Juan Manuel Fangio

Juan Manuel Fangio was born in Balcarce, a farming town south of Buenos Aires, in 1911, the son of Italian immigrants. He left school at thirteen to work in a garage, and learned to race on the roads of Argentina rather than on circuits: the Turismo Carretera, thousands of kilometres of dirt and mountain passes in heavily modified saloon cars, where a driver was also his own mechanic.

He did not arrive in Europe until 1949, when he was thirty-seven, sent over with Argentine government support. It should have been too late. Instead he won six races that first season, and in 1951 took the world title with Alfa Romeo.

What followed has never been matched for its spread. Fangio won the championship with Alfa Romeo, then with Maserati and Mercedes in 1954, with Mercedes again in 1955, with Ferrari in 1956 and with Maserati in 1957 — five titles, four constructors. He started fifty-one championship Grands Prix and won twenty-four of them, a strike rate no one has come close to since.

His greatest day was his last win. At the Nürburgring in August 1957, a slow pit stop left him almost a minute behind the two Ferraris of Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins. Over the next laps he broke the lap record again and again, on a circuit of more than twenty kilometres, caught them both and won. He said afterwards that he had driven harder than ever before, and that he never wanted to drive like that again.

In February 1958 he was kidnapped in Havana by Fidel Castro’s rebels on the eve of the Cuban Grand Prix, held for about a day and released unharmed — he later spoke well of his captors. He retired that summer, became head of Mercedes-Benz in Argentina, and was treated for the rest of his life as a kind of head of state of motor racing. He died in 1995, in Buenos Aires, at eighty-four.

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