Discover the Untold Stories of Ferrari's Ill-Fated Generation in 'Race to Immortality' Documentary 

It must be terribly easy to be a movie critic. Literally all-seeing, egocentrically all-knowing, the danger is that the critic’s assessment can always be based on a misconception. Back in 2016-17, I was closely involved with production of a movie for Universal which the marketeers entitled Ferrari: Race to Immortality. 

It was about the interwoven lives and racing careers of that tragically ill-fated generation of Ferrari works drivers, Mike Hawthorn, Peter Collins, Luigi Musso, Eugenio Castellotti – and the Marquis Alfonso ‘Fon’ de Portago. It was essentially a people picture, the story being told mainly by skilful editing of the most gorgeous and incredibly rare contemporary archive movie footage – while voice-over commentary was supplied by many of the surviving people most closely involved at the time – not seen on-screen until the movie’s conclusion – plus me.

The problem with the title – so far as The Guardian newspaper’s supercilious critic was concerned – was that he couldn’t see beyond it, and he whinged about how the movie hardly scratched the surface of telling us what Mr Ferrari was like, what he did and how he did it. But he’d completely missed the point. This isn’t at all a film about The Old Man – it is instead about Ferrari’s ’50s Boys, the lost generation in fact – and it certainly still told enough about Mr Ferrari’s always-goading influence upon them. 

Reading that fatuous criticism stung me at the time, and it still rankles because it was so unfair to the gifted production team, headed by Julia Taylor-Stanley – at one time daughter-in-law of Louis Stanley (of BRM) – and her chosen director Daryl Goodrich. 

After an immense amount of work, not least to recreate a suitable sound-effects track to bring more than an hour of mute archive footage even more to life, the production was launched at a big-screen premier in the Curzon Cinema, Mayfair, London.

I attended, with former Ferrari numero uno driver Tony Brooks and his lovely Italian wife Pina, who had both contributed. Immersion in the movie’s long-lingering minutes of first-rate contemporary colour archive movie on the big cinema screen had a real impact on Tony, winner for Ferrari of the 1959 French and German GPs. 

He approved – which thrilled Julia and Daryl – and added that “It certainly captured the atmosphere of the Fifties, creating a generous portion of nostalgia with a good 10 seconds of my blazing BRM at Silverstone! It was an hour and a half living in my past world, winning three GPs in 1958 to Mike’s one for the championship, which led me to recall my close miss in 1959 following a longer than average run of ‘genuine’ hard luck. However, the movie provided some consolation in reminding me that my career total of GP wins was better than the combined total of both Mike and Peter…”.

You’ve just got to love the typical retired great racing driver here. You can take the man out of competitive driving but even at 85 the otherwise faultlessly modest and discreet Tony Brooks – deep inside – remained the driven competitor, almost Geoff Boycott-style record-conscious. And that, perhaps, is what really set these remarkably committed sportsmen of the 1950s apart from their modern successors. They could park the spectre of imminent violent death to race regardless – winning their only objective – achieving, in truth, immortality…

This 92-minute movie tells how Hawthorn and Collins were not the only devil-may-care young athletes to put their lives on the line for Ferrari in the 1950s. The jam-packed and often joyous lives they led are well demonstrated until four of the five featured ultimately died, most in Ferrari cars. The fifth and last of them was Mike Hawthorn himself – by the end of 1958 Britain’s first-ever Formula 1 world champion driver. But just 12 weeks after having clinched that title – by just one single, solitary point from Stirling Moss – Mike himself lost his life, in his Jaguar 3.4 saloon, in a crash on the A3 Guildford Bypass…

In period I was very much a schoolboy

In period I was very much a schoolboy fan of both Moss and Hawthorn, and – for that matter – of almost every other British driver, most certainly of Tony Brooks. We enthusiastic kids were more in awe of what all these blokes could do than of one individual sports star versus another. To us – naive innocents though we might have been (but doubt we were) – all proper grand prix drivers were just men from Mars.

My involvement with Ferrari: Race to Immortality – began with a call from Julia Taylor-Stanley of Artemis Films who had been trying to get the project off the ground for some years. Her father had been a motor racing enthusiast, she had married Louis ‘BRM’ Stanley’s son John and she had always been entranced by the Hawthorn/Collins story and the wider real-life drama of Ferrari through the late-1950s. 

She was involved in the music industry as a composer, song writer and producer before entering the movie world. Early in her quest to launch this project she met Louise Cordier Collins, Peter’s entirely engaging widow, in Florida. They clicked immediately and the project moved forward. She engaged Daryl Goodrich as director, a great filmmaker whose 2012 London Olympics Bid video is often credited with having clinched that deal. 

“This is an extraordinarily tightly woven story of young sportsmen engaged in an incredibly dangerous activity”
Daryl Goodrich, Director

Then someone recommended she contact me. I had great initial doubts, having already had much bad experience with filmmakers (and BBC TV… don’t ask). But Julia stuck to her guns; resilient, insistent. It then dawned on me that she and her crew were incredibly knowledgeable and understood the racing world. They evidently cared. And progress they did. Among them, they all possessed a get-things-done force of nature attitude.

So it ended up with a full production crew at my home filming a talking-head interview, which extended over two or three days in 2016. 

Director Daryl and I just got on like a house on fire. Specialist movie researcher Richard Wiseman – working with the crew – likewise. I had worked previously with cameraman Dave Meadows on a Targa Florio shoot in Sicily – and also at various Goodwood events – so this was comfort zone, mutual fun with like-minded good people… working towards a shared end vision.

With tremendous help and input from another old friend and Goodwood movie contributor David Weguelin, Richard Wiseman secured the stupendously jaw-dropping, gloriously high-definition colour archive footage that provides the vast majority of the movie, superbly well-edited by specialist Paul Trewartha.

Daryl Goodrich: “We weren’t only making a motor racing movie for the pure enthusiast; this is an extraordinarily tightly woven story of real people, real young sportsmen engaged in an incredibly dangerous activity, and all driving for this extraordinarily charismatic team, run by this one dark, brooding, manipulative man at the top – Enzo Ferrari. In fact – what a story! We wanted to tell it, and tell it well – and the challenge to do that within an hour and a half proved immense…

“We ended up with a mass of archive footage – much of it either not shown publicly for many years, or indeed never ever shown at all. And much of what we found was just of unbelievably superb quality – as the audience will see. We have to chime with the present-day YouTube youth audience, and also with the female audience. And when it comes to motor racing footage from the period the youth market is accustomed to poor-quality black-and-white. Here in stark contrast they can see – maybe for the first time – genuine period footage in gorgeous colour and fantastic high resolution. It looks as if it was shot at the very latest grand prix, just last weekend, not captured more than 60 years ago.

“And then we found the background to their lives, brilliantly covered in the Wolfgang von Trips archive – he had a Bolex cine camera and shot all kinds of candid contemporary footage of himself and his fellow drivers, crossing the Atlantic on an ocean liner, larking about on a Florida beach, sun bathing at Monte Carlo, or swimming and diving in a hotel pool near Le Mans or Rouen or somewhere similar. And that is what really made the difference – what enabled us to complete the picture… and to tell the story.”

Because I was quite close to the project it’s not for me to express an opinion on how successfully the work achieves its aim. I think it’s spoiled by over-long coverage of the 1955 Le Mans disaster, but closing my mind to that (marketing-engendered) lapse it is for me a brilliantly crafted piece of work. And one of which all involved can feel quite proud. I must confess, I do…