An F1 Nostalgia Trip to the 50’s
The start of the Formula One season this month with the Melbourne Grand Prix and an article in the New York Times by John Burns, harking back 50 years to the dramatic Grand Prix season of 1958, induced a bout of nostalgia for the late 50’s, a last burst of old-style European elegance and exuberant high life, before it all gave way to the much more interesting and egalitarian wave of the 60’s. Nowhere did this come together more powerfully than in the world of motor racing and the birth of Formula One.
Burns compared the new F1 phenomenon Lewis Hamilton, the young 23-year old Englishman driving for McLaren, the first black driver to break into the sport at the highest levels who lost the World Championship in his rookie year to Kimi Raikkonen by just one point, to another young English driver battling for the world championship in 1958.
At 25 the debonair Peter Collins had the 1957 championship sewn up, when he handed his car over to senior team mate the legendary Fangio, whose Ferrari had developed steering trouble. “It’s too early for me”, said Collins, “you take it”. No wonder team boss Enzo Ferrari loved him like a son. Collins never made champ. He was killed later that year at Nürburgring, Europe’s No.1 killer track, and world’s No.2 after the Indy 500.
In fact 1958 was a bad year for racing drivers. Six top European drivers were killed that year, along with two Americans. In addition to Peter Collins there were Erwin Breuer (Nürburgring), Stuart Lewis-Evans (Morocco GP, Casablanca), Luigi Musso (Rheims GP), Archie Scott Brown (Spa-Francorchamps, Belg.) and Mike Hawthorn, killed in a road accident on the Guildford by-pass (UK). In the US, Pat O’Connor was killed in the Indy 500 of that year and Jimmy Reese at Trenton.
In the 50’s motor racing was a glamourous but dangerous sport, not just for drivers, for spectators too. It remained so through the 60’s, which is when the Brits came to dominate the sport (with an élan somewhat less than the Italians but more than the Germans), and on into the 70’s, accounting for Jim Clark, Bruce McLaren, Piers Courage, Peter Revson, Joachim Bonnier, Jochem Rindt and Graham Hill (plane crash). By the 1980’s drivers still crashed but fatalities had mostly been regulated out of the sport. The last F1 fatality was the Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna in the South African GP of 1994. Before that there had been no fatality in a race since 1982. But in that first decade of F1 from 1952 to 1962 it was a very different sport. In those ten years nearly 50 top drivers had been killed. In addition to those who died in 1958 these included: Alberto Ascari (1955 Monza), Jean Behra (1959 Berlin), Ivor Bueb (1959 Clermont-Ferrand), Chris Bristow (1960 Belgian GP), Eugenio Castellotti (1957 Modena), Alfonso de Portago (1956 Mille Miglia), Luigi Fagioli (1952 Monaco), Pierre Levegue (1955 Le Mans), Herbert MacKay-Fraser (1957 Rheims), Onofre Marimón (1954 Nürburgring), Luigi Musso (1958 Rheims), Louis Rosier (1956 Monthéry, Fr.), Harry Schell (1960, Belgian GP), Alan Stacey (1960 Belgian GP), Wolfgang von Tripp (1961, Monza).
After 30 years of safety improvements statistically Grand Prix racing is now safer than top level equestrianism. But high speed accidents remain common and no one in their right mind could claim it is not a high risk sport, with death an ever-present reality. Interestingly, addressing this Lewis Hamilton tells Burns racing without risk would hardly be worth the effort. “It’s very safe now, the worry for me is that it is getting too safe”, he said. “As soon as you make it into bumper cars it will get very, very boring.”
I have to say, that seeing F1 racers whizzing around a racetrack in a sports bar someplace, the sport has long since become a bore. Unless you’re an avid motor enthusiast where’s the fun in seeing Bernie Ecclestone raking in the lolly? A killer track in Singapore? Somehow it’s not quite the same, is it? Where’s the glam of Silverstone, Le Mans, Monaco or Monza, the sinister aura of Nürburgring set amongst the dark pines or the fast and fatal Belgian GP circuit at Spa?
Where’s the whiff of high octane danger, romance and glamour in it all now? If they can make ocean racing or the America Cup into a fascinating TV experience with the added spice of the world’s richest men duking it out on the high seas, no expense spared, there’s something badly wrong if the great racing marques run such a dull hi-tech show. Perhaps Bernie should let go his moribund grip on the sport and go off count his loot someplace? If we don’t want to bring more death back into the sport exactly, how do you reinvigorate the sport without it becoming boxing with headgear? Fact is our gladiatorial-watching, or should I say chariot-racing, natures haven’t just gone away, they’re with us still. Except when we think about it we think it’s wrong to enjoy seeing other men risking their lives for reward and our entertainment. Nothing is black and white, perhaps we should get over it….a little. Then again back in the 50’s motor racing still attracted hot-blooded men addicted to speed, high living and beautiful women. Men like the Fon, Alfonso de Portago, a good looking millionaire from one of Spain’s noblest families, a talented not reckless driver, an all-round athlete, Olympic bob-sleigh medalist, who married (among others) the world’s first super model Dorien Leigh (sister to Suzy Parker) and dating Linda Christian when his car went off the road near Brescia in the 1956 Mille Miglia and he and his co-driver with a dozen spectators were killed.
So while I resonate with John Burns as a young 14-year old skiving off from school across the fields to Silverstone, my enthusiasm for the sport did not last long into the 60’s. My high school was a Palladian pile barely three miles from Silverstone and from 1957 through 1960 I scarcely missed a meet. For reasons I can’t fathom, anyone caught at Towcester races, our nearest race course, would be mercilessly flogged and expelled on the spot. Weirdly the governors seemed to smile on motor racing but considered a flutter on the ponies the road to perdition. Perhaps that was more to do with their own backgrounds and the fact that the place had more than its fair shire of Midlands industrialists as parents. No accident then that Tony Vandervell’s son was a student there. I lost interest more or less when they stuck tail wings on the back and painted them John Player black or cowboy red.
For anyone growing up in the 50’s it was a time of Parker and Mulligan, the blues, and rock n’roll from America, from Europe it was fashion, the arts and high life, but frothy and fun. As young men in the 60’s it was rock & social revolution. Speed and Kristal, with bubbles and boobs, were no longer the drugs of choice of our aspirational icons. Much, much darker and a lot more real it was.
