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 King of England is in the crowd. 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.[95]

Four red Alfa Romeos fill the front of the grid. The 158s — the “Alfettas” — are supercharged pre-war machines, and on this afternoon they are untouchable. Giuseppe “Nino” Farina leads from pole position, sets the fastest lap, and wins.[95] The sport has its first race, and its first winner, in the same breath.

The championship that opens here is a strange, half-formed thing. Seven rounds — six European Grands Prix and, improbably, the Indianapolis 500, run to entirely different American rules, where the Formula One and Indy fields almost never meet.[96] Points fall only to the top five finishers — eight for a win, then six, four, three, two — with a single point for the fastest lap, and only a driver’s best four results count toward the title.[96]

By season’s end the trophy belongs to Farina: thirty points, three clear of his Alfa Romeo teammate Juan Manuel Fangio, the title settled at Monza.[97][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.

Fangio loses the first championship and then takes almost every one that follows: 1951, then 1954, 1955, 1956 and 1957 — five titles with four different manufacturers, a record that will stand for forty-six years.[98] He wins for Alfa Romeo, for Mercedes-Benz, for Ferrari and for Maserati, moving between them like a man auditioning marques rather than the other way round.

It is a beginning written in red and silver, on a runway, in front of a king — and from it grows everything that comes after.[99]