The Official Formula1 Opus eBook: The Whole Story

reserved.

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting…

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you…

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew…

If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same…

…Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it.

And – which is more – you’ll be a racing driver, my son!

What is Formula 1™?

It is not easy to forget the history and drama of Formula One – now into its seventh decade – especially if you have lived it from day to day for so long. Motor sport, and especially Formula One, has been a constant part of my life ever since my first race at 19 years of age, a year before the inaugural Formula One championship. Back then I thought I might become a racing driver. After all, who would not want to do that? But I never saw it as my future, just a hobby, albeit a dangerous one.

Today, Formula One is much changed and, mostly, for the good. It is safer, it is bigger, it provides greater livings for a greater number of people, and it is more popular than ever.

The Official Formula 1 Opus underlines this fact. Yet, for all its graphic and textual beauty, the following pages serve an even greater purpose for me. After 60 years Formula One has never been stronger. We have so many people to thank, and so many stories to tell, and nearly all of them can be found in these pages.

Those involved in telling the story of Formula One, like me, will draw the same conclusion. It has been a long, sometimes painful and always challenging journey, but it has also been a wonderful road to take and I, for one, would not have missed it for the world.

Bernie Ecclestone

Chapter 1

A Pioneering Heritage

A Pioneering Heritage

Foreword by Murray Walker

When and where the first ever motor race took place is lost in the annals of time, but Formula 1 owes an enormous debt to the nation of France, home of so many of the first car manufacturers and where the first major recorded race took place, in 1894, between Paris and Rouen. This led to a series of Inter-City races, including Paris to Berlin (690 miles, taking 15 hours to complete) and the infamous Paris to Madrid in 1903 that was watched by over three million people crowding the road sides and which resulted in multiple deaths. The races were both exciting and dangerous, tremendously dangerous, with the cars travelling at enormous speeds for the day on roads that could barely be termed as such. But with the intensive development of their cars through competition, the early racing drivers became national heroes. Names such as Henri Fournier, Camille Jenatzy, Emile Levassor and Fernand Charron are barely known today, but they were no less skilful than the modern-day F1 driver.

In order to race in greater safety the French introduced closed road events in 1906, creating the Grand Prix as we know it today; the Hungarian Ferenc Szisz became the first ever winner, a feat he chronicles later in this chapter. Other great drivers of the time were Felice Nazzaro, Victor Hemery, Louis Wagner, Georges Boillot and Christian Lautenschlager, the last of these winning the prestigious French GP in 1908 and 1914, with the immediate pre-war race still regarded as one of the greatest of all time.

When World War I ended, more countries and manufacturers took up the sport and new names emerged, notably my personal hero, Tazio Nuvolari, as well as Achille Varzi from Italy, Robert Benoist and Louis Chiron from France and many others, but local and national Grand Prix racing was, at this time, still mainly for wealthy amateurs.

This all changed in 1934 when Germany entered the fray and, with the encouragement of their Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, Mercedes Benz and Auto Union brought an awesome and all-conquering professional approach to the sport as the Third Reich strove for international superiority. This was the era when Rudolf Caracciola and Bernd Rosemeyer became towering superstars, consistently winning but humiliatingly beaten in 1935 at their home circuit, the legendary Nürburgring, when Nuvolari won one of motor racing’s most famous victories in his P3 Alfa Romeo.

World War II halted motorsport for eight long years and when peace broke out, Germany was on its knees. In its enforced absence, Frenchman Jean-Pierre Wimille won the first post-war GP in Switzerland, in 1947, in an Alfa Romeo 158. But it would be the Italian manufacturers of Alfa Romeo, Maserati and Ferrari, driven by new stars such as Giuseppe Farina and – with the advent of the drivers’ world championship – Alberto Ascari, who would dominate the dawn of Formula 1.

Sixty years on, the sport has produced the likes of Fangio, Moss and Clark, Senna, Prost and Schumacher, but they and all their contemporaries owe their very existence to those unsung heroes of the first half of the 20th century who pioneered a sporting heritage.

The Grand Prize

In an age when technological developments came at a rate that alarmed traditionalists, and speed became an ever more important fact of everyday life, it was inevitable that the emergent sport of motor racing would metamorphose beyond its haphazard beginnings. When the reorganisation came, it carried a name that would come to symbolise ultimate competition: Grand Prix – literally, ‘Grand Prize’

It was an age of miracles and wonders. Mankind had finished exploring the dark continents and was turning to explore new technologies. The age of steam was giving way to an era in which the internal combustion engine would allow man to find new limits. As the telegraph was replaced by the telephone and then the wireless, information too was travelling much faster. It was an age of heroes. They were no longer explorers, but rather daredevils who pushed the physical and mechanical limits. At the forefront were the racing drivers.

The first real motor race had taken place between Paris and Rouen in France in 1894, and development had accelerated after that. In 1899 James Gordon Bennett Jr, an American newspaper magnate, came up with an idea. In his early years in the newspaper business he had funded Henry Stanley’s expeditions to Africa to find the missing Dr Livingstone. Stanley’s despatches had sold plenty of newspapers and Gordon Bennett quickly recognised that heroes made good copy. His latest idea was to create an international competition for automobile racing, allowing national clubs to compete for a Gordon Bennett Cup and to see which country built the best cars.

The Gordon Bennett automobile between 1900 and 1905 not only generated huge public interest but gave the car manufacturers a chance to showcase their products. The first events were city-to-city races, with cars thundering through the countryside with minimal security. A series of spectacular and often fatal accidents on the Paris-Madrid race of 1903 forced the sport to acknowledge its need for responsibility. Speed could no longer continue unfettered. Racing moved on to closed circuits. These were still huge compared to modern tracks, but at least a measure of crowd control – the greatest failing on those dramatic road races – could be enforced.

The Gordon Bennett Cup had one major problem, which arose from victories for Britain and Germany respectively in 1902 and ’03. France had many more automobile manufacturers than other countries and that left a lot of French carmakers frustrated by the rule limiting entries to three marques per country. The French wanted the number of entries per country to reflect the number of road cars built by each nation. Since France built more cars than anyone else at that time, it argued that there should be more French entries. Those manufacturers who could not compete unsurprisingly argued that France would have won if their own cars had been allowed to race, as they felt they were superior to those French cars that did race.

By 1904 the Automobile Club de France had been cajoled by the disgruntled into proposing a new race, with entries based on each nation’s car production. This race was to be called the ‘Grand Prix’. In literal translation this means ‘Big Prize’ or ‘Grand Prize’. It was a term that had first been used in the late 17th century for a prize offered to artists by France’s Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture.

The aim was to stimulate more artistic endeavour and it was so successful that by the 1720s other academies were offering their own Grands Prix for architecture, mathematics and science. By 1805 the name slipped into horse racing with a ‘Grand Prix’ being held in Paris, but it wasn’t until 1863 that the Grand Prix de Paris became established as the biggest event of the French equestrian year. Other racecourses took up the idea and Grands Prix were held in Chantilly, Deauville and at Pau. And it was at Pau in 1901 that an automobile club borrowed the name from horse racing and used it for the first time at a motor race.

It was undoubtedly a good name, and the ACF lost no time in adopting the idea with enthusiasm. But where the Pau club had named its race after the locality, the ACF had a much better strategy and the title of its race grandly reflected national pride: it was called the French Grand Prix.

Britain, Germany, Italy and America remained outraged by France’s plan to go it alone and although this forced the Grand Prix planned for 1905 to be called off, in 1906 the ACF finally went ahead on its own.

From the start, the plan was for the new race to be different. No longer did cars have to run in national colours, there was a new numbering system and the circuit chosen was very different from those seen previously. It was longer, faster and tougher than anything the Gordon Bennett Cup competitors had ever encountered. And the prize money was impressive.

The choice of venue had a great deal to do with money. There were 17 bidders for the race but the winning bid was a surprise. It came from a new entity that was only recognised as a club after the decision to award the race had been taken, based on the size of its bid. Prior to that this entity had merely been a loose association of wealthy sportsmen in the city of Le Mans. They were led by Adolphe Singher, the son of the founder of the insurance company that would eventually become the giant Mutuelle du Mans. The entity became the Automobile Club de la Sarthe, the forerunner of the modern Automobile Club de l’Ouest.

The route chosen was a 64-mile triangular circuit on public roads to the east of the city, running from Champagné, a small village on the outskirts of Le Mans, down the main Orleans road to St Calais. It then turned north on a fast back road to Vibraye and on to La Ferté Bernard, where it joined the main Chartres-Le Mans road and headed back to the start. In order to avoid slow passages through the towns that had plagued earlier events, the ACF ordered the construction of bypasses at St Calais and Vibraye, constructed from wooden planks. In addition to this vast expense, there were grandstands to house 35,000 people and 25 miles of wooden barriers to control crowds. And, in an effort to stabilise the road surface, 500,000 square metres of tar was laid around the route. Thirty-four cars entered, although two failed scrutineering because they exceeded the maximum 1007 kg weight limit. The remaining 32 comprised 23 French cars, six from Italy and three from Germany. The British and Americans stayed away, although it is unlikely that this would have made any difference to the result. The 32 cars were the most advanced of the time but almost all were of similar design, with large four-cylinder engines mounted in twin-rail chassis. The engines ranged from a seven-litre Gregoire to the vast 18.3-litre Panhard-Levassor. The most powerful were reckoned to be the Clement-Bayards and the Fiats, with about 110 bhp.

While some manufacturers concentrated on the quest for horsepower, Louis Renault decided to look at other important aspects: reliability was going to be a problem in a two-day 769-mile event. He designed hydraulic dampers, the first ever to be fitted to a racing car, in order to reduce the stress on the chassis. He wanted good cooling and so fitted huge thermo-syphon radiators behind the engine rather than at the front of the car. This not only endowed his eponymous cars with better cooling, but also better weight distribution and thus better handling. Despite the radiators, the Renaults were very light, which allowed Renault to risk another innovation. Michelin had created new detachable wheel rims in order to speed up tyre changes. This cut stops from 15 minutes to five but added 36 kg if used on all four wheels. Three manufacturers decided to try them: Fiat ran the new rims all round, while Renault compromised with detachable rims at the rear and Clement-Bayard hoped to gain advantage one way or the other by running one car on the new rims and two others on more traditional wheels.

One of the side-effects of the switch to closed circuits in 1903 was that information flowed much more easily among those watching. In the city-to-city events the cars came and went in a blur of noise and speed but on closed circuits the adventures and exploits of the drivers became more widely known. Thus were stars born.

And it was these heroes that the fans came to see. Leon Thery, twice the winner of the Gordon Bennett Cup, had retired the previous year but the field for the Grand Prix featured many other big names: the veteran Fernand Charron, who had won the first Gordon Bennett Cup in 1900; Fernand Gabriel, the winner of the 1903 Paris-Madrid; from Italy came the established Fiat stars Felice Nazzaro, runner-up to Thery in the Gordon Bennett Cup in 1905, and Vincenzo Lancia. There were youngsters too, notably Albert Clement, the 22-year-old son of Gustave Clement, the owner of Clement-Bayard, and 25-year-old daredevil Arthur Duray, who had made his name breaking land speed records. The speed record men were well represented with Belgium’s Pierre de Caters, Louis Rigolly, Paul Baras, Victor Hemery and the great Camille Jenatzy all racing. Jenatzy was a Belgian nicknamed ‘The Red Devil’ who raced for Germany’s Mercedes and had won the Gordon Bennett Cup in 1903. And then there were characters such as ‘De La Touloubre,’ the third Clement-Bayard entry who appeared in the race programme as ‘The Masked Driver,’ and remained a mystery figure. Through the night before the race tens of thousands of spectators made their way to the circuit and by morning an estimated 180,000 people lined the route. It was an impressive figure given that France was in the grip of a heatwave. To avoid the worst of this, the ACF started the cars at 90-second intervals, from six o’clock in the morning.

The action was intense from the very start, with Baras completing his first lap in 52m and 25s. That translated into an average speed of 73.3 mph (117.9 kmh). That would be the fastest lap of the race. Renault’s Ferenc Szisz was timed on the straight at 95 mph (153 kmh) in his red Renault.

The condition of the carefully tarred roads deteriorated rapidly as the temperatures soared to 95 degrees farenheit during the morning. The rate of attrition soared in equal measure. Four cars failed to complete a lap, the most spectacular exit being that of Maurice Fabry’s Itala which rolled at Vibraye after a wheel collapsed. The wooden bypass sections proved to be the most dangerous, and in mid-morning Jacques Salleron crashed his Hotchkiss at St Calais. His team-mate Hubert Le Blon suffered a wheel failure nearby and spent three hours building a new one from parts of the two cars. The board track at Vibraye claimed the third-placed Fiat in the late morning when banker Aldo Weillschott rolled.

Out on the road the drivers were bombarded with stones and pieces of the sulphurous tar as the surface inevitably broke up under the passage of so many powerful monsters. There were several eye injuries and Renault driver J Edmond was in so much pain that doctors gave him a shot of cocaine to help him on his way. He stopped soon afterwards, unable to see the road.

Only 17 cars were left by the end of the six laps that had been planned for the opening day. Szisz was 26 minutes ahead of Clement. Nazzaro was third in his Fiat and American Elliott Shepard was fourth for Hotchkiss.

The plan was for the cars to start in the morning of the final day with the same time intervals between them, having spent the night in parc ferme. Szisz was thus able to have a leisurely stop to change tyres and check his Renault over and was still on his way 15 minutes before Clement departed. Lancia, suffering from problems with his eyes, did not intend to race on the second day but when his replacement driver failed to show up he jumped aboard the Fiat and set off, still wearing a lounge suit. Jenatzy did drop out, replaced by Alexander Burton before he, too, suffered serious eye problems by mid-morning.

The only serious accident of the race occurred on the first lap when Georges Teste’s Panhard hit a bump and broke its suspension on the straight near Ardenay-sur-Merize. The car left the road and hit a tree, before rolling. Teste suffered a broken thigh and two broken ribs. Later Shepard and Renault’s third driver, Claude Richez, would also crash but without injury. By the finish there were just 11 cars still running. Szisz had driven a canny race, conserving his huge advantage and taking fewer risks than rivals, but on his penultimate lap he went wide in one corner and damaged his front right suspension. He pulled off in the shade of a forest and fixed the problem, and was still 32 minutes ahead of Nazzaro, who had Clement only three minutes behind him. For the locals, Clement was the hero of the day. He was losing 10 minutes to his rivals at each pit stop and yet was still only 35 minutes behind the winner. The Clement-Bayard was clearly a very fast car but of the three entered only that of ‘De La Touloubre’ had used the detachable rims – and he retired early with gearbox failure. As Renault celebrated the victory, other manufacturers were left to ponder the fact that though the drivers were the heroes, the newly born category of Grand Prix racing was also a technical competition and that the fastest car did not always win.

The spark had been lit, and the sport would go on from there with that uppermost in mind.

JS

Ferenc Szisz’s own account of his remarkable triumph

In 1902 Ferenc Szisz emerged from the Renault workshops and on to the racetrack as a riding mechanic. Four years later he took his place as a driver for Renault at the start of the Grand Prix of 1906. This is Szisz’s own account of his remarkable triumph

"I’m Hungarian by birth. Although my place of birth is often said to be Vienna, where I lived before coming to Paris, I am in fact – as my name suggests – a true Magyar not only by race but also by birthplace. You know, in the Dual Monarchy we have two distinctly different states and nations which are often at loggerheads with each other – the Austrian and the Hungarian.

"I first saw the light of the world in the heart of Hungary in Szeghalom [Szeged], a town in the Theiss lowlands between Maria Theresiopel [Subotica] and Temeschwar [Timisoara]. I was born there in the year 1873 and also attended all my schooling in Hungary. After completing my education I decided to become a mechanic, a profession for which I always had a special predilection. Military service interrupted my career and I served in a cavalry regiment stationed on the Russian-Galizian border.

"Once, when we were roaming through the area around Krakow, I laughed with astonishment and disbelief when someone told me that one day I’d be honoured – my name would be in all the newspapers and a Minister of the French Republic would shake my hand and congratulate me! I knew as little then of the existence of a town called Le Mans as a French mechanic would have known of our towns Szekszard or Szentes. As you can see, the double consonant Sz, which makes my name seem somewhat strange, is quite common down there.

"My countrymen are reckoned to be erratic and restless and I was no exception. Before I landed in Paris I moved around a lot and worked a bit here, there and everywhere. I made my debut as a fitter in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, then one after the other in Prague, Brunn and Graz where I worked in wagon and automobile factories. This brought me to Munich where I again worked in auto and wagon factories, finally arriving in Paris on June 22, 1899.

"I certainly didn’t begin in France with ‘automobilism’. I made my start with the production of milling machines for watchmakers in the Strube establishment in the Rue Hortense. Soon thereafter I heard that the Renault brothers at Billancourt needed mechanics. The automobile beckoned! I was interviewed and engaged as a mechanic on May 1, 1900.

"Such quick acceptance wouldn’t be customary in this year, 1906.

"I admit that my first impression wasn’t exactly one of splendour. Hitherto I’d only worked in large establishments and the Renault factory in those days was a simple wooden shack. I just couldn’t take the company seriously. Later I admitted to M. Louis Renault that I’d meant to leave after a week. After that week, however, I was fire and flame in favour of my new métier. Now I’ve been here six years and I feel like I’ve only just started.

"As an unnamed, unknown employee I helped prepare the cars for the race from Paris to Toulouse. Once, in September 1900, when M. Louis Renault had to go off to join his colours for their twenty-eighth weapons practice, a voiturette (which, as I recall, was intended for the Generalissimo Brugère) was to be fitted with an electric headlamp and Renault entrusted me with its installation. When he found me keen to do the job our relationship became closer which, with so few workers in those days, was much easier than now.

"I found myself assisting the works drivers in the team mustered for the Paris-Bordeaux and Paris-Berlin races of 1901 and the Circuit du Nord, using alcohol fuel, of 1902 in which M. Louis Renault drove in a light car. The changeover to light cars was made in 1902.

"For the big Paris-Vienna race of 1902 they needed a riding mechanic. Louis Renault was used to me, I could speak German and, as the route took in my homeland, he brought me with him. Thus I emerged from the workshop and on to the race track. The rest needs no explanation.

"In the Paris-Vienna race the victory wasn’t ours, rather Marcel Renault’s. At Innsbruck on the penultimate day, just at the moment we’d taken the lead, we collided with a competitor and lost precious hours making repairs. Shortly thereafter we were forced off the road and into a field by another competitor and broke a wheel. We had to repair the wheel by carving rough spokes from lumps of wood. Louis Renault worked tirelessly. Running on the rebuilt wheel, the next day our car gave best only to brother Marcel’s Renault for the final day of the race from Salzburg to Vienna.

"Together we won the first leg of the tragic Paris-Madrid race of 1903. As you can see, I’d already had good schooling before I took the wheel in my own hands. After the bereavement that our camp suffered with the death of Marcel Renault in the Paris-Madrid, we stayed away from racing for two years. I test-drove the cars and advanced to foreman of that department. The factory grew enormously in the meantime with works the size of a small town rising in place of the original wooden shed.

"Two years later, when the decision was taken to return to racing, it was decided that M. Louis Renault should no longer drive. I, his mechanic (and proud to have been), took his place. The car drove well in the French eliminating trials on the Auvergne circuit for the Gordon-Bennett Trophy of 1905, but overheated a little. I finished fifth in the trials so we weren’t in the top three who were chosen for the race itself. I also drove in New York’s Vanderbilt Cup race but without success. I was as high as second but was awarded fifth at the finish after Mr. Vanderbilt stopped the race. He had to; the spectators were crowding on to the course to drive home!

"So I finally came to the starting grid for the third time – in the Grand Prix of 1906. This time I admit I was full of confidence. I knew that I wouldn’t find worse roads in the Sarthe than those in the Auvergne or the race from Paris to Vienna. Indeed on the previous day we trained east of Paris on the road from Sezanne to Chalons and back to Sezanne through Champaubert. I did 600 kilometres from 5.00 in the morning until 10.30 in the forenoon. In spite of a stop and driving slowly through the suburbs my average speed was 114 kmh.

"But in the race itself I was held up on the first lap by a defective tyre. In this contest one had the choice of two evils: either to take solid tyres and slide or hollow tyres with less rubber and risk a puncture. Which do you prefer: to be hung or shot? To be sure we had removable rims but we weren’t the only ones. While other competitors had them on all four wheels we only had them on the two at the rear.

"Nonetheless my car ran not only with excellent consistency but also with extraordinary speed. The only exceptions were the changing of a spark plug at the start and the stop to change the tyre. I lapped faster than virtually all of the competition including Lancia, Baras and Jenatzy. None of them overtook me on the track except when I had to stop to change tyres. On the second lap I was overtaken by Baras when I burst another tyre. Around the middle of the lap, though, I managed to overtake him to put myself back in the lead. When I drove past my team I saw the index fingers of all hands uplifted to show I was leading. On my fourth lap I stopped in front of the stands at my pit to take on supplies and learn my lap times.

"The race was exceptionally hard. Whenever I passed one of the competitors who was struggling – which happened at least 30 times during the race – the tar thrown up almost burned my eyes. With our short wheelbase we had the front wheels virtually in front of our eyes and suffered awfully. My hour of desperation came late on the first day. At five that evening my eyes were so inflamed I couldn’t see anything. A thick fog seemed to have descended before me.

"That whole night the Renaults and Hugé Grus made efforts to look after me. By 11 it finally got a bit better and at midnight M. Renault was racing around Le Mans trying to find a pair of safety goggles for me. At one in the morning, needle and scissors in hand, he took on the role of tailor and cut me a face mask to fit around the goggles. My distressed condition had been well-nigh critical. To have been the victor on the first day and then perhaps on the second to have to watch another winning! Inconceivable!

"When I finally got started everything went well. Knowing that no competitor was in front of me and with the aim of profiting as much as possible from the clear road, on the second day I set my fastest lap. I lingered 11 minutes at my pit for recuperation and started off again at 5.45 am. I was back at 6.47 am after completing the lap in 51 minutes.

I drove the final laps in a state of tremendous excitement. Victory was to be mine and as I drove past M. Girardot I couldn’t keep from shouting to him, We’ve done it!" My mechanic was as delighted as I. The honest Martaud is the best tyre fitter I know. While we reckoned on four minutes to change a removable rear rim, he could fit a fresh tyre on a non-removable front rim in five. And then came the finale, the Marseillaise, the Minister, the ovations. All very gratifying – as was the return journey to Paris and the factory where our colleagues awaited us.

And now for next year’s racing! I can only say that I hope to defend the victory vigorously and perhaps win again. In racing every outsider hopes for this but only learns from experience that a race is won through the careful preparation in equal measure of both driver and car. But now I want to conclude by giving some advice to all participants: Watch out for the tar! It may be excellent for the lungs but it’s certainly a plague for the eyes!

Dusty heroes

After its glorious beginnings in 1906, Grand Prix racing struggled to survive. The French car manufacturers, defeated at the hands of Felice Nazzaro’s Fiat in 1907 and Christian Lautenschlager’s Mercedes in 1908, lost heart and agreed amongst themselves not to compete. Some of the daredevils turned to the new craze of flying, but soon a new breed of racing car – and a new generation of drivers – emerged

In the forefront was Georges Boillot, a larger-than-life character who stepped into the limelight by winning the revived Grand Prix de l’Automobile Club de France in 1912. Here was a showman, a man who would cut corners to get what he wanted. He first tasted success in the lightweight voiturettes that appeared in 1909 and ’10 but soon became the driving force behind an independent team that would use the Peugeot name.

Although known to the Peugeot staff as ‘Les Charlatans’ Boillot’s team was certainly effective. The 1912 Peugeot was an extraordinary car which swept away the era of production-based racing cars. This car was built to race. It had started out as a Hispano-Suiza project but Boillot grabbed it by hiring the principal players. It was theft of a sort, but the courts could not keep up with racing. By the time the case was heard Boillot was a national hero and Peugeot had taken all the headlines. Hispano-Suiza never caught up.

In 1913 Boillot dominated at Indianapolis yet failed to win, but back in France he won a second French Grand Prix victory, amid joyful scenes at Amiens. The plan was for the charismatic star to return for a third French Grand Prix victory in 1914 – but Mercedes, absent from the scene since its victory of 1908, had other ideas. In a Board meeting the company decided to win the Grand Prix this year and it did so with crushing efficiency, running an unprecedented five cars all using the very latest aero-engines.

Against the backdrop of international tension before Europe plunged into the Great War, Boillot took on Mercedes single-handed on a dramatic new road course near Lyons. The Peugeot was a better-handling car, but the power of the Mercedes negated Boillot’s advantage and, in the first-ever display of tactical racing, Max Sailer was ordered to act as a ‘hare’ to break the Peugeot challenge. There were 300,000 French fans willing Boillot to victory and he gave his all, leading the race until close to the finish when the Peugeot lost a cylinder and Lautenschlager swept into the lead.

The moustached Boillot fought on, throwing his car around, until the engine finally died. The great showman was a hero to the end. Two years later, he was killed in a dog-fight with German planes over Verdun.

The war devastated Europe and while Edouard Ballot kept France’s racing alive by sending cars to Indianapolis in 1919, it was two years before the nation could host another Grand Prix. The rules for 1921 were designed to attract the Americans, and Duesenberg took up the challenge. The ACF picked a new circuit to the south of Le Mans (part of which is still used today for the famed Le Mans 24 Hours) but the roads of the region had not much improved since 1906. Duesenberg driver Joe Boyer later described the race as a damned rock-hewing contest, because of the rubble that was thrown into the air by the passage of so many cars. Drivers and riding mechanics were often knocked senseless and the machinery took a real hammering. Murphy’s riding mechanic, Ernie Olsen, said, As the stones and rocks hit all round us, it sounded like we were being strafed by machine gun fire.

It soon became clear just how fast the Duesenbergs were, but during practice the team’s star driver, JimmyMurphy, rolled his car and suffered internal injuries. Two hours before the start of the race he walked out of the hospital and returned to the cockpit of his white racer. In one of the truly astonishing performances in Grand Prix history, the tough little man ignored his injuries, a hole in his Duesenberg’s radiator and two punctures on his final lap, and went on to win.

The Yankees gained yards going into the corners and coming out of them, admitted Sunbeam Talbot Darracq rival Kenelm Lee Guinness. We were in another race! As an indication of the poor conditions, his team-mate, Henry Segrave, changed no fewer than 14 tyres in the course of the race.

The French fans jeered and whistled as Murphy had to be lifted from the car at the finish, four hours, seven minutes and 11.4 seconds after he had started. But those with a greater appreciation of sporting heroes applauded his average speed of 78.1 mph (125.699 kmh), a record that stood until 1930. It was an unnerving experience, Murphy admitted. And I was hurting badly from my injuries. He was the first American to win a European Grand Prix and would remain the only one until Phil Hill won at Monza 39 years later.

Murphy’s fellow American, Ralph de Palma, finished second, almost a quarter of an hour adrift, but entrant Ernest Ballot was a sore loser. Look at my cars, in perfect condition, all ready to start out again, he bleated. Then look at that American junk, all shot to pieces, unfit to go another mile. If they had only lengthened the race a little bit, I should have won. I may not have won the Grand Prix, but I am the moral winner.

After the race there was a great banquet but when the ACF began proceedings by toasting the third-placed finisher Jules Goux – a Frenchman – Murphy set down his glass and calmly walked out. Murphy and his famous white Duesenberg returned to America. The following season he won the national championship and the Indianapolis 500 and remained the biggest star of American motorsport until the autumn of 1924 when, racing on dirt at Syracuse, he slid into a wooden rail beside the race track. A splinter of fencing pierced his heart and the great Murphy was no more, pre-dating Jochen Rindt as a posthumous champion.

Death was ever-present in the Twenties, and sometimes it was just down to luck. Mechanical failures were as dangerous as driving errors. After the veteran Felice Nazzaro won the Grand Prix in Strasbourg in 1922 it was discovered that his Fiat 804–404 was on the verge of axle failure. The team had been running 1–2–3 in the race but first Pietro Bordino and then Nazzaro’s nephew Biagio crashed out with similar failures. Biagio, whose car broke on the final lap, was killed. Luck (of sorts) had ridden with the elder Nazzaro that day.

After the humiliation in Strasbourg, Sunbeam- Talbot-Darracq boss Louis Coatalen hired Fiat’s Vincenzo Bertarione to build him a Fiat copy for 1923. And thus it was that Sunbeam’s star driver, Henry O’Neal de Hane Segrave, emerged in the spotlight. With a background of Eton, Sandhurst and the Royal Flying Corps, Segrave was the perfect ‘Boy’s Own’ hero. Spotted by Coatalen at Brooklands in 1920, he was the man to lead Sunbeam to victory over Fiat at Tours in 1923, to become the first British driver to win on European soil for more than 20 years. Segrave won another major victory at San Sebastian the following year and remained a top Grand Prix contender until he turned to record-breaking. He broke the land speed record for the first time in 1926, driving a Sunbeam Tiger racing car. The following year he drove a bespoke twin-engined Sunbeam to breach the 200 mph (320 kmh) barrier for the first time. Two years later his beautiful Golden Arrow took him to 231 mph (371 kmh) and a knighthood. De Hane Segrave was motorsport’s first true superstar, but his quest for speed on water proved his undoing in June 1930 when, having set a new record of 98 mph (157 kmh), he died when his Miss England II speedboat capsized during a subsequent run over 100 (160) on Windermere.

The success of Fiat and later Alfa Romeo made Italy the major force in the sport in the early Twenties and Bordino was the biggest Italian star. He had joined as a riding mechanic in his teens and was racing as early as 1904, but by the time he was old enough to drive Fiat was not competing and then the war intervened. Bordino was 33 before he finally got his chance as a Grand Prix driver in 1921. At Strasbourg in 1922, he showed he could beat Nazzaro and he won later that year at the new speedway at Monza. In 1923 he led at Tours but retired with engine failure and then crashed heavily while testing for the Italian Grand Prix. His riding mechanic died in the crash and Bordino suffered a broken arm, but such was the talent of the man that he not only competed in the race but led until the pain was so bad that he could go on no longer.

That same Monza weekend marked the first appearance of Alfa Romeo, an ambitious new team with a bright youngster called Antonio Ascari and a rather portly but talented ace called Giuseppe Campari, a man who loved to eat and drink and was particularly fond of singing opera. Alas, third driver Ugo Sivocci crashed and was killed and so the other two cars were withdrawn, but the team regrouped, hired the best men from Fiat and built a new car called the P2 for 1924. The Grand Prix that year was at Lyons, on a shortened version of the 1914 circuit. It would be the last of the great road races and witnessed an incredible fight between Fiat, Sunbeam and Alfa Romeo, while Delage, which was developing a new V12-engined car, and a young driver called Robert Benoist, flew the French flag.

Segrave, Bordino and Ascari all fought for the lead but one by one retired, leaving Campari to come home a joyful winner. Ascari’s talents would bring victories for the Alfa Romeo P2 in 1925 but at Montlhery that summer he skidded on a damp track while leading the race. His P2 flipped after snagging a chestnut paling fence, throwing Ascari out and crushing him. When news came of his death Alfa Romeo withdrew and for the first time in a dozen years the Marseillaise was played at the end of Grand Prix de l’ACF. Delage’s Benoist was the new hero of France, but acknowledging that his had been a hollow victory, he drove to the spot where Ascari had succumbed and left his winner’s laurels in tribute to the fallen hero.

Benoist might have won everything in 1926 because the Italians stayed at home, but the Delages overheated badly and roasted their drivers’ feet and Bugatti won most of the races. At the end of the year Louis Coatalen, looking for a new hero to replace the departed Segrave, signed a mysterious young Englishman for the 1927 season who raced as ‘W Williams’. His real name was William Grover-Williams. That was the year in which Delage finally got it right and Benoist won all the major races, an extraordinary achievement but one undermined by the lack of opposition. At the French Grand Prix at Montlhery ‘W Williams’ took the fight to Benoist’s Delage, but then ran into mechanical trouble.

A few days later Coatalen was forced to close his team. At the end of the year Delage followed suit. The economic downturn would ruin Grand Prix racing in the years that followed and frustrate the careers of the best racers. ‘W Williams’ begged and borrowed cars. Benoist was less successful and was forced to manage a garage in Paris.

At the end of 1927 Fiat appeared briefly with a new challenger, driven by Bordino, but the company could not afford to race and Bordino had to buy himself a Bugatti to remain in action. Early in 1928, while testing on the Alessandria circuit in Italy, he hit a stray dog. The steering jammed and the great Italian crashed into the Tanaro river and drowned.

In 1928 and ’29 privately-owned Bugattis kept Grand Prix racing alive. The Alfa P2s appeared only from time to time. In Italy a new generation was emerging led by Achille Varzi and Tazio Nuvolari. ‘W Williams’ won two French Grands Prix, in 1928 and again in 1929, the year in which he took on and beat a young German called Rudolf Caracciola in an interesting new race round the streets of Monte Carlo.

The Roaring Twenties came to a close, and with them the romance of the dusty road races began its slow fade. It had been an age when the stars shone with a brilliance that was all too often fleeting. Death was always close at hand, but the spirit of racing lived on as successive generations took to the stage and demanded an audience.

JS

Racing for the Reich

Red and blue dominated Grand Prix racing in the early Thirties: Alfa Romeo and Maserati from Italy, Bugatti from France. From 1934 on, however, silver was predominant, and until the outbreak of World War II, in 1939, Germany’s Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union teams would hold complete sway

It was not until 1937, at the Donington Grand Prix, that ‘the Germans’ came to England, and when they did the effect on the native racing populous was shattering. Prior to their arrival, the lap record (set by the ERA of company founder Raymond Mays) stood at 74.31 mph (119.58 kmh); now Manfred von Brauchitsch took his Mercedes W125 round at 86.01 (138.41 kmh). On the run down to Melbourne Corner the German cars were doing more than 170 mph (273 kmh): nothing like this had been seen before.

Although the Thirties are remembered as the era of the ‘Silver Arrows’, at the beginning of the decade Auto Union was not in motor racing, and Mercedes’s grand prix involvement was confined to occasional outings – in German races – with a stripped-down version of the SSKL sports car. Rudolf Caracciola won the 1931 German Grand Prix in such a car, but when he won it again, a year later, it was in an Alfa Romeo.

Caracciola will forever be synonymous with Mercedes, but when the company withdrew from racing, at the end of 1931, he had no alternative but to go to Alfa. There he won several Grands Prix, but an accident at Monaco in 1933 – the impact was with a stone balustrade – inflicted terrible leg injuries. Caracciola recovered, but would walk with a limp for the rest of his life.

Clearly he was a man of some resolve. A few months earlier his beloved wife had been killed in a skiing accident, and his suffering in this period of his life can only be imagined. After months in hospital, though, he was passed fit to drive again – and his return coincided with the introduction, for 1934, of the 750 kg formula, and also with the return of Mercedes-Benz.

Over the next six years Caracciola would be the company’s enduring star, and Alfred Neubauer, the celebrated, if perhaps overblown, team manager, considered him the best driver of the time. Rene Dreyfus, a leading French driver, did not disagree, as such, but felt Neubauer’s assessment a little absolute.

Perhaps, said Dreyfus, Rudi was the best, technically. He was superb in all conditions, made hardly any mistakes, and was a genius in the wet. But ask me who was the fastest, and I would say Rosemeyer. And as for the greatest, I have no doubt: Nuvolari. With him, you had the impression of a man on an unbroken horse – but instead of fighting it, he let it run free. Tazio could do things with a car that no one else could do. There is nothing to discuss…

For Bugatti, Dreyfus won the Monaco Grand Prix in 1930, but the outstanding drivers, in the early years of the decade, were Tazio Nuvolari and his fellow Italian Achille Varzi. It was the meeting of fire and ice.

Although invariably on good terms, in the way they drove, in the way they were, no two men could havediffered more. Nuvolari was earthy, the embodiment of extrovert heroism, the true Italian who talked with his hands and loved children. Varzi was dry of wit, remote and arrogant, irresistible to women; he did not kiss babies.

At the wheel Nuvolari was flamboyant, at the edge, Varzi immaculate of line. Both were stupefyingly quick. And for all their pitiless professional rivalry, their respect for each other was absolute. After the arrival of the German teams, Nuvolari remained long faithful to Alfa Romeo, fighting the odds in uncompetitive cars, but Varzi did not hesitate: in 1935 he joined Auto Union – a move which was ultimately to bring about his downfall.

When Mercedes and Auto Union arrived, it was an assault on the status quo, a redefining of the parameters of the racing car. Each team had an engineering genius – Rudolf Uhlenhaut at Mercedes, Dr Ferdinand Porsche at Auto Union – and each had a good deal of funding from the Nazi government. There was immense prestige to be gained from racing, and Adolf Hitler was not slow to appreciate it: German domination was his template, after all.

The 750 kg formula was introduced with the aim of slowing the cars down, but, as has so often been the case over time, a major rule change had precisely the opposite effect from the one intended.

Those were simpler days: the only rule of consequence was that the maximum weight of a Grand Prix car – without fuel, water or tyres – was to be 750 kg. Given that, prior to its introduction, Maserati and Bugatti were running cars heavier than that, it was assumed that now the manufacturers would have to go to smaller, less powerful, engines.

Such was not to be the case. The German teams, with substantial cash available, concentrated on lightweight tubular chassis, this concept both lighter and stiffer than anything previously seen. As well as that, they introduced independent suspension on all four wheels.

For many years, chassis development had been moribund, manufacturers concentrating simply on horsepower. Overnight Mercedes and Auto Union raised the bar by several notches – and nor did they neglect the power aspect. By 1937, the last year of the 750 kg formula, the engine of the Mercedes W125 – 5.6-litres, straighteight, supercharged – gave as much as 600 bhp. Not until the late Seventies, when Renault introduced turbocharging to Grand Prix racing, would such figures be seen again.

While the two German teams dominated the era, they went about it in very different ways, for while Mercedes abided by convention, Auto Union put the driver where Dr Porsche believed he belonged, in front of the engine.

The Thirties Grand Prix car, while inevitably state-of-the- art, was hardly a comfortable environment in which to spend a Sunday afternoon. The driver sat bolt upright, with a huge steering wheel very close at hand, and the races were of 300 miles minimum, which meant three to four hours. He had immense power under his right foot, and, with very narrow, very hard, tyres. grip was minimal. There were no such niceties as power-steering and traction control.

If he worked very hard, and very long, moreover, he did it in perilous circumstances: no seat belts, no rollover bar, no fireproof overalls – and a ‘helmet’ made of linen!

Can you imagine, said Hans-Joachim Stuck, after driving an Auto Union in the Nineties, how it must have been to race a car like this? At the Nürburgring? In the rain? No belt, no helmet… They must have been gods, those people – and my father was one of them…

So he had been. Hans Stuck, while not a truly front rank driver, was the first man to win for Auto Union, and scored several victories in 1934 and ’35.

His path to the team had been paved by a chance meeting with Hitler. Stuck was friendly with a chauffeur called Julius Schrek, whom he regularly invited to go shooting on his estate. One day Schrek asked if his employer might join them, and thus Stuck met Hitler for the first time. Subsequently the Austrian, impressed by Stuck’s driving, promised him a car when the National Socialist Party came to power. In the intervening years Stuck had to make do with his own lightweight Mercedes-Benz SSKL to continue his career, but early in 1933 the Nazi Party came to power and he received a surprise call from Hitler, who instructed him: Make a list of your requirements, then come and see me.

Thus came about Stuck’s involvement with Auto Union, as he and Professor Porsche rushed to Berlin to discuss the unique mid-engined Grand Prix car that the latter had designed for the emergent manufacturer.

Stuck and his contemporaries had no concept of safety in motor racing. Necessarily it didn’t – couldn’t – exist, and therefore they gave no thought to it. Many of the circuits on which they raced – Pescara, Tripoli – were made up of fast open roads, complete with all the hazards. It was the way it was.

That being so, it is remarkable that so few drivers died in this era. One who did was Guy Moll, born in Algeria of a Spanish mother and French father, and a young man of prodigious ability. In 1934, only his third season of international racing, Moll was invited to drive for Scuderia Ferrari, by then running the Alfa Romeo team cars, and in a P3 he won both the Monaco Grand Prix and the Avusrennen, only to be killed at Pescara the same year, fighting for the lead of the Coppa Acerbo with Luigi Fagioli. In his memoirs, Enzo Ferrari declared Moll the only driver, in his experience, worthy of comparison with Nuvolari and Moss.

Ernst von Delius of Auto Union lost his life at the Nürburgring after a coming-together with his friend Dick Seaman, and in 1939 the Englishman was himself fatally burned at Spa-Francorchamps, while leading the Belgian Grand Prix in the rain.

Seaman, young, wealthy, and perhaps a touch spoilt, was invited to join Mercedes-Benz in 1937, and the following year won the German Grand Prix. It was an awkward occasion, for by now Hitler’s intentions were clear to one and all, and his ‘man at the races’, Korpsfuhrer Adolf Huhnlein, was plainly less than thrilled to see an Englishman with the laurel wreath around his shoulders. As for Seaman, he couldn’t quite bring himself to keep his right arm straight during the salute…

In terms of drivers, Mercedes invariably had the best of it, with such as Caracciola, Manfred von Brauchitsch, Seaman and Hermann Lang in its cars. Auto Union could, and should, have won many races with Varzi, but soon after joining the team, in 1935, he began an affair with Ilse, the wife of Paul Pietsch, Auto Union’s reserve driver. She, it transpired, had become addicted to morphine after a minor operation, and before long Varzi, too, was in its snare. By the end of 1936, his personality had changed, and so had his driving.

Even had he been fully fit, though, it is unlikely that even Varzi could have matched Bernd Rosemeyer in an Auto Union. In terms of natural fl air, blinding speed – and, above all, the instant impact he had on the racing world – Rosemeyer was the Gilles Villeneuve of his time.

Having raced only motorcycles before joining Auto Union, the debonair Rosemeyer had no conventional experience to overcome. Utterly fearless, he had the hair trigger reactions to keep ahead of a car by turn wilful and vicious, and no one ever mastered an Auto Union as he did. In 1936 he was European champion – the equivalent of world champion today – and it was only his second full season.

A little over a year later he was gone, killed not at one of the great theatres of battle, but on a dreary autobahn, between Frankfurt and Darmstadt, where Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union indulged in Class C speed record attempts.

It seems an absurdity now that the lives of such as Rosemeyer and Caracciola should have been put at risk in such circumstances, but Hitler and his cronies thought it important, and so it was that one morning, in January 1938, Rosemeyer died when his car, travelling at over 270 mph (435 kmh), was blown off the road by a freak gust of wind.

In a short time Rosemeyer had become a national hero, and his marriage to Elly Beinhorn, the Amy Johnson of Germany, had only added to the mystique. Even in death he was of propaganda value to Hitler: at the funeral Goering declared that Bernd had ‘died in service to the fight for Germany’s world prestige’. It didn’t cheer anyone up.

In 1938 the 750 kg formula was dropped, and the 3-litre formula introduced. With smaller engines, power was obviously reduced, but speeds did not greatly change.

By now Nuvolari, whose victories for Alfa – such as a brilliant defeat of the Germans at the Nürburgring in 1935 – had been few and far between, decided to go to Auto Union, and if he was never quite the force Rosemeyer had been, still he was able to win with his new, very unfamiliar, car.

By now, too, the best driver at Mercedes was Lang, the shy former team mechanic who had made it into the cockpit, and who had to live with casual barbs from some of those around him.

Once, said Raymond Mays, "I was in the Roxy Bar in Berlin with some of the drivers. Caracciola and von Brauchitsch were there, and Lang came in. ‘Champagne for Rudi and myself,’ said Manfred, and then, ‘Oh, and a beer for Lang…’

Of course von Brauchitsch was from one of Germany’s great military families. He didn’t like the way this upstart had graduated from being a mechanic – and of course it didn’t help that Lang was a much better driver…

Indeed he was. By 1939 Caracciola, happily remarried now – in a novel twist, to the former mistress of his close friend Louis Chiron, the great Monegasque driver – was past his best, and Lang was the driver to beat, the one who became European champion. It was his tragedy that what would have been his greatest years were stolen by the war.

Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, announced the declaration of war on Germany on Sunday, September 3, 1939. That very afternoon, over the tramlines of Belgrade, the Yugoslav Grand Prix was run. In every way an era was coming to a close. Perhaps appropriately, the race was won by Tazio Nuvolari for Auto Union.

NR

A new beginning

After the end of World War I, motor racing took several years to recover in Europe. It was two and half years before the first big race was held. But after World War II, there was no such delay. The first motor race took place just one week after Japan surrendered, in September 1945, and just four months after Germany admitted defeat as Adolf Hitler committed suicide in a bunker beneath the ruined city of Berlin

The drive to return to normality was strongest in France, where the war had done so much to undermine national confidence. The country had lasted only a matter of weeks against the German armies in 1940 and there had followed four years of misery under Nazi occupation. It was not a time of which the French were very proud, despite the rousing stories of great resistance movements. The reality had been very different. Only a very few had actively resisted the Germans.

In those immediate postwar months there was also incredible anger at what the Germans and collaborators had done. Thousands of people were killed without trial. Thousands more went to prison. There was much suspicion and there were many recriminations. Morale was low and what France needed most was heroes. General Charles de Gaulle was one – and he would become France’s new President a month later.

The French Resistance had provided many more heroes, but the French population knew deep down that during the occupation years only the bravest Frenchmen and women had actively resisted. The action was not as widespread as history likes to relate and, indeed, in the early part of the war, before Allied victory became a certainty, there was precious little fight against the Germans. Those who had fought had done so because they were passionate about freedom.

In the motor racing world there were two men who had been among that small number: Grand Prix drivers Robert Benoist and ‘W Williams’, William Grover-Williams. They had been more than just resistants. They had been specially trained in Britain and sent to France by secret plane and parachute, to stir up trouble. They had taken enormous risks and had paid for that with their lives. No-one knows for certain what had happened to Grover-Williams, but there is little doubt that he was executed at Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin in 1945. Benoist’s fate was more widely known. He had died of slow strangulation, hanging from a meat hook in a cellar at the Buchenwald camp in the autumn of 1944.

The anger that such things had been allowed to happen was a major factor in the rapid return of motor racing in France, if only because the men who had known them wanted them to be remembered and decided that the best way to achieve that was to hold a motor race in their honour – and in honour of the thousands of others who had been sent to the camps