Ascari's Last Curve

by JOHN FITCH

1

ALBERTO ASCARI, like his father, died at the wheel of a racing car. Both were thirty-six years old and both died on the 26th of the month twice the 13 that Alberto feared. It was a fate that his race-wise friends could have predicted for him, but who can say that the Ascaris, father and son, chose the wrong career?

The shadow of Ascari’s father and his mother’s fear that Alberto would follow him made Alberto aware of the stakes involved. But young Ascari was compelled to race, and at seventeen he overcame his mother’s opposition by threats to run away from home. Secretly at first, he raced motorcycles with moderate success until his opportunity to graduate to four wheels came in 1940 when he drove an early Ferrari in the Mille Miglia. Ascari never seemed to doubt where he was going.

His real success began with Maserati cars after the war, and at Modena in September of 1947 he had his first taste of the victory that was so sweet to him. His star rose quickly and in 1949 he was champion of Italy. From then on, he was always a driver to be reckoned with in the battle for the world’s championship, and this he won with Ferrari in 1952 and 1953. He went everywhere that races were held. In Spain, South America, Italy, England, France, and Germany, his skill was polished to a razor’s edge by experience and the counsel of his veteran teacher and friend, Gigi Villoresi. This was one of the closest and most successful master-protégé combinations in sports history. Villoresi was at the peak of his powers just after the war when Ascari was finding himself. Gigi, a gentle and cultivated bachelor, guided Ascari’s apprenticeship and taught him his technique of cornering, which may account for a long absence of serious crashes. The secret is to brake early and drive smoothly around the corner with full power on. This gives a margin of safety as well as being fast. When the corner is entered too fast a lot of correction is necessary before the car is steady enough to take full throttle again. But Villoresi taught Ascari to concentrate on leaving the corner fast, benefiting by a higher speed all the way to the next corner.

This and a knowledge of which corners to leave fast and which should be entered fast in order to get the best lap speed were the key to Ascari’s mastery, I think. For Alberto, these were the tips that counted; they were the inside story on the only world that mattered to a man whose star was a checkered flag at the end of a hot and dusty road.

Ascari became a hard-minded, analytical, grimly determined racing machine. However much he suffered off duty with ulcers, sleeplessness, and apprehension, behind the wheel he became a cold computer of distance, time and tires, corners and competition, and he got his checkered flags, luck and family history notwithstanding. He became stonily indifferent to danger, and the thought of such emergencies as lost wheels or broken suspensions, two of the completely uncontrollable hazards he faced, left him unmoved.

He brought a Ferrari to Indianapolis in 1952 and won the respect of everyone from the perennial railbirds to the speedway’s president, Wilbur Shaw, by his masterful handling of a basically unsuitable car The Ferraris were designed for road racing rather than for the relatively constant speeds and the greater distance of the Indianapolis event.

There were three similar Ferraris at Indianapolis that year, but their American drivers bowed to the seemingly inevitable when the cars refused to qualify. The drivers switched to the native Offenhausers. Not Alberto. Fired by pride in his Italian car, Ascari, a foreign underdog a long way from home, modified the car, changed tactics, and tried harder. Finally, with his face a picture of determination that truly approached ferocity, he forced the car to a qualifying speed, ensuring his entry in the race.

He knew where he was going all right, and he was well on his way when a collapsing wheel spun him helplessly into the infield and out of the race. He was in the northeast curve traveling at about 120 mph, not a remarkable speed until you consider the curves at Indianapolis. No one of these curves is like any other, and all are bounded on the outside by a cement wall that has proved to be immovable. The curves are slightly banked to a degree designed to prevent centrifugal loading at 85 mph, and they are all bumpy. At 120 mph, Ascari was precariously holding his heavy Ferrari to the smooth line that would carry him onto the next straightaway, while it bounced, jerking and skidding, toward the wall. At this moment the outside rear wheel, the one doing the most to resist centrifugal force, collapsed, crashing the lurching car onto the pavement in a shower of sparks. The sensation must have been something like falling through a trap door on a roller coaster. Alberto was no longer a driver, but a passenger in his spinning car as it described a large arc, at first toward the dreaded wall and then looping down into the unpaved infield where it came to rest in a cascade of plowed earth. To have a wheel collapse at a speed of more than 100 mph is not a trifling matter. But Alberto was concerned only with his next race. It was not his first or his last wheel failure. The next was in Germany.

In 1950, 1951, and 1952, Ascari had won the Grand Prix of Germany on the Nurburgring, which is known as a driver’s course. Here the road twists and plunges erratically through the Eifel Mountains in a particularly wicked way that awards courage and skill a clear dividend of speed. There are few straights allowing a moment’s respite and these are punctuated with humpbacked bridges which send a fast car soaring. Here, in 1951, Ascari demonstrated the high order of racecraft he commanded when, with a small lead over his old rival Fangio, he calmly drew into the pits before his last lap. The Ferrari team was frantic. Ascari wanted the tires changed before committing himself to that long (14-mile) last lap rather than risk a failure. He knew he had time to change before Fangio passed and that he could hold Fangio if he had new tires. He was right, but the strain on the Ferrari team was almost unbearable.

In 1953, his efforts to make it four wins in a row were surely the ultimate in cold-blooded determination. He had a 50-second lead over Fangio (again) one kilometer from the pits when he lost a front wheel in the fastest part of the circuit at about 140 mph. By means known only to Alberto, he not only avoided a crash but arrived at the pits at the same time as Fangio. He had covered the kilometer on three wheels only 50 seconds slower than Fangio on four wheels! Then, when most drivers would have put the brakes on and ruined the brake drum, he let the car coast to a stop even though it was beyond his pit. Furthermore, he left the engine going, so that when the mechanics arrived with a jack, he was able to drive backwards to the pit while a mechanic steered with the jack handle. With a new wheel he sailed off and his next flying lap was a record, in spite of the fact that the brake drum was damaged and out of balance. He then took over Villoresi’s car, which Gigi was always glad to give to his erstwhile pupil, and set up another lap record. Just when it appeared conceivable that he could do it again and win in spite of everything, the car broke and he retired. He quietly packed his helmet and goggles into his bag, put on his customary sports jacket, and walked out of the pits to a spontaneous ovation for a man who had tried and lost.

But Ascari usually won. On that hard championship trail that kept him packing, traveling, practicing, and racing nearly every weekend, the novelty became the race Ascari didn’t win. The results were almost monotonous; still no one denied full credit to his determined skill and applied racecraft. He was the idol of the tifosi, Italy’s racing fans, and his nickname, “Ciccio” (roughly, Chubby), was universally known in Italy. The name Ciccio was a measure of his real popularity. Instead of being awed by their world champion driver — and this is an awesome thing in Italy — his fans named him familiarly and affectionately.

2

ASCARI was an undemonstrative, almost non-Latin, Italian whose quiet behavior was as unpretentious as his stodgy figure. A show of temperament or grandstanding of any kind was simply never suggested by anything in his public or private behavior. He didn’t care for crowds or attention from the press, but he put in a dutiful appearance at the many prize-giving functions whose success depended upon his presence. After the function was over he would take a solitary walk, clearing his mind in the fresh air and looking, in his neat blue suit, a little like a respectable headwaiter after hours. He was never exuberant, but his smile came most frequently in the company of racing friends, when concerned with the familiar questions of his profession.

At Indianapolis, he whimsically solved the language problem by learning one innocuous word and using it for all occasions. Everything was “fine, fine" for Alberto at the brickyard. No one could remember such an agreeable fellow.

He was superstitious, as are most drivers whose continued well-being is dependent upon such vagaries as the flight trajectory of birds (which can knock a man out at high speed), the ability of a battered tire to resist blowout, or the good fortune to miss an invisible patch of oil dropped by another car. Good drivers often see their comrades crash for reasons which are never completely understood. The results of chance happenings on the race course are drastic enough to tempt the most literal-minded to consult astrologists. Like many another driver seeking a neutrality pact with fate, Ascari shunned black cats, the number 13, and so forth, but he also had a private anathema: the Monthlery circuit outside Paris, the road where his father died. It was too deeply fraught with association, even for Ascari.

And so Alberto Ascari became the Italian driver of his age in a country that knows racing and breeds good drivers. He was the World’s Champion for two consecutive years, 1952 and 1953. Instead of easing up when on top, he demanded more of himself, became determined and dedicated to victory. His escapes became more frequent and miraculous. There never was a suggestion of retirement. He was an idol, and idols seldom quit at the peak of their powers.

It is conceivable that Ascari drove as though he could afford to die; that the circumstances of his life and times as Italy’s champion demanded it of him, and that he acceded. To see him drive was to consider this possibility; for, though beautifully controlled and never wild, he used the full capacity of his car and every inch of road, leaving absolutely no margin for error.

Pressing for every second at high speed in Mexico, he anticipated a right curve over a hill but found a sharper left instead. His big Ferrari rocketed up the wall of a cut, rolled and skidded hundreds of yards down the road on its fragile alloy roof. Luckily for Ascari, the Ferrari was a coupé.

Ascari never liked the Mille Miglia or its Mexican counterpart, the Pan-American, because these long-distance, city-to-city races on the open road, which can at best be only partially remembered, did not suit his thrusting style of driving close to the border of control. His technique was better suited to the short and fierce Grand Prix on known circuits. A Mille Miglia crash in 1951 resulted in the death of a spectator, and the ensuing process of law deprived Ascari of third-party insurance until the case was settled. He therefore abstained from entering the event out of consideration for spectators until 1954, when, the case settled, he won for Lancia in one of his most glorious victories. Though he had entered with distaste and even with misgiving in a Lancia that was as yet unproved for long-distance races, he and Villoresi practiced assiduously. A truck rammed him the morning before the start, on the streets of Brescia as he set out for a final check of the first miles; but despite the unpropitious sign, he made the start and fought for 1000 miles in appalling weather to win the race least suited to his nature, He said he was especially glad for Villoresi’s sake as his old friend had crashed in practice and was unable to start.

He fought a prodigious, race-long battle with Fangio and Farina at Monza in 1953 only to have his first place snatched from him on the last curve of the last lap by a crash. Villoresi crossed the line himself and rushed back, his face a mask of anxiety, to find his friend regretting only the lost victory.

In May, 1955, four days before he died, at the moment of gaining the lead in the Grand Prix of Europe, he crashed through a barrier and plunged into the harbor at Monte Carlo. He had just burst out of the dark tunnel under the Casino and rushed down the ramp to the chicane, a barricaded jog that carried the race onto the quay bordering the basin with its white yachts decked with fluttering pennants, when a snatching brake or perhaps a film of oil left by the last Mercedes, retiring at this moment in a swirl of blue smoke, upset the delicate 100 mph balance. Ascari’s Lancia could not be saved. In an explosion of fence splinters and sandbags he catapulted into the harbor in a geyser of spray and steam that towered like a depth charge. For a dreadful twenty seconds the milling green surface gave up only a few oily bubbles while divers, prepared for just this emergency, scrambled into action. A puck of cars roared by, the last slowing as its driver twisted in his seat looking back. A light blue helmet bobbed to the surface, and Ascari’s streaked face was beneath it. On leaving the quay he had missed a steel mooring by inches, and not to have been knocked unconscious or caught in the sinking car was a bonus of luck, but to Alberto it was “nothing, nothing.”

From the brief convalescence at his home in Milan it was only a few minutes’ drive to Monza, Italy’s premier circuit, where he had seen his father win in 1924. There, on the familiar road, while trying a Ferrari before the next Sunday’s race, Alberto Ascari took his last curve. The curve where he crashed could be taken at full speed easily in the carefully prepared car he was driving; the exact circumstances of his death probably never will be known. The sports car he was driving was 20 mph slower than a first-class Grand Prix car at this point, which means that the Ascari talent could not have been brought to bear, much less ruffled, by the driving situation in which he died. Some say he had not recovered from the Monte Carlo crash and suffered a sudden relapse or missed a gear. Whatever happened, the racing world lost one of its finest figures of all time.

His funeral brought a day of mourning for a nation stunned with grief. Milan, the business and financial center of Italy, was as quiet as a village when the fifteen canopied carriages required to carry the many wreaths inched past the silent mourners. On the black coffin rested Ascari’s familiar light blue helmet. The procession was drawn by horses, feather-plumed and all black, and only the sorrowful clopping of hoofs could be heard from the streets lined with black drapes. A million people paid the only tribute left to give to a favorite prince who was lost in his full strength.