Fifty years ago, cars powered from the front dominated grand prix races, but then everything was turned aroundThe universe has a natural order, even when it comes to motor cars, and Enzo Ferrari believed he understood it. "The horse doesn't push the cart along with its nose," he told guests assembled for his traditional end-of-season address in 1959. He was explaining why his Formula One cars still had their engines in front of the driver, where they had always been.
Ask a man of a certain age to draw a racing car and he is likely to sketch something with a very long bonnet and a short, hump-backed tail. Nothing like today's Formula One missiles. His subconscious image will have been formed by the prevailing shape of generations of front-engined racers – from Ferenc Szisz's 90-horsepower Renault, the winner of the first grand prix in 1906, through the Bugattis and Alfa Romeos of the roaring 20s to the streamlined Maseratis and Vanwalls of the post‑war era.
A year after Ferrari made his famous remark, three of his cars finished first, second and third in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza. The horses were still pulling the carts, as he had decreed. But 4 September 1960 would go down in history as the last day on which a front-engined car would win a world championship race, marking the single most radical change in the sport's technical history. From the results sheet, it looked like the most sweeping of triumphs.Phil Hill, the highly strung Californian who had already won the 24 Hours of Le Mans for Ferrari, took the chequered flag, covering the 500km distance at an average speed of 212kph, or 132mph – a record for the event – and became the first American to win a European grand prix since Jimmy Murphy's victory in France at the wheel of a Duesenberg, almost 40 years earlier. Two minutes behind came another Californian, Richie Ginther, a crewcut Korean war veteran who had worked as a mechanic for Hill during their early days on the American sports car racing scene. Ginther was followed into third place by Willy Mairesse, a Belgian driver of great speed but uncertain temperament.
Each of them was at the wheel of a Ferrari Dino 246, a handsome brute of a car whose bodywork – crafted in the Modena workshop of Medardo Fantuzzi, an artist in aluminium – was distinguished by a scoop on the bonnet, feeding air to its carburettors. The name Dino came from Ferrari's late son, a gifted young engineer who was said to have drawn up the basic configuration of its 2.5-litre V6 engine before dying of muscular dystrophy in 1956, aged 24.
The car delivered a world championship to Mike Hawthorn in 1958 and had won grands prix in the hands of two other Englishmen, Peter Collins and Tony Brooks. Collins died in a Dino 246, at the Nürburgring three weeks after winning the 1958 British Grand Prix at Silverstone, as did Luigi Musso at Rheims.
In triumph and tragedy, it was the final stage of an evolutionary process that had begun with the earliest horseless carriages. "It had a lovely gearbox and a lovely engine," Brooks remembers. "But let's just say that the road holding was not its strong point."
At Monza in 1960 there were special circumstances behind an apparently glorious day for the Italian team. For the second year in a row, the championship had been dominated by the new lightweight, mid-engined cars of the British constructors Cooper and Lotus. These were machines designed for a very different kind of racing, bred on the tracks laid out on a sudden profusion of decommissioned second world war airfields – Thruxton, Snetterton, Goodwood, Silverstone – which, with their smooth asphalt surfaces and open bends, were a world away from the corrugated, potholed road circuits on which motor racing had been born in continental Europe in the first half of the 20th century.
The layout of the new generation of British cars had been inspired by the little Formula Three cars assembled in a Surbiton garage in 1946 by John Cooper, with 500cc motorcycle engines located behind the driver's seat. The successful Auto Unions of the late 30s, designed by Dr Ferdinand Porsche, had pioneered the mid-engined format, but they had been heavyweights; it was Cooper's stroke of genius to combine the format with a concentration on reducing weight, and his great rival Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus, would take the philosophy ever further.
By the end of the 1950s they were trouncing the front-engined Ferraris and Maseratis, and it was probably with the thought of Stirling Moss's success with a Cooper at Monza in 1959 in their minds that the organisers of the Italian Grand Prix decided to hold the 1960 race on a combination of the conventional 3.5-mile circuit laid around the royal park of Monza with the fearsome and controversial banked oval track, increasing the lap length to 6.2 miles.
Banked speedways had existed since the earliest days of motor racing, but many drivers hated the steep and roughly surfaced Monza bowl. It was particularly unpopular with the British constructors, whose rear-engine machines had not been conceived with such coarse conditions in mind. When the plan to use it for the 1960 race was announced, they realised that the conditions would favour the heavier, more rugged Ferraris and promptly organised a boycott.
Of the 15 cars that had contested the preceding race in Portugal, all but two – the Ferraris – were withdrawn from the entry list for Monza. That meant the absence of the Coopers of Moss, Jack Brabham (the reigning world champion, who had just won five races in a row), Bruce McLaren and Brooks, the Lotuses of Jim Clark, Innes Ireland and John Surtees, and the BRMs of Graham Hill and Dan Gurney – all the serious contenders.
By that stage of the season it had become clear that the Ferraris were now also-rans. A second place for Cliff Allison at the opening race in Buenos Aires and a third for Phil Hill at Monaco were their only podium finishes. Now Enzo Ferrari sensed an increasingly rare opportunity to win a grand prix, and his home race at that. The organisers found themselves facing the prospect of a grid occupied by a handful of Ferraris, a single old Maserati in the hands of the plump Bristolian garage owner Horace Gould, such no-hope hybrids as Cooper-Maseratis and Cooper-Ferraris, the JBW-Maserati of the Stockport amateur Brian Naylor, and the Cooper-Climax of Arthur Owen, a Londoner making his only appearance in a grand prix. To fill out the field to respectable proportions they opened the entry to 1.5 litre cars competing in Formula Two, attracting a response from Porsche, who sent their regular drivers, Hans Hermann and Edgar Barth.
Of all the cars eventually making up a motley grid the most interesting was a fourth Ferrari, entered in the Formula Two category with Wolfgang von Trips, the German count, at the wheel. Called the Dino 156, this was a mid-engined car aimed at the new Formula One regulations coming into effect in 1961, which stipulated a reduced engine capacity of 1.5 litres. In effect it was a refinement of the mid-engined Dino 246 that, making an appearance at Monaco earlier in the season, had signalled Ferrari's decision to listen to his engineers and bow to the inevitable.
Chief among those engineers was Carlo Chiti, who had been watching the development of the British cars with concern for several seasons. Late in 1959, he made up his mind. "If we wanted to win again, we had to go for a rear-engined car," he said many years later. "But I also knew very well that it would be difficult to convince Ferrari.
"He wouldn't hear of a single-seater with a rear engine. He believed that this would be a betrayal of the whole technical philosophy of his company. He kept telling me: 'Do anything you like to get a victory with a traditional car, because that's where Ferrari's destiny lies. Our touring cars have front engines, and our customers will never agree to buy cars designed differently from the ones with which we race.'"
Eventually Chiti's entreaties were heard. But when the first mid-engined Dino 246 finished sixth on its debut at Monaco, criticisms from the Italian press persuaded Ferrari to order the engineer to concentrate on the conventional cars for the remainder of the season. But development of the mid-engined Formula Two car continued, reaching fruition in mid-summer at Solitude, the German circuit, where Von Trips, in a rear-engined car, won the race and proved four seconds a lap faster than Phil Hill in a car with an identical V6 mounted at the front. At that point, Chiti was given his head.
Brooks had left Ferrari at the end of 1959, believing that mid-engined cars represented the future, and missed the Monza race as a result of the boycott. He was one driver who regretted the disappearance of the traditional front-engineered car and the challenge it presented.
"The rear-engined cars were much easier to drive," he says. "They were lighter, you could stop them much more quickly and they were more responsive, so if you made a mistake you could recover more quickly. With a front-engined car there was more scope for a really good driver to demonstrate his ability. When the rear-engined cars came in, there were a lot of drivers whose careers suddenly took off."
As was his custom, Ferrari did not watch the grand prix at Monza. He arrived to watch the practice session on the Saturday, but was ejected from the pits by the police for not having a pass and threatened to withdraw his cars from the event before receiving the organisers' apology.
While Ferrari sat at home in Modena, waiting for a telephone call from his team manager, Hill was winning the race with ease, while Ginther and Mairesse took turns at towing Von Trips's car in their slipstream, enabling the German driver to win the Formula Two class. When Von Trips stepped from his car, his face was covered with oil from the bigger machines of his two team-mates, so close had he been following in their wake.
No Ferraris competed in the final race of the year, the United States Grand Prix at the Riverside in California. There were just two front-engined cars on the grid: the slow Scarab of ***** Daigh, entered by the Woolworth heir Lance Reventlow, and the obsolete Maserati of the American driver Bob Drake. They finished in 10th and 13th place, thoroughly outpaced by the new generation.
In Holland five months later, Von Trips was at the wheel of the first rear-engined Ferrari to win a Formula One grand prix. The horse and the cart had changed places for good.
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