outside. Five cars slipstreamed for the lead, and Fangio led on lap 7, revving the Maserati to 8,400 rpm, 800 over its limit. Moss drew away. Fangio stopped for rear tyres on lap 41 and finished second, 41.2 seconds behind. By Motor Sport’s reading of the race, “it was obvious that the World Champion was playing a waiting game, hoping for the Vanwall to break up, it being quite impossible for the Maserati to cope with the superior speed”.

The 6 points from Monza were not counted. He finished the season with 40 counted, from 46 scored, to Moss’s 25, Musso’s 16 and Hawthorn’s 13.

The end of the works team

A fortnight after Monza he could not race at Modena: a minor road accident had damaged his wrist, and he started the second heat instead, with the flag. In October, at Casablanca, he went off the road, came into the pits with the nose of the Maserati full of straw, then set the fastest lap and finished fourth, looking unwell. In December he won two sports-car races in Brazil, at Interlagos and at Boa Vista, in the 300S.

The honours came in the autumn. The British motoring writers made him Driver of the Year, and the Duke of Richmond and Gordon presented the trophy. At the Nürburgring, where he had now won the German Grand Prix three times running (1954, 1956 and 1957; 1955 had no race there), he was named Ring-Meister, with a diamond star, and President Theodor Heuss declared him a guest of honour. Mercedes-⁠Benz, his old team, had given him a pale-blue 300 SL roadster for his birthday in June.

Maserati had won the championship with him and could not afford to go on. The fall of Perón had wrecked a deal to trade Argentine grain for machine tools from the Orsi group, which owned Maserati, and the Orsis had not been paid; the sports-car team’s expensive cars had been left as burnt-out wrecks at Caracas. At the end of 1957 Maserati withdrew its works team from racing. Alfieri looked back on the year to Doug Nye in 1981: