T HE AM A ZING S UMMER OF ‘55 T HE AM A ZING S UMMER OF ‘55 The year of motor racing’s biggest dramas, worst tragedies and greatest victories EION YOUNG Foreword by Tony Brooks Haynes Publishing Dedication In appreciation of the huge help from true friends, saving me from myself and TFW ... Thank you most sincerely. CON T EN ts Acknowledgements Foreword Introduction 1 January Prince ‘Bira’ wins in New Zealand 27 2 January Those searing South American races 33 3 10 April The saga of Ruth Ellis and David Blakeley 39 4 1-2 May Moss and the Mille Miglia - 1,000 miles at lOOmph! 45 5 May Ferrari’s mystery twin-cylinder Grand Prix engine 58 6 22 May In the drink - the tale of the 1955 Monaco Grand Prix! 62 7 25 May World Champion Alberto Ascari killed 71 8 30 May Fatal hat-trick at Indy 77 9 Summer Grand Prix du Roc 86 10 5 June Lancia’s Spa swansong 94 11 Summer Lancia flatters to demise 99 12 11-12 June New British cars at Le Mans 107 13 11-12 June Disaster at Le Mans 115 14 June The air-brake controversy 144 15 19 June Back to business: Racing goes on in Holland 148 16 16 July Briton wins the British Grand Prix 152 17 7 August Swedish mixture as before 162 18 11 September Banking on Monza 166 19 17 September Sunshine and shadow at Dundrod 174 20 30 September James Dean: “Too fast to live, too young to die” 183 21 8 October First Grand Prix for Cooper in “The Car that Jack Built” 193 22 16 October Final laurels in Sicily 198 23 23 October Tony Brooks wins in Syracuse 204 24 Epilogue The 300SLR Coupe: A racer that never raced 212 AC KNOWLEDGEMEN ts his book has been for me a hugely enjoyable visit to a Tseason of motor sport half a century ago, when the world was very different, a summer when the world of motor sport was changed violently and safety was being mentioned - or at least noticed - seemingly for the first time. It clashed with the sentiments of Earl Howe, then President of the British Racing Drivers’ Club, who addressed the drivers on the grid before a British Grand Prix in the late 1940s, saying “Gentlemen, motor racing is dangerous... and it is up to us to keep it that way!” It was also a summer when it was good to be British, when that dashingly youthful sportsman Stirling Moss was winning his first Grand Prix - and his home Grand Prix at that - and he amazed Italy and the world by winning the Mille Miglia at record speed in the works Mercedes. Tony Brooks, the quiet dental student, drove into the history books when he became the first British driver since Henry Segrave, in the 1920s, to win a Grand Prix on a foreign circuit with a British car by dominating the Syracuse Grand 11 THE AM A ZING SUMMER OF ‘55 Prix in a Connaught, to the total devastation and amazement of the famous and all-conquering Maserati team. I would like to thank those contemporary writers and sources I have used as research, since 1955 was six seasons before I found myself in Europe and travelling around circuits I had only read about in awe as a young bank clerk in New Zealand. Thanks to Haymarket Publications for the material I borrowed from the race reports in The Autocar and Motor Sport and I hope that I have used this as a means of honouring my predecessors at the typewriter in those days before laptops. My thanks for the use of the wonderful words by Peter Gamier, who did so much to capture the spirit of racing in that summer of ‘fifty-five. It was Peter, then Sports Editor, who invited me to write a page on racing every week in The Autocar “because I knew the younger drivers better than he did” in the mid- sixties. I wrote that page for over 30 years. Thanks to Chris Nixon for his volumes on the cars and drivers in that pivotal season of 1955 when Mercedes and Lancia were at loggerheads and thanks also to Peter Miller who was something of a soldier of writing fortune in the 1950s, covering the races, working with Aston Martin, mates with the drivers and writing books like The Fast Ones, much as I did in the 1960s and 1970s when I covered the races and for a time worked with John Wyer’s Gulf team, a generation after Miller had worked with him at Aston Martin. My thanks to Nigel Roebuck, the top motor racing columnist on Autosport, who has been a life-long enthusi- ast, a writer with a sentimental love of the history of the sport and the tenacity to stay involved into the modern era when racing has changed from an exciting amateur sport to a 12 A C KNOWLEDGEMEN ts professional arm of show business, fuelled by huge helpings of commercial sponsorship. It was Roebuck’s words that he allowed me to use from his interview with Sir Peter Ustinov and his memories of making the classic comedy offering of The Grand Prix du Roc, commissioned by a Californian record company in 1955. Thanks to Mark Hughes at Haynes Publishing for the offer of the idea and the suggestion that I was the person to write this book. Peter Renn has been my right-hand man back at my office base in Bookham, Surrey, and it has been thanks to the ARFS (Amazing Renn Filing System) that I have been able to research from afar. Closer to my laptop while I was finishing the book in Christchurch, New Zealand, has been Milan Fistonic who not only enjoys his impressive library of motor-sporting books, but also knows where all the facts I need are, and can e-mail instant answers to my many queries. Thanks to Milan and to Peter for making sure that I stay with the play. Thanks to Tony Brooks for his Foreword, a driver I never saw race but who has been warm and entertaining company when he has joined us for lunch at the Barley Mow, a true gentleman and a former Ferrari team driver from an era so different from the modern Michael Schumacher days that it belies comparison. In fact the comparison is direct between 1955 and 2005. Sex seemed to be safe then and motor racing was danger- ous. Now the reverse rules life and motorsport. In 1955 the drivers were sportsmen who regarded the danger as a necessary aspect, the challenge of the bullfighter, the jousting on the edge with the winner taking all. Now motor racing is necessarily safe and sanitised but there is room to 13 THE AM A ZING SUMMER OF ‘55 suggest that the drivers have become almost automatons cocooned away from the thought of danger. No such thing as changing gear with a lever after judging the optimum engine revs. Risk is relegated to the back of the shelf. Even the drivers on the last row of the grid are millionaires with management teams. I remember the morning I arrived late for practice at a Belgian Grand Prix and asked that bearded doyen, Denis Jenkinson, who was quick. Jenks regarded me for a moment and said “They’re all quick... even the slow ones are quick.” And of course the same stays true today if we are to assume that we watch the 20 best drivers in the world performing in a different country every fortnight with the action beamed by television to our living rooms wherever we may be in the world. The races may be excruciatingly clinical and boring to eyes that have been watching racing for half a century but this year I spoke to a young car salesman in New Zealand who had just returned from attending his first Grand Prix in Australia. His eyes were still like saucers and he spoke in awe of the noise and the enormity of the event. So the excitement and the speed is still there to the fans who are always discovering the excitement of Grand Prix racing for the first time, and becoming the newly converted who can tell their mates about the glimpse of Michael Schumacher in the flesh. I am pleased to have been involved in motor racing when there were what seemed like a handful of specialist journalists and photographers travelling from one race to another over the summer, mates with the drivers and the mechanics, when a post-race press conference was the driver sitting on the 14 A C KNOWLEDGEMEN ts back tyre of his car and telling it like it had been during the previous few hours of sweaty track action. Now there must be close to a thousand members of ‘the media’ who travel the world trying to write something different from their neighbour in the tabled ranks of writers, each with their mini TV screen. In ‘my day’ if you wanted to interview a driver, you asked him when it might be convenient to have a chat. They regarded an interview with enthusiasm because this was ‘PR’ (Public Relations) and an opportunity to get themselves and their opinions in print. Today a one-on-one interview with anyone on the front end of the grid is regarded as an imposition, an intolerable demand on a driver’s time, and a seat in a crowded press conference is as near to an interview with a star driver as the average scribe is likely to get.