Sir Henry Segrave, 1920s speed racer and world speed record holder, wrote in his later years: “The desire for speed is an instinct possessed by every human being, as well as by the great majority of animals, and has been one of the most important drives in the process of human evolution.” This instinct has been the lifeblood of every car race, even though the first car races were not conceived as sporting events, but merely as a demonstration of new technology. It was a romantic era marked by daring drivers in slow cars.
In April 1887, the Vélocipéde newspaper organised a race through the streets of Paris to promote the virtues of the new movement. The winner was the one who drove the most beautifully and at the least cost. In 1894, Le Petit Journal organised a race over 129 kilometres from Paris to Rouen. That was the beginning of the end. The next race was already 1197 kilometres long, running from Paris to Bordeaux, with a prize fund of 70 000 francs, 31 500 francs for the winner. For those days, a nice sum of money. The rules stipulated that there could be two competitors in the car, and they had to do all the repairs themselves, using only the tools they had in the car. The fastest one was supposed to win. A speed race, then.
In 1895, the Paris-Bordeaux race was already heavily publicised and thousands of spectators gathered at the Victory Arch. 27 cars competed. They slowly made their way to the start in Versailles. The first vehicle – a Peugeot – started at noon on 11 June, and the others at two-minute intervals. No one could overtake the Frenchman Emile Levasseur, who, despite a broken gas lamp slowing down the night’s driving, appeared at the finish two days later with a five-hour head start on the next competitor.
France was then the leading country in car production and the centre of this new racing sport. However, it soon developed in other countries. Only in Britain did the law forbid racing on public roads and any car that was not horse-drawn had to be preceded by a man with a red flag as a danger sign.
In 1896, the Automobile Club of France organised a race from Paris to Marseilles, a distance of 1709 kilometres, in stages of 170 kilometres, to avoid the torturous night drives. Here again, Frenchman Levassor was among the leaders, but his Panhard, which already had Michelin tyres, overturned when it collided with a dog. Levassor died the following year from internal injuries sustained in the accident. The sport of racing had its first tragic hero.
The next big event – the Paris-Nice race in 1898 – had already brought technically significantly improved cars. But it also began the competition between the various car manufacturers, who now preferred to use paid professional drivers rather than amateur buyers for their cars. Charles Jarrott, the first successful English racing driver, watched his colleague Heath drive like this:
“Suddenly, there was a small dot and a sound in the distance, like the buzzing of a bee. The sound became clearer and clearer, and the dot grew larger, leaving a thin tail of dust behind it. It was George Heath in his 70-horsepower Panhard, just coming round the last bend. We quickly ducked behind a hedge and the bouncing and swaying monster whizzed past us. I’ll never forget the feeling of it rushing past us and enveloping us in a thick cloud of dust.”
In 1898, the Paris-Amsterdam race brought together several countries for the first time. In 1900, American and newspaper millionaire Gordon Bennett proposed that those countries with a national drivers’ club should take part in an annual race, each with three cars. The national teams were distinguished by the colour of their cars; blue for France, yellow for Belgium and red for America.
And while France was still the leader in race organisation, Germany took the lead in technology. With the Daimler-Mercedes model, as conceived by Maybach, they took a decisive step forward in design. For the first time, Mercedes completely eclipsed the other models, so that they now looked outdated. It was the biggest change in technology that happened all at once and was immediately copied by Panhard and Morse.
The turn of the millennium
In 1901, George Bennett first introduced a maximum weight limit for the car – the first formula – in order to limit speeds by limiting engine power. But the manufacturers immediately found their feet, kept their big engines and made the body thinner to make it lighter. Speeds, of course, continued to rise. Again the astute observer Charles Jarrott: “New cars were built for each race and the drivers didn’t know until the last moment what untried car they would be racing. Much of the charm of the sport was in that brilliant uncertainty.”
Unfortunately, this has been to the detriment of the viewers. In 1901, at the Paris-Berlin race, a child standing just off the side of the road was run to death by a racing car, and the French government banned all motor racing. But the car manufacturers’ lobby was too strong – France was already producing 8000 cars a year at the time – and the ban was lifted for the very next race, Paris-Vienna. Marcel Renault won the race with a 5.4-litre car.
Nevertheless, in 1902, the Ardennes hosted the first race of the kind we know today. Racers drove six closed laps, each 85 kilometres long, but on public roads outside the towns, which were closed to traffic at the time. In a sense, the Ardennes was a critical moment for the sport, as some of the characteristics of the grand prix were already becoming apparent.
The second such moment was the next big race after Ardennes, Paris-Madrid. Three million spectators gathered on the roads to enjoy the incredibly fast cars. There were so many deaths among the drivers and spectators that the French government stopped the race at Bordeaux, so that the horse-drawn cars had to be towed to the railway station and loaded onto wagons. That was the end of the town-to-town car races, and the idea of a closed-circuit race won out.
However, the rule that a national team could only have three cars in a race did not allow more than three manufacturers from each country to participate. The idea of pitting individual manufacturers against each other rather than nation states in motor racing has therefore become increasingly popular. And what name did they give this competition? GRAND PRIX – the Grand Prix.
In 1906, a 104.6 kilometre route was conceived on flat roads around Le Mans, sometimes across fields covered with wooden planks. This way they avoided the towns. The event is scheduled to last two days, 26 and 27 June, with two races of six laps each. Thirteen manufacturers took part with a total of 34 vehicles. The Bennett weight limit of up to 1000 kilograms was still in force. Only the driver and the mechanic could be in the car and only they could repair it. The three teams – Renault, Fiat and Itala – immediately realised that the outcome of the race would depend on the speed of the tyre changes and adopted Michelin’s innovation of separable wheel rings.
The Renault won, not because it was the fastest, but because it took the least time to change tyres. The race was a great success for the sport of racing and soon similar events were being organised in other countries. Thus, in 1907, the German Grand Prix, still known as the Kaiserpreis, was created, followed by the Targa Florio as the Italian Grand Prix, and so on. The French Grand Prix remained the most prestigious motor race in the world for years to come.
Then it happened that the French car brands did not win twice on their own ground and the French started to boycott it. But it turned out that the sport of racing has a life of its own. There were other, more advanced manufacturers such as Peugeot, Hispano Suiza and Delage who saw no reason not to participate.
In 1912, Peugeot came out with a new racing car, as there were now no more restrictions on engine size. It defeated its main rival, Fiat. Thereafter, it could no longer be stopped. He won almost every race, including the American 500-mile Indianapolis race in 1913. Finally, in 1914, Daimler came along, having learned a lot while building aircraft engines. His engine already had four valves on each cylinder and Peugeot, which had resisted valiantly, had to admit defeat. It was not until after the end of the First World War that spectators were able to watch the Grand Prix races again.
The first post-war Grand Prix race was not held until 1921, and it was seen that there was nothing that could drive the development of technology forward faster than war. Now the race cars started together, no longer at intervals, and the order was drawn by lot. The development of aero engines led to the astonishing technological development of the internal combustion engine, and it was Fiat that was one of the first to use it in racing cars. Its Fiat 801-402 engine was hailed as the first “high-speed engine”.
For the first time in Italy, the Grand Prix is held in Monza. Tracks specially built for car racing were already known in America at Indianopolis and in England at Brooklands, but Monza was the first Grand Prix not to include public roads. This allowed the organisers to charge an entry fee for the first time. Now, for the first time, many have also heard of Enzo Ferrari, who drove for manufacturer and Fiat rival Alfa Romeo and won 13 of his 47 races.
Alfa Romeo’s advantage over Fiat eventually became so great that Fiat slowly began to withdraw and was rarely seen in racing. Alfa Romeo continued to reign for a while with its P 2, but then the factory fell into financial crisis and slowly withdrew from Grand Prix racing. This had almost fatal consequences for the company. In 1926, only three cars, all Bugatti, appeared on the grid.
A new generation of small and independent producers emerged, living off entry fees and prizes and sponsors. Some of the best drivers had already bought their own race cars and were racing them. It was Bugatti, and to some extent Masserati, that produced most of the racing equipment for the new groups. Bugatti’s racing cars were so modern that they made the others look like old carriages, not because of their technical characteristics, but because of their modern design and their much better handling than other racing cars. Drivers used to say that the Bugatti was the jewel in the crown of racing cars.
In 1932, new Grand Prix rules were adopted, including that the weight of a racing car could not exceed 750 kilograms. These innovations attracted the attention of two German manufacturers, Mercedes and Auto Union, both of which were heavily subsidised by the Nazi Party. The slogan was: “The 1934 Grand Prix must be a milestone for German know-how”. Then, with the outbreak of war, motor racing was over for a long time.
In 1945, Europe was still reeling from the horrors of war, but motorsport made a remarkably rapid return to the racetracks, especially in France and Italy. The new International Automobile Federation (FIA), based in Paris, decided at that time to rationalise the plethora of different racing groups that existed in each country. It set specifications for three types of single-seater racing cars, simply called Formula A, B and C.
Formula C allowed not-too-fast racing in not-too-expensive cars, as it allowed the use of existing 500cc engines. Formula B, with its two-litre limit, was similar to the lighter racing cars of the pre-war era, while Formula A was intended to allow the revival of the grand prix races of yore. Formula 1, 2 and 3 soon replaced Formula A, B and C.
In 1949, the International Motorcycle Federation already had a World Championship schedule based on points scored in specific major races, and the FIA followed suit. Thus, as early as 1950, the Formula 1 World Championship was announced.
The Grand Prix takes effect
At that time, all Formula 1 races were in Western Europe, and just to really make the championship more global and world-wide, Indianapolis was added to the calendar and stayed there for a few seasons. In the first season in 1950, there were only six races – in England, Monaco, Switzerland, Belgium, France and Italy. Later, as the number of Formula 1 races increased, the other circuits slowly lost their importance as Formula 1 cars stopped competing there.
In the beginning, the fight for the World Championship did not attract much interest among the drivers. They were more interested in whether they won a race or not than in scoring points in races. Today, it is very different, because for the drivers and constructors, winning is only a means to the ultimate goal of winning the top prize.
When the World Championships started, helmets were not even compulsory and many drivers wore only leather headgear, but if they did have helmets, they were adapted from polo helmets. Some racers even competed in jackets and shirts and ties. Eventually, tyre manufacturers started to dress racers in jackets with their own inscription on the chest. This was actually the beginning of sponsorship in motor racing.
The Formula 1 driver’s cockpit was high and open, with the driver’s elbows peering out of the bodywork. This caused the abdominal muscles and kidneys to suffer the most, which is why the famous English racing driver Stirling Moss wore a wide and tight belt to protect these parts of his body during races that lasted for hours.
The races were really long back then. The 1954 German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, won by Juan Manuel Fangio, lasted just under four hours. In 1950, Giuseppe Farina became world champion in an Alfa Romeo. In general, Alfa Romeo took all the major prizes at that time, except for the one at Indianapolis. In that year, the Argentine Juan Manuel Fangio also attracted attention with his Maserati. Both he and Farina won three grand prix victories each that year, but Farina scored more points and thus made motorsport history as the first world champion.
The following year, Alfa Romeo realised that it would have to enter a completely new car in the races if it wanted to continue to be better than Ferrari. The AR 159 was a very fuel-intensive car, so it had to be fitted with extra fuel tanks for each race. He asked the Italian government for financial help and, when they refused, he announced that he was no longer interested in Formula 1. Now Ferrari no longer had a rival and the FIA, seeing that the World Championship was becoming boring, announced that the 1952/1953 World Championship would also be contested by Formula 2 cars, of which there were plenty. It was a dull season, with Ferrari winning every race and its driver Alberto Ascari winning nine in a row. The following event tells us how simple it all was back then.
In 1952, a small factory in the suburbs of Paris was unable to build a race car for Frenchman Jean Behra in time to take it to the Swiss Grand Prix. So he got in the car himself, hit the accelerator and drove all over France and across the Swiss border to Bern. The border guards blinked their eyes in understanding.
This season, Ferrari has dominated the circuits, but new teams and new drivers have also started to emerge. The revelation of the year was definitely Mike Hawthorne, who always drove with a bow-tie around his neck, and the young Englishman Stirling Moss.
The first South American World Championship Grand Prix was held in Buenos Aires in 1953. The construction of the circuit was financed by the dictator Perón himself and the race attracted 350,000 curious spectators. The organisation was poor, with people without tickets pressing against the flimsy fences around the circuit and eventually knocking them down, so that whole clusters of heated spectators sat on the very edge of the race track. Under these conditions, which could quickly have turned into a disaster, the drivers refused to start and the arguing began.
The heat of the afternoon was intense and the organisers feared that there would be riots. Finally, the drivers reluctantly got into their cars and the race started. Mike Hawthorn recalls, “The crowd was pressing harder and harder on the track, completely blocking the view of the corners. Sometimes I waved at people to get out of the way, but it just got worse. They got up, waved their shirts in front of me and only backed off just before I skidded past them.”
The inevitable happened in the 32nd round. A child ran onto the track, Farina swerved to avoid it but lost control and crashed into the crowd. Ten spectators died and thirty were injured. There was a terrible stampede, with hysterical spectators running around, and then Brown, the English racing driver, came along and ran another child to death. Farina was carried away with a broken leg, his vehicle completely wrecked. Ambulances crashed into each other in panic and a policeman who tried to make order was trampled to death. Unbelievably, the race went on. Ascari in the Ferrari won.
Juan Manuel Fangio
In the years that followed, Juan Manuel Fangio proved to be the rider who would outshine all the others. It was no fluke that he became Formula One World Champion in 1951, a title he would go on to win in 1954, 1955, 1956 and 1957. He competed in cars ranging from Alfa Romeos, Maseratis and Mercedes to Ferraris. This eclipsed Alberto Ascari, who won in a Ferrari in 1952 and 1953.
Fangio recalls that the races in his home country, Argentina, were always the hardest for him, especially the 1955 race: ‘The heat was unbearable, with thermometers reading as high as 51 degrees Celsius in some places. The race lasted more than three hours and some drivers almost fainted. They stopped in the pits and were replaced by other drivers, so that almost every car had three drivers. I was 43 years old at the time, but I won because I didn’t get out of the car for the whole three hours.”
Stirling Moss had a similar experience: ‘I nearly went mad from the heat. When I stopped, despite my protests – I just wanted to freshen up and continue the race – the paramedics grabbed me and pushed me into the ambulance. I was only rescued with the help of a translator.”
These years were important for Mercedes’ return to the racetrack, showing a new racing car and signing a contract with Fangio.
In 1955 Alberto Ascari was killed in a fatal accident. He had already had an accident at the Monte Carlo race, drifting around a bend to break through a fence and crashing his racing car into the sea just off a yacht moored there. He was rescued by divers and carried away with only a few scratches and a broken nose. Knowing that a long break could be psychologically fatal for him, he turned up in Monza a few days later to test the new car. On the second lap, he crashed fatally on a slight bend that he would otherwise have taken blindfolded.
That year, a tragedy occurred at the 24 Hours of Le Mans sports car race, which has marked the sport of racing for a long time. A Mercedes 300 LRs racing car driven by Frenchman Pierre Levegh crashed into spectators, killing 80 people. Grand Prix races were cancelled in France, Germany and Switzerland.
In a season and a half, the Mercedes-Benz W196 has competed in 15 Grand Prix races and won 12 times. In doing so, Mercedes proved that it is the best and that it has achieved all that can be achieved. It therefore announced that it was retiring from motor racing. Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss, who were Mercedes drivers at the time, had to find other employers. This left only Ferrari and Maserati in the competition, although Vanwall also appeared and hired Mike Hawthorn for his brand new car.
But the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring in August 1957 will remain a lasting memory in the history of Formula 1, for drivers and participants alike. It was one of the greatest races of all time, not only crowning Juan Manuel Fangio with his fifth world championship title, but it was also special for him because it was his best race. Fangio had not recovered from the intense mental pressure for several days after the race.
“I pitted on lap 12 with a 28-second lead. The mechanics started to circle around my car, but they didn’t do a good job. I don’t know if they were nervous or what, but before they had finished their work I had lost the advantage and had built up a 48-second gap to the two Ferraris driven by Hawthorn and Collins.
The mechanics were still working when two Ferraris whizzed past me, close behind each other. When they had finished, all we could see was that they had spent far more time than they should have. There were still ten laps to go out of the twenty-two and I was disappointed because I thought I had lost a race in which I could have won the World Championship.
The Nürburgring is one of those circuits where you lose your sense of things; you think you’re going fast, but you’re actually going slow. That’s why I started using higher gears. I knew from experience that if you leave the car in a higher gear in some of the faster corners and take them at the right angle, you can get out of the corner on the straight faster and gain time. So I went into all the corners in a higher gear, which is not a nice feeling, but I knew I had to win.
So I was always driving almost on the edge of the corners and I could see the dust rising behind my car. But I was gaining second by second. I was told later that there was a great excitement in the Ferrari pit lane because of my driving. They had signalled to their drivers not to go too fast, because they were convinced that I had blown my victory by stopping in the pit lane. They could not believe their eyes when they looked at the stopwatches. I gained 10 seconds in just one lap.
On the last lap, I saw two Ferrari cars in front of me and got on their tails. I overtook one of them – Collins was driving – and started chasing Hawthorn. After a series of corners, there was a short straight that ended with a sharp turn at almost a 90-degree angle to the left and then an identical turn to the right. Here I saw my chance and went past him at breakneck speed.
I won. What a celebration that was. I was carried on their shoulders. Collins and Hawthorn were good guys. They appreciated me and their congratulations were sincere. After the race I was convinced that I would never be able to drive that well again. I was tense and concentrated to the limit. I was trying new things and pushing myself to do things I had never had the courage to do before. I never liked to take too many risks and I tried to win as easily as possible. Until this race, I never asked too much of myself and my car. Whenever I close my eyes, I find myself in this race, seeing corners in the dark that I didn’t have the courage to do before. It was only two days after the race that I had a delayed reaction of fear and I couldn’t believe I had done what I had done.”
In its ninth season, 1958, the World Championship also became the Constructors’ Championship, but it was also the year of changes to the driving rules. Methanol fuel was banned, replaced by 100 to 130 octane aviation fuel, and two-hour races over 300 kilometres instead of three-hour races with a minimum distance of 500 kilometres. This allowed smaller and lighter racing cars.
In July 1958, Fangio sat in a racing car for the last time in Reims, France. He was 47 years old and his rivals were almost 20 years younger: “Things have changed. For me, the atmosphere just wasn’t the same as it was when racing was still a sport for the pros. During my first season in Europe, I always fixed my car myself, but now it’s the professionals who do it. I, who never raced with money in mind, now had to deal with contracts and sponsors. Racing no longer gave me pleasure, it became a liability. And when racing becomes something like work, then …” Fangio never raced again.
Eternal Others
Fangio was, of course, helped by luck during the race. He could have ended up in flames or in a nearby ditch. The other great racer of the period, Stirling Moss – called the eternal second – had skill and heart, but not luck. He never managed to become world champion, even though he wanted to. He won matches, but always came up a few points short of winning the title.
In August 1958, in Oporto, Portugal, he lost some valuable points due to a simple misunderstanding. He and Hawthorn, driving a Ferrari, were fighting for the win. Moss, in his van, saw a sign on the side of the track for him. It read HAW-REC, which was to inform his team that Hawthorne had set a record speed and therefore needed to push the accelerator harder. Moss took it to mean HAW-REG, that his rival was therefore running in second place and not threatening him. The chance to win went wrong.
He then hoped that the World Champion would be decided in October at the Morocco Grand Prix in Casablanca. Although he won that race by a large margin, Hawthorne became World Champion by a single point. Moss won four of the ten races, Hawthorne only one, but he also had five second places and that was decisive.
Stirling Moss: “I really congratulated Hawthorn on their victory, although I couldn’t hide my deep disappointment. But after a few days the knot in my stomach untied and I realised that it didn’t really matter. I have become more philosophical and perhaps more mature.”
Hawthorn decided at the end of the year to stop competing. Enzo Ferrari offered him to just name his price for the 1959 season, but Hawthorn showed no interest in this royal offer. He said that even he could not say why he had made this decision. Maybe he had a hunch. In January 1959, he was killed in a routine car accident on a motorway; he was driving a Jaguar. He was only 29 years old.
The 1959 season started late. Four Formula 1 drivers who had driven the previous year were dead. The Belgian Grand Prix was cancelled due to the organiser’s financial problems, and the Argentine and Moroccan Grand Prix were not on the calendar. Aston Martin appeared with the long-awaited single-seater, a large front-engined racing car that was obsolete before it even appeared on the track. Stirling Moss, of course, was still out of luck. He was attacked by many for driving in such a way as to destroy every race car he could get his hands on.
In August 1959, the Germans gave up the Nürburgring and the German Grand Prix was moved to the outskirts of Berlin, to the dangerous and unsuitable Avus track, a former motorway that was no longer used. The rain made it particularly slippery. Jean Behra, the driver, lost control of his Porsche, skidded off the track and crashed into a concrete building. The Porsche broke in two, Behra was thrown from the car into a pole and was killed instantly.
In every season, there is usually a driver who is noticeably better than the others. When this decade began, it was Stirling Moss, until a freak accident ended his career. He was succeeded by Jim Clark, but only until his fatal accident when he took the wheel of Jackie Stewart. Now it was money that was becoming the most important thing; first Moss, then Clark and then Stewart were the highest paid. The enormously increased earning potential of Grand Prix racing was just one of the biggest changes. Another was the disappearance of front-engined racing cars. Television also appeared and with it sponsors. But this decade was also very deadly.
In 1960, as well as the year before, the precious title went to Jack Brabham and his Cooper. The most spectacular accident occurred in August 1960, when Stirling Moss broke his nose, three vertebrae, several ribs and both legs in the Belgian Grand Prix. He was already riding extremely fast in training. In the race, Bruce McLaren was driving behind him and noticed that something strange was happening to Moss’s car. Moss said this about it:
“I was turning right at 240 kilometres per hour when my left rear wheel came off. I did the only thing possible under the circumstances. Without the rear wheel, the rear of the car started to drift to the left, so I turned the steering wheel to correct this movement and started to brake. I remember looking back and seeing that the wheel was really no longer there. The car had spun twice around the axle and was thrown backwards into the embankment. I hit the back of my head with the nape of my neck and lost consciousness.”
Bruce McLaren was shocked to see Moss’s lotus spinning on its axis and jumping wildly in the air. He stopped and thought Moss was still in the car, even though there was a high risk of fire. He drove back and saw that the car was empty. Moss: “I don’t remember how I got out of the car. I must have been thrown out. The next thing I remember I was kneeling in the mud. I wasn’t scared in the race car, but now I’m scared. I thought I was going to die. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see.”
Bruce McLaren: “Moss asked for artificial respiration, but as I thought he had internal injuries, I asked him to lie still with his mouth open to get his breath. I was sure he was just out of breath. The only thing I had forgotten was that he might have swallowed his false teeth. It was some time before the ambulance arrived.”
A few months later, Moss miraculously reappeared at the start of the Portuguese Grand Prix. Ignoring the intense pain from the broken bones, he endured all the necessary rehabilitation. Five weeks after the accident, he was driving the fastest lap at Silverstone, two weeks later he won a race in Sweden, which did not count as a Grand Prix, and two weeks after that he was competing in Portugal.
1961 was a wet year, so the right tyre choice was crucial for a successful performance. Even at the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, the August weather played on the nerves of the drivers. It rained all day, so before the start all the cars started fitting Dunlop rain tyres. Then the rain suddenly stopped and Dunlop wanted the rain tyres to be replaced by dry-weather tyres. Two-time world champion Jack Brabham wanted to do the same, but his mechanics only had time to change two tyres. So he went to the start with two front tyres for rain and two rears for dry weather. He led from the start until he got to the ground, which was still wet from the rain. The front wheels obeyed him, the rears did not. Before he could straighten the car out, he was through the hedge. Stirling Moss won with the lotus.
The 1962 season brought a lot of dramatic changes for the drivers. Jack Brabham emerged with his own team and Stirling Moss’ career came to an end. Moss started at Goodwood for Easter, but it was not considered a Grand Prix. The strange thing was that a well-known professional photojournalist, who was a constant follower of motor racing, had a dream the night before the race that something was going to happen on the St Mary’s Corner circuit, so he went there the next day and was the only witness to the accident, as Moss had no later recollection of what had happened. The photojournalist had dreamt that Moss had crashed into an embankment, had been thrown from his vehicle and had died. Of course, he had not said a word to Moss about this dream before the race.
Moss led at the start, then was overtaken by Graham Hill, who became World Champion that year. Hill saw Moss coming up behind him, but didn’t worry because he had the advantage. Then the official race leader’s representative started waving the blue flag, which meant that a faster car was trying to overtake him. Some later said that Hill waved to the official to signal that he understood and would comply, but Moss took it as a sign that he could overtake Hill. He approached Hill in his Lotus, but Hill swerved slightly to negotiate the bend and the next moment Moss was driving on the grass verge and heading towards the disaster.
Graham Hill later claimed that he never waved his hand. The Lotus was thrown into the air and flew straight into the embankment. Moss was taken to hospital, seriously injured. An X-ray showed that the impact had caused the right side of his brain to become physically detached from his skull, a sign of deep coma. The other injuries – a double fracture of the left leg, a broken left arm, a fractured cheekbone and a damaged left eye – were only minor wounds compared to the brain injury. Moss was in a coma from which he did not fully emerge until 38 days later. His career as a Formula 1 driver was over.
Eggshell
The following season brought some important technical innovations. With Lotus 25, new principles of body design for motor racing were introduced, principles that are still in principle today and have had a major impact on drivers. The new bodywork did away with all the tubes that could be seen on the exterior. It was even more like an eggshell or the fuselage of a small aircraft, very beautiful and also functional. But this aerodynamic shape caused a few problems for the racers at the beginning. For example, the gears could only be moved by moving the wrist backwards and forwards, as there was no room to bend the elbow. “It’s bloody ridiculous,” one of the racers said.
In 1963, a new name emerged among the drivers. John Surtees did not win the coveted World Championship title in a Ferrari, but only a year later. That year, Jim Clark became champion in a Lotus 25, winning seven grand prix. Others had also raced the same cars, but Clark’s Lotus 25 was much more worn out than the others by the end of the race. This meant that he pushed it to the limits.
Slowly, some of the riders who had lasted a few seasons in the Grand Prix are starting to leave. In 1964, Phil Hill, the 1961 World Champion, said goodbye after seven seasons. He confided his feelings to journalists:
“You have to be out of the business for a while and also far enough away from it to see objectively where you have been. I know how I feel about motor racing now. I understand much better now the reasons why I raced better than others than I did when I was still racing. So I can respect and admire those who have raced longer more.”
In 1965, Jim Clark’s six victories announced that he was going to climb back on the podium and become World Champion once again after 1963. That year, however, another Scot made his indelible mark on the races. Jackie Stewart had gained quite a bit of experience in Formula 3 racing and announced that he would be challenging for the title in a few years’ time.
In 1966, Jack Brabham went for his third championship title. He never found it harder to drive than at the Belgian Grand Prix, because the weather was so bad. While it was dry at the start, it was pouring rain at the other end of the course, which is dangerous even in the best of weather.
“Unfortunately, almost nobody at the start knew anything about this weather change. As soon as I took the most dangerous corner at the other end of the track, I saw that it had rained a little earlier. The track was slippery, there were puddles in places and we were going 217 kilometres per hour when we started to drift. Jochen Rindt was driving in front of me and I could see that he was in trouble. I started to brake when Rindt’s car started to spin like a top. I have never seen a car spin so many times, so fast and so violently. The strangest thing was that while it was spinning, it was still going around the corners. It was a miracle that he stayed on the track, but the awkward thing was that I was catching up with him because he was going slower because he was spinning.
The last time he turned, I was right next to him. But luckily he ended up on the right side of the track, leaving me enough room to pass him on the left. Rindt really surprised me. Despite the heavy spin, he kept going and finished the race in second place, which was fantastic. If I had spun like him, I would have given up racing for good.”
Brabham finished fourth, but several other cars were blown off the track. Jackie Stewart was badly injured and was unable to get out of his crumpled car. The fuel tank was leaking and Jackie was soaked in fuel. Graham Hill came to his rescue, first turning off the fuel pump and checking for sparks. Finally, he managed to get Stewart out of the car, but only after unwinding the steering wheel. He then carried him to a small farmhouse nearby. He stripped him naked, his clothes soaked in fuel. Finally, an ambulance arrived and took him to hospital in Liége. He had terrible burns, a broken collarbone, a dislocated shoulder and broken ribs.”
This experience made him decide that the safety situation at the race tracks needed to be improved. He was the one who demanded safer seats and seatbelts, flame-resistant clothing for drivers, protective fencing on racetracks and pit stops at corners. However, he did not initially find support from all the drivers. Even Stirling Moss, despite his bad experience of accidents, did not always agree with him. In his autobiography, he described it like this:
“We don’t want staging areas and things like that. We accept the risk, like in Monaco, of crashing into buildings or going off the track. I like seat belts in closed cars, but in a race car I want to be thrown out of the car in case of an accident because of the risk of fire.”
Then, like a comet, New Zealander Denny Hulme appeared on the racing scene and won twice in 1967, although Monaco and the Nürburgring are among the toughest races in the world. Although Jim Clark won four times, Hulme became the new World Champion. Jim Clark only finished third at Monza in September, a result that finally put him one race away from the title. The new champion was nicknamed “The Bear”, and was called that by people who liked him, and also by those who disliked him.
He clashed with the press right from the start, and the International Federation of Journalists awarded him the “lemon” for the least friendly Formula 1 driver two years in a row, all because he wanted “to be left alone to race in peace so he could go home. I had a hard time getting the title and maybe I was bitter about it. I worked hard and if I got to where I am, it was because of my work. Until I became champion, the journalists were never nice to me, so I took it out on them.”
Player’s Gold Leaf
The face of Formula 1 changed radically in January 1968 when Lotus race cars changed colour from the traditional British green with a central yellow stripe to the red and gold of Player’s Gold Leaf cigarette packs. Traditionalists were horrified. They had not yet realised that the era of commercialisation had also dawned on the racecourses. This was also the year when one of the greatest racing drivers lost his life in a tragic way.
In January, Jim Clark won the South African Grand Prix for the 25th and final time. He was a driver who made very few mistakes and had very few accidents. But his biggest accident, in which his rear tyre blew out and came off the ring during a Formula 2 race in Hockenheim, Germany, killed him.
Graham Hill recalled the event as follows: “I saw Clark rounding a bend in front of me, then he disappeared. I thought he’d gained a few seconds, and at the same time I saw some brake lights on the fastest part of the straight, moving away from the track towards the trees. I immediately thought that something bad must have happened to whoever had been swept away in that direction. But I never thought it was poor Clark.”
Jackie Stewart described Clark: “Nobody knew what was going on inside him. He was an incredibly reserved man, yet you could see his anxiety growing with age. He was one of the coldest and most calculating racers in the world, even though he was constantly biting his nails. He was terribly tense in his own way, but when he got behind the wheel he changed completely.”
The Nürburgring has always been the most feared track for all the drivers, as it was very dangerous even in good conditions. It had 170 bends and nearly 100 people have lost their lives on it. It was quite bumpy, with cars jumping in the air from one corner to the next, and there were rocks or ditches on either side of the track.
Jackie Stewart recalls this lane as an almost monstrous event in August 1968: ‘It was raining so hard that I couldn’t see anything in front of me, not even the front of the car. The track was narrow and undulating and it was difficult to navigate, especially in the rain. I was constantly worried about the car slipping on the wet track and I kept losing control. I hoped that the vehicle in front of me was driving in the same way and would not suddenly appear in front of me.
We were driving at around 270 kilometres per hour, with water staying on the track and not draining off. There were only three laps to go when it really poured. That’s when I lost control of the car because of a real river of rain coming over the track. The car started to drift towards the safety officer, who was standing unprotected at the side of the track. He stood as if petrified, watched me racing towards him and did not move. He bounced just before I was about to crash into him. Something similar happened to Graham Hill, who was driving behind me. I was very happy to win that race in the end, even though I’m sure it shouldn’t have happened in those conditions.”
The last season of the 1960s was marked by race cars that started to be fitted with awkward wings at various ends of the bodywork. Some teams didn’t understand their significance at first. Then everyone realised that they helped and kept the car on the track. Jochen Rindt had such flaps at the Spanish Grand Prix at Mont Juich in early May 1969, but they buckled on lap 20 at 225 kilometres per hour. The rear of the car lifted up as if to climb a guard rail, the car was thrown to the right, flipped upside down and began to slide along the track. Fuel was gushing out in huge quantities and the slightest spark could have caused all hell to break loose. Rindt’s face was covered in blood and all he could say was, “Shit.”
Five days after the accident in Spain, Rindt wrote to his team leader. In the letter, in which he complained about his health, he also came out with a real problem. He had nothing but complimentary things to say about the team of mechanics and finished: “I can only drive a race car that I trust. And I feel that trust is now gone.”
The decade was over and a new era of Grand Prix competitions had begun. The old guard of Jackie Stewart racers was slowly retiring, and new heroes were emerging. Names like Emerson Fittipaldi, Niki Lauda, James Hunt, Nelson Piquet, Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna, Mika Hakkinen and Michael Schumacher began to fill the sporting newspapers. It was a new era of racing, more brutal but also more technically sophisticated.
