Cruel tragedy of Elio de Angelis, an F1 gentleman with the talent to take on Senna

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Italian Formula 1 drivers have been much on my mind lately, and for an unusually happy reason. Kimi Antonelli, the startlingly gifted teenager from Bologna, has achieved something in recent weeks that ought to make every tifoso from Monza to Mugello sit up a little straighter and smile a little wider. By winning three F1 grands prix on the trot – Shanghai, Suzuka, and Miami – he has accomplished a feat that no Italian driver has managed since Alberto Ascari strung together one of the most dominant sequences in F1 history, winning nine consecutive F1 grands prix in 1952 and 1953, beginning at Spa in June 1952 and ending in the same place exactly a year later.

(Yes, dear pedants, I know that Ascari’s extraordinary run excluded the 1953 Indianapolis 500, which was technically part of the F1 world championship in those days, but none of the European teams or drivers ever bothered with it. Equally, I also know that F1 was run to F2 rules in 1952 and 1953, but it was still known as the F1 world championship in both those years.)

To be clear, I do not expect Antonelli to equal Ascari’s phenomenal victory spree. Nine successive grand prix victories is a tall order, and then some, and in 1952 and 1953 Ascari therefore seemed to be more than just a racing driver. Many rated him higher than Juan Manuel Fangio at that time, and I tend to think of him during those two glorious years as some kind of motorised ballerino gliding his beautiful Ferrari 500 through dust and tyre smoke to victory after victory after victory – at Spa, Rouen, Silverstone, Nürburgring, Zandvoort, Monza, Buenos Aires, Zandvoort again, and Spa again.

Yet what Antonelli has already achieved at the age of only 19 has also been deeply impressive. More than that, it has been oddly moving. Italian motor sport has waited a very long time for a new golden boy, and Kimi, obviously superfast but also composed, precise, and naturally authoritative, looks increasingly like the real deal and the right stuff.

It still astonishes me that Ascari remains the most recent Italian to have won the F1 drivers’ world championship, and that he last did so 73 years ago. Think about that for a moment. Italy gave us Monza, Ferrari, tifosi whose passion borders on the ecclesiastical, and generations of drivers whose names sound like motor sport opera: Alberto Ascari, obviously, and also Giuseppe Farina, Luigi Fagioli, Lorenzo Bandini, Ludovico Scarfiotti, Vittorio Brambilla, Riccardo Patrese, Michele Alboreto, Giancarlo Fisichella, and many more. All those whom I have just listed won F1 grands prix, yet no Italian has been crowned F1 world champion since Ascari.

Perhaps even more surprising is that only four Italian drivers have ever won more F1 grands prix than Antonelli has already won: Ascari won 13; Patrese won six; and Farina and Alboreto both won five. Antonelli has won three, and he is still too young to buy himself a beer in the country in which he scored the third of those wins. In other words, he has time to win many, many more.

Kimi’s victory in Miami, combined with my musings on the broader subject of Italian F1 history, inevitably brought another operatic name to my mind — not least because on May 15 it will be 40 years since that fine Italian F1 driver, Elio de Angelis, died in a Marseille hospital following a testing accident at Paul Ricard the previous day. Forty years is a long time, yet those four decades have done little to soften the sadness I feel when I think of him, for he was one of F1’s great might-have-beens: a man of serious ability, extraordinary charm, and uncommon grace, born in Rome to wealthy parents but the very opposite of arrogant. He won only two F1 grands prix, but there are some drivers whose win stats tell only the smallest fraction of their story. De Angelis is one of them.

It was only four days before his death that he had made his 108th and final F1 grand prix start — at Monaco, on May 11, 1986 — and it was not a fitting farewell. In his Brabham BT55, Gordon Murray’s infamously experimental low-line design, he qualified 20th and last, and he retired on lap 32 owing to BMW engine failure. Looking back now, there is something distinctly bleak about that weekend: the genial 28-year-old Roman, successful and popular, wrestling an ungainly and uncompetitive machine around the streets of Monte-Carlo before disappearing noisily from the race, departing quietly from the Principality, and, soon after, leaving us for ever.

The plain facts are that, three days after Monaco, he was testing that Brabham at Paul Ricard, when its rear wing detached itself at high speed in one of that fast circuit’s fastest sections, the almost-flat Verrerie curves at the end of the start-finish straight. The car became airborne, it crashed heavily, it barrel-rolled, and it finally came to rest upside-down, whereupon a fuel leak caused it to begin to burn. But the cruellest aspect of the tragedy was that Elio’s sole injury was very trivial: a broken collarbone. What killed him was smoke inhalation.

Unable to extricate himself from the wreckage, he inhaled toxic fumes while trapped inside the smouldering car, and he was trapped in it for far too long – for, although Alain Prost (McLaren) and Alan Jones (Beatrice) both stopped to try to offer assistance, in those days F1 testing was organised and marshalled with a degree of negligence that now seems grotesque. Only two marshals joined Prost and Jones, both of them wearing shorts and T-shirts, neither of them therefore equipped to approach the fire, which continued to burn. Eventually, the car was turned right-side-up, and de Angelis was lifted out of it and taken to a hospital in nearby Marseille, but by then nothing could be done for him and he breathed his last the following day.

His death, therefore, was totally unnecessary and entirely avoidable. It was a wicked waste of a life. And what a life it had been, for de Angelis had brought to F1 an almost unparalleled level of elegance and sophistication. His father, Giulio, was a glamorous man – a rich real estate developer and, before he began dealing in property, a successful powerboat racer – and Elio grew up amid privilege, refinement, and expectation. Moreover, he was good-looking, and he had wisdom beyond his years, impeccable manners, a ready wit, and a kind of understated self-confidence that made him instantly likeable.

I vividly remember watching the 1979 Argentine Grand Prix on an 11-inch black-and-white portable television in my bedroom at home in north London. I was 16, absurdly obsessed with F1, and fascinated by the arrival of two F1 rookies at Shadow: 22-year-old Jan Lammers and 20-year-old Elio de Angelis. The media hype beforehand – such as there was any in 1979 – had centred much more heavily on Lammers, whose reputation had been burnished by F3 success and considerable Dutch excitement. Press coverage of de Angelis, by contrast, seemed subdued.

Yet throughout that Buenos Aires weekend it was de Angelis who impressed. He outqualified Lammers by exactly one second, and in the race he drove with a composure and a maturity that immediately marked him out. He spent much of the afternoon lapping in the company of two F1 world champions: Mario Andretti (Lotus) and Emerson Fittipaldi (Copersucar). Andretti finished fifth, Fittipaldi sixth, and de Angelis seventh, looking entirely as though he belonged among his legendary on-track neighbours.

We later learned that, 18-or-so months before that, in the late summer of 1977, Enzo Ferrari had considered de Angelis as a possible replacement for Niki Lauda. In the event, Ferrari chose Gilles Villeneuve, and history has rendered that decision untouchable, because Villeneuve became not merely a Ferrari driver but also a Ferrari demigod. Still, de Angelis would also have been an excellent choice. He had speed, intelligence, mechanical sympathy, and immense personal charisma. One can easily imagine him flourishing in rosso corsa, although, since he was a child of Italy, the Italian press might have given him a harder time than they gave Villeneuve in 1978, when Gilles was outperformed by the man in the other Ferrari, the experienced and talented Carlos Reutemann, a man then at the very top of his form.

But perhaps being overlooked by Ferrari in late 1977 did not matter, because Colin Chapman noticed what many others had also seen during de Angelis’s rookie F1 season with Shadow, 1979, which he ended with a brilliant fourth place at a cold and wet Watkins Glen; and Chapman duly signed him to Lotus for 1980. There, alongside Andretti, from whom he learned so much so fast that he was very soon outpacing the 40-year-old American grandee, Elio quietly matured into one of F1’s most admired and complete drivers. At the old and daunting Interlagos, only the second grand prix of the 1980 F1 season, he raced magnificently to second place, at the age of 21 becoming the then-youngest podium finisher in F1 history. The drive was quintessential de Angelis: clever, patient, neat, smooth, and deceptively fast, for he was not, he never had been, and he never would be a flamboyant wheel-thrasher. His ability lay in his finesse.

That quality became especially apparent during the turbo era, when mechanical brutality and fuel management often fought each other in uneasy compromise. De Angelis had beautiful car control and exceptional technical sensitivity. Engineers trusted his feedback because his approach was thoughtful and exact rather than impatient or theatrical. His first F1 grand prix victory came at the fast and frightening Österreichring in 1982, and it was one of F1’s all-time great finishes.

Keke Rosberg‘s Williams loomed ever larger in de Angelis’s mirrors during the final laps, and on the drag to the line Rosberg almost snatched victory, but de Angelis hung on to win by half a length. And right there, leaping ecstatically over the pit wall, was Chapman, hurling his trademark cloth cap into the air. It would be the last time that he would ever do so, for he died four months later, making de Angelis’s Austrian triumph the final Lotus win blessed by that iconic victory celebration.

There was another Lotus win for de Angelis three years later, at Imola in 1985, although circumstances have rendered it less memorable than his and Rosberg’s Austrian odyssey. Prost crossed the Imola finish line first, but he was later disqualified when his McLaren was found to be underweight. Thus victory passed to de Angelis. Purists may attach a mental asterisk to such successes, but a win is a win. Moreover, for Elio, an Italian victorious in an F1 grand prix in Italy, it was deeply meaningful.

His finest F1 year was 1984. McLaren’s TAG Porsche-powered MP4/2, driven by Lauda and Prost, was the class of the field, and they duly finished first and second in the 1984 F1 drivers’ world championship, but de Angelis was third, well ahead of his Lotus team-mate Nigel Mansell, scoring podium finishes at Jacarepaguá, Imola, Detroit, and Dallas, and delivering further top-six placings at Zolder, Dijon, Monaco, Montreal, Brands Hatch, Zandvoort, and Estoril. He was fast, dependable, and resilient all season.