FANGIO, THE GREATEST OF ALL TIMES. "The best classroom of all time was about two car lengths be

And I don't care how fast you went, boy, he could always go quicker. .. . No man who ever sat in a racing car made fewer mistakes than Fangio. No one.

The man's judgment was just incredibly good, never mind his sheer ability, his strength, his quickness." This was Stirling Moss speaking in the book All But My Life, which he wrote with Ken Purdy. Moss was peculiarly well qualified to judge.

During the fifties he and Fangio raced against one another for eight years. They were together on the Mercedes team in 1955. And for the best part of that time Fangio was the only man consistently capable of beating Moss. The two of them were forerunners of the modern professional. Both lived to drive and looked to be paid accordingly at a time when it was still un-fashionable for a racing driver to appear concerned with money.

Fangio had an equally high regard for Moss. They first clashed in the 1950 Italian Grand Prix. Dr. Giuseppe "Nino" Farina won the race, Fangio and Moss were second and third. "I passed him [Moss] twice," Fangio wrote in his autobiography. "Nevertheless I was strongly impressed by his driving style.... I sensed the makings of a great driver in this young man." It was a time when racing was very short of fresh talent.

The war had broken up the development cycle of grand-prix drivers. Most of the stars still were prewar figures, aging men playing out their final years, relying mostly on experience: Farina, Varzi, Luigi Villoresi, Chi-ron, Fagioli, Jean-Pierre Wimille, and Caracciola. They were challenged by new, but not young, stars: Antonio Ascari's son Alberto, and the two Argentinians, Fangio and his close friend Froilan Gonzalez.

The only exception was Moss, who was just emerging as a major talent. Racing was embarked on its last great romantic decade. Racing grand-prix cars could still be a diversion and not a profession. Most drivers had private incomes; they could afford to be temperamental, not that driving was easy.

Grand prix cars still had so many handling vices that drivers spent most of their energies taming their machines rather than the track itself. Handling characteristics changed radically during a race, and brakes had to be conserved to last the distance. Little was known about tires.

The master of these cars and this driving style was Fangio. He came from a peculiar school, but it prepared him well. Although he didn't break into grand-prix racing until he was thirty-nine, he was world champion five times after that. He was exceptional in other ways too.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, he lived quietly and singlemindedly. He dieted to keep his weight down, drank little and slept long. He remained married to, and evidently faithful to, one woman. He tailored his lifestyle to his driving.

Born to poor Italian emigrant parents, he treated money with grave respect, found himself a good manager, and parlayed his skill into a sizable fortune by the time he retired. He probably was at his peak when he first came to Europe in 1949. Over the next nine years Fangio must have been inspiration to millions of middle-aged men. He won twenty-four world championship races, driving Alfa Romeos, Maseratis, Mercedes', and Ferraris. Since the current drivers' championship system was introduced in 1950, only Jim Clark (twice world champion) has won more grands prix, and even he only beat Fangio's total by one.

On a percentage basis of races won Fangio is way ahead and with the depth of competition that exists at the top today it's likely he will remain so. But for the effort of Argentina's dictator, Juan D. Peron, to promote the national image, Fangio probably would never have come to Europe at all.

When he did come, dazzling in his artistry, he found plenty of room at the top. He was invited to join Alfa Romeo, which was at the height of its success.

In 1954 Mercedes came to him and he drove its Silver Arrows to two successive championships. When Mercedes withdrew, Fangio exploited his situation to the full, spending a good year with Ferrari and then leaving to join Maserati in 1957 for his last full season, just as Maserati's classic 250F grand-prix car reached the peak of its development.

Fangio was born in 1911, the fourth of six children sired by a house painter from Balcarce, a small town 220 miles south of Buenos Aires. He went to work in a garage at ten, but didn't begin racing until he was twenty three, driving a series of Ford and Chevrolet V-8 specials, which he built himself, in long distance races of a thousand miles or more. In 1940 he won the International Grand Prix of the North, a 5,920 mile chase across the pampas from Buenos Aires, over the Andes to Lima, Peru, and back.

It took thirteen days. Fangio became used to extraordinary physical punishment, to driving fast and flawlessly for thousands of miles over unknown roads.

He learned how to pace himself and his machine, and how to nurse a lame car for days on end. These were skills that were to stand him in good stead when he began his grand-prix career.

In 1947, the Argentine Automobile Club began staging an annual series of races around Buenos Aires, inviting the cream of the European drivers to compete. Villoresi, Varzi, Ascari, and Wimille, a Frenchman whom many people were now comparing to Louis Chiron in his prime, came that first year. Fangio was a spectator.

The next year he drove. The Argentine Auto Club bought a pair of 1.5-litre Maserati 4CL's and assigned one to Fangio. After the first race Wimille said of Fangio, "If one day he has the right car for his temperament, he will perform miracles." Wimille didn't live to see his prophecy fulfilled. He was killed at Buenos Aires the following year in an inexplicable practice accident.

His death came only a few months after Varzi died in equally anticlimactic fashion, rolling an Alfa Romeo 158 in the wet at Berne during practice for the Swiss GP. Varzi had raced cars for twenty years. He had crashed only once before, at Tunis in 1936 while he was driving for Auto Union.

Of the the prewar giants only Raymond Sommer and Luigi Fagioli, who had emerged from retirement, were now left and both of them would be dead within two years. Three months after Wimille's death Fangio was sent to Europe by his Argentine club with a new San Remo 4CLT/48 Maserati.

Admittedly driving against only middling compe-tition, Fangio won the first four races he entered. The real test came late that June in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, when he faced Ascari, Villoresi, and Felice Bonetto. The four men were driving identical 2-litre, unblown Ferraris. They raced for three hours, averag-ing over 100 mph, the lead changing among them constantly. At the finish, Fangio was in front with Bonetto second and Ascari third. El Cheuco ("the Bowlegged One") had arrived.

The Italians, who love motor racing more than any other nationality on earth, were stunned. The only champion left to defend Europe's honor was Farina. He and Fangio would meet ten days later at Albi, in France.

Farina had a law degree from the university of Turin and a wealthy father, co-founder of the Pininfarina coachworks. He epitomized the sportsman driver of the period. He was five years older than Fangio, had raced professionally since 1933, was a Mille Miglia specialist, and had been a member of the Alfa Romeo team in the late thirties. He was an utterly ruthless competitor and a magnificent stylist, credited with having originated the straight arm driving position.

For all his style, he was inclined to recklessness and had an incredible series of enormous accidents, which he survived, physically and financially. Nuvolari had "adopted" Farina during the thirties, but Farina didn't really come into his own until after the war. In 1949 he was approaching the height of his fame.

He was a popular figure in European society and was known affectionately as "the Fox." For all of Farina's experience, Fangio beat him at Albi, first in a five lap qualifying race and then in the final, when Farina's Maserati refused to start after a pit stop. "You didn't deserve it," he said to Fangio afterward and Fangio agreed, rather generously perhaps, since he had led both races from beginning to end. With this victory Fangio's rather simple existence was suddenly shattered. He was feted 'wherever he went, hounded by Europe's sporting press as well as his own, and besieged by a determined horde of female admirers.

He was happy to get back to Argentina. "When one runs the risk of losing one's sense of proportion," he said in his autobiography, "it's time to go home, sleep in the same .bed in which one dreamed while still a nobody, and eat the simple, healthy dishes of one's childhood. Fangio's victory marked the end of an era. It was Alfa Romeo's swansong in grand-prix racing and a supercharged car has not won a grand prix since. With the departure of Alfa went the last of a breed. Alfa's 158/159 was really a remnant of the thirties school of design which held that the key to victory lay in producing more and more powerful cars whose enormous acceleration and high top speed presumably made up for their lack of roadholding ability. In other words, as long as the car handled well enough to allow the driver to use maximum power,

it was enough. Now the time had come for a differ-ent approach. The FIA's announcement in 1951 that the current grand-prix formula of 1.5 litres supercharged, 4.5 litres unsupercharged, would continue through 1953, had the unexpected effect of virtually killing interest in grand prix racing for two years. Alfa withdrew, knowing full well that in 1951 it had reached the peak of develop-ment with the 159's eight-cylinder supercharged engine.

To hold off the Ferraris another year would mean going to the expense of designing a completely new engine with a very limited fu-ture. Mercedes-Benz had been in the process of building a small supercharged engine but aban-doned the project when the FIA announced that blown engines would be restricted to 750 cc (the unblown limit was put at 2.5 litres) in 1954. Other likely contenders—Talbot-Lago, Maserati, and Gordini—were all out of the picture by now, which left Ferrari's 4.5-litre cars essentially un-challenged. British Racing Motors (BRM) was at work on a car, but when it failed to materialize at the start of the 1952 season, race organizers decided that the only way to keep the public interested would be to stage grand-prix races for 2-litre Formula Two cars.

There were plenty of these about (although Ferrari was to dominate this category, too), and international competition was revived on a new scale, with England, France, and Italy well represented. These were the progeny of the cars Fangio had known in South America in the late forties.

They were no match for full-blooded grand-prix machines in terms of speed and spec-tacle, but they soon became more than a match for them technically. With top speeds of only 150 mph, designers were forced to concentrate on improving handling and increasing cornering power and braking.

This knowledge influenced the new generation of full-sized grand prix cars that emerged in 1954; they were considerably more sophisticated than their lineal predecessors. For Fangio, these two years were not happy. Alfa withdrew from Formula One and he joined BRM, the runt of the racing litter. Meanwhile, Marcello Giambertone, Fangio's manager, convinced him that Maserati had the best Formula Two car, and Maserati made him welcome.

The arrangement led to the only serious accident of his career. In June of 1952 he raced a BRM in the Ulster Trophy in Belfast, despite having a Formula Two race at Monza the next day. Bad weather delayed his flight to Paris and caused cancellation of connecting service to Italy. Fangio drove the 500 miles to Milan. "I knew I was making a rani and Maserati merely modified existing designs, but the two new challengers broke ground with radically different machines.

Mercedes in-troduced the W196, the most impressive of all its grand-prix cars. Lancia's D-50, designed by Vittorio Jano, whose credits reached back to the Alfa Romeo P2 and P3, had a short and sad history, yet eventually had an even greater influence on the future than the W196.

The new Mercedes was the work of the Mercedes Racing Department, directed by Rudolf Uhlenhaut, who had worked on the W125 and W163 before the war. The W196 was powered by a 2.49-litre straight-eight, with two plugs per cylinder and dual overhead camshafts. To solve the problem of valve springs breaking up under sustained high rpm, a Mercedes engineer, Dr. Fritz Nallinger, invented a cam-operated valve system (desmodromic valve gear). In addition, Mercedes used direct fuel injection in a racing car for the first time (although by now it was common in air-craft engines).

The engine produced 310 hp at 8,000 rpm and was mounted almost on its side in an immensely rigid space frame, giving the car an extremely low frontal area. The W196 grand-prix car had a top speed of 187 mph (in 1937 this had taken 600 hp to achieve). The engine drive shaft passed at an angle under the driver's seat into a five-speed gearbox, mounted behind the differential unit.

Huge, finned drum brakes were mounted inboard front and rear, reducing unsprung weight, an idea Lancia had tried on its sports cars the year before. The brakes too were new, the entire shoe moving against the drum, rather than pivoting from one end. Front suspension was by upper and lower A-arms and torsion bars.

At the rear it was a modified version of the swing-axle system that the company had tried to make work in the thirties. The problem then had been that the axles were pivoted around the centerline of the differential producing a high roll center and bad weight transfer under cornering.

What Mercedes did now was to double joint each drive shaft, which kept the tire flat on the road under cornering loads. Lancia's D-50 was as original as the W196, but utterly different. Jano's basic idea was to build a car with a very low polar moment of inertia, and constant weight distribution, points on which the W196 was weak.

The engine was a 90-degree, 2.48-litre V-8 with four overhead cams, two plugs per cylinder, and four double-choke downdraft carburetors, providing one choke per cylinder. It produced 260 hp at 8,000 rpm. Jano also chose a space frame, using the length of the engine as a chassis member.

There was nothing unusual about the suspension (independent front, de Dion rear), but a major step forward was the mounting of the fuel tanks on the sides between the front and rear wheels, thereby minimizing the change in weight distribution as the tanks emptied. Ferrari realized the value of this idea, too, and Aurelio Lampredi, who designed the new 2.5-litre car known as the Type 625, also put the fuel tanks inside the wheelbase, but beneath the body shell, giving it a pregnant look and earning it the name of squalo, or shark.

The way with a lot more than they do today. If you look back over the last few years in grand-prix racing, there have been many deaths, and in more cases than not the cause has been mechanical rather than driver error.

Neubauer was also saddened by the lack of strategy in modern racing. In the thir-ties, a 10-minute lap at the Niirburgring was fast, and every 75 miles (or five laps) drivers had to pit for fresh tires, which kept a team manager very busy.

Now times are approaching the 7-minute mark and pit stops are a thing of the past. But of all the elements in racing, tire chang-ing and pit stops would seem the most expendable. Perhaps what Neubauer really lamented was the diminishing role of the team manager. In any case, with Mercedes' with-drawal, Neubauer, the father and probably the best of all team managers, found his racing career at an end.

The Silver Arrows were rolled into the museum at Stuttgart, leaving Fangio a free agent. He was still driving well, but the men whose time had come were Moss and Hawthorn.