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As much as our rose-tinted retro spectacles like to believe that motorsports was better in the old days, domination has been a regular occurrence in racing’s 120-year existence. On YouTube, you can find Shell’s fantastic half-hour documentary on the 1955 Belgian Grand Prix. It’s a delightful trip back in time to when Spa-Francorchamps was in its perilous 8.761-mile form, when wire wheels and tire sidewalls bent through sustained cornering at Les Combes and Burnenville, and fans were protected by strips of grass and a lack of imagination. What it also shows is that the race itself was something of a demonstration run for Mercedes-Benz.
Driving a Lancia D50, Eugenio Castellotti had taken one of the most memorable pole positions in grand prix history, in only his fifth Formula 1 outing, and third at world championship level. It was an extraordinary mind-over-matter effort while he and his compatriots – and F1 fans in general – were still in shock and grief over the death of his erstwhile teammate, the great Alberto Ascari. Castellotti’s achievement was also performed against the background of the messy absorption of the Lancia F1 team by Scuderia Ferrari – in the D50, Lancia had a great Vittorio Jano-designed car, but no money; Ferrari had some money, but was being crushed on a regular basis in F1 by Mercedes.
It was no different on this occasion at Spa. Fangio’s W196 grabbed the lead at the start, and by the second mile, Moss’s silberpfeil was into second. Castellotti’s retirement on Lap 17 signaled the end of the token opposition to the Benz brutes. Fangio kept Moss at arm’s length pretty much throughout, and around 2h40m later, won by eight seconds. Next up was 1950 world championGiuseppe Farina’s Ferrari, 1m40s adrift. His closest challenger, another Ferrari piloted by racing journalist Paul Frère, was a similar time in arrears.
This was the second of four wins for Fangio that season, and it’s captured on the cover of this issue of Vintage Motorsport, in which we do a deep dive into the legendary W196, that car that held a not-quite-two-year reign in Formula 1.
Can you imagine the reaction of those watching the “streamliner” model being brought out of the transporter in the paddock at Reims in 1954? Anyone who hadn’t heard of M-B’s plans would be forgiven for thinking the German squad had accidentally brought a sports car to a Formula 1 race. And those who knew better, Mercedes’ rivals, probably took a look and thought “Uh-oh.”
Their pessimism was well founded: W196 was a classic, and in its two seasons, whenever it wasn’t the outright fastest car, drivers like Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss made up the difference, or the car would beat its Italian rivals with superior reliability.
Like the W196, but for different reasons, the Chaparral 2K didn’t spend long at the top of Indy car racing. In 1979 it was let down by pesky issues and by ’81 the other teams had caught up, but for one blissful season, Johnny Rutherford and Chaparral owner Jim Hall saw light at the end of the venturi and delivered an Indy 500 win and J.R.’s sole Indy car championship. The 2K’s brilliant designer, John Barnard, chose an illustration of this car for the cover of his 2018 biography, “The Perfect Car.” We’re sure he couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate vehicle.
If the superiority of the Mercedes-Benz W196 and Chaparral 2K were relatively fleeting, the Porsche 956/962 family made the Stuttgart-based marque a formidable force in sports car racing for the best part of a decade. Porsche was the target rivals aimed at for several seasons, and it took concerted efforts by the like of Electramotive Nissan, TWR Jaguar and Sauber Mercedes to overthrow 962s which, even when not factory cars, were run by immensely professional customer outfits, burgeoning with talented drivers, engineers, mechanics and tacticians.
It was one such customer squad that scored the 962’s first 24-hour race win in 1985 at Daytona, but victory did not go to the Holbert Racing squad that had chalked up five victories in the back half of the ’84 IMSA season. No, at the culmination of a strange race, it was Preston Henn’s team that, with the aid of a remarkable driver lineup, delivered the goods at Daytona.
Dominance can come in many forms, and when it comes to preeminent drivers, we’ve picked three to highlight, two of them demoralizing their opponents over a season, one in a single race.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Richard Petty’s sixth and penultimate NASCAR Cup Series championship, in which he set a modern-day record ratio of wins – 13 from 30 races – in that delectable (’74 model) Dodge Challenger. That he backed up this stat with eight more top-three finishes shows that he and his Petty Enterprises team had it all in hand on any given race weekend. There would be great days ahead – another championship, another 22 wins (including two more Daytona 500 triumphs) to take his tally to the magic 200 mark – but 1975 was the last year in which Petty was indisputably The King.
Another seven-time champion was Formula 1 maestro Michael Schumacher. He enjoyed several seasons of dominance in the sport – 11 wins from 17 in 2002 and 13 from 18 in 2004 are two extreme examples, but in both cases he was blessed with a Ferrari that was quantifiably better than the nearest opposition. We know this because his teammate Rubens Barrichello pounded the likes of Juan Pablo Montoya, Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso to claim second in points.
But the season that left us in no doubt that Schumacher was head and shoulders above his rivals came far earlier – 1995 and his final campaign with Benetton. That year, with the best engine of the time, the Renault V10, but with a B195 chassis not on par with Adrian Newey’s identically-powered Williams FW17, he made Damon Hill (world champion the following year!) and David Coulthard look remarkably ordinary. Between them, the Britons earned 12 pole positions to Schumacher’s four, yet in terms of race wins, they were beaten 5-9 by the German meister. Yes, Benetton’s strategists were superior to their Williams counterparts for most of the season, but as Ross Brawn pointed out on a regular basis, it was Schuey’s relentless race pace that enabled the team to turn gambles into surefire winning tactics.
“Relentless” would be an apt way to describe Jimmy Clark’s Indy 500 performance in 1965. After an oil-foiled first attempt at breaking the roadsters’ dominance at the Brickyard with his rear-engine Lotus-Ford “funny car” in ’63, and a rubber-stymied second try that ended in a DNF before quarter distance in ’64, Clark, Chapman and Lotus nailed down the lid on the front-engine Indy car ethos in ’65. A.J. Foyt beat everyone to pole in a one-year-old Lotus 34, but failed to trouble Clark’s Lotus 38 after Lap 3, and the humble Scot led 190 of the 200 laps and won by two minutes over Parnelli Jones – all at a record-breaking average speed.
Tales such as this, along with reports from Historic Sportscar Racing events at Daytona and Sebring, and the Taupo Historic Grand Prix in New Zealand make this an unmissable issue of Vintage Motorsport.
The February/March 2025 issue of Vintage Motorsport is now mailing to subscribers and is already available to read in digital format. We hope you enjoy it. Single copies can be purchased at our online store HERE Vintage Motorsport magazine is also available at Barnes & Noble bookstores nationwide.
