Giuseppe Farina: Stylish daredevil who snatched F1's first world title

The three rivals for 1950 F1 glory – the three Fs – represent a fascinating triptych in terms of racing character. Fangio was all grace and guile – and astonishing speed. He was a fitter by background, and his mechanical sympathy for the fast but fragile F1 cars of the 1950s was unparalleled. His driving was not so much aggressive as assertive, each movement unruffled, each decision assured.

Fagioli, by contrast, was a man out of his time. One of only six drivers born in the 19th century to compete in the F1 world championship – the others being Philippe Étancelin (born in 1896), Arthur Legat (1898), Clemente Biondetti (1898 also), Adolf Brudes (1899), and Louis Chiron (1899 also) – he adhered more to the devil-may-care disposition of the 1920s and 1930s than to the battle-toughened post-World War II ethos. He was nicknamed the Abruzzi Robber. His temperament was volatile. He clashed with team managers and team-mates alike. Yet he was fast as well as furious. A determined and dogged man, he was proof that age need not wither speed, nor experience subdue ferocity.

Then there was Farina, the strangest of the three. Possessing a doctorate in political science and the courtly mien of the aristocracy into which he had been born, he carried himself with a patrician detachment. His suits were flawlessly tailored, his hair immaculately pomaded. But put him in a racing car, and something changed. He drove, always, on the edge of violence – yet, paradoxically I have always thought, he was also the smoothest of stylists. His lines were geometric, his inputs measured, his methodology considered and refined. Indeed, he wrote about racing with the same analytical precision that he had brought to his academic studies. But although his technique was dexterous, his intent was savage. He would chop thuggishly across his opponents, and he would barge and bully his way onto the inside line even if by rights it belonged to someone else. At Deauville in 1936 he shoved Marcel Lehoux off the track – to his death. In 1938, at Tripoli, he did the same thing to László Hartmann, even though he had been lapping the poor man rather than racing him. The contradiction between Farina’s off-track politesse and his on-track hooliganism was not only a flaw but also an essence: he was both surgeon and soldier.

He would sometimes light a cigar on a race’s cool-down lap, then coast to a stop as though he were parking outside a trattoria in Turin. He was an enthusiastic and successful womaniser. But, withal, he was also a man of bewildering contradictions. He could be delightful company – but, as reported by my friend Nigel Roebuck in the August 2003 edition of Motor Sport, Stirling Moss said of him: “Undoubtedly, Farina was a great driver, and I loved his relaxed arms-outstretched style. In fact I copied it. But on the track he was a bastard. If he was lapping you, you had to be damn’ sure not to hold him up – because, if you did, he’d just push you off the road.”

Here is an equally striking quote about him, from Fangio, translated from the Spanish: “Farina drove like a madman. We used to say that he was protected by the Virgin Mary, but even the Holy Madonna’s patience has a limit, and he should have considered that she couldn’t be at his disposal all the time.” And here is what Enzo Ferrari had to say, translated from the Italian: “Farina was a man of steel, inside and out, capable of crazy things, and a regular inmate of hospital wards as a result.”

That 1950 F1 season had begun in May. Europe was still in a process of mending. The pages of ration books still lined drawers in the UK. Bombed-out buildings still stood sentinel all over England. But F1 emerged like a phoenix from the fires of the Blitz – and the British were dauntlessly eager for a rousing high-octane distraction. A crowd of 120,000 spectators, including King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, and Princess Margaret, duly turned up to watch the three Fs and 17 others do battle in the first ever world championship-status F1 grand prix, hurling their cars between straw bales on the perimeter road of an airfield that those who were watching still thought of as RAF Silverstone, for it had been home to a fleet of Vickers Wellington bombers during World War II.

The Alfa Romeo 158 – aka the Alfetta – was the car to beat, its supercharged 1.5-litre straight-eight engine belying its pre-war heritage with impressive speed. Such was the team’s domination that the assembled journalists reckoned that the keenest competition would be for fifth place – the best position left available by the three Fs and Alfa Romeo’s token Brit, Reg Parnell. Farina duly won at a canter that first ever world championship-status F1 grand prix at Silverstone – and Fangio won the second one, at Monaco, by a whole lap. The F1 world championship lead then ebbed and flowed between the two of them across the European summer.

When Farina won at Monza, he became F1 world champion not only for himself and for Alfa Romeo, but also for Italy and for Italians, who were still licking their wounds after the madness of Mussolini, and were now seeking new heroes to exalt. And here was one: a tall, elegant, ferocious man from Turin, bringing home glory in the scarlet car whose nose-mounted logo proudly incorporated an emblem of the Milanese biscione; 75 years later, all Alfa Romeos are so adorned still.

Yet Farina was not destined for lasting domination. Unlike Fangio, who would go on to win five F1 world championships with four different teams – and who remains a touchstone of racing genius – Farina would win only that single crown. The rest of his F1 career was marked by brilliance interspersed with fits of recklessness, crashes, and injuries. He retired from full-time competition in 1955, just as a new generation, including a dashing band of talented Englishmen – Stirling Moss, Mike Hawthorn, Peter Collins, and Tony Brooks – were beginning to make their mark.

After Farina had hung up his helmet – or, rather, his cloth skull-cap – his life was not what one might have expected for an F1 world champion, even 70 years ago. There was no gentle fade into ambassadorship, no pundit’s chair. He remained peripherally involved in motor sport – a semi-regular visitor to the F1 paddock – but he never found his post-driving niche, although he did a bit of advisory work for Alfa Romeo and, perhaps surprisingly, Jaguar.

As a result he is underrated, very much so in my opinion. Here was a man who, despite having lost his best and fastest years to the war, between 1950 and 1955 started 33 F1 grands prix and stood on 20 F1 grand prix podiums, five times from the central plinth; 20 podiums out of 33 starts is a truly prodigious strike rate. Moreover, he won 11 non-championship F1 races in the 1950s, and he had raced extensively before the inauguration of F1, too, winning the Gran Premio di Napoli in 1937, the Coppa Ciano in 1939, the Monaco Grand Prix and the Grand Prix des Nations in 1948, and many more big races besides.

In 1966, by which time he was 59, Hollywood came a-calling. John Frankenheimer, the American film director, was about to start work on Grand Prix, the movie that would become one of the most lauded cinematic representations of motor sport ever made. Frankenheimer wanted realism; he wanted drama; he wanted an experienced and intelligent man who knew how many racing beans made five and would help him create that F1 drama and realism for the silver screen. He wanted Farina.

The plan was for the two men to meet during the weekend of the French Grand Prix, which would be run that year on the fast and fearsome Reims circuit in Champagne country. Farina, ever the man of action, did not board a plane or take a train. No, he climbed into his Lotus Cortina – a fast, frisky road car – and pointed it north-west from Italy. On a mountain pass near the town of Aiguebelle, in the Alpes Savoie, he lost control – driving, as always, fast – driving, as always, on the limit. The little car careened into a telegraph pole, and its driver was killed instantly.

We can imagine, with a melancholy bow, that Farina might have preferred it that way. Often had he spent time in hospital beds, after racing accidents, but I doubt that he would have wanted to die in one. Nor would it have suited him to breathe his last in a comfy armchair, watching TV and musing on his past glories. Better for a man like Farina to hurtle – not shuffle – off this mortal coil. At speed. Always at speed.

Frankenheimer went on to make Grand Prix without his chosen consultant. F1 fans – even knowledgeable ones who love the history of our sport and have therefore seen the film many times – rarely wax lyrical about Farina. Yet, for me, his presence – or rather his absence – lingers in every shot. I see it – or rather I sense it – in the tailored jackets, in the arrogant sneers of some of the protagonists, and in the flashes of driving brutality that punctuate the film’s otherwise romantic lens. He is there for me: ghostlike, yes, but always elegant, and forever dangerous.

Seventy-five years on from that hot and sunny late-summer day at Monza, F1 is a very different beast. The engines are quieter, the cars more sculpted but less beautiful, the circuits tamer. F1 has matured, as it has had to, and safety is rightly prioritised. But its DNA – the drivers’ intoxicating cocktail of skill, poise, ambition, and courage that empowers them to do in a car that which you or I could not even imagine let alone emulate – remains unchanged. And at the beginning of that genetic strand, on the first page of the first chapter of that never-ending story, is a name that F1 people now speak too seldom, but one that deserves to be remembered: Giuseppe Farina. The first F1 world champion. The original surgeon-soldier of speed.