Matt Bishop: Just four drivers from F1's first decade remain alive

Hans Herrmann died four days ago, on January 9, aged 97. The news landed with the dull thud of inevitability, yet it still had the power to hurt, because men like him somehow ought to be immortal, for he was not merely old. No, he was also venerable, a living bridge to motor racing’s most romantic but least safe epoch, a time when bravery was assumed rather than applauded and survival itself was a kind of victory.

Once international motor sport had recommenced after World War II, Herrmann raced in the wild, untamed, and unapologetically perilous classics such as the Mille Miglia, the Targa Florio, and the Carrera Panamericana, and he was still racing 20 years later, having adapted his driving style to suit the new breed of powerful and bewinged early-1970s endurance projectiles. Along the way he acquired a reputation as one of the great survivors: a dyed-in-the-wool racer whose very longevity felt like a rebuke to the sport’s then brazen acceptance of danger. His Le Mans win in a Porsche 917 in 1970 – the marque’s first triumph there, to be followed by 18 more – came when most 1950s aces who had survived that decade had long since hung up their helmets. Well into his forties, he had promised his wife that he would retire if he won, and he was as good as his word.

Following Herrmann’s death, a subtle but significant statistical line has been crossed: there is now no longer anyone alive who recorded a top-three finish in a 1950s world championship-status F1 grand prix, which Herrmann did in 1954, at the wheel of a Mercedes-Benz W196, at fast and tree-lined Bremgarten, Switzerland, which even 72 years ago was regarded as a scary place, especially in the rain; and it rained there in 1954. The heroes who stood on those makeshift 1950s podiums, if there were podiums at all — smiling, sweaty, grimy, and garlanded in laurels — are all now gone, their names long ago transferred from the realm of mere memory to that of indelible legend. Herrmann, the last of them, could say, hand on heart, that he had raced wheel-to-wheel with those giants — Giuseppe Farina, Alberto Ascari, Juan Manuel Fangio, Froilán González, Stirling Moss, Mike Hawthorn, et al — and that he had been there when F1 had been inventing itself, in real time, often with scant regard for the wellbeing of its dauntless protagonists. He was the last, and now he has gone.

Yet, if every top-three finisher of F1’s first decade has now met his maker, and they all now have, the decade itself is not entirely beyond the reach of living memory, for four drivers remain alive who started world championship-status F1 grands prix in the 1950s, although top-three finishes eluded them; four men who, in different ways and with different levels of involvement, lined up on the same grids, took the same risks, felt the same fear and exhilaration, and breathed the same oily air as the aces, even if their names do not resonate as loudly. They are, in descending order of age, Hermano da Silva Ramos, André Milhoux, David Piper, and Peter Ashdown, and each of them is a reminder that F1’s history is made not only by its winners but also by the hope and hustle of those who never quite made it.

Hermano da Silva Ramos is now 100 years old, a centenarian who, improbably and delightfully, still represents a living link to F1’s earliest years. Born in 1925, in Paris, he started seven world championship-status F1 grands prix, a modest tally by modern standards but a significant achievement in an era when opportunities were scarce, funding was haphazard, and travel itself could be an adventure. He raced in F1 in the mid-1950s, and like so many of his contemporaries he was a gentleman racer in the truest sense: competing for the love of it, driven by passion rather than by the prospect of professional reward.

Ramos’s mother was French but his father Brazilian, and his F1 forays were interwoven with sports car racing in Europe and South America. His first race was the 1947 Grande Premio de Interlagos, a Formula Libre race won by Achille Varzi in an old Alfa Romeo Tipo 308, which Ramos entered in an MG TC. Yes, you read that right: there is a man alive today who raced Achille Varzi, a megastar of the 1920s and 1930s, and the great Tazio Nuvolari’s fiercest rival.

In the 1950s, having returned to France, Ramos campaigned Aston Martin sports cars. In F1 he raced Gordini Type 16s, those dinky French machines that sometimes punched above their ultra-light weight, particularly when driven by the French aces Robert Manzon and Jean Behra. Ramos’s best F1 result, his only points-scoring finish, came in 1956, at Monaco, where he was fifth, albeit seven laps behind Stirling Moss’s winning Maserati 250F. Today, at 100, he is not merely a former driver; he is a century-old custodian of memories from a time when F1 was still defining what it was.

Next in line, and only just younger, is André Milhoux, who was born in 1928 and is now therefore 97. Milhoux started just one world championship-status F1 grand prix, but to measure his contribution to motor racing by that single statistic would be a pity. A Belgian, born in Liège, he raced a Fiat 1100 in the 1953 Spa 24 Hours, a Ferrari 500 Mondial in the 1956 Monza 1000km, and a Gordini T17S in the 1956 Le Mans 24 Hours. He is a man for whom racing was not a ladder to be climbed but a pastime to be enjoyed.

He drove his sole world championship-status F1 grand prix in 1956, at Nürburgring, the infamously dangerous ‘green hell’ that punished mistakes with pitiless brutality, and his opportunity came about quite by chance. A guest of Équipe Gordini, he had not intended to race until the team’s regular driver, André Pilette, was injured in practice. To race at the Nordschleife at all in the 1950s was an act of nerve. To do so with no preparation whatsoever, in a Gordini Type 32, a stylish but ponderous machine, as Milhoux did in 1956, required a particular brand of sangfroid. He completed 15 laps – more than 200 miles – before his engine failed, but he had broken his F1 duck.

David Piper, born in 1930, occupies a rather different niche in the sport’s collective memory. His F1 record shows just two world championship-status F1 grand prix starts, but his name resonates far beyond those sparse entries. Piper was a quintessential British privateer, a man who loved racing in all its forms and carved out a formidable reputation in sports cars, particularly in his own Ferraris and Porsches, which he painted bright green, and touring cars, racing tin-tops as disparate as a Chevy Camaro Z28 and a Triumph Dolomite Sprint.

His two world championship-status F1 grand prix appearances came in 1959 at Aintree, and in 1960 at Silverstone, at the wheel of a privateer Lotus 16, for like so many of his generation he straddled the amateur-professional divide with ease. He was good enough to race at the highest level — F1 — but he never constrained himself to it, preferring the variety and camaraderie of sports cars and touring cars.

His career was savagely altered by a catastrophic accident while filming the Steve McQueen movie Le Mans in 1970, which resulted in the loss of his right leg. That he survived at all was remarkable. That he continued to race thereafter, competing successfully in historic events with a prosthetic limb, was a testament to his indomitable spirit. He once described the accident with the very stiffest of upper lips: “I was sitting in a half a car, surrounded by smoke and dust, and I thought, ‘Good Lord, that’s my shoe over there, and my foot is still in it.’” It was. Today, 95-year-old Piper stands as an emblem of resilience, a man whose life in racing has encompassed both the beauty and the brutality of the sport.

The youngest of the quartet, if that word can be used with any validity, is Peter Ashdown, who was born in 1934 and is now therefore 91. Ashdown started just one world championship-status F1 grand prix, but his presence on the 1950s survivors’ list is no less significant for that. An Essex man, he started racing in the mid 1950s, in sports cars and Formula 2 cars, before becoming a leading light in Formula Junior until he had a big shunt at Rouen in 1958. He resumed his motor sport career the following year, 1959, racing an Alan Brown-entered Cooper T45 in that year’s British Grand Prix at Aintree. He qualified 23rd and finished 12th.

His racing story harks back to a time when talented amateurs could find themselves lining up alongside world champions, and when the distinction between professional and enthusiast was blurred to the point of irrelevance. When he felt that he had done enough racing he quietly hung up his helmet and opened a Vauxhall dealership in his native Essex.

What unites Ramos, Milhoux, Piper, and Ashdown is not success measured in trophies or even fame but participation measured in courage and enthusiasm. They raced in the 1950s, F1’s first decade, when safety was rudimentary, circuits were unforgiving, and risks were fearlessly yet casually accepted. They strapped themselves into machines that were fast and fragile, and they did so with a level of acquiescence that feels alien to modern sensibilities. To have survived that era, then to have lived long lives beyond it, is in itself worthy of a doff of the titfer.