Racing Greats

This year's Spanish Grand Prix was touted as being a triumph of pit strategy and clever planning by team leader Ross Brawn. However, aside from one fairly unimpressive accident right at the beginning, the race might have been dubbed the Curious Case of Jenson Button, as it was long, tedious, and predictable.

By now I'm sure rabid F1 fans are foaming at the mouth, racing to their Ferrari-branded keyboards and writing huge tracts about the many ways in which I should be disembowled with carbonfibre wings. Fair enough I suppose, but I would challenge anyone to be excited by Formula 1's chess-like strategies after reading, as I did before watching the race, anything about racing in the '30's-'60's.

In particular, I had been reading about the last variant of Mercedes-McLaren's SLR supercar, a homage to Sir Stirling Moss, and stumbled across this quote from the fabled racecar driver: “Jenks [navigator Denis Jenkison] had given me the signal that it was OK flat and we went over the damn thing [a humpbacked bridge] at 150 or 160 [about 250km/h] and the bloody thing was flying. It was a dead straight road, but I knew it was a bit dodgy. We were airborne for quite a few seconds.”

A bit dodgy indeed when you learn that this was on a narrow, tree-lined Italian road in an open-topped Mercedes with drum brakes, and nobody was wearing seatbelts in case the car caught on fire. Oh, and Sir Moss preferred shortsleeved shirts so he could work on his tan. Next to lunacy of this calibre, Formula 1 is like paintball compared to the Normandy landings.

That's not to say F1 is really boring, it's just been designed to be safer and safer, and rightly so. There's no way that the antics of the past could be allowed, and it's not like there still isn't a great potential for danger. But my fear is that the greatest racing stories have been told, Lewis Hamilton notwithstanding.

Sir Stirling's achievement, for instance, in the 1955 Mille Miglia, a 1600km gruelling endurance race, is nothing short of superhuman. Blasting through narrow, winding Italian country roads, throttle-steering the big Mercedes around blind sweepers with spectators leaping out at you, Moss averaged 160km/h over a ten-hour period, beating his closest rival and teammate by 30 minutes. His time of ten hours, seven minutes and forty-eight seconds would never be beaten.

Epic surely, but for the greatest racing victory of all time, we have to look to the Italians. Tazio Nuvolari was a successful motorcycle racer in the 20's and early 30's but by 1931 he'd decided to move into four-wheel racing. He had some success and engaged in the usual staggering stupidity of racecar drivers, racing once with a broken leg in a car specially designed to be driven with only one leg, but then came the 1935 German Grand Prix.

Every good story needs villains, and who better than the old standbys, the Third Reich. Yep, here come the Nazis in their two state-funded teams with the supercharged 400-hp Mercedes W25s and the rear-engined Auto-Union (later to become Audi) Type-Bs, also with well over 400hp. These enormous silver beasts were to be piloted by the best drivers out there: Hans Stuck, Rudolf Caracciola, Manfred von Brauchitsch, Achille Varzi and the amazingly talented Bernd Rosemeyer.

Nuvolari was in an hopelessly outdated and underpowered Alfa Romeo that looked like a chicken coop on bicycle tires. He was 43 years old, grizzled from years of racing and partially crippled by the injuries he had sustained through his career. The track was the fabled Nürburgring, a course that even today takes a dozen lives every year. The nine big German rocket ships lined up on the wet track in front of 300,000 nationalistic fans, one of them with a funny moustache and a bad haircut.

They're off! And already there's a serious injury as a mechanic rushing to help a stalled Hans Stuck gets clipped by one of the big Auto Unions, fracturing his skull. The slick track is no match for Caracciola, an expert in the wet, and he opens up a significant lead, but here comes Rosemeyer, drifiting his car through the corners at over 160km/h. The two racing greats duel for the lead, while von Brauchitsch and Varzi are battling with Hans Stuck who has somehow caught up after his disastrous start, and in fifth place it's...

It's Nuvolari! Yes, the 5ft 4in Italian in his tiny soapbox-racer of an Alfa Romeo is somehow keeping up to all that German horsepower. He's grimacing, chatting away to the car and patting it encouragingly, wringing every last ounce of speed and handling out of the little Alfa.

By lap nine, the Germans were still leading and the other two Alfa Romeos had predicably broken, leaving only Nuvolari battling alone against eight cars, Rosemeyer having pitted to change out his shredded tires. The little Italian was still hanging on, and then he wasn't just hanging on any more. He was winning.

Recording the first-ever sub-11 minute circuit of the Nurburgring, Nuvolari passed an Audi, then a Mercedes, then another Audi, and then suddenly he was past Caracciola for the lead! The crowd went deathly silent.

But then disaster strikes! Von Brauchitsch sets a blistering 10 minutes 32 seconds lap to catch up, and he, Nuvolari, Rosemeyer and Caracciola all enter their last pit stop at the same time. With military precision, von Brauchitsch's team gets him out first, then Caracciola and Rosemeyer. Nuvolari? Stuck in the pits, with a broken fuel pressure pump. As the mechanics attempted to fuel the car by hand, the time ticked away until he was right back in sixth place.

Sensing victory, von Brauchitsch pushed harder and harder as Rosemeyer and Caracciola fell back, charging to a comfortable lead of one minute 30 seconds. But then that lead started shrinking. And the car in second place, gaining precious seconds? It was the number 12 Alfa Romeo of Nuvolari.

Over the last three laps, von Brauchitsch's lead was cut until the final lap only left him a 30 second lead, not enough time to change the tires he had worn through pushing so hard. The cars disappeared out of sight, and the announcer had become so frenzied and unintelligible there was no way for the crowd to know what was happening. They waited for the winner to appear out of the light mist.

Finally a silhouette emerged. It was boxy, small, and there was a jubilant Italian at the wheel. The crowd sat in stunned silence.

Tiny Nuvolari looked ridiculous in the huge victory wreath that had been designed for the taller German drivers, and the race organizers hadn't even bothered to bring a copy of the Italian national anthem, but there was nothing taken away from the jubilation felt by the Alfa Romeo team, especially by its young leader, who declared that Nuvolari was the best driver that had ever been. The leader's name? Enzo Ferrari.

So you can have your clinical Formula 1, but I think I'll let Sir Stirling have the last word:

"To me now racing is - the dangers are taken away: if it's difficult, they put in a chicane. So really now the danger is minimal - which is good, because people aren't hurt. But for me the fact that I had danger on my shoulder made it much more exciting... And I think with driving a motor car, the danger is a very necessary ingredient. Like if you're cooking, you need salt. You can cook without salt, but it doesn't have the flavor. It's the same with motor racing without danger. For me.”

Me too.