Fireworks for Fangio

Florida's International Twelve-Hour Grand Prix of Endurance was less than four hours old when Chicago's Bob Gold-ich, 33, took a tricky S turn just a touch too fast. His little (1.9 liters) Arnolt-Bristol sports car skidded across a taxiway at Sebring's abandoned airfield and rolled into a sideways somersault. A graduate of the dangerous melees of midget-auto racing and the father of two children, Goldich was dead of a broken neck before he reached the hospital.

Since 1950, when they began playing host to the country's biggest sports-car race, Sebring's citizens have learned to make sense of the foreign names and the continental accents that color the annual invasion of their sleepy town. They have learned to tell a Maserati from a Ferrari; they know a Mercedes-Benz when they see one. But Goldich's death was Sebring's first Grand Prix fatality. Now, at last, the spectators knew the danger and fear that ride with the high-speed racers.

More than Speed. On the track the other drivers settled stoically to their work. Steadily, the high, whining scream of a big (4.5 liters) bright red Maserati moved out in front of the pack. Handled by World Champion Juan Manuel Fangio and France's Jean Behra, a pair of extraordinarily delicate car conservers, the 400-h.p. Maserati was in fact taking it easy. No one knew better than Fangio and Behra that speed alone is not enough on Sebring's demanding course; the trick is to keep a car going all the way to the finish.

Behind them, hard-driven cars were dropping out. The largest car in the race, Chevrolet's highly touted 4.6-liter "Super Sport" Corvette, lasted only 23 laps. Brakes locked, a fuel line broke, the ignition system went haywire--finally Drivers John Fitch and Piero Taruffi quit in despair. Before dark, 32 of the 65 starters were in the pits for good.

Only an Accident. For a long while, a 3.8-liter D-Jaguar clung close to the leading Maserati. Then its new-type disk brakes began to give trouble, and it began to drop back. Maserati's most consistent racing competitor, a 3.4-liter Ferrari, had also slowed down to nurse its brakes. The race was only nine hours old, but already only an accident could lose for Fangio. His excitable pit crew managed to get one of his teammates' cars disqualified by refueling it too often; later they doused his cockpit in gasoline. But he and Behra kept rolling in fine style. When the fireworks were touched off at 10 p.m. to signal the end of the race, the exquisitely tooled Maserati was winner by two laps. In twelve hours of relatively easy driving, the winner had covered a record 1,024.4 miles. Second: a lighter (2.9 liters) Maserati driven by England's Stirling Moss and American Expatriate Harry Schell. The D-Jag was third. Index of Performance prize for the car that exceeds theoretical standards by the largest amount went to a perky, eighth-place, 1.5-liter Porsche Spyder.

Last year at Sebring Fangio had finished first with a Ferrari. (His teammate then: the late Eugenio Castellotti, killed testing another Ferrari for this year's race.)

"I am no better or worse now than I was then," insisted the happy champion. "But the car I drove today was fantastic. As TIME said last month, this is indeed the Year of the Maserati."

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