WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

Silverstone, 13 May 1950. A disused wartime airfield in Northamptonshire, its runways roped off with straw bales, a finish line painted across the tarmac. A hundred thousand people are here, and so is a King: George VI and the royal family watch from the pits, the only time a reigning British monarch has ever attended a Grand Prix.[95] Nobody quite knows it yet, but this is the first race of a World Championship that will still be running three-quarters of a century later.

Four red Alfa Romeos fill the front of the grid. The 158s — the “Alfettas” — are supercharged machines designed by Gioacchino Colombo back in 1937–38, their 1.5-litre straight-eights coaxed by 1951 to something near 420 horsepower, all from engine blocks cast before the war.[148] Giuseppe “Nino” Farina leads from pole, wins, and the sport has its first race and its first winner in the same breath.[95]

The championship that opens here is a strange, improvised thing. Alfa Romeo’s 158 wins six of the seven rounds, and Farina takes the inaugural title at Monza, just ahead of his teammate Juan Manuel Fangio.[96] Stranger still, one of those seven rounds is the Indianapolis 500: from 1950 to 1960 the American oval counts for the World Championship, even though the European and American fields almost never meet, two racing worlds sharing a trophy they never actually contest together.[96]

The first name in the record books is Italian. The man chasing him is an Argentine — and he is about to own the decade.

Juan Manuel Fangio loses the first championship and then takes almost every one that follows. Five World Championships, won with four different manufacturers — Alfa Romeo, Mercedes, Ferrari and Maserati — and in 1954 he becomes the only man ever to win the title driving for two teams in a single season.[98] He wins 24 of his 52 starts, a strike rate near 46 percent that has never been beaten.[98]

His masterpiece comes at the Nürburgring in 1957. A slow pit stop drops him far behind the Ferraris of Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins; Fangio then breaks the lap record again and again, hunts them both down, and wins by seconds in what he later calls the finest drive of his life — his last Grand Prix victory.[147] He does it in a Maserati 250F, the car Stirling Moss would call the best front-engined Formula One car he ever drove.[150]

The machinery is evolving fast around him. Mercedes returns in 1954 with the W196 — the first Formula One car with mechanical direct fuel injection, the technology lifted from wartime Messerschmitt aero engines — and it wins nine of the twelve races it enters across 1954 and 1955.[149] For two seasons the sport looks like a German-Italian duel run at the edge of what anyone thought possible.

And then it shows its other face. At Le Mans in 1955 — a sports-car race, not a Grand Prix, but the same drivers, the same era — Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes is launched into the crowd. The driver and an estimated eighty-plus spectators are killed, the deadliest accident in motorsport history; Mercedes withdraws from racing entirely, and several countries ban it outright.[153]

Weeks earlier the sport had already lost one of its giants. Alberto Ascari — double World Champion — crashed his Lancia into Monaco harbour, swam clear, and then died four days later testing a Ferrari at Monza. He was 36, the same age at which his own father Antonio had been killed leading the 1925 French Grand Prix.[154] Ascari had been almost superstitious about it: he refused to race on the 26th of any month and always carried a lucky blue helmet — and he died on the 26th.[154] The new championship was learning, race by funeral, what it cost.

The 1950s were never only about driving. Alfa Romeo, having won the first two titles, simply walked away after 1951 when its state holding company refused to fund a new car to replace the ageing pre-war design — the dominant team in the sport, gone for want of a budget.[152]

The decade’s strangest chapter, though, belongs to Fangio. Reports record that in February 1958, on the eve of a race in Havana, armed members of Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement kidnapped the five-time champion at gunpoint and held him for around a day before releasing him unharmed to the Argentine embassy — an abduction that, it was widely reported, won the rebels more attention than any raid could.[98]

That same year produced one of sport’s great acts of grace. In 1958 Stirling Moss won four races to Mike Hawthorn’s one, yet lost the title by a single point — partly because Moss himself stepped in to defend Hawthorn before the stewards in Portugal, preserving the very points that beat him.[151] Hawthorn became the first British World Champion, then promptly retired, shaken by the death of his teammate and friend Peter Collins — and was killed in a road crash months later.[155] Moss would never win a championship at all, and is remembered ever since as the finest driver who never did.

It is a beginning written in red and silver — on a runway, in front of a king, under the shadow of the funerals. Fangio’s five titles would stand as the record for forty-six years, until a German called Michael Schumacher finally matched them in 2003.[98] Everything that Formula One becomes grows out of this strange, brave, half-formed decade.