In the summer of 1975 Juan Manuel Fangio took the journalist Rodolfo Braceli for a drive round the autodrome in Buenos Aires, the circuit where he had won the Argentine Grand Prix four years running. He waited until the belts were fastened, and he drove the first lap slowly, to make sure that the circuit was closed. When Braceli asked him whether he did not like speed, he gave the answer that stands at the head of this book. He was 63, and he had stopped racing in 1958, of his own accord.
He came late to nearly everything. He was 25 when he first raced as a driver, in a borrowed taxi entered under the name of his football club, and 37 when he first raced in Europe. He was 38 at his first World Championship Grand Prix, at Silverstone in 1950, and 40 when he was first champion, in 1951. He won the fifth of his titles at 46, and no one has ever been World Champion at a greater age. Then, at 47, he stopped.
He was born in Balcarce, a potato-growing town of the pampa, on 24 June 1911, the fourth of the six children of Loreto Fangio, a bricklayer from the Abruzzo who built the family house in Calle 13 a room at a time, and of Herminia Déramo, a seamstress. In the town they called him El Chueco, “the bandy-legged one”. From boyhood he worked at a smithy and then in one garage after another, and by his early twenties he and a friend had opened a workshop beside his father’s house. He had been a mechanic first, and he remained one. He promised the mechanics of every team he drove for a tenth of what he won, and Maserati’s engineer, Giulio Alfieri, remembered how gently he treated a car.
He made his name on the roads of Argentina, in the Turismo Carretera: races of thousands of kilometres for touring coupés, over dirt, desert and the passes of the Andes. For 1940 his friends raffled the car he was to race, and it carried him to victory over the 9,445 km (5,869 miles) of the Gran Premio Internacional del Norte (the Northern International Grand Prix), from Buenos Aires to Lima and back. He was champion that year and the next. In October 1948, on the long road to Caracas, he went off at night in northern Peru, and his co-driver, Daniel Urrutia, a friend from Balcarce, was killed. For a time he thought of stopping.
The state sent him to Europe instead. In 1949 the government of Juan Perón paid for the Maseratis of the Automóvil Club Argentino’s team, painted in the country’s blue and yellow, and Fangio was its captain. Before he left he told El Gráfico that he hoped for one win at least. He won six of his 10 races in Europe that season, and for 1950 Alfa Romeo signed him for the first World Championship.
Between 1950 and 1958 he started 51 World Championship Grands Prix and won 24 of them, and he took the title five times, for four makes: Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Mercedes-Benz and Ferrari. In June 1952, after a race in Northern Ireland, a night of aeroplanes and roads and a morning alone at the wheel over the Alps, he crashed on the second lap at Monza and broke his neck. He was racing again the next January, and his neck stayed stiff for the rest of his life.
His greatest day came late as well. At the Nürburgring on 4 August 1957, at 46, he won the German Grand Prix from behind and was champion for the fifth time. By his own count, 30 drivers were killed while he raced in Grands Prix. At Le Mans in 1955 he was just behind the accident that killed more than 80 people, among them his team-mate Pierre Levegh, and in Havana in February 1958, the night before a race, Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement kidnapped him from his hotel and let him go about 27 hours later.
He made up his mind to stop at Reims, on the long straights of the French Grand Prix of 6 July 1958. In 1989 he told Autosport what had gone through his head: “But while I was driving in that race, I started to think, what am I doing? … What am I looking for?” He finished fourth, and he never raced again.
He lived another 37 years, and from 1974 he was at the head of Mercedes-Benz Argentina. He never married; Andrea Berruet shared his life from the mid-1930s until about 1960, and after his death DNA tests and the courts named three men as his sons. Since 2021 he has lain in the museum of the town where he was born.
